Andy's Blog

The mystery is over, and the deed done; I have resigned from my current employer!  Too many reasons into why this needed to be done, but even so it is not something that is easily or gladly done, rather as a thing of last resort.

That said I have a new job awaiting me in Northampton, MUCH closer to home, with more money and benefits… so I definitely have something to look forward to.

More later..

Next week should prove to be interesting as the natural conclusion to some things will come to fruition.  Mysterious eh?  All will become clearer sometime next week.

I am up in sunny Glasgow today for a meeting with one of our major customers.  Unfortunately the lady who does the flight bookings decided that I needed more time to ‘acclimatise’ so landed me here at 8am for a meeting that won’t start till 1pm.

I think I am starting to get the DT’s from too many shots of Latte’s whilst waiting in a nearby hotel!

Today was somewhat hectic as ‘she-who-must-be-obeyed’ is not feeling very well at all and it was left to me to do the School run with my two boys; Alex and James. Of course the School run also involved me having to make their pack lunches (wait till they open THAT little surprise!), break-their-fast and also ensure they are sh*t, showered and shaved before departure.

We survived

After all that, and the grumblings they made when I told ‘em we were walking to School, it was back to work, albeit working from home – thank gawd for broadband and a VPN connection.

Work, as in my previous post, is not going particularly pleasantly and today has gone pretty much to that same script. However, this post isn’t really a usual rant about how badly work has gone, but the small things that make life seem so much more worth living.

The look on my youngest son’s face, as he popped out of his classroom, when he saw me waiting made the whole day seem not so bad after all. His enthusiasm as he skips in front of me telling me about all that he did today does make me wistful for those yesteryears of my youth.

Keeping cynical in the face of his youthful exuberance seemed almost sacriligious.

Definitely in a bit of a ‘funk’ at the moment. All the responsibilities I thought I had seemed to be in the hands of others and nobody seems to have had the decency to explain why, what and how this all happened.

New ‘challenges’ are coming on-stream and the resources I thought I had have been moved elsewhere, and the people who moved those resources are asking how am I planning to support the new ‘challenges’? Good question!

I actually do enjoy challenges and given the reins I will run with any challenge, the position I find myself in now is kinda pulling me down. I have decided to just calmly follow the new world order and see how well they do my job for me.

Let’s see how this week works out….

As Robert F. Kennedy once famously said; “we live in interesting times”. Now as most of you probably know ‘living in interesting times’ is not necessarily the best of places to be. This, however, is definitely where we are at work.

A product that has taken an inordinately long time being delivered to the customer has now, on the eve of its launch, been shown not to be able to deliver what it promised…. by a country mile! Instead of supporting the 500 concurrent users it supposed to be able to do, it can only just manage 83!

For the past week teams of guys here, including my fair self, have been working around the clock to re-engineer the architecture and understand where it failed. But it doth seem that the Gods are against us. I present to you the prosecution against the Gods;

• At the same time the failure was found, the computer room air-conditioning has failed and now requires teams of developers to blow on the servers in an attempt to keep them cool whilst tests are ran.
• The only person who knew the local administrator password on the servers, at the hosting company, has disappeared on holiday.
• Key personnel from our Company also disappeared on holiday BEFORE the problems occurred (hmmmmm)

Not a huge list I grant you, but at the end of 18 hour days it doth seem somewhat suspicious to already paranoia ridden minds.

Ah well, I am in work on my lonesome trying to figure out the best way to cool down a server room which is slowly cooking servers…. as I said to my manager; “This wouldn’t be happening if we were using Linux”.

…his response was VERY rude!