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Admin
Absolutely not! I too have had employers call me trying to get me to continue doing my job for free. It's one thing to ask questions on undocumented stuff. Ongoing support, and new tasks are another thing.
You acted professionally and (IMHO) excedingly graciously - far more than they deserved.
Good luck on your new job!
Admin
Well, actually, they don't. Usually they ask me things like "Would you please move your fat arse out of the way?" or "Did somebody just cut a giant gorgonzola around here?" or, if they're particularly short and female, "Could you help me screw this lightbulb in?" I figure one out of three ain't bad.
However, for current purposes, they ask me "Is it the money? The free time? The endless travel to glitzy places like Bracknell, Tulsa, and exotic war zones?"
Well, no. It's none of that. I figured out quite early in my "career" that, for absolutely every single job I had ever done, by far my most enjoyable day was the one where I left it.
With contracting, joy is telescoped and easily accessible. About one day every three months, I get to experience an ecstasy, an epiphany. Sometimes, if I'm either lucky or tremendously incompetent, it can take as little as a week for bliss to come my way.
Your mileage may vary, of course.
Admin
Admin
Admin
To be honest EVERYONE was a manager there. The story was cleaned a bit. It was an abusive hostile environment. It started out weird but the company was sold as growing up and coming and soon to move to a new location due to the growth.
Yes it seems cool to have little to do.
What stops it being cool is having to fill out a spreadsheet every day to turn into your manager to show what you did. That's fun!
The server was originially put in place to do email, web servicing and file storage. It became pretty much a closet fan. No one used it. We had a hardware firewall but thats not the issue. Why buy equipment and refuse to use it. Even better why hire someone that you didnt need?
Admin
Which was better than absolutely everything else about Tulsa.
Admin
I'll be truthful with you, I sometimes like dumb girls better than smart girls. Maybe it's me subconciously wanting to have an upper hand, but I many times find them much more fun.
Admin
Oh yeah, someone already mentioned that he probably was caucasian too.
Admin
"Ooooh! I love your new YouTube persona! It's just so .... butch!
"But it's just not you, is it, darling?"
Obviously, to somebody else.
Admin
I am probably inflating a few things but not by much. This was my one chance to finally put some type of barrier up and I took it. I work on the same system at a new place and I like it cause, well, it's all that I do. And I can set up time for it to come down for maint and patches when needed. There's an actual backup plan in place. I am allowed to run an actual mirror of the live environment. I am cross trained here and others are cross trained on what I do. That was another thing at the old place, no cross training. No one wanted to cause if only THEY knew what was going on, they looked important. There was no real 'holiday time' because of the lack of cross training.
The place was a functioning business alright (I won't say successful) but as so many people here and at /. or anywhere else you go will say, many business view IT as a necessary evil. They want all these cool hi-tech gadgets and software but they don't understand the background about putting these things into the IT fabric. Many don't know what it will take to make systems A, B and D talk to glitzy new toy Z and they get upset when you tell them the time it would take to implement it isn't the short 'couple of days' the salesman told em it would be.
I am probably eating up the comments section here, but another issue that ate away at my time at the old job was the fact smaller businesses and practices would be acquired and absorbed...along with all their custom or otherwise software. They wouldn't consult IT when doing this and so it was VERY common two days prior to the absorption to have a CTO or CEO or CFO or something walk in and go, "We just got so-and-so to join us last week, they're using <some piece of crap software> to track their things, we told em we could have it interfaced by tomorrow." or even worse, "we told em we would give them a month to parallel their and our systems so we can transfer their data." Lots of times, these would never happen.. So, add '<some piece of crap software>' to yet another thing that we had to suddenly train in and maintain.
I'm gonna stop here, I've avoided thus far giving away specifics that would indicate what I'm talking about. Trust me, that place was an emotional blackhole and I'm glad to have finally pulled away from it. I don't want to go back. My current job keeps me happy, I am doing what I like, and learning more things. I get upset from time to time at this job, but it is nowhere near as bad as the constant feeling of dread and worthlessness my last job managed to bless me with.
Okay, okay, stopping now. (Case you haven't guessed, slow day today for some reason, lol)
Admin
So Bob... it REALLY sounds like you worked at the same place I used to. The only major difference is that my old company was really successful in their field. ALL of their code and internal processes were pure shit but they somehow managed to rake in ass-loads of money.
