Prose and Kaa

At my workplace — which I commonly refer to in public as "Romper Room" for Reasons™ — we have a habit of going all-out at Halloween and Christmas. Decorating our cubes, entire departments, etc. There are contests and decent money is awarded for the best decorating. $200 for a team or $100 for an individual at Halloween.

This year, the Halloween decorations were . . . lackluster to say the least. There wasn't as much participation, and the people that did participate didn't go as all-out as they have in prior years.

And, for the first time in several years, there is no Christmas decoration. At all, at least among my cow-orkers. There's a tree in the main lobby with fake presents, and the guards at the reception desk are wearing Santa hats. And on my floor, someone put out a little Christmas-tree-shaped tray of peppermint candies with Hershey's Kisses™ 'ornaments' next to the elevator. And I have my signature 'reindeer peppermint' on my filing cabinet (see image above). But that's it. Last year, we had whole Christmas villages in various departments, complete with people dressing up as elves or Santa, baked goods, fake cobblestone paths, chimneys, snow . . . you name it.

This year . . . nothing.

I'd chalk it down to a certain . . . how do I put this? "Societal ennui"? "Political weariness"? "Existential dread"?

I would, except that, judging from the very few times politics have been brought up in the eleven years I've worked here, I'm in the vast minority, politically. I'm judging based on snippets of conversation, desk decor, and bumper stickers on cars.

So I have to wonder what's causing the sense of 'meh, hum...whatever' that seems to rule around me. Is it the same elsewhere? Or has Romper Room just gone Scroogetastic?

This entry is part 10 in an ongoing series of sem-irregular posts detailing my frustration with Workers Compensation and the wonderful world of rotator cuff surgery. In case you haven't been keeping up: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 (YOU ARE HERE) | Part 11

This isn't even a surprise to me at this point. It's like a character in a sitcom saying, "What else could possibly go wrong?" and the studio audience all going, "Oooooooooh."

As I said in part 9, I returned to work last week. Not on Monday, but on Wednesday. This was because I couldn't get an appointment with the doctor the prior week, and didn't have the okay to drive until I saw him. He gave me the OK on Tuesday and I left the next morning to head back to the office.

Flash forward to Friday. I'm paid hourly because of some kerfuffle that happened a few years back with IT workers suing for overtime pay in California(?), and most of the rest of the nation followed suit to avoid the same lawsuit (as I understand it). Anyhoo, I was salaried up to a point, then became hourly, and so I can, if the need is great, get paid overtime for anything > 40 hours that I work. What this has to do with anything is that I have to put my hours into our PeopleSoft system, which they use to calculate my weekly pay. Friday is the day we fill that out and submit it, because the payroll is run on Monday before noon, Pacific. (But we still have to have our time submitted before noon Eastern on Monday. Whatever.)

Before I left for surgery and recovery, I pre-submitted two weeks of time sheets with 40 hours each of leave time. There was apparently some question about that (I was apparently not supposed to fill out a time sheet at all for leave time, even though LEAVE is one of the sub-categories under EXCEPTION TIME, but no one tells me anything), and an email discussion between my boss and our payroll department ensued, on which I was CC'd. It was cleared up before I ever even saw the email exchange. Problem: Solved!

Or so I thought.

Friday, I opened PeopleSoft and clickity-clicked through to where I put my hours in . . . and it didn't recognize me. As in, the place on the form for "Employee ID," which heretofore had always been populated automatically, wasn't.

Thinking that maybe I had done something wrong, I looked up the number on my paycheck stub and put that in. Invalid ID. Hm. I tried searching on the ID. Invalid ID. Name, last first. Invalid ID. Name, first first? Invalid ID. Grrrr. Advanced Search. Same results.

I looked for my boss, but he was in a meeting, so I walked around until I found another manager (who was my manager before my current manager). I told him what was going on, and he did some button-pushing and mouse-clicking. He informed me that the Employee ID number on the paycheck stub and the Employee ID in PeopleSoft are two separate things. But I should try the other one and see if that worked.

I managed to get the other number off of an approved timesheet from earlier in the year. Invalid ID. Hm.

I tried searching on that number. Invalid ID. Advanced Search? Invalid ID.

Worried, I approached my boss once he was out of his meeting, and said, "PeopleSoft says I don't exist."

He got this look on his face I interpreted as, "I knew this was going to happen. I just knew it." Plus some fun expletives. He didn't say them, but I could see them in his eyes.

Seems that part of that little problem with my 'leave' time ended up with me being taken completely out of the whole time reporting system. I mean, I could log in, and I could see my previous time sheets and approvals. I just couldn't put in anything new. Because that's logical, right?

He was on his way out and said he would deal with it over the weekend.

Flash forward to today.

He didn't have time to deal with it over the weekend because Mothers Day.

