Daily grind
Yesterday was another busy day at work, following on from Friday’s balls up.
Well, the balls up didn’t happen on Friday - it actually happened almost a month ago, where some switch to a data feed which comes to us got switched to 0. And it then didn’t get checked. And then the file we get sent, it appears, doesn’t get checked either. And the file comes to us and automatically gets input into the system - without any checks.
I noticed on Friday that whereas we normally action 2,000 people a day, this had rocketed to 13,000 on Wednesday, and then 17,000 on Thursday. Most of which are actioned based on data from this file. Which got uploaded on Wednesday.
I spotted there was a problem around Friday lunch time, then spent all afternoon trying to find what the problem actually was, and then being called to ’summit’ meetings to discuss if it was going to cause a major impact over the weekend, and worth the risk of a panic upload on a Friday night. Z, being the tosser he is, is telling me I have to insist the IT guys in Scotland can’t go home on Friday until the problem is sorted. I laughed. He looked me in the eye, “I am deadly serious. You tell these guys they can’t go home until it is sorted.” “I can’t do that, these are the guys who will help us put it right, we don’t even know if it is their fault, many times we have to rely on the goodwill of these guys to put right balls up we make, I am not going to piss them off.” “You tell them they are not going home until it is fixed.”
Arsehole.
I told them no such thing.
The result of the summit meeting was we decided to wait until the beginning of this week. I went down to tell Z, to find he had gone home!
Yesterday, I arrived to find an email basically announcing that (because it didn’t effect the other part of the company - the one’s who had actually done the balls up) they weren’t going to do anything about it until middle of March. I immediately sent a stroppy email off, saying this was unacceptable, and that ideally it would have to be sorted by the end of the day. I copied in Z, expecting him to get on his high horse because it wasn’t sorted Friday night.
I was pleasantly surprised. He complimented me on getting it sorted so quickly - so I was right about Friday - he is just so mouthy, shouting the odds at people in an attempt to get his own way, when he really does realise that in the real world things won’t get done that quickly.
However, my way means that next time we have a problem, I can ring these guys up, and ask them nicely and they will go out of their way to help me.
Today I have been in a meeting - all day! Thankfully it was offsite, so I managed to get away from the fiasco. I also hope I managed to impress E, the guy I sent my CV to weeks back, and am waiting for the structure to be announced so I can apply for a job under him.
Tonight I have baked blueberry muffins.