Could you maybe tell us the state that your old company was in (assuming it was in America of course)? :)
Admin
The only 2 things better than putting in my 2 week notice at my last company, was having an arugment with the asshat that ran the company, that yes, they still owed me the 2&1/2 vacation days I had left. Their argument was that according to the employee manual, "upon termination" you lose your vacation/sick days. As I was quitting, I did not understand how I was somehow being terminated. This was all in the front section of the building, within earshot of quite a few people. I told him that this argument was making me feel ill, and I might have to go home early (with gee, 2 & 1/2 days left before I offically resigned) because my stomach was bothering me. To which they "threatened" that if I did so, it could hurt my chances of future employement with that company (fat chance of that happening anyways). So I had a nice 4 1/2 day weekend before I started my new job. Got a bit of yardwork done. Nice.
The other better thing was when, gee, I still got paid for the 2 1/2 days that I didn't work. And I thought that the empolyee handbook said that I couldn't take sick days after I turned in my 2 week notification.
Oh, one more thing that was even better then the day I gave them my notice. I had changed positions to do something that I was in charge of before there, as the person who took over it from me was leaving. Well, I streamlined the process even more than the last time I did that job, and the customer that I was doing the work for was starting to get oh, triple the amount of money back then they did before (which was the whole point of the job). I had some nice charts done up, because at that place, unless you could prove that you were doing good, then you were not. And about a week before I put in my notice, the boss bragged to our customer on how much better we're doing.
Well, being the type of place that they were, that they never thought that anyone would ever leave them, the amount of training I did before I left was 15 minutes with my supervisor on what I was doing different than the last person. As one could guess, the numbers dropped down to $0 for oh, about a month or so before they hired someone to do the job.
Admin
Admin
http://images.google.com/images?q=whale%20teeth&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS234US235&um=1&sa=N&tab=wi
They do?
Admin
Admin
Good on ya, Jon!
Personally though, after roughly 15 years of IT experience, I just want to go home.
/sigh
Admin
"Son, what you want to be when you grow up?" "A gardener, or a plumber, or a pool boy..." "Hey, honey, it looks like he found that tape!"
Admin
Mmmmmmm........Vidia...........
Admin
That's ok, we all look the same to them anyway.
Admin
I quit a horrible job last March after sticking it out for six long years. I got hired almost immediately at another company. The bad part is that I took a 40%+ paycut (benefits are much worse at my new job.) The good part... well, everything else is the good part. I love the job, I'm good at it, I'm treated with respect and my contributions are valued, and full-time means 40 hours/week rather than 60-80 hours/week.
It's been worth it.
Admin
doesn't make you an ass. makes you a PROFESSIONAL.
Admin
You can't accuse Hartman of not being proactive. On the very first day he was already helping Jon clean out his desk.
Admin
Speaking as an innocent observer; No honey, that pretty much had to involve firearms. And that goofy grin is mostly because the cops stopped off for whiskey and hookers while they were giving him a ride home. They'll let you take the limo from the medal ceremony tomorrow to pick up the car. Have a nice night.
At the very least, they didn't get any notice.
Admin
Now I'm curious - so if I went there and spoke German with no accent, they'd from at me, even though I'd be coming directly from the fatherland?
Admin
Err.. doen't that mean you got a raise?
You new income i_n is 40% times less than your old income i_o. So i_n = 0.6i_o
However, your hourly wage was h_o = i_o/70 and your new hourly wage is h_n = (0.6i_o)/40
So it's 4 i_o/280 and 7 (0.6i_o) / 280
or 0.01428 i_o vs. 0.015i_o
I mean, you old hourly income was i_o/70 , and your new income is i_n/40.
Admin
Hey bob you wouldent happen to be from victoria, australia by any chance?
Admin
That, and my IT skills are being wasted on things like these:
Copy-paste a link to Internet Explorer address bar for the boss, because he really can't do it on his own.
Yes. Seriously. He also types via hunt-and-peck system, using two fingers. On the only ergonomic keyboard found from the company.
Ooooh, only ninety-one days to go.
Admin
This reminds me of how I quit in one of my previous jobs...
I came back from a week's holiday to find a deluge of work to do. By Friday lunchtime, I've finally cleared the mountain of work that'd been assigned to me and started checking over the servers to make sure they were behaving (I know it's late in the week, but I was hired as a programmer, I just did adhoc sysadmin work because I was the only one who could).
Noticing some erratic network traffic from a staging server, I discovered someone had hacked the box and installed an irc bouncer on it. After informing the boss, the first step was to unplug the network cable, second track down the process and files they'd installed and disable them, then check all the other servers which were all clean. As I had to be away over the week, as a final precaution I shut down the box so that if there was still anything lurking on there it wouldn't trash things and I'd make doubly sure on Monday that all was well.
