Taking A Bullet

My dive trip to Cayman Brac that was scheduled for next week was cancelled. Actually Cayman Brac was not in that bad of shape but Grand Cayman is and a lot of people moved to Cayman Brac while Grand Cayman is being rebuilt. Right now the population of Cayman Brac has tripled. We're hoping to go next February.

Since I've got all next week off, I decided to take a vacation day today to recover from the wine tasting and work a day next week instead. I still wound up doing some work.

Operations called me about 5:30 and told me that one of my users was having problems with a new system I had built for him. The IPL volume was busy and he wasn't able to IPL. It was a neat bug. It was an error on my part. I fixed it. Which brings up the latest at TCIDNN (The Company I Dare Not Name).

I'll be the first person to admit that I haven't been working my ass off for the last three years. I pissed off the CDSM® (Clueless Dipshit Manager) that I was working for back then. I made him look ridiculous. He did all the work, I merely pointed it out. He dropped my rating in my next appraisal and I, nearing retirement and realizing that my career was essentially over, decided to work down to that rating.

Let me just say that even after cutting back on my work, I am so good at certain things that I do (This is not bragging. I am stating a fact.
All you have to do is ask the people I support.) and am so familiar with our environment (I built the configurations) that it would take a very talented person to come in and replace me immediately. What I do in 20 hours would take my replacement 30 to 40 hours to do. My team lead knows this. My current manager, and my old CDSM® who is her boss doesn't.

Last week I asked my team lead what they were gonna do about replacing me as I had a candidate in mind. He told me that management told him they weren't gonna replace me. I know how that made him feel since he already works his butt off and now he and the other fulltime programmer were gonna have to pick up my workload as well. If the new network guy knew anything they could have farmed some of what I do out to him, but he cannot do anything that I do. He cannot even do a lot of what he is supposed to do and I've been doing it by default.

When my users found out I was retiring and asked who was gonna replace me I told them the truth: no one. This pissed off a lot of my users. I'm in the middle of a lot of projects that I will not have completed by the time I leave. Someone is gonna have to complete them.

My users know what I do. Their managers know what I do. It's a shame my managers don't.

Evidently their managers started thumping on my managers because my manager stopped by my office last Friday and asked what I had told my users about my replacement. I told her what I had been told, that I wasn't being replaced. She said I was wrong and that I was gonna be replaced by a fulltime contractor. Hmmmm. They had only made that decision the previous day. I wonder what happened?

Here I am with only nine more working days before I'm gone and I get in trouble again. As I told my team lead on Monday, I took one last bullet for the team.

But I fixed the problem.

Posted by denny at September 22, 2004 09:20 PM