So I looked up the number for Payroll on our company Intranet, and got ready to beard the dragon in his lair. Before I dialed, I thought, "I'd probably better try the time sheet one more time so I can read off the exact error to them."

And I was fine. The Employee ID (the correct one) was in place. It knew who I was. I was able to report my time and submit it to my boss, comfortably before noon. Eastern.

All's well that ends well, as Shakespeare said.

I'm sure this will be the last problem I'll have stemming from this whole thing. Sure. Absolutely. I mean . . .

What else could possibly go wrong?

This entry is part 6 in an ongoing series of semi-irregular posts detailing my frustration with Workers Compensation and the wonderful world of rotator cuff surgery. In case you haven't been keeping up: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 (YOU ARE HERE) | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11

You knew there was going to be another part, didn't you? I certainly did. Because why should anything be over when it's over?

So, first things first: Story time!

( This is long, but it does at least tangentially relate to the rest of the post. So you should probably click it. )

Why did I tell that story? It will soon become obvious.

So. Back in October, we left our intrepid hero (me) with physical therapy appointments, finally. After a long, drawn out battle. I had my first six PT appointments. They seemed to help. I had a lot of exercises to do, and they all hurt like heck. But I did them.

And after six visits, it still hurt like heck, but there was a bit more mobility. But Some Company had approved "eight to ten," so we still had a little wiggle room. So we scheduled six more, and I went back to my doctor to get another order for PT, which he gladly gave me.

Fast forward to the tenth PT visit. Melissa told me that Some Company had told them they weren't paying for any more visits after the sixth one, because they had only approved eight to ten. (Don't think about this too long. I did, and I lost 7 IQ points, permanently. But I still remember Gilligan's Island episodes. Can't ever get rid of something that doesn't matter. But I digress.)

I pointed out that they had said "eight to ten," and that six is not equal to either eight or ten, based on my many years of mathematics. I mean, I'm not a nuclear physicist, but this is fairly easy math. But apparently not for Some Company.

We cancelled my last two appointments until they could straighten everything out, and Melissa said they had also sent in my doctor's request for six more.

I spoke to Jane in HR about the whole thing, and she once again got everyone involved, and Some Company said that they would, indeed, pay for ten full visits. Once we explained the math to them. And I don't even mean that facetiously. Jane had to actually say, "You said 'eight to ten,' and he had six, after which you refused to pay for any more. Six is not 'eight to ten.' He's had four more, and by your own agreement, you should pay for them."

But still nothing about the approval for the remaining ones my doctor felt were needed.

Then I got The Letter. <ominous chord>

In The Letter <ominous chord>, I was informed that a doctor I have never met in my life reviewed my case and decided that since I "had returned to work at full duty" (which I never left, I might add), further therapy was "not medically necessary," and that they would not be covering the last two visits, nor would they be covering any subsequent visits. Further, my case was closed, and that was the end of it, as far as Some Company was concerned.

I . . . might have exploded. All over anyone in audible distance. I . . . might have used some of those words I didn't use in 8th grade. I might, indeed, have invented a few new ones. And I might have marched, letter in hand, to HR.

The next email from HR — after Jane talked with Some Company and others — was that Some Company would be paying for the final two visits. They I would request my PT for a referral to an orthopedist. And we would go from there.

So, I asked the PT for a referral.

Crickets. When I finally got hold of them again (another week went by because I thought maybe they were mailing it), they said they didn't do that, and that Melissa was no longer employed there, and who was I again? I would have to talk with my regular doctor.

I went a few rounds on the phone with his office staff, as well, and basically found out that I can't trust his office staff to give him messages.

Finally, in frustration, I contacted HR again and got them to send me a list of 'approved' orthopedists. I picked one and made my own damned appointment.

Which was yesterday at 3 pm.

The first question he asked me was, "Has your elbow been x-rayed?" I said it had not. He made some remark under his breath that I didn't quite catch, and then sent me to get an x-ray.

They x-rayed my elbow. And developed the film. And put it up on the light box.

And from all the way across the goddamned room, I could see . . . something.

He called me closer. "Do you see this little dark line right here?" He pointed. I said I did. "That is the sign of a healed compression fracture. That's why your elbow has been hurting."

He said that fractures like this "always heal" and that the treatment is basically to keep using it as normal so you get full movement once it heals. But it would continue to hurt for 3 to 12 months. I assured him that I had been using the arm as normally as I could given the pain. He said that was good.

Well, that's nice to know.

He then wanted to schedule me for an MRI of my shoulder. Which meant I had to call Some Woman at Some Company and get that approved. I called, and it went directly to her voice mail.

Much amaze. So expect. Wow. I didn't even bother leaving a message.

