Grumphing Along

I live.  Allegedly.  

My wife began her new job this week with an out of town training trip.  She traveled to Sioux Falls, South Dakota - about 3 hours by ... well, freeway speeds, I guess, where her new employer is based.  She is doing the same thing, just new challenges for new people who have made it deeply and profoundly clear that she is valued.

A quick word to all of those organizations out there looking to hire: Don't forget your current employees.  My wife's employer has changed over the past few years, with leadership changes, that see the people less as people, more as parts to be exchanged, greased, and continue to move forward.

It don't work like that.

As a much younger man, I was part of a small but growing organization that occasionally experienced the loss of trained personnel.  We developed a sort of metric that made sense for us after a while.  The jobs we did required a heck of a lot of knowledge that wasn't just laying around at the time.  It was highly specialized, required a bit of experience to figure out what it is you were doing, and ... well, lets be honest - some things you learned by doing, and some you learned by breaking.  

The metric we had was that an exceptional new hire might be able to make a contribution within 90 days, and within 6 months they would be at "break even" point.  Until the first 90 days, and more usually, the first six months, had passed, the employee was a drain on already-stretched thin resources.  It required at least one person part time every minute of the day to explain, train, answer questions, and aid in their development.

I was one lucky ... individual in that regard.  I had been with the organization about three weeks when the fellow who had been designated to train me ended up leaving the company due to health issues.  We'd met perhaps four times during those 15 work days, he was out.  My boss, who was my primary trainer, had her own work load, and she had to absorb that of the fellow who was not there.  She tried to spread the load among the other three people in the department, but only two of them were able to assist.  I spent a lot of time listening, reading manuals, and playing with things.  There's no other way to describe it.  

Less than two weeks into that job, I was taken out to a new client site.  I sat and took careful notes as my boss spoke with the client's representatives on how they did what they needed us to do to replace their current system.  I did not know much of what they spoke of from experience, only from book learning, but my notes were pretty valuable.  We got back to the office, my boss told me to take a shot at getting things set up, and we'd see how it went.  

And it worked pretty well.  Within a month, I was taken to a very large new client to be responsible for a major upgrade.  And it went well.  And I kept taking notes.

I learned a lot on that job.  But I also learned that I was only one person, if I kept all that knowledge locked inside, I wasn't doing much for the greater good.  That department of four people grew to over thirty by the time I left.  And I left because it had been made clear to me that I had reached a point where the organization felt I had topped out in my ability to contribute.  Now, at the time I left that organization, I was the only person in the whole world who was certified to install their software on every single platform they had successfully installed it.  One test I took was because, well, it was available, I'd read a few manuals, and thought I might be able to pull it off.  Another system, which the company we distributed for made abundantly clear that no one would ever be certified outside of their own people to install was a system I had come to know well in College.  I used it, I learned it, I helped write software for it, and I helped to manage it.  

When their resident expert sent over (by fax, we didn't have email yet) a test to take (and no, we didn't have internet access, either), I took his test, and then added a few notes on some of the questions that overlooked a couple key points that someone familiar with that system's security configuration would understand and have to know well.  I learned, over some time with other systems that systems security was going to be key for us, as my employer was essentially building a network of devices to collect information, and to do so, we needed to communicate - and most computers, in those days, were difficult to configure for communication.  Not like today when every single access point is - you damned well hope, but know it ain't always so - hardened as tough as granite or diamond to prevent unauthorized access to data.

So when I turned around and returned that test with four of the five days remaining in the window to complete it, I got a phone call back.  The chief architect of the system was calling me to confirm a few points I had made.  He had forgotten a key feature which I had used to permit my friends and I to join together and co-edit documents.  There were specific features, called "Access Control Lists" - or ACLs - in the system.  If these were not configured in addition to overall security, the devices that needed to speak to the computer would not be able to load their data in the files.  He had checked with the people who, under his direction, installed the software, and they had confirmed that was something they had added to their install routine, a step which hadn't yet made it to his desk.  

So, much chagrined, he had to certify me as able to install that package.  This saved our client almost a quarter-million dollars in their implementation costs due to a local resource being available, not requiring additional dedicated team members when and out-of-town resource became available.  In other words, I was a phone call and a half-hour car ride away, not a few hours by airplane.  I could stop out that afternoon, I didn't need to book a flight.  

And as someone who had also won a world-wide contest for submitting suggestions into their knowledge base, I thought I had made my value clear to my employer.  Instead, my employer had made it clear to me that they did not see the future including as many opportunities as I had already taken advantage of to learn - they might sell a few more of these or other systems, but my expertise in all of their platforms, and in project management, training, problem solving, and general system knowledge, wasn't that valuable.

I left.  Less than one year later, the company was sold to the company they distributed for, because, well, that was the way things worked.  I'd also read the corporate newsletters that large organization had sent to us (on good old paper, not via email), and noticed the larger organization planted, grew, praised, and eventually acquired each of these outside distributors.  And it was likely to happen to us. 

So I left.  And that employer did suffer a few additional casualties as some of their clients also left.  Not because of me, just because their problems, which I had learned from, figured how to resolve, and to do so in a manner which their corporate culture could accept and build on with success, were no longer listened to.  They felt their concerns were no longer shared by that organization.  Their problems grew more complex, but the people attempting to resolve them had turned to newer systems that were incompatible with their environment.  And they found new solutions that were.

So there's that.

And in the non-business world this week, I have a few recommendations for you if you should be hosting a demon puppy as it attempts to grow into something that resembles an adult dog.  Freyja this week managed to find one of my wife's heating pads.  A non-electric one which had been filled with uncooked white rice.  One heated the pad in the microwave for a few minutes, then it served to soothe those aches and pains.  For small puppies, it served as a midday snack.  I suppose the overall lack of fiber may have been the contributing factor to this week's shitpalooza, where the dogs both seemed to have diarrhea outbreaks that continued.  Fortunately, yours truly was a total idiot when cleaning up one mess, and I left the nearly-new roll of paper towels insufficiently high.  That is, it was low enough for the puppy to experience the joy of shredding.  About 2/3rds of the roll sacrificed itself for her joy - and did absorb some of the poop as she combined her activities.

Don't worry, I won't break my arm patting myself on the back.  I used the straw broom to sweep up the shreds, into the trash bag, trash bag out to the trash, and the broom back to the corner.  Where said puppy decided that as it would not carry her like in all of the Harry Potter ads, she'd try to fine-tune the thing, and reduce some of the straw to improve aerodynamics.   Silly me, I thought I had a dog, not a doctoral candidate for broom aerodynamicist.  What the hell do I know?  

So yeah, we had a week.  The carpets are recovering, a few more shampoos once we get all of the straw bits off the carpet, should make it right.  I hope.  

Beyond that, I did yet another 60-hour week this past week, on top of the 55-hour week before.  Yes, the over time money is nice, the problem is that I seem to be the only one on my team who hasn't yet managed to take enough time off.  I have already used 13 days of the 26 I get, which means I need to shave off another 7 before I hit year end, because I can only carry over only 5 days...  So I got vacation coming up, I sure hope.  It'll be a staycation, but I will have plenty to do.  I hope.  

So hopefully I'll slow down a bit and be able to do a bit more writing. Hopefully.