Other Jobs In I.T.

I've suffered disk drive crashes plenty of times, and I'm guilty of not backing stuff up.
I actually have several crashed drives at Pr3++yG33kyTh1ng World Wide Amalgamated Corporate Head Quarters which I intend to keep until technology develops to revive them, much like I intend to have my own head frozen in the event my daily exfoliation and moisturization process begins to deliver less-than-stunning results.
Anyway, I have felt, both personally and professionally, the loss associated with a data repository failure.
While I have always turned to friends, co-workers and alcohol (sometimes a combination of the three) in order to deal with my grief maturely, I had wondered, until this morning, if there was a more well-defined mechanism.
It turns out there is for clients of Drive Savers, a company which specializes in data recovery.
I think the technical process of recovering data from failed hardware is fascinating and I've often considered moving into the "Data Recovery" business, but mostly for the off chance that the data which needs to be recovered has simply been stolen, leading me on an action-packed chase across the globe after an international band of data thieves with accents so I could make smart-assed comments like Bruce Willis would do. If Bruce Willis was into data recovery, you know.
Apparently Drive Savers is not hiring action heroes at this time, unfortunately.
The point I was originally flailing at is that they do have, on staff, full time, a professional "Data Loss Counselor".
This person basically listens to the customer as they discuss their loss. Working in data recovery, they can also recommend options to get the data back. In the event this is impossible, however, the Data Loss Counselor is also a certified grief counselor.
In an interview she said she hears from distraught people constantly, sometimes from one panicked I.T. guy one day and then from another at the same company on the next day because the first guy got fired and all the broken stuff got turned over to someone else.
It must be enormously stressful to hear from users in this kind of distress all day, every day, as a function of one's job.
It also has to look seriously sweet on a resume.

Tuesday

Since Microsoft releases patches once a month on a Tuesday, there is a regular security meeting to go over those. They only do that on a single Tuesday each month, but the meeting here is every Tuesday, recurring until death.
The process in these non-Patch Tuesday Tuesday meetings is the same every time. We look at scan results, argue over the validity, promise to fix any straggling servers before Friday (even though the outage window is Sunday night) and then spend 45 minutes discussing how this process (the meeting process, not the patching process) is being refined.
One of the more interesting meetings concluded with the meeting organizer asking everyone if they felt like they had gotten good use of their time in attending the meeting.
This was the meeting organizer.
There could not be a more loaded question in a corporate environment without violating the code of conduct for sexual harassment.
The answer, of course, is "Yes. Time spent here in this meeting was time well-spent. Let us take the information we have freely shared and venture forth into a new age of improved I.T. functionality." I mean, that is the answer since I'm a consultant. If I were full-time I'd have answered with saliva-laced profanity.
After that meeting, we have a meeting with our management to discuss what was said in the first meeting. After that, there is a closed-door session where we go over what we said and heard and what that looks like in comparison to current corporate rumors and/or reality.
A few hours later, there is a conference call with the participants of the first meeting to discuss progress, even though any actual progress would have happened at the expense of our uptime agreements with our customers.
Then an email is sent summarizing the conference call.
I can't decide if this would be more or less funny if I were making any of it up so I'll just put a picture of John Stamos here.

Problem Solving

A meeting first thing on a Monday morning is pretty brutal, especially when it is early enough that the first cup of coffee isn't over and people expect a person to know what he is doing this week.
But this is an every Monday thing and I've taken to writing down my plans on a Post-It note on Friday so I can hand it to whoever sits next to me on Monday so that they can just read what I planned.
If there are questions, I can generally answer them. Or at least grunt knowingly, which seems to accomplish the same effect -- That of making the questions stop.
When the topic switched mid-meeting to why a co-worker was taking three days off this week, I snapped to full consciousness.
I've been fascinated for the past year with the wildlife dwelling in the greater metropolitan Columbia area.
I've seen foxes and deer and an otter, all without having to get out of range of a Starbucks.
But my co-worker is taking part of a week off to snake-proof her yard.
There is apparently a product called "Snake-A-Way" which is sprinkled around the perimeter of the yard. This prompted me to ask what would happen if the snake were already inside the perimeter. Would it be trapped there? Growing ever more hungry and bitter?
These questions were not well received, amazingly.
So I led the meeting into full-on problem-solving mode.
The take-away from this particular meeting is that there is no solution readily commercially available.
However, our official recommendation was for her to purchase an eagle or, depending on the local laws which we (admittedly) did not research, an owl.
When she said she owned little yippy dogs the solution of adding a large avian predator was even more appealing to some members of my team, while disregarded by a separate dog-loving faction which advocated burning the house to the ground and renting an upstairs apartment in the university district.
The other thing which came from the meeting was an action item for Management to reschedule the Monday meetings for after lunch for some reason.