A few minutes later, as I was checking out and the receptionist was getting ready to call Some Woman themselves, my cell phone rang. It was Some Woman! OMG! First call I've ever gotten back! Alas, I was so shocked that she had called me that I didn't manage to answer. But we knew she was at her desk. So the receptionist ("Martha") called her and got on the phone with her!

The conversation, edited to remove the back-and-forth between me and the receptionist, went something like this:

Receptionist: Hi, this is Martha at Orthopedists R Us. I have one of your clients in my office, and we need to schedule an MRI for him. . . . [Kaa] . . . his right shoulder. . . . He made the appointment himself; there was no referral. . . . He says he got our name from a list of approved medical professionals from his workers comp representative at work. . . . Martha . . . Orthopedists R Us. . . . [Kaa] . . . his right shoulder . . .

And it went on. Then, Some Woman apparently said she'd have to call back and let them know where to send me for the MRI.

Martha said she would let me know if and when Some Woman called her back. [I should note here, for the record, that the doctor and the nurse and the receptionist were all scandalized when I told them about the sixty days Some Company made me wait before getting PT. Apparently, that is not normal. My mishandling of the initial doctor visit is probably what it all stems from. Had I gone to an orthopedist from the get-go . . . but hindsight is 20/20.]

That was yesterday at 4 pm.

Another part of Jane's email from work says this: "Katie (the My Company workers comp program manager) will oversee / ensure that Some Woman is facilitating the approval in a timely manner."

What that said to me was that someone is now watching over Some Company and Some Woman in particular, and that I may finally get some reaction from them on a timely enough basis to do something about.

What? Why are you laughing? That's not very polite.

This entry is part 4 in an ongoing series of semi-irregular posts detailing my frustration with Workers Compensation and the wonderful world of rotator cuff surgery. In case you haven't been keeping up: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 (YOU ARE HERE) | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11

After DEFCON 1, I realized that I was very close to saying something that would get me in hot water with either my own HR people or the people at Some Company. Certainly, calling Some Woman a lying, incompetent waste of human DNA would not have endeared me to her, that was all I had left. So . . . I punted up to HR and I backed the hell off.

I communicated with "Jane" (not her real name; the HR director) a few times, checking on progress. Which was slow.

Unfortunately, I had a slight incident with some data and lost several days of notes on this and other topics. So I'm working solely from memory, here.

On the 17th, pretty much out of the blue, I got a call from Some Woman at Some Company. She had, she said, just called the physical therapy place and was waiting on a call back from them. She said she would call me back and let me know the outcome of that call.

That was the last contact I had with anyone over this until yesterday. Not trusting my temper, I didn't write about it, nor did I do more than note to Jane in HR (and my boss) that I had had the contact and was very pointedly not expecting a call back, given our history.

Flash forward to this week. I finally finished the project I was working on and before I could get wholly sucked in on the next one, I decided to give Some Woman a call. Of course, I got her voice mail, complete with "I will return your call promptly."

I left a message for her to call me back, and you'd have to be either deaf or completely unable to judge tone of voice not to know that I've reached the end of my patience. I think my last sentence was something like, "Look, all I really need from you is just a call saying 'yes' or 'no.' Really. That's it."

I called the physical therapist's office. I asked if they'd had any contact with either Some Woman or Some Company. Can you guess their answer? Can you? Because I could. I already knew before I dialed.

They said they had heard nothing at all. I may have . . . voiced a tiny bit of frustration. She explained to me that because I checked the "work injury" box on my form, the insurance company would reject it instantly, and that the only other recourse I had was to pay for it out of my own pocket. I thanked her for the information and said I would try to light some fires on my end of things.

I sent another email to HR.



For about an hour after that, I typed and deleted several tweets to @SomeCompany. And another email to HR. And one to the corporate office at Some Company. All of them were, frankly, hostile and bordering on insubordination (hence the 'deleted' part). Finally, I just left the office.

This morning, in my email box, was the following from Jane.



Victory? Maybe? I have a missed call on my work phone, but the phone system didn't record who it was from or when it was missed. Maybe it was Some Woman. More likely, it was left over from last night when the contractor who did my window replacement a couple of weeks ago called me about something. (My phone number rings both my cell phone and my office.)

Who knows how long it will take for all the pieces to align at this point, but after two solid months of trying, I finally got the one-word answer I've been asking for all along. I didn't honestly care if it was 'yes' or 'no.' I still don't. I just wanted it over and done with.

The moral of my story is this: Unless you want to go through all nine circles of the Inferno, all nine rings of Mount Purgatory, a detour through Mordor (which one does not simply walk into), and emerge doubleplus goodfully, loving Big Brother, you'll not report anything as an on-the-job injury. Take it from me: it's not worth the hassle. If I could go back in time to the 31st of July, I'd tell people at work I got hit by a car a block from work. I'd be done with PT by this point. And I would never have encountered Some Woman at Some Company, and my frustration would not now be co-orbiting with the ISS.

