Headache Inducing Donkitus

Hello Manifestites! Welcome to this edition of Morphy has a Headache. Pull up a chair, sofa, cushion, or whatever is your fancy, and listen to this tale of woe and donk, straight from the heart of donk country, where donks run free in the wild.

I’ve written in the past that I can’t really blog things that happen at work because they either take too much time to set up, or contain inner workings of the businesses I’m working with and it’s not right for me to write about them. However, today’s story is about my work, specifically my boss. Allow me to change names slightly to protect those who practice the donktastic art of donk.

For some quick background info: I’m a server/Citrix admin on a global team of a dozen or so people. There are 4 of us who specifically support the environment, including on-call support issues that may arise. Now, typically in these situations, or at least at every other company I’ve worked at in my entire life, the on-call schedule is a straight forward thing to put together. The manager looks at his people, picks names out of a hat, and in that particular order, they rotate weeks or days or months or whatever of being on-call. Seems easy, huh? So let’s take an example. We have 4 people in the group. You would think that a person would be on-call for one week then have 3 weeks off, right? Ummm, no. Allow me to explain.

First off, the on-call rotation must have a primary and a secondary. Our manager then decided we would have a 3rd and 4th listed as well. So the rotation *should* look like this: 1234 for the first week, 2341 for the second, week, and so on. The support desk looks at the list, calls the primary first, then the secondary, then 3rd, then 4th. Easy? Hah.

One guy, a big fat-ass useless fuck of a donk who we will call Jack(ass) decides that since he "gets called anyway", he’s going to always be listed as 4th in this rotation. I guess “working from home” 3 days a week and “being in the office” 5 hours a day for the other 2 days is too much stress for him to handle, that he just can’t be asked to do anything outside of normal business hours.

So that leaves 3 of us. Sam has to support another environment, and is the only person on-call for that environment. Until his replacement comes in and gets up to speed, Sam is listed as 3rd all the time. That leaves Susan and yours truly. For 6 months or so, we’ve been alternating weeks, taking every single call that comes in after hours or on weekends. We’ve let the boss know that we’re not happy with this, but he promises to get us some relief by putting Sam into the rotation once his replacement is up to speed. (Oh yeah, during this time Jackass has received exactly 2 calls).

2 weeks ago the boss announced that Sam’s replacement is taking over for what Sam was doing, and that Sam will now be part of our normal on-call rotation. He tasks Sam and Jackass with coming up with a schedule that works (there’s more to the schedule that I didn’t get into, like the UK and India offices taking over during their day-time hours, which is why they have to look at it a little closer). Great! We’re happy. But now it’s 2 weeks later, Thanksgiving is coming up, and shortly after that, Christmas. We want to plan our holidays around times we need to be on-call.

So Susan sends the boss an email:

Hi Boss,

Did Sam send you a schedule for weekend coverage? Just trying to plan for the holidays.

Boss fires back:

Yes for Thanksgiving – you and XaQ need to work out the same schedule for the holidays.

Ummm, wtf does that mean? So I fire up an email:

Dear Boss,

Do you think you could maybe spend 15 seconds reading the email you reply to before writing said reply, so you don’t come off looking like a drooling idiot?

Something got in the way of me sending it though, which is a shame, because the question begs to be asked. Susan replies:

I thought Sam was going to be part of our on-call and he was going to make up a schedule?

Boss must be busy with his side project of using quantum physics and theoretical calculus to calculate the amount of orange juice it would take to fill a 1972 VW Bug traveling at 32mph down a flight of stairs. That is apparent by his reply:

He and Jack will become alternate secondary on-call. They have already been working on a schedule.

WHAT IN THE FUCKING HELL DOES THAT MEAN YOU ASSHOLE??? Alternate secondary? I'm pretty sure this dipshit just invented that term on the spot.

I mean really, ffs already. Is it too much to ask to fucking READ something before replying to it? Apparently. All I have to say is my forehead now hurts, there’s a noticeable crack in my desk where I’ve been banging my head on it, and it’s a damn good thing I found out I’m NOT allergic to alcohol!

