Okay, suddenly I get it!
“You’d feel a Hell of a lot better if you’d just rip into the occasional customer once in a while.” — Randall Graves
The main issue I have with this job (the Tech Services Manager I got drafted into … not the Business Analyst one I hired on for) is that the stupid overhead takes longer than the actual problem.
Case in point, email this morning: “Client cannot connect to FTP site.”
It took five minutes to log in, kill 40 idle threads, and get everything running again. However, because some over-eager Willy-Loman-type decided to file a “corrective action report” with the higher-ups, I was forced to spend 25 minutes filling in a formal explanation about how we have given out 200 FTP accounts and are only licensed for 50 simultaneous connections, and why this process is a bad one that will lead to more problems in the future.
To add insult to injury the “Willie” demanded I provide an explanation they could give to the client (substituting their name and resolution for mine, of course), so I was further forced to spend another 30 minutes carefully crafting an email in a polite and helpful tone that avoided hurting the sensitive feelings of both the “Willie” and their client by inadvertently making them feel stupid or technically inadequate in any way. The email was done in my best “Mr. Rogers” tone and explained WHY we only allow 50 simultaneous connections from outside entities into our network and included a brief primer on the concepts of department budget, processor prioritization, upstream/downstream bandwidth, IP load balancing, disk storage, and max worker threads.
This led to a realization as to the reason I quit this particular line of work five years ago to concentrate more on the business side of things. It’s not that I hate tech work. I actually enjoy it. Unfortunately, the constant struggle to remain pleasant and professional, and not at all sarcastic and condescending (my natural predilection), is really the source of almost all of my stress — not the actual job itself. In fact, I wouldn’t have had to write this self-therapeutic rant if I could just be efficient and say what is really on my mind.
What I really wanted to say is, “1) Salespeople promise everyone the moon even though they don’t have the slightest clue what they’re promising or if the person really needs it. 2) Executives are cheap, and budgets are tight, I understand this, but you don’t ask for Lobster in a truffle butter sauce on a McDonald’s value menu. 3) Users are incompetent feebs who — no matter how many times you show them — can’t figure out how to rename .zip extensions so they can get through the email filters. 4) Clients are morons who don’t know how to set their FTP clients to use less than 10 threads at a time and thus plug up “the series of tubes.”
In fact, I just wrote this entire rant — which is completely uninteresting to the general site visitor but will no doubt be read by someone I work for in the next five hours — in less time than it took me to spot and fix the problem in the first place.