---

By the way, I'm so, so very sorry for putting that song in your head. I really am. Really.

Got to work a little late, today, and parked right next to someone else also just arriving. She got her stuff together before I did and went into the building. When I arrived a minute later, she was signing in. So an employee, but not one who normally works out of this site.

Got on the elevator with her and she asked, "Which floor?" I said, "Four," and she pressed the button. I thought she looked vaguely familiar.

Then she asked how I liked the new floor. (Two floors of the building have been redesigned recently. The color scheme is . . . bright. Like someone fellated a box of Crayola and then used the result to paint our walls.)

It's Friday. I had a rough night (leg cramps; long story). Without considering, I said, "Well, it's there. I mean, the colors are kind of bright, but I guess I'll get used to them eventually."

And then she said, "Those are ICARE colors."

A small digression. ICARE is my company's "Shared Principles." It stands for Integrity, Customer-First, Accountability, Respect, Excellence. We are constantly bombarded with it. It's painted on the wall across from our elevators. It's on our intranet. It's on our web site. It's integral to our annual self-assessments. I had just, you know . . . never noticed that there were colors associated with it. End digression.

So, it was at that point that I realized I was talking to Someone Important™. It was at that point that I finally realized why she looked vaguely familiar. She's one of the vice presidents.

Heh heh. Whoops?

But then, she said, "When we" -- don't think I didn't notice the presence of this word; I did -- "were selecting the color scheme, I thought it looked like someone spilled a bag of Skittles and said, 'Oh, there's our color palette right there!'"

We laughed. Then another higher-up (only three layers above me in the organization) got on the elevator and he and she talked. She bade me to 'have a good day!' as I left the elevator on the fourth floor.

I can only hope she didn't see my badge. Which I was wearing, prominently, in plain sight, name in a nice, bold font.

Heh. Heh heh. Heh?

I guess I should be really glad that I didn't blurt out what I've been calling the office on my Facebook page: Romper Room.

Hi! I've been really busy at work, which maybe you could tell because I haven't posted anything for about two months. And it's been longer than that since I had a good rant. But I'm sort of back, now. And I'm going straight into the toilet.

Literally.

At work, I'm on the second floor of five (and a ground floor, so technically, it's the third floor of six) with all the other software developer-types, our managers, QA, their managers, project developers and managers (and their management), and who knows what else. There are a lot of us packed like sardines into 5' x 8' cubes.

And in the bathroom, when we wave our hands in front of the towel dispenser to get a towel, it gives four inches of towel and then makes you wait a full ten seconds or so before you can get another four inches of towel. This is a recent change that has not gone unnoticed.

It's very annoying, because now, guys stand there and drip (their hands, people; get your minds out of the gutter) while waiting for the tiny paper towel, which does nothing but smear the water around because it's too small to dry anything larger than a field mouse (again, hands, people).

I was recently on the fifth floor. Up in the "penthouse" where the guys with seven-digit salaries dwell. There are probably 1/6 as many of them as there are of us on the second floor. And their towel dispenser has no delay. And it gives a glorious eight full inches. Of towel. (Mind, gutter, out of.)

I was in the bathroom on the second floor washing my hands and there were three of us in there waiting to get towels, dripping water onto the floor and bitching about the inadequate towel dispensage.

One of the guys suggested with a wry laugh that it must have been one of the more successful outcomes of our highly vaunted Six Sigma project. Surely, we were using too many paper towels, so the obvious solution to cut costs would be to limit our per-tear towel use and our per-minute consumption rate of said towels by making it so inconvenient that we would merely resort to wiping our hands on our pants and leaving in disgust.

Instead, what it has done is caused the floor to be dangerously slick because, when we can't get towels, some people sling the water off onto the floor, walls, or counters around the sink. And some guys just don't wash their hands at all, which increases the likelihood of horrible things being on every surface.

And instead of getting a single eight-inch towel, we're now having to get three four-inch towels (do the math). And it takes longer to get them.

We spend longer away from our desks. There is probably an increased rate of no hand-washing. As a result of that, there is an increase in towel usage because now people have to get a towel to open the door of the bathroom before they leave. Water is everywhere, which increases how often the janitorial service has to clean up. And employees are grousing about it instead of just washing our hands and quickly vacating the bathroom.

Great jobs, management. Truly.

And yeah, the manager-type who suggested the Six Sigma tie-in was joking . . . but the more I think about it, the less funny it is, because I'll bet you someone somewhere did have a meeting about it.

My solution? I'll just take the elevator up to the fifth floor and use their bathroom. Then I can waste energy as well as towels.

Progress!

