But first, look what I stole from Curmudgeonly & Sceptical.
Eeeewwww! There goes my dinner!
So what's up with the Germans?
The German project is on hiatus. We gave them two proposals:
1. $1.5 million a year. They run on our platform fully automated.
2. $1.75 million a year. They run the stupid, inefficient way they're running now. The difference in price is the two additional programmers we would have to hire to support their dumb environment. As it is, we'll still be doing it with seven less people. Ah, the triumph of capitalism over socialism.
For them to meet their budget, we would have had to have had them up and running by September 1. To do that, we would have had to have ordered and installed four new processors and six new DASD magic boxes. If they hadn't sat around with their thumbs up their asses and rotating on said thumbs and signed the contract in March, we could have made it. As it is, there is no way. They are $350,000 short. We are not willing to eat that money, so the project has been put off until November when we will revisit it. Of course, this is impacting our needs as we were gonna piggyback some of our stuff on the hardware we were getting for them. Now, we gotta figger a way to get at least one new processor to properly support our current customers. And, next October, we get to start the process with the Germans again. Maybe I'll be resource actioned out the door by then.
So why do I hate client server? First off, I'm a mainframe bigot. I'm a systems programmer who works with MVS (renamed OS/390 and then renamed z/OS) and VM. I've been doing stuff in the large systems environment since 1977. One of the nice things about the large system environment is support is handled by the mainframe staff, not the end user.
On Monday, I got into work and powered up my PC and fired up my mail program. Hmmm! Nuttin' new. Wassup wid dat? I replicate a local copy of my mail from the server and the replication worked OK. Hmmm! So let's go up to the server. That's funny. Nuttin' there either. What's going on? Then, I remembered. They migrated me to a different server over the weekend. There's an e-mail from support that they were doing it and instructions on how I was suppposed to do a bunch of shit on my PC to make this work.
Now this is the kind of shit that pisses me off. They could invest in some sneaker wear and get some intern to do all this shit, but instead, they have the end user, in my case a highly paid data processing professional, do it. To top it off, the instructions sucked! So, I spent an hour-and-a-half (and my team lead helped also) fucking with this stuff to make it work. A kid making 1/4 of what I make could have done it in 1/6 of the time.
This is the false economy of pushing everything off on the end user. Plus, management does not like us to call the (No) Help (Whatsoever) Desk 'cause that's $25 a call. It's internal funny money, but it is charged against us. What really pissed me off, since I'm not doing too much (call me Wally) this cut into my web surfing time. But, if we had the German project I would be working my butt off (at least six hours a day - remember, my boss lowered my rating last year, so I'm working down to it - 6 hours a day - nice round number), and this bullshit would have cut into my productivity bigtime.
Oh well, the week is over and I'm off until Tuesday.
Yeeee! Hahhhh!