So, about 4pm, I went to tell my boss that I'd tracked down the rogue program, disabled it and turned the box off to be sure (no-one needed the staging machine over the weekend) and that all the other boxes were clean. There she was on the phone to her husband, panicking about it.
At 5pm, her husband arrived and decided that as he was a "Unix expert", he'd back-up the machine, re-install Linux and restore everything, just to be absolutely sure. I showed him all the documentation on the backup system, how to use the tape drive, etc, and hung around for 2 hours past when I needed to leave, although it was clear I wasn't going to be allowed to touch the machine.
Roll on Monday morning...
Turn up to find that EVERY SINGLE SERVER had been re-installed. I say re-installed, I mean botched as not a single one actually booted any more. The boss was yelling at me for "not volunteering to come in at the weekend" and generally making a massive scene because it was MY fault. Not her husbands, who had trashed every machine including the central file repository (which incidentally was inside the firewall), no mine.
That lunchtime, I just wrote a simple letter: "I will not be talked to like that. Here's my notice". I was absolutely ecstatic the whole day, and in fact most of the week later when I was still clearing up the mess left by her husband and restoring everything from the backups.
Best move I ever made!
Admin
I wouldn't have cleaned up hubby's mess. I'd walk out the door and let those dumb fuckers clean up their own mess.
Admin
It's fuuny actually, I used to work in a company like that as well. Mind you, even though we had over 45 machines on our network and no servers everything worked fine. A couple of machines we called 'servers', but they where just Windows 2000 boxes with shared drives. We even used an old Windows 98 postbox manager for the internal mail.
Oddly when we went 'Enterprisey' no benfits where seen, well I guess one, not having to walk to someone's machine when something could be set in an Active Directory setup.
The old system had looked after itself without intervention for about 5 years. All we had to do was change backup tapes on one of the server machines (all the PC's on the network performed a xcopy when logging in to a 'server').
Ho hum
Admin
Well, actually - a domain can be very useful for an 8 user network, although I'd strongly question the need for SharePoint (and a simple Samba config can run the domain, too). Firstly, if everyone has their home directory and profile on the server, when their PC goes tits up or needs replacing, they don't incessantly whine that all their stuff has gone. They can use other machines and get their profile and home dir. Everything can be backed up on one device.
Admin
No kidding. "I'm mad because you yelled at me. I quit. But first, let me fix everything that was broken first. Everything set? Ok, just let me make a fresh pot of coffee for everyone before I leave. Also, I bought a box of doughnuts, so help yourself."
Admin
Admin
I am absolutely ecstatics to learn that there are other IT professionals that have had experiences like these.
BTW: NO, it doesn't make you an ass. It does however get you away from one ;)
Admin
Ah Bracknell.
As a client once remarked to me as we were doing our third circuit of the roundabout on the way to drop me off at the train station: "I'd sooner kill myself than live in Bracknell."
He commuted from Ealing every day.
(And he once described Utrecht as "a toilet". I miss him.)
Admin
My job isnt as horrible as this but I did get an offer for a way better job this week. I wish it was horrible...it would make leaving this one so much easier :(
Admin
Actually, I thought that one of the real WTFs about the article is that he kept listening to the wife, who obviously lived in Happy Land where everything is going to get better despite strong evidence to the contrary. She should have told him to get out quickly.
Also, why did he take the job without understanding the computer setup and the "drab" cubicle layout?
His fault for not properly asking questions at the interview! These crappy bosses and lousy companies only thrive because people are stupid enough to work for them.
Admin
My wife recently left a job she hated. I really encouraged her to leave with her integrity intact and she did everything she could to document processes and smooth the transition. When they didn't have her replacement start until after she left to save money she actually came in unpaid for a day to train him after her last day and gave him her cell phone number
Then every time someone needed something they were calling her. She quickly adopted a policy of letting it go to voicemail and returning the call four hours later. If it could be fixed without her within four hours then it really wasn't an emergency and if your first response was to call her without doing any legwork yourself you didn't deserve immediatte help.
I loved it.
Admin
THATS MY COMPANY!!! Holy cow! They did the exact same thing with my unused vacation/sick time. They told my as I hadnt taken my time before resigning I was losing it.
They also sent a nasty letter a short time later that I had to take my 401k immediately or they would send me a dispersal check. Nice, my new 401k hadnt kicked in yet at the new place.
I have to say beyond a doubt my old boss had great timing as he pissed me off right when a company was trying to poach me. I was worried about ending up in a worse situation even though it was in no way possible.