Background

I have two laptops. I have The Shiny, and I have the most leatherific bag to tote it around in. It is, in fact, one of these, here. I mean, it is not physically possible for me to love it more than I do. (I even referred to it in the past as The Leather.)

I also, of course, have a BookBook, which I use when the other one is too bulky or if I just intend to carry it short distances.

At work, I have a Dell Precision M6500, which is also 17" (and henceforth, I shall refer to it as The Matte (Get it? Shiny? Matte? Oh, I slay me!). Which, of course, should not be confused with Matt. But I digress.

I have the nylon sleeve they gave me for The Matte, and I am sort of required by the nature of my job to bring it to work and take it home with me. Oh, and not lose it. They were very specific on that point . . .

On top of all that, I have a leather backpack from Wilson's Leather that is not altogether unlike this one, here. I use it for everything from accessories for the computers to books I'm reading, gaming supplies, and during Dragon*Con, I live out of it during the day. I shall call it The Backpack.

Problem

Since I have to bring The Matte with me, and I like to have The Shiny with me in case I need to work on something personal (like writing) during work hours, and I use The Backpack to carry other things I might need, I end up coming to work every morning with The Backpack strapped to my back, The Shiny in The Leather over my left shoulder and neck, and The Matte in its nylon sleeve over my right shoulder and neck.

In short, it cuts off circulation to my brain. :) And it's unwieldy trying to walk through the narrow gaps in the parking lot laden like a native guide in a 1940s "safari to deepest, darkest Africa" movie, in which the unlikely pair of usually pasty and annoyingly upperclass white protagonists with fakey-fakey "mid-Atlantic" accents that talk too fast insist on bringing a full bone china tea service—complete with tea cozy—out into the bush so they can "take tea" on the veldt whilst badly integrated, early green-screened lions stalk and kill equally badly integrated, early green-screened zebras or wildebeests in the background, and you ask yourself, "Why doesn't M!buk!u the native guide just break the tea set and leave bwana and bwanette to get their own damned tea?"

<sigh> Where was I? Oh, right.

Desire

I'd really, really, really like a rolling bag that would securely hold both The Shiny and The Matte and have room for the other junk in The Backpack.

Now, The Shiny is thin and light without The Leather. The Matte is . . . well, not. It's a lot heavier, and the power cord and such aren't designed to fit in the sleeve that comes with it. I leave those home, anyway, since there were two sets. But if I'm traveling . . .

Searching online for "dual laptop bags" or "bag to hold two laptops," I run into . . . pretty much nothing. There doesn't seem to be anyone out there, anywhere, that makes something like what I want. To wit: something wheeled and big enough to hold two 17" laptops and accessories. That isn't the size of a Hum-V and twice as expensive. (I mean, there's the Saddleback Leather Duffel Overnight Bag, which I'm practically drooling over, but at nearly $600, it seems a bit overblown, especially considering I'd need to get a couple of sleeves to put the laptops in (probably not this, since that's another $75, each) to make sure they don't jostle around too much.)

So I ask The Hivemind (I'm going to stop doing that, now): Do you know of a suitable rolling bag that is sizable enough to carry all this stuff, doesn't cost a fortune, and won't disintegrate the first time it's used? (You'd likely be shocked by how many things do.)

I'm more interested in things you've actually used/seen than in you doing the same Google search I did and finding the same links I did, without much useful information on exactly how much will fit into the thing. Let's assume that I know how to use Google and that I've done so rather exhaustively. :)

I prefer leather (Really? Shocking . . . ), but any material will do if it's good quality.

I seldom fly, so the whole 'will it fit in an overhead bin or underneath an airline seat' thing is not really a concern for me. Nor is making it easy for TSA to search the bag.

And, since one person I mentioned this to went on at some length about how I should "just" get my IT department at work to image my work laptop and use The Shiny to run a virtual Windows XP, thereby eliminating the need for two computers . . . that isn't really an option. For either me or the IT group here.

I'll be visiting various stores and looking in person, too, of course. And probably drool some more over Saddleback's products. But if you have any recommendations, do let me know. :)

My company is on a "green" kick. They've removed 1/3 of the fluorescent bulbs from all the fixtures (each fixture has three bulbs, or did). Issued all of us mugs and plastic cups so they could quit making Styrofoam cups available for our free sodas. Bought all of us little blue trash cans for recyclables.

And with that last item—the blue cans—came a "Commercial Recycling Tips" handout. It has two columns on it: Do Recycle and Don't Recycle.

Items in the Don't Recycle column are:

Food
Food waste (leftovers) [What, no compost heap in the corner of the parking lot?]
Styrofoam
Tissues
Napkins
Paper towels
Plastic wrapping
Dirty aluminum foil

And I'm fine with all of those. But here's where it takes a turn toward the surreal:

Carpeting
Wood or lumber
Light bulbs
Mirrors
Paint or hazardous waste

o.O

Methinks they copied this, unedited, from a handout aimed at people other than cube-farm dwellers.

