Friday, January 07, 2011

Suddenly, it’s easier to plan the next few months

So, Wednesday morning I’m sitting there at work, working. Which is a thing I do when I’m at work.

It’s kind of expected.

So, I’m sitting there coding away like I had good sense, and our departmental manager-types are all in a phone meeting, and they're talking about budgets and resource-management and all kinds of Manager-Type-Stuff; we're in a "hoteling" style layout, which means there are no offices, cubicle walls or even flimsy dividers between our desks.

Every word spoken into any phone on the floor is going to be overheard by every ear within at least a six-desk radius.

So the “budget” and the “resources” and we’re all grabbing our iPod earbuds because the conversation is getting loud, and then suddenly all the managers are grabbing their stuff and dashing for a meeting room. Whew.

Then, about five minutes after they’ve all vanished…my laptop started acting up. Couldn’t run a query. Email kept prompting me for a password it refused to take. Couldn’t access the Sharepoint sites. Couldn’t even look at my own Reporting Services stuff.

My first thought was that I had a network issue. Some kind of weird ‘server is down’ thing; or maybe because I just changed my password…?

…and then I thought, …wait…budget + resources, which is a code word for head-count…?, and I looked at my information in Outlook.

I was a zz.Name. A. Zee-Zee. Dot. Name, people! That generally translates to, “Don’t let the door bang you on the butt on your way out, Terminated One!”

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaat? Seriously?!

Now, I try very hard not to jump to conclusions. It had seemed pretty likely that I would actually have my contract extended, because frankly we’re in the middle of some stuff that it would be very hard for them to get done if I were to walk out the door; they don’t have another me, somebody who can handle the trickier analysis questions, understand what the system is doing and why, and all like that. They have a ton of business analysts, and enough QA testers to fill an entire warehouse, but database analysts?

…I might be the only one on the floor, come to think of it…there’s only one other “pure” data analyst, too, and the poor guy is positively swamped trying to keep up with all the stuff that gets dumped on him…

But still. I’m not a cheap date, either. And if the budget is tightening, well, I’m sure the line item that is the invoice from my agency isn’t exactly under the radar, you know?

When my manager emerged blinking into the daylight, I moseyed over to her desk as casually as I could manage and said, “Ya, uh…my access suddenly got cut off? Sooooooooooo…is that, you know, some kind of…? Or is there something you need to, um, tell me…?”

“Oh!” she said, and blinked a couple times. “Oh. Crap. It’s probably my fault…wait, I thought we had another month…are you just dead, or what?”

“Uh, yeah, completely shut out. Well. I get email, and IM still works, but I can’t get to any of the shares or the servers or anything like that.”

“Crap. I gotta get on this call. You call them, find out what I need to do, and when I get out of this meeting I’ll expedite it.”

“Cool. So, I’m not fired or anything?”

{blink-blink}

“No! I’m extending your contract. Wait. Didn’t I already tell you that?!”

“Heh. No.”

“Crap. Well, I am.”

“Sweet! OK, I’ll call the Access Dudes.”

And I did and a lot of huff and bother later, they told me that “somebody” saw “something” that morning and decided I needed to be shut off immediately. (What it was, nobody could say. And I can’t imagine what it might have been; I’ve worked for MegaBank off and on since 198{achoo!} – I know better than to do just about anything on their wire, thank-you-very-much.)

And then they told me it would take two to three business days to get my disabled access re-enabled.

To which I said, “!!!!!!!!!!?” because We. Only. Have. One. Week. For. Initial. UAT. Testing. And. Test. Plan. Submission. You. JACKASS! (<= I didn’t say that part out loud. That would be how not to get the nice Access Dude to switch your user ID back on. Unfortunately, he was based Elsewhere, or I would have used the single-best method of getting what you want from the Technology Team, which would be baked goods.)

Then my manager got on the horn with the same guy and said “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

And then he said, two hours.

So! I went for a very long walk around the Embarcadero, both to cool off a little bit and to keep myself from being annoying to everybody else. (There is nothing worse than a bored Tama. Seriously. I get really twitchy and talk-y. And if I’m bored when I’ve got a lot to do? Ohmygah. Somebody bring the tranquilizer gun…)

And then I came back and my access was back and I went back to work.

Where I will be until around mid-May. It’s good information to know; it makes planning these next few months so much easier.

Plus, it gets me out of having to put on my Fancy Clothes and going for endless cycles of interviews in search of the Next Big Thing for a while.

Also? Mid-May?

That’s right about the time the first round of produce from the garden starts to come in.

…just sayin’…

6 comments:

(formerly) no-blog-rachel said...

Oh good LORD. That's the kind of stuff that makes my head explode. But on the up side, yay that you know your plans and have that income until May!

Tola said...

awesome for extension, boo to execution.

Steph Bolinger said...

Oh good grief. Well, glad you got your extension, sorry you got a dose of panic! I hope it's smooth sailing from here on out.

Rena said...

congratulations on more work, which will keep that boredom at bay (because I can second that people... a bored Tama is kind of scary)

JustGail said...

I'm about a month behind reading your blog so -
1. woohoo on the work extension
2. $40k paid off - awesome!
3. how do you like your new floor cleaner? is it easy to use/clean?
4. I'd totally buy a book if you wrote one.
5. you're not the only one with Christmas present buying issues. I pretty much just threw cash at the DH and DS this year.
6. I can't store onions for long either. So now I just buy them. Back when I did grow them, I chopped and froze them.

Mother of Chaos said...

3. I LOVE THAT CARPET CLEANER!!!! I got it from Amazon for $138, about half off the regular price, and I have now irritated the ENTIRE household with my incessant yelps of, "Stay off that carpet over there, I just washed it!"

The only downside I've found to it so far is that it is HEAVY; not that surprising, considering that you're loading it up with half a ton of water and all, but it gets tiring if you're doing a big area. And it's a bit hard on my back. Which hasn't entirely stopped me, mind you, but does kind of encourage me to take my current obsession in smaller square-foot areas at a time.

Well, that, and the fact that the dirty water it sucks out of the carpet grosses me out. But that's more a function of "ohmygah, seriously, THAT was in my CARPET?!" and really, I can't blame the All-Terrain for that.