Pictures Tell A Story

In this crappy cellphone picture taken from the second floor window just behind my desk we can see a couple of interesting things.
The point is the large yellow stain on the parking lot.
That's pollen. And the levels have actually dropped in the past couple of days.
I'm used to a light dusting of the stuff, but here I guess the pine trees produce enough that it actually forms drifts on sidewalks and discolors drains.
The piles were high enough some places at the beginning of the week that I could swear I saw bedouin tribes setting up tents on a couple while they passed through South Carolina.
A co-worker told me this is not a particularly bad year for pollen, really. He said if I grabbed and shook a pine branch it would look like it was snowing.
However, I learned in biology class exactly what purpose the trees have for pollen and I really don't want to involve myself in that. I mean if the trees are going to get busy out in public that's their business and who am I to judge? I just don't have to assist.
The other feature of the image is the top-notch pre-dawn parking job done by me. I like to sprawl out in a space a little, apparently.
The guy next to me (and directly above the pollen mound) took my favorite spot like he does every single day.
According to my custom, I dragged my keys down the side of his car in retribution like I do every single day.
He's tried fooling me by driving a different car just about every day this week but I haven't fallen for it.

Ahead of the Trends

I keep finding myself cool before the times catch up with me. When Dungeons and Dragons finally becomes a game the cool kids play, I'm all set.
For years now, I've been frustrating loved ones and co-workers by never checking my email. My current phone number doesn't even have it set up yet, nor will it ever.
I can see who called and I can call back.
I'm skipping half a dozen steps involved in listening to and deleting voicemails.
My work voicemail box has been full for over eight months and there isn't even a call log on that thing. Those calls will never be returned.
No one has missed it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/fashion/02voicemail.html?ref=personaltech

The text from page 1:

By JILL COLVIN

Published: April 1, 2009

WHEN Steve Hamrick left his last job as manager at a software corporation, he had at least 25 unheard messages in his office voice mailbox. And that’s not counting the unreturned calls on his cellphone or landline at home.

It’s not that he doesn’t like to talk. But with the cascade of messages he receives by e-mail, texting and on Facebook, Mr. Hamrick, 29, a self-described “voice mail phobic” from Cupertino, Calif., said he’d found better ways to keep in touch.

“I had to give up something and that, for me, was voice mail,” he said. “It’s cutting out some forms of communication to make room for the others.”

When it was introduced in the early 1980s, voice mail was hailed as a miracle invention — a boon to office productivity and a godsend to busy households. Hollywood screenwriters incorporated it into plotlines: Distraught heroine comes home, sees blinking red light, listens as desperate suitor begs for another chance to make it all right. Beep!

But in an age of instant information gratification, the burden of having to hit the playback button — or worse, dial in to a mailbox and enter a pass code — and sit through “ums” and “ahs” can seem too much to bear.

Many dread the process or, like Mr. Hamrick, avoid it altogether, raising the question: is voice mail on its way to becoming obsolete?

“Once upon a time, voice mail was useful,” said Yen Cheong, 32, a book publicist in New York who has transitioned almost entirely to e-mail and text messaging. According to her calculation, it takes 7 to 10 steps to check a voice mail message versus zero to 3 for an e-mail.

“If you left a message, I have to dial in, dial in my code,” Ms. Cheong said. “Then I mess up and redial. Then once I hear the message, I need the phone number. I try to write it down, and then I have to rewind the message to hear it again,” she added, feigning exhaustion.

Tim Kassouf from Baltimore, 24, who calls himself “a certified voice mail hater,” said he had 68 messages, 62 of them unheard, in his cellphone mail box. Scott Taylor, 41, a senior manager at an e-commerce company in Phoenix, said voice mail was “just totally an ineffective communication method, almost ancient now.”

Like many others, Mr. Taylor advises callers on his outgoing message to try his cellphone or to send an e-mail message if they need to reach him right away.

It is good advice. Research shows that people take longer to reply to voice messages than other types of communication. Data from uReach Technologies, which operates the voice messaging systems of Verizon Wireless and other cellphone carriers, shows that over 30 percent of voice messages linger unheard for three days or longer and that more than 20 percent of people with messages in their mailboxes “rarely even dial in” to check them, said Saul Einbinder, senior vice president for marketing and business development for uReach, in an e-mail message.