Of course, now what am I going to do with all these carpet scraps, lumber, burnt-out light bulbs, broken mirrors, old paint, and depleted uranium that I've been saving up for the express purpose of recycling them?

I was talking to !evil Phil today, and something brought up a snafu that went on at the steel mill back when I first started (which, I would like to stress, is not where I work now, nor do !evil Phil or craftsman). I would like to find out from any of you who have accounting experience or background if you can explain to me without using magic, smoke, mirrors, or a curare-laden dart how the decision they made makes any sense.

This was 1990. We had a PR1ME 9755 mainframe that was running the (in-house-developed¹) order entry, shipping, and financial software at the mill; and two VAX 3800 mini computers that we had purchased for the express purpose of running the Ross Financial software that our VP of finance (Dave) just had to have.² And since we have this great new hardware, why not use it for other stuff?³ So, the idea was to get the data in the databases on the PR1ME to the VAX, because the PR1ME was going to be retired Any Day Now™.⁴

The mill Information Systems department consisted of !evil Phil, who at the time had a Bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Alabama and was working on his Master's. We also had craftsman who was nearing graduation from the University of Alabama with his Bachelor's degree in computer science. I had come on board as well with my undergrad degree from the University of Alabama in computer science, and had stopped a few hours short of a Master's degree in same (severe burn-out, if you're curious). Our boss was an Electrical Engineer-type. His boss was the president of the company, Mike Austin.

Our solution (as suggested by !evil Phil) was to spend about $8000 on an Ethernet card and TCP/IP stack for the PR1ME and FTP the data over to the VAX.

"Egad, no!" they shrieked. "That's throwing money away! The PR1ME is going away any day now, and the VAX cost us too much money to abandon! If we spend anything at all, it has to be on the VAX!"

Here's what they actually ended up doing.

They got this guy from Tippins, one of the parent companies of the mill, to come in and use his Years of Experience™ on the PR1ME. His name was Frank. Frank was self-trained on computers. He started as a blue-collar out in a mill somewhere in Pennsylvania and worked his way up to a white collar and an office. I say more power to him, really. He unarguably knew more about the PR1ME and its screwy operating system (PRIMOS) than did any of us. And none of us wanted to know more than we did.

They also found these two guys who were named Ralph and Avi. I don't remember much about them except that I believe one of them started life as a literature major and the other got his degree from some sort of diploma mill. But they were from Pennsylvania and were therefore Much More Smarterer Than Any Southern Bumpkin™. They paid Ralph and Avi $40,000 in advance for what I'm about to describe.

The company purchased a $3000 9-track tape drive for the VAX 3800. The PR1ME already had one. The idea was that Ralph and Avi and Frank would use their <echo chamber>Vast Powers of Expertise!!!</echo chamber> to copy the data from the PR1ME onto the VAX using the two tape drives and countless 9-track tapes.

Let me pause here to describe the tape drives for those of you too young or too lucky to know what a 9-track tape is. Remember those old TV shows and movies where every time you'd see computers, it'd be a room full of huge, gray consoles with blinky lights, bespectacled people standing around in lab coats with clipboards, and on every blinky-light console there'd be tapes spinning back and forth? Those are 9-track tapes. They're enormous and they're not light. And a 1G USB thumb-drive would probably hold an entire room's worth of those tapes. The drives themselves were a bit smaller than refrigerators and about as cumbersome. But back to my narrative.

So...copy the data from the databases on the PR1ME to CSV files onto tape, load that onto the VAX, and in a few hours we're good to go, right?

Right?

Oh, no. No, no, no.

Here was Frank's, Ralph's, and Avi's brilliant plan. Prepare to be stunned by the brilliance. Are you prepared for the brilliance? Because you really should. Seriously. You might get hurt. Don't say I didn't warn you. Here comes the brilliance.

<Brilliance>We take the database on the PR1ME, and let's say it had 20 columns of data (it had many more, but let's stick with 20 for illustrative reasons). That data might be anything from a single-bit boolean to an 80-character string. Their—brilliant!—idea was to take each column (we called them "fields") of this database and write it to another database that had just one 200-character string column.</Brilliance>

So, the value of every column of each row of the original database becomes a single row of the new database, and takes up 200 characters of space, even if it was just an integer or a boolean/bit originally. So a 1000-row database of 20 columns expands to a 20,000 row database of one column, each one guaranteed to be 200 characters wide.

