Well, I'm in trouble again. We're still working on the German project at TCIDNN (The Company I Dare Not Name). It's getting ridiculous. Long time readers may remember that we submitted a proposal for $1.9 million. The only other outsourcer submitted a proposal for $2.5 million. Should be a no brainer, right?
Wrong.
They came back to us and said they could only afford $2.5 million this year and $1.5 million for each year for the rest of the contract. Now a rational person would think that what we would deliver for the money would be negotiable, right? Wrong again.
My manager who has been walking around with a big ol' boner at the prospect of our data center supporting the world is beginning to write checks that his staff won't be able to cash. We have been having three meetings a week trying to figger out how to give the Germans exactly what they want for $1.5 million. Fortunately my manager has not been in most of them. My team lead, who wouldn't say shit if he had a mouthful, has been trying very patiently to explain why we can't duplicate and support the identical environment that the Germans use for $1.5 million because we couldn't support the additional hardware and staffing. My manager pissed off my team lead a few weeks ago when we were talking about staffing the project when he bragged about laying off 50% of our overall support team and still was able to deliver support. Asshole! He bragged about laying people off! Un-fricking-believable!
I took off early on Friday and about 4:00 PM, I was taking a nap when my phone rang. I ignored it. My answering machine doesn't have a greeting on it anymore. I don't know why it quit working but I just left it that way. My friends know to leave a message, but half the telemarketers who call think it's out of order and hangup. As we say in the progamming world, "It's not a bug, it's a feature." Whoever was on the phone hung up. A minute later, my cell phone rang. It was my manager, the project manager, and my team lead.
I am usually grouchy when awakened. My manager said, "Explain to me why we cannot bring this particular portion of their environment across and run it on our machines." I have explained this to him many times already, but he only hears what he wants to hear. So, in frustration, I asked him, "Why are we performing this exercise? The Germans have already told us they will only pay $1.5 million. We have no competition. The only other organization that can support their environment will charge $2.5 million. Call the Germans' bluff."
Well that did it. Out came the managerize bullshit: You don't understand the big picture. You are not a team player. Yadda. Yadda. Yadda. Blah. Blah. Blah. Arrrggghhh!
Yeah. What I don't understand is why we are letting Hans jerk us around, and while we are expending energy on trying to expand my boss's empire, we are letting our existing users suffer. When I asked him what we were gonna do about that, the shit really hit the fan. He blamed me for our users' complaints because I had told them about the German project. I explained that I hadn't, but the project manager had in discussing how we were holding off on updating our infrastructure until we found out if the German project was a go.
So I got another bullshit lecture. Fortunately, my team lead has heard me explain the problem that this particular environment in its existing form was not supportable (It runs on obsolete hardware and the operating system is off support) and he was able to successfully explain this to my manager. We will actually give them a better environment.
So I'm in my manager's shit house. I've been on his shit list for two years for calling one of our users incompetent, which he was as he was fired about two months after that incident. Fortunately, my boss is off Monday and Tuesday, so I won't have to see him again until Wednesday. On the biright side I can retire anytime I want, but with the stock market down, I'm not sure if I can live off my pension and my investments.
So this week oughta be interesting. By the way, France sucks.
Posted by denny at April 20, 2003 06:43 PM