Fun With Bozo

Every Tuesday we have a team conference call to talk about projects and problems. This is the only meeting that I attend that actually is productive. One of the reasons is my team lead, who runs the meeting, sends out an agenda before the meeting. It is a list of problem records, I/T requests, and ongoing projects. The meeting starts on time and we stick to the agenda.

If you have been reading my stuff for the last few weeks, you know that we just got a new processor. It is an IBM z/900. Yeah, I know, for those of you in the know, the latest and the greatest is a z/990, but I'll take what I can get. This allows me to get in the Early Ship Program for z/OS 1.6. Both my IBM rep and myself are happy about that. And for the person who commented last week about not hearing IPL in over 10 years, I still run DITTO.

Last week I ran up against a wall on using token ring OSA (STFU about token ring. We're working on ethernet) that another one of my team members solved. He found the right book to use. Using his samples, I got two of my guest systems working. He called me on Monday and he couldn't get his system working. So, using what I had done on my system, which were his examples, I got his system working. I now know how to set up QDIO. Piece of cake! Slice of pie!

Last Friday, my team lead spent over an hour on the phone trying to talk the new network guy (I've talked about him before. He's a bozo.) through setting up TCPIP on an MVS system from scratch. Lemme tell you how bad this guy is. He thought cut and paste was magic. Really. I'm not making this up. I was listening to my team lead try to explain some of this shit to him and it was all I could do to keep myself from falling out of my chair, falling on the floor and laughing my ass off.

I've moved one of my VM systems to the new processor. I've started to update the TCPIP connections to all the MVS guests on that system. I got a FART (Fast Available Real Time - Similar to AOL IM) from one of my users that she wasn't able to IP into her system. I FART'ed back that I had moved the system and I would fix it but it would take me a few minutes. Just then the phone rang. It was the new network guy.

During the meeting, my team lead told Bozo tha he was gonna have to do all the IP work on most of the guests on my VM system. After the call I looked at him and asked him why was he doing this to me? I was gonna have to try to explain to Bozo how to do all this stuff. Aaarrrggghhh!

Whenever I answer the phone and I hear , "Hello Denny, this is Bozo", I know that I am facing an hour of sheer hell. So, for the next hour, I try to explain to him about the TCPIP profile data set, about how we need three OSA devices, and yes, I will define those devices in the hardware configuration, and, yes, he could see how they were defined if he knew HCD, or I could build an IOCDS input dataset and he could see how they were defined if he knew how to read the source code. So how many of you understood what I just wrote? I know all you Delta folks do. Bozo doesn't have a clue.

My team lead told me that we have to get Bozo up to where he understands what we are talking about. It was funny. When he was talking about how we learned how to do stuff he said, "Here's how Denny learns. he moves along until he runs into a wall. Then he gets out the books, looks at IBMLINK, or calls some other sysprogs. Eventually he gets over the wall and goes along until he runs into the next wall." Sounds good. I got ropes and pitons. Bozo ain't got shit.

We are planning on moving our main MVS system to the new processor this weekend. I did all the planning, updated the IODF, and checked out the NCP's. We should be good to go. This is supposed to be Bozo's job. He doesn't have a clue. He even attended a class on this. It was above his head.

The upside of all this, is it is job security for me. The downside is if the migration goes as smoothly as it has so far (And it has gone even better than I thought it would. We are way ahead of schedule.) management is gonna think they won't need me. The upside is if they do shitcan me, they will have to bring me back as a contractor.

And I will have Bozo to thank for that.

Posted by denny at June 8, 2004 09:48 PM