<understatement>Needless to say, this vastly expanded the data.</understatement> Instead of compressing the data, Frank, Ralph and Avi bloated it. And wrote this on tapes. Well, Frank did. He was the PR1ME guy, after all. And I'm sure his code was actually pretty tight. Frank actually did know what he was doing, up to a point.⁵

Now. It was our jobs—mine, !evil Phil's, and craftsman's—to babysit the tape transfer. 24x7 for what I'm told was a week, but seems like a lot longer in my memory. We worked shifts so someone would be there at all times, just letting a tape fill up on one system and then moving the tape to the other and starting the process of loading it. We were all zombies for the entire thing.

Meanwhile, in another part of the mill, Ralph and Avi had logins on the VAX 3800. It was their jobs to take the data Frank wrote to the tapes and extract it and put it in a corresponding database on the VAX.

Let me belabor this point: their task was to write a program that basically read a single record of 200 characters off tape, convert that into its original data type, and insert that into the proper column and row of a new table. Simple loop, right?

Right?

Oh, no. No, no, no.

Ralph and Avi—who I must repeat at this point had already been paid $40,000—wrote a series of batch files that explicitly extracted this data from tape one column at a time. They repeated the same lines of code millions upon millions of times, but with different column names and such. And if they made a typo 200,000 lines into the batch file (I'm not joking—one of their batch files was 1 million lines long), it took hours to page down to that point, make the correction, and then start the file from that point, after repositioning the 9-track tape, as well, so it could resume reading at the point where it left off.

!Evil Phil even took a look at what they were doing at one point and suggested loops, but Ralph and Avi—who had already been paid $40,000 and who were The Experts on the VAX™—knew better, and disdained the use of loops.

The three people who actually knew what the hell we were talking about were patted condescendingly on the head and told to just be nice little tape-swap-monkeys and not make trouble by talking about things we didn't know and couldn't possibly comprehend by two overpaid yahoos with about as much programming skill as a stale marshmallow peep. And the mill backed up Ralph and Avi. See, they had already paid them $40,000, so their opinions must be right. Because if they weren't experts, they wouldn't have paid them $40,000 in advance, right?

Right?

So, here's my question to the accountant-types or any of you who operate in the world of finance at a level far beyond that of li'l ol' me: can you make me understand how spending $8000 on hardware and using other existing hardware, software, and personnel to accomplish task A in, let's say two weeks, is "throwing money away," but spending $3000 on new hardware, bringing in a consultant from the parent company and having him waste his time, and hiring two outside consultants for $40,000 to waste a week of three mill employees' time needlessly flipping tapes is reasonable?

Oh! Oh! I forgot the best part. Take your explanation you were going to hit me with from the question I just asked and now factor this in: right after we finished the entire task of flipping tapes, running millions of loopless lines of code, and working 24x7 shifts...after spending $40,000 on two consultants, bringing in a PR1ME expert from the parent company, and spending $3000 on a new tape drive for the VAX...they canceled the project.

Yep. The entire thing was thrown out.

Does that change your answer?

---

1. At one of our parent companies, Tippins, I believe.
2. Dave paid DEC something like $60,000 for a study and they (of course!) recommended Ross Financials because it ran on VAX computers and was The Best Financial Software In the Known Universe™. So we bought the VAX 3800s ($250,000) and Ross ($500,000), but we never could get Ross to work on it; that would have cost an extra $400,000 for implementation. This is where they finally balked.
3. There was a push to use PathWorks on the VAX computers as the main repository for all user data, including the Windows 3.0 diskless desktop workstations, but !evil Phil and craftsman were able to demonstrate that Novell blew PathWorks and the VAX away on speed and reliability and we were spared that indignity. They wanted to use that hardware they'd invested so much in.
4. The PR1ME was decommissioned in 1998 or so.
5. So after Dan "resigned" and Frank became our boss, he wanted to try to find something to replace Ross and the PR1ME software. So he paid DEC (we have these VAX computers we aren't using, and why waste the investment?) another $50,000 for another study to find software that would not only do financial stuff, but order entry and shipping and all that stuff. DEC recommended RollCIM, which was another $450,000, plus, I believe, $288,000 for "minor changes" to match our exact spec. But RollCIM was too much of a HAWG to run on our puny VAX 3800's, so we bought four VAX 6000's and a number of VAX 3100's to use as desktop machines for the IS Department. Then, it was determined that RollCIM needed more work to make it compliant with our spec. And more. And more. So about 7 years later and more than $1.5 million into the "minor changes" to RollCIM, I left the company, having never seen RollCIM work as advertised. The mill also ended up getting the latest version of Ross to run payroll, which required another new VAX. That was about 3 years before I left.

Well, work finally did it--they blocked access to LiveJournal, among many other sites (Amazon is among them, which makes no sense, and NetFlix isn't, which also boggles).

But that has nothing to do with the urge to kill. It merely explains why I'm making this, a work-related post, on a Saturday. :) (The cut-off of non-work sites has been expected and anticipated, so is frustrating and annoying, but not urge-to-kill-producing.)