I found out yesterday that the meetings we had with his 'settings' for a situation were all BS and are now what I had originally planned for the job. I also saw that they now outsource their website and IT needs along with pretty much everything else. Not a jab at Apple but they really are a mac shop running on PCs.
To all the sharepoint haters: They wanted the server setup and sharepoint is a part of the build, along with Exchange and SQL. They had static ips for their webserver and email. There was no need to pay offsite services (4) to host email or the website. Its not a bank nor ecommerce site so there is no "mission critical" loss if the site goes out due to a hurricane or other issue.
Honestly the whole thing was a colossal waste of money and when I realized it, I was scared as I was the single earner with a pregnant wife. I had no idea why a company would hire a Programmer/system Admin who was running a 300+ user environment with a department under him to do what I was doing. Not to mention they were paying me more to be there listening to 'managers' complain that they couldnt find the mail-merge feature in 'outlook'... Sigh.
Admin
I did that at an old employer years ago. The only problem was, they said "Ok, that sounds fine, how about this weekend?" It really wasn't worth the money that I got.
Admin
For those curious, the events I described took place in Oklahoma... I try not to go into specifics for two reasons: One is to guard the good people who were there and are still there (1 or 2 of em left after I did and two more are planning after their kids graduate) and two is that the place has been a tad litigation happy as of late. CYA, and all.
Admin
Thankfully it looks like the OP wasn't owned by his wife. He went ahead and quit without getting her approval.
Admin
... and the next day Jon took a job with Lehman Brothers.
Admin
Arriving home to his smiling wife, he was asked a familiar question. "How was work?" Jon looked different than usual — he had a smile on his face. "Oh my god," she began, concerned that Jon looked so... happy. "Did something happen? You quit, didn't you?" Jon just kept smiling. "You Idiot! You better have a new Job lined up! The mortgage is due again this thursday", the smile left jons face.
...there all fixed ;)
erm..third time in a row with that captcha...
Admin
That's how it's done. If your job "creeps" to the point where you're working outside of your skillset and paygrade, you need to look around. If your employer treats you like crap, it's time to look around. If your work environment is unbearable, you need to look around.
TRWTF is that the joker in todays WTF didn't know any of this stuff before he sat down. Didn't he ask to see the building? Didn't he ask about the network? Didn't he talk to his new boss?
Before you get in the door, you ask, you look, and if you have a bad feeling, you walk. On day 1, they're putting their best foot forward, and if that is only enough to make you worried, then you need to leave because that place will be hell on earth in record time.
Admin
How do you "look at the building" when its under construction. Did you miss the part where I wired the lan myself? The company EXCELS at putting a much different image of itself public. They have ZERO IT skills and market themselves as a provider.
Case in point: The server that some have been negative about is dead. It died a horrific death from a 'temp' they hired after I left. Worse no one really cared to learn about any of the system before I left.
Also many companies with 'security clearance' with the government dont let you inspect their systems. I accept responsability for screwing up by taking the job for the money. Also being 10 minutes from home was a bonus! I should have known when the password to access the network that I didnt know the first day was taped to the monitor. What was the super-secret master admin password? 'Windows2000'
I should have ran back and begged for my old job back that day!
Admin
I know the feeling. I had sent out an e-mail saying that a piece of functionality was incomplete and should not be tested. Three weeks later I start recieving defects... When I didn't respond instantly to these defects, I my e-mail started to panic. 10 e-mails in a 1/2 hour period from 6 different people. So, in the middle of a well typed reply to them as a group, a manager walks into my cube. As he stands there and spews the managerial peptalk, a second and third manager come and join in. While this is going on, my cellphone starts blaring like a fire alarm with all the text messages being sent from other departments. Finally, when I get everyone out of my cube and calmed down, my office phone starts ringing "You really should let us know, daily, what we can and cannot test".
No, I do not work at Initech. I was wondering when the TPS reports were coming.
Admin
Was the WTF his attitude?
Because his job was to support his customers, and his customers had a system they were comfortable with. The system had proven reliable, and more importantly, it was a system they had experienced a great deal of success with.
They made an investment in his experience not because they wanted things changed today, but so they would be positioned to make changes in the future, but only when NECESSARY.
I realize that everyone in the IT industry thinks of themselves as a "star", but that doesn't mean that every business revolves around the IT department.
Admin
Why would you want to travel all the way to Tulsa to sink a mug of beer with a bunch of old Nazis? Good God, man, you've got Croatia on your doorstep right there.
Admin
Wow, WTF dude, thats enough to ruin anyones day I guess. Pisser.
Jester www.anonymize.us.tc