Monday, June 02, 2008

So . . . About the Screaming Rant This Morning . . .

I was informed that the rant was completely justified and totally understandable given the totally impossible tasks which I've found myself without the system access rights to complete.
It just should have happened further away from the other teams, since now they think I'm cracking under the pressure.
For the record (and I explained this, too) I'm not cracking.
My natural response to calamity which I have no control over is a complete sense of calm.
Ranting, for me, is never based in panic. Ranting is based in anger.
Ranting is just another tool to communicate my displeasure at the way things at work are structured, or not structured as the case may be.
In this case, the security patches I'm not authorized to deploy myself yet am somehow responsible for deploying -- did not deploy over the weekend. I was asked why. I have no idea. Hell, I don't even know what happens after the change request was placed. Where do those go?
Could I have deployed the patches myself on Sunday? Sure, but I don't have access to the tool for that.
What about manual deployment? Of course, but I don't have remote access and my security badge doesn't work on the weekend.
Can I check to see if the patch was deployed to at least some of the servers? Not as me, no, but there is a service account I can use. My account doesn't have access to the servers in question at all.
I think a rant, however poorly geographically placed, is an important corporate communication tool. It is my responsibility to use all the communications tools at my disposal -- Especially when my technical tools are so horribly gimped.
Anyway, when the facts were arrayed before the audit team, the response was a disheartening "Wow. You are screwed!"
And that four word summary naturally carried over into a screaming, profanity-laced rant. As, in my opinion, it should.
Again, for the sake of clarity, I'm not cracking. I'm communicating in a way which seems to the uniformed to look an awful lot like cracking when, in fact, it is merely the way I keep myself from putting mechanical pencils into people. Perfectly healthy. Nothing to see here. Please move about your business.
Stage two of my communication technique involves quiet sobbing peppered with an occasional,"Oh, no reason," and "everything is fine," and "thanks for asking but I've got it covered."
Want to hear the most awesome part? Of course you do.
The most awesome part was the call in the early afternoon from the Change Control department which sought to place the blame for the weekend outage on the patches which I requested but were never implemented. I think I'm in the clear on that one unless, as I told them, "the mere act of submitting an official request for change, which your department completely ignored, somehow broke a totally unrelated application in a different environment through some bizarre butterfly effect."
To which they replied, "So you are saying you don't know for sure."
Which began a perfectly reasonable second rant from me.
My coworkers gave it an 8.8 for quality and originality, though the overall critique was that it was too "adverby".

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Working in IT seems like it eats your soul.

Garrick said...

Maybe, but it isn't really my problem anymore.
I traded my soul years ago for magic beans . . . Which I later lost.