By contrast, 91 percent of people under 30 respond to text messages within an hour, and they are four times more likely to respond to texts than to voice messages within minutes, according to a 2008 study for Sprint conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation. Even adults 30 and older are twice as likely to respond within minutes to a text than to a voice message, the study found.

There are no definitive studies of how many voice mail messages American leave compared with earlier periods, but if the technology is heading toward obsolescence — as many communication experts suspect — the trend is being driven by young people. Again and again, people under 25 recount returning calls from older colleagues and family members without bothering to listen to messages first. Thanks to cellphone technology, they can see who called and hit the Send button to reply without calling their voice mail box. “Didn’t you get my message?” parents ask. “No,” their children reply, “but I saw that you called.”

Jack Cathey, 20, a college student in Lewisburg, Tenn., said his parents and grandparents continued trying to leave him voice messages despite his objections. “Do you know your voice mail’s full?” a family member asked him recently, failing to comprehend that, for his generation, that might not be a problem.

To cater to those with no patience for voice mail, wireless providers are busy rolling out a new generation of text-based alternatives that promise to make communication faster and more efficient.

The most popular is Visual Voicemail, which comes standard on the iPhone and is available on other smart phones, including the Samsung Instinct and the BlackBerry Storm. The application displays messages in a visual in-box, just like e-mail, and allows users to listen to messages one by one, in any order, so important calls can be returned first and others saved.

Other companies have taken a bolder approach, eliminating the need to listen to messages altogether.

Fixing Stuff

Some users astound me with their complete stupidity. I wonder at their ability to walk and breathe at the same time. Their utter incompetence is only overshadowed by their complete lack of concern for the personal lives of the I.T. staff.
I'd like to again recommend a special internet for these people. One where updates are only allowed temporarily, with the whole thing reset to proper working order every day at 4am from backup.
Anyway, when someone decides to put a user in charge of something, often this results in weird things.
In a standard security scan, findings are categorized by severity level. There are high, medium, low and informational findings.
The first three are pretty straightforward. The severity dictates how quickly the issue needs to be resolved.
With informational findings, there generally isn't any action to be taken.
This is stuff like "The scanning account has rights to read security settings" and "Windows Server 2003 is installed". I could, technically, fix either of these things, but not without pissing off a lot of people.
Generally, informational findings can be ignored. It is just data the scanner picked up in the course of the scan.
Except when a user gets involved at a high level.
Apparently, the guy dealing with the auditors last year was tired of seeing the same informational findings turn up year after year. He decided to ask the auditor to change the severity level on all informational findings to low, medium or high to make sure that the I.T. people would act on them. This modified report was submitted in that way, and getting a finding which is categorized as low, medium or high pulled out of an officially submitted report requires an act of congress. What I mean to say is that since the systems in question contain health records of current military personnel, it literally requires an act of congress.
From what I understand, congress is a little busy at the moment, so I have to submit crazy detailed paperwork on something like 14000 findings which should, in reality, be all but ignored.
And this, dear internetz, is why users should never ever be put in charge of anything important or given access to anything with more processing power than an Etch-a-Sketch.
It is also another item on my ever-growing list of reasons why I hate them. So hard. In the face.

A Kinder, Gentler Th1ng

I got a call last night at about a quarter to nine. Users were reporting sluggishness in accessing applications. Since "sluggish" can encompass a lot of different things based on the quantity of the effect itself, I knew I'd be troubleshooting for a while just to figure out what they were talking about. After that I'd still have to go about solving the problem itself.
At first, I was angry.
I mean, I'd put in a full day at work already and just settled in to attend my WoW guild's first official heroic-level raid. The last thing I wanted to do was work harder than I should have to to resolve some nebulous issue for a user.
Then I had an epiphany.
It wasn't like a burst of light or spectral choir kind of epiphany. It was more a connection-related epiphany.
As I was logging in to get to work, I realized that these users with the complaints were no different than me. They have families and lives outside of work and probably didn't want to be grinding away at tasks after hours any more than I did.
Their ability to work quickly and efficiently is my responsibility, and by executing that responsibility I can get the users back to their families or favorite TV programs faster, improving their quality of life in the process.
And so I resolve from this day forward to do just that.
I will consider myself an employee and friend of the end user. If I keep them happy, the company benefits from their increased productivity. I'm sure the company will reward all of us based on our improved performance, which will fling us all into a never-ending happiness loop.
So, my challenge to you, internets, is to walk a mile in the packet shape of those users around you.
Think about their feelings and tailor your interactions around them.
Good intentions are the universal language of harmony. We will be able to use our good deeds as karmic currency.
I look forward to this new time of shared awareness and sincerely hope that you do as well.