I wish I could say that everyone with whom I associate on the job is terribly motivated and competent. Some are. Our local IT (information technology, you know, computers and sh*t) is motivated and capable and a joy to work with. He enjoys his work and has a sense of humor.
My work laptop has ‘issues’. It has a little touchbar that toggles several functions on and off, like the wireless connection, and the the external display, both functions that are important to me. I told the IT guy about it and he popped into the office and tried everything he could, and between the two of us we decided the thing needed a trip back to whatever fetid swamp H-P dragged this thing out of.
Today he called me while I was on the way to lunch. He had another identical computer and we could swap hard drives, leaving me with a functioning system while mine goes back to H-P. When I got back to the office, I sent him an email. No response. That’s unlike him, but hey, he’s a busy guy. I waited. Got impatient. I needed to get this swap done before next weeks’ road trip, so I called.
“Hey’, I said, “are we gonna do that swap today?”
He says, “Come on over, but I’m busy right now. The whole network is down.” Since I’m on “the whole network and I’m NOT down, I tell him this.
“Well,” he says, “then the south building is down. I’m trying to see what happened. You can come over here if you want, but I can’t guarantee we can do anything. I gotta get this fixed. I think I lost power to the servers.”
“Well, if it’s a POWER problem, then why don’t I come over with my voltmeter?”
“You have a voltmeter?”
“Well, yeah. It goes with the territory.” And I shut down my computer down and head out the back door to my car. And I hear the emergency generator running. Since nobody’s gone into panic mode in the plant, I note this as a routine monthly test. YOu have to do those tests for your own good, and to meet several government regulations. I file this bit of data, the running status, away as I head over to the IT guy’s cave.
I get there to find him fretting. He’s got a couple of dead EtherNet hubs. I told him that the plant people were running the emergency generator.
“But,” he says, “that shouldn’t affect us. We’re on UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) and it should last for hours.”
I smile, because if UPS problems went away, I’d have a very uneventful life.
He continues, “I called the plant. Somebody’s coming to help.”
And in walk the morons. Our plant’s electrical staff is small, four or five “qualified” electricians, including the supervisor, and the supervisor and his ‘pet’ have the charming qualities of being both lazy AND incompetent. Guess who shows up. You got it: Lead moron and his pet.
“Uh, something’s wrong with the UPS.”
Me: “It’s dead. We need to get it fixed.”
Lead moron: “I know. It’s been messin’ up for three months.”
THIS is the guy who is responsible for scheduling work on this plant’s power system. He’s just announced that he’s known about a failed piece of equipment for three months and hasn’t seen fit to do something about it. My temper is rising. “We need to get his fixed. If it means calling in a specialist, then we need to do it. We can’t have this.” But I’m not in this chain of command. I’m an outsider. I’m “pipeline’ and they’re ‘plant’.
“Yeah, I guess we need to get it fixed.” He starts poking on the keypad under the LCD display. I figure (correctly) that this will produce results equivalent to me spending a buck on a lottery ticket.
We open a couple of doors and find that the circuit breaker that connects the batteries to the rest of the system is tripped. This signals some possible problems within the magic boxes of the UPS and like a Japanese radio, “No user-serviceable parts inside”. “Get a factory service rep out.” That’s my last word to the moron.
I and the IT guy move some power cables off the power strip supplied by the UPS and onto another strip that IS on, but subject to power interruption, and that puts the network back up and running. The IT guy says he’s going to send an email to the area vice president since this problem keeps happening. I think it’s a good idea, because it’s obvious the the two morons aren’t going to do anything on their own.
Anyhow, five minutes with the IT guy working on transplanting the hard drive from my computer into this spare, and I’m on the road again. “Write that email,” I tell him as I leave. I know my vice president. He’s not one to let a ball drop, and he is feared by the lazy and incompetent.
And I left there shaking my head. The two morons? I don’t understand why they’re here, but they’ve been here for thirty years and their traits are not unknown. It’s just one of the phenomena of the workplace, I guess.
Such people exist and can continue to exist in any organisation sufficiently large that 1) they can hide behind others who do actually do some work, 2) they can blame bureaucratic CFs for their failure to do the job, and 3) their failures can’t be directly linked to them by people with the power to fire them.
Seems your organisation has all three safeguards for incompetence and laziness in place.
If they weren’t working there they’d be draining resources somewhere else. I usually see that in human resources or other office support types. Those kind mostly get weeded out of critical areas, in my experience.
Have to add one more “safegaurd” for lazy idiots…..if they’re the hunting and/or fishing buddies of important people. Like you, in my profession I’m considered a “high level specialist”…about a year ago I was sent into one of our “areas” to ‘help’ the local guys get their equipment into the condition it should be so that our customers would be satisfied. I went around and inspected approximately two dozen ‘machines’, made lists of what we needed to do (including making comprehensive parts lists for them). All they had to do was actually order the parts and cooperate with scheduling the ‘down time’, and give me a couple of their mechanics to get the work done. First hurdle, “we can’t spend the money.”—-can’t spend a couple thousand dollars in preventive maintenance BUT we CAN spend a couple hundred thousand replacing engines/compressor frames when they crash!?!?!?!
Second hurdle, “But we’ve always done it THIS way…” After much effort at trying to be professional and tactful my final response was, “it’s because you’ve always done it that way that your equipment is in the condition it is and the customer wants to use another vendor!”
I really honestly believe we should be not only allowed, but encouraged, to just shoot stupid and lazy people! Ignorant but willing I can work with……lazy and stupid?? Just shoot them along with those that believe we WANT to listen to their thumping loud music.
Ignorant and willing is wonderful for ignorance can be repaired via training and experience. Flat lazy and incompetent is no kidding terminal.
Four decades ago we had a total power outage at work DESPITE having an emergency diesel generator in the cellar.
Turns out the noodle-heads had wired the starter motor to the mains instead of to the battery side of the UPS :-(
It gets better… A bit over a decade ago we had a major outage on the mainframe, which was fed (or should have been) from 2 independent 380V lines connected to 2 underground cables leading to 2 substations, each of which gettings its juice from a different powerstation.
Of course each was supposed to have its own UPS as well.
Turns out the UPSs were there, but the batteries were long dead.
Both 380V lines were spliced into a single extension cable, which was running loose over the floor of the server room (rather than being safely installed below the raised floor or run through a ceiling duct), directly into a wall outlet with no proper fusing, and out to the grid.
Of course someone had to trip over that cable, ripping it out, causing a mainframe running a cellphone network to go down.
No surprises there…
Of course I’m sure you realize that power spikes are bad-juju for network equipment, and likely to help spread a surge so it can fry every PC in a building instead of just those on the single circuit…
Bet those two voted Obama as well…
DD