No, this post is about my current project. And specifically, the woman (we'll call her "Roz" (those of you who've seen 9 to 5 have the appropriate picture in your head, right now)) who is the project lead.

I was tagged to come to a meeting about this project a couple of weeks ago. There were about 8 people in the meeting, and it was the first time I'd met Roz. I'd seen her around, of course. She works four doors down from me, but we're in different departments, so we'd never formally met. Immediately, I noticed that every time Roz opened her mouth to talk, everyone in the room rolled their eyes or smiled indulgently or sighed silently. I wondered why.

In the second meeting, it was the same thing. I was, however, beginning to get a clue. Roz is...panic-driven. She is one of those types for whom every little thing is a world-ending disaster. She is also one of those types that has to have everything planned out to the molecular level. And--this is the kicker--she needs and sort of demands constant feedback-style reassurance.

Dear. Mother. Of. God.

She blusters into my office about 5 times per day and starts out with "I just wanted to get you up to speed with where I am..." and then proceeds to talk rapidly with her back turned to me as she draws illegibly on our white board while my officemate and I exchange eye-rolls. Everything is a disaster. Then, she'll ask me about where I am, and I'll show her, and she's very impressed with my progress. Then, she'll say, "Do you think we're making progress?" And this is where I'm supposed to reassure her that we are. This is every time she shows up in our office. Carl (my officemate) is about tired of it. He has, in fact, started to just leave whenever he sees her coming down the hall. Roz has her own office. And we have email. And phones. And, Monday, I'm getting the company-approved IM software installed on my machine by some drone from IT (because I'm too stupid to install software by myself). Does/will any of that stop her? I sincerely doubt it.

We're the only two people on the team (I did not know this going in--I thought at least 3 of the other people from those first two meetings were going to be in with us). The deadline is some time in November, so we have to have it to QA some time in October.

The project requires us to learn C# 2.0, ASP.NET 2.0, and MySQL. The MySQL tools are...not stable. I'll just state that for the record. I've been having this problem with it that's causing me difficulties in learning it because every time I type a minus sign (hyphen) (-) in the query editor, it hangs the program, which then pegs the CPU at 100% until I kill it. So I can't use negative numbers or subtraction. Oy. Roz, of course, panics when I tell her this, and comes down to my office and starts making bizarre pronouncements. "It's a syntax error," she confidently states. Um...if the program freaks every time I type a hyphen, that is not a syntax error. I could see the panic in her eyes Friday when I showed her it didn't matter where I typed the hyphen or under what circumstances. Her hands were practically shaking. I reassured her that I would figure it out and that I needed to go. I've left early (by a half-hour or so: nothing major) every day this week because I just can't take it.

She came down one day this week and asked to see where I was at, and I showed her that I had it basically done, and was working on the CSS stylesheets to get the colors and such like we wanted them. She panicked and basically said that I shouldn't be working on that kind of stuff, and should be doing content, not style. I nodded, smiled, and continued working on what I was working on. Later in the week, she calls me down to her office after she's spent most of a day integrating my stuff with hers. She has changed colors and alignments and all kinds of things, basically rendering everything I did useless. And I keep having to tell her that we should be more worried about how the code works than how it looks. And she doesn't seem to realize I'm feeding her own words back to her. It'll take me a few hours to fix it when I get it all back from her. I also had to stop her from doing work that we put off until Phase II of the project.

She also grossly overestimates how hard everything has been, to date. I was given...6 days to do the Master Page and Navigation. It took me all of 5 hours. And that included the aforementioned CSS Stylesheets. The rest of that time was spent reading C# 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 and MySQL manuals. I have 11 days to do "logging" (HIPAA requires us to log every time a user access any PHI). But that will require me to have access to the databases and the ability to create stored procedures, which she is not giving me because she seems to think that because I don't know MySQL, I don't understand that I shouldn't just cavalierly drop databases or insert columns or something. I'll get access to everything next week after we have all the code in some non-VSS source-code repository I don't have access to because she has to upgrade the thing to the next version for some unknown reason, and another programmer won't let her do it until he's there to supervise. Meanwhile, I twiddle my thumbs and kill MySQL every time I forget and type a hyphen.

I'm eventually going to take a very large hammer and stave in her skull. Watch and see. You'll see it on the news. ATLANTA MAN GOES BERSERK, KILLS COWORKER. No jury will convict, though. My officemate can testify that she's enough to make the Pope say "Fuck!" Hell, even my boss has to rein her in during every meeting. She'll start to go off on some molecule-management freak-out and he'll say, "Roz! Let's concentrate on security right now, and we can worry about that, later." Or whatever. They'll thank me for doing them a favor. They will. Trust me.