I am eligible for full retirement from TCIDNN (The Company I Dare Not Name), but I stick around for the following reasons:
1. I get paid a lot of money.
2. I don't have enough money to retire and still maintain my lifestyle. I'm close.
3. Every month I work, my pension goes up.
4. I like my work, it's my job that sucks.
5. Sometimes the bullshit is really amusing and gives me good material for my blog.
And sure 'nuff, reason 5 came through for me on Thursday and Friday.
My friend Brian, got to attend a conference call circle jerk round table with a HMMM® (High Mucky-Muck Manager). Now I have told him many times, when on a conference call with management, remember this: Mute is my friend! Keep your mouth shut. He didn't heed my advice.
One of the things that was brought up in this circle jerk round table was the fact that IT support (That's my group) does not have the hardware to support the latest software coming down the pipe. Now why is that?
Long time readers may recall that from January to November we have been working on a project that I named Death Spiral, that involved us providing host support to our counterparts in Europe. This all came about because their IT support was raising their price from $2.7 million a year to $2.9 million a year. We got involved and after countless meeetings and writing and rewriting proposals we told them we could provide support for $1.7 million a year.
After a month of this bullshit, I realized that our counterparts were just using us as a bargaining chip. I tried to explain this to my CDSM® (Clueless Dipshit Manager), but I was accused of having an "attitude problem" and not being a "team player". I truly know how Cassandra must have felt. I guess the shit hit the fan when I remarked in one of the meetings that our users were pissed that we were spending all of our time trying to nail down this project rather than concentrating on our real customers. My CDSM® accused me of telling this to our users. As a result, I wasn't invited to any more meetings which as you can probably imagine really broke my heart.
We had been planning on using Death Spiral to finance our hardware upgrades. When the project fell through in November (Actually my CDSM® still thinks we have a chance even though the IT support group in Germany dropped their price to $1.5 million) there was no backup plan, so we have no financing for needed upgrades. In the meantime, my CDSM®'s manager (who was also a CDSM®) retired and my CDSM® was promoted to take his place. Can anyone say Peter Principle?
And just last week, that same user group, who has been telling us we needed to upgrade our hardware, had me on a conference call to France to discuss having them provide host support since our hardware was almost obsolete. This was the group that my CDSM® accused me of telling that we were spending more time with Hans und Fritz than we were trying to provide solutions to them. This group had to go to France for support eight years ago because we didn't have the hardware to support them. It turns out that what they were paying France then was more than enough to pay for us to upgrade our hardware. But, here we are, eight years later, going through the same old bullshit again! The more things change, the more they remain the same.
But, back to the circle jerk round table. All of this was related to the HMMM® (who just happens to be my CDSM®'s immediate superior) and he assured them that just that morning my CDSM® had made an "aggressive hardware purchase".
Immediately after the circle jerk round table, Brian came down to my office and related this to me. My team lead and I looked at each other and realized that maybe we were gonna get the DASD subsystem, tape drive and 500 tapes that we had been trying to get for over a year. After hooting with laughter about this "aggressive hardware purchase", we asked what else went on during the circle jerk round table.
Indeed there was more. The HMMM® was told that we were no longer gonna be able to share hardware with the division that was splitting off from us.
"That cannot be", he said.
"Oh yes it can", said Brian. (Mute is my friend! Mute is my friend!)
"Oh, surely not. That would not provide synergy."
On Friday morning when I got to work and checked my mail, there was a note from my CDSM®, asking me what hardware we were sharing with the other division, why we weren't sharing hardware with them, and what could we do to share more hardware with them. Obviously, the HMMM® checked with him about the split.
I replied to the note that I had been spending the last two months working on the reverse synergy hardware non-leveraging project. We had had two meetings with the other division discussing this (He had been at both of them.) and I had been updating the team about what I was doing in our Waste 15 Minutes Every Other Tuesday concerence call. We had also discussed this in the weekly Host Team Meeting, that he usually monitors. The only hardware that we are sharing is about 32 addresses on one of our DASD subsystems so they could have a spinning backup of their systems and since we back up all the volumes on that subsystem we would back up their data, which we are charging them for.
I know that somehow this is all gonna wind up being my fault. But I don't care. The bullshit at TCIDNN does not really bother me any more. It's just too funny.
Posted by denny at December 19, 2003 08:31 PM