Yoshi’s

Back on Oct 16, while in the office for PostgreSQL training, a couple of us went to Yoshi’s for dinner. While I’m not exactly a fan of sushi I did find a couple items to my liking. Nate and Ian ordered sushi and the like and shared between them while Brian and I ordered some chicken and pork and shared between us. It really was quite good and I wouldn’t mind hitting it again any time I’m in the bay Area. To further sweeten the deal both Adam and Jamie of MythBusters were about ten feet away having what appeared to be a ‘working dinner’.

Good times.

somebody loves me

When I returned from lunch I had a package from UPS. Inside was a hand-written note of thanks from one of our larger customers along with some swag and other little goodies. I’m just completely floored. I mean, I’ve always known this particular customer appreciates what we do for them, but having them take the time to write a note and to send goodies? I’m just at a loss. Totally made my month. I mean, it’s the nature of the beast in my line of work to hear nothing but the negativity. And it takes a certain kind of person to hear that all day long and not let it affect them. Yes, I know a lot of people will say that I clearly let it affect me. You’re wrong. I’m an opinionated, strong-willed ass all on my own. And yeah, we do get ‘thanks’ in a ticket or on a call from time to time, but it’s just always kinda been the ‘polite’ thing. Ya know. This gesture was so much more than that. I truly appreciate this person/customer. If you’re reading this, I wanna say:

THANKS

one of those highs again

Dave has been on PTO all week since his wife just had their 2^nd child (congrats) so I’ve been covering his tickets in the legacy ticketing system while Ian has been covering his tickets in the new system. Things have been fairly decent this week load-wise in spite of this. At least, they were until yesterday.

It seems that yesterday kicked off one of those ‘tidal wave’ periods. I’ve got more tickets than I can reasonably work in 8 hours and so does Ian. The rest of the Collab team appear to be barely treading water as well based on the level of tickets sitting in the queue.

On the plus side, no customers have blown up this week, and I just made Ian into the oncall fool. Here’s to walking away at 5pm today and not even remotely thinking about it for two whole days! :)

argh!

That about sums it up for the past 11 months. I’d post more, but it would just piss me off again, and I have a feeling it would get back to people and be used against me. Yes, this place has that kinda people. :(

180 != 90 and 9 != 6

Took Tina’s car in for its 15k checkup/maintenance. Tina managed to snag an 8am appointment, and I recently received my

new job

It’s official. As of yesterday, Tina has taken a new position at the hospital. I haven’t been blogging about it, but over the past month or so, they’ve had 1 person quit, another leave the department, and yet another go out on leave. As you can imagine, things have been hectic in the department, and I’ve barely seen Tina since she’s working so much overtime.

Tina had fairly recently switched from her Registrar job to being in charge of the billing, reconcilliation, pre-registration, and some other duties (things taken from the Registrar and other positions that didn’t really belong with them) and was in the process of training to be a backup for another position in her group when that person announced she was going to another group. So, Tina has been doing her old job, her old-old job, and the new job. She went to her boss last week (week before?) and talked about everything she was doing and what she thought fit into which position. Her boss was impressed and agreed, so together they carved out a new position and swapped around who does what a bit.

Her boss took it to HR, they got the job written up, and as of yesterday, Tina had accepted their offer. Congrats Tina!

surviving death

I found out today that when our product (and all the accompanying resources and people) was purchased, it was with the intent to kill said product. Fortunately, there were enough people talking /and/ listening to have reversed that decision.

While I’m obviously glad at the outcome, I’m .. confused .. about how I feel about the whole thing. I’m pissed that the people who agreed to be acquired didn’t see it coming, and (apparently) didn’t put verbage