Until next time, where I hope to introduce the Manifestites of the world to what I call The List. Trust me, the wait will be worth it. Or maybe not. Who cares. It makes me laugh, and that’s what is important.

Yours Donkily,

Morphy

Donk E-Mail

Hello Manifestites! Once again we find ourselves weeks and weeks in between blog entries. Eh, not much to say. To be honest, I haven’t seen that many stupid things lately. I’ve seen stupid driving things here and there, but nothing to really blog about. I did see someone driving down a freeway on-ramp the wrong way today, but she turned around right away, and the person getting off the freeway actually stopped and let her go without honking their horn. I don’t get it.

I could blog about RGPer AtticusCole, who spent a few days stalking me and making a very poor attempt at humor related to the blog, but since I can’t seem to find an email address of his to post publically, I’ll just mention it.

I’ve told several people that the only stupid things I see at work, and that usually I can’t really blog them because they either involve way too much set up, or they involve more inner workings of the business that I’m working for. But tonight I ran into something that I can’t let go.

As you may or may not know (or care, for that matter), I am a Windows based server engineer specializing in Citrix products. I have a good job that I like working for a major company here in the area. The drive is nice, I get to work from home once a week, and the work is challenging enough to keep me on my toes and clear of boredom. But of course, like anywhere, I run into all sorts of strange political things, and sometimes straight up donkishness.

Today a group requested an emergency install of a major patch to 10 of their servers. Since I support their group, I was volunteered to do it. Tonight at 9pm seemed to be the best time, so we set up all necessary paperwork. The manager of the project group emailed his entire team letting them know to expect the servers to be down from 7pm-5am (just in case anything went wrong), and gave me the go-ahead to install the patches and reboot the servers.

Shortly after 9pm I log onto each server one at a time and start the patch installations. The plan was for me to install the patch, reboot the servers, then email the group letting them know the servers were successfully patched so they can test their applications. At 9:50pm I decided to log into work email to get that set up and ready. I see a strange email:

From: Donkey
To: Me

Hi Adam – I see you’re running something on 34…when will you be finished?

34 is the short name for one of the servers I’m patching. Now, 34 isn’t necessarily a unique number. Our naming scheme contains letters for the company name, location, application, then a 2 digit number. As far as I know, there are at least 3 servers that end in 34. Luckily I happened to be checking my email at 9:50pm on a Tuesday, and I also happened to know what this person was talking about.

So I reply:

From: Me
To: Donkey

I'm putting service pack 1 for Windows 2003 on it right now. After that it will reboot…shouldn't be more than 20 more minutes I would guess.

Immediately, I get this back:

From: Donkey
To: Me
Subject: Out of Office AutoReply

I'll be out of the office Oct 10 returning Monday Oct 16. I will not have access to email or voicemail.

Umm…huh? The person that emailed me won’t have access to email? WTF is up with that? A few minutes later I get this:

From: Donkey
To: Me

Damn…Ok – I’ll stop my job. Please let me know if it’ll be more than your estimated 20 minutes…I’ll plan to restart my job in about ½ an hour.

So I’m a little annoyed, and fire this back:

From: Me
To: Donkey

You did get the email from Bob earlier today saying I would be starting at 7pm and to expect the servers to be down until 5am, right?

Then this, and I have no words for this:

From: Donkey
To: Me

No, I’m on vacation and am not checking my emails until next week.

Uhhhhhh, Beavis? WTF? I give up. People not checking emails are emailing me with answers to my emails. I’m either in the twilight zone, I imagined this entire conversation (which is possible, I just recently found out that I’m apparently NOT allergic to alcohol), or this person is a complete donkey. I’m going with option C.

So that’s that. Until next time, where I hope to have something interesting to report. I have more home owner stories based on the home projects we’ve tried to do this summer, but I want to wait until things are finished to post it, because there’s a good chance more idiots will try something as stupid as trying to blow themselves up, like last time.

Yours Donkily,

Morphy