Bad Taste Office Humor Week continues:
I gotta get me that tie!
The Audit starts next week and things are really getting absurd. My team lead missed the first conference call on The Audit and had to attend a makeup call. Fortunately for him, it was only 30 minutes. Mine was over an hour.
I got into work Tuesday and there was a dumpster right outside my office. Hmmm. Could this be a subtle hint that I'm supposed to clean up my desk?
Anyway, I plugged in my laptop and logged on and checked my mail.
I was reading my mail when my team lead (TL) said, "We need to clean up your desk".
Me: Oh. Is the dumpster outside the door a hint from our DM (Dickhead Manager)?
TL: Yep. He put it there. Not very subtle is he?
Me: Actually, this is the cleanest my desk has been in years. I just need to pitch a few things (I didn't even fill up a waste basket), and put some stuff on my bulletin board.
One of the things is my poster of two canoes in a race. One has one guy with a megaphone and everyone rowing in sync and the other has one rower and everyone else with megaphones. I've also printed out a story that goes with it.
TCIDNN (The Company I Dare Not Name) and another company got in a canoe race. Guess which canoe was TCIDNN? The other company won big time. TCIDNN convened a task force to see why they lost and they decided it was because the one guy rowing didn't row fast enough. They scheduled another race and got the same results. So, they fired the rower, sold the canoe and paddles and used the money to give themselves bonuses.
The other thing I have on my bulletin board is my version of the Serenity Prayer:
Grant me the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, courage to change what should be changed, and the wisdom to hide the bodies of all those people I had to kill because they pissed me off.
I got into work on Wednesday, and was planning on doing the catalog work that I tried to do last week when I screwed the pooch. I took off early on Tuesday so I could do it at night when there would be no users on the system. We backed up the volume that I was gonna be playing with so we could recover if I messed up again. If you are not an MVS sysprog skip the next two paragraphs.
We're getting ready to do an upgrade and the guy doing it wanted me to make a copy of the master catalog and we'd use that to IPL on Saturday. All I had to do was allocate a new one and do a REPRO NOMERGECAT. Last week I did a REPRO MERGECAT (I know. Dumb move), and when the job failed, I tried to delete the new catalog which caused the disaster.
This time I did it right. The only problem is there were entries in the master catalog for datasets that didn't exist and lots of them were VSAM. So, my REPRO NOMERGECAT job would fail and I'd have to delete the entry out of both catalogs, delete the new one, reallocate, and rerun the job. I knew I could do it safely, so I logged off last night and decided to finish Wednesday morning.
I'm reconfiguring our floor in preparation for the German project and cleaning up the configurations for all the hardware we've disco'd. But, all the fiber optic cables are still there, so I planned on pulling a lot of them out on Wednesday. This has the benefit of getting me away from my office, where everyone in the vicinity is preparing for The Audit.
The Audit is coming! The Audit is coming!
Unfortunately, I wound up working on the catalog all morning. We had shit cataloged on volumes that no longer existed. What a pain in the ass! So I'm in my office and my team lead returned from talking to The Project Manager In Charge Of Preparing For The Audit (TPMICOPFTA) and he says that we need to rerun my PC security report tool and encrypt all the local data bases flagged on the report. We had done this last week and it went like this.
Me: You know we didn't encrypt all those databases.
TL: They don't need to be encrypted.
Me: I'll bet TPMICOPFTA will say we have to.
TL: Nah. He won't
He was wrong. One of the things I had to encrypt was my last year's vacation schedule. I'm not making this up. I guess if someone outside TCIDNN knew what days I took off last year they could use that info for some nefarious plot.
It reminds me of the Dilbert cartoon where the boss is chiding Alice for leaving stuff on her desk since the competition could see it and determine their company's strategy. The last panel has three guys looking at a document, laughing and saying, "They're gonna use synergy!"
We had our normal Wednesday Inquisition Meeting and DM was remarking about how light our workload was this week. I just had to say it:
Me: Our users know that we're getting ready for The Audit.
He didn't hear me, but half of the people in the room did. A few minutes later, one of the younger guys made a similar comment which DM heard. Did he get a dirty look. I took the young guy aside after the meeting and told him to take a good look at me. That is what he'll be in 20 years.
And I also found out that The Audit trumps Diversity. My team lead missed the mandatory Diversity Meeting and has to make it up. Unfortunately, since everyone is busy working on The Audit, we don't have time for Diversity.
I feel like going to see the VP in charge of Diversity and telling him that The Audit is more important than Diversity.
I'd like to do it wearing that tie.
Posted by denny at July 30, 2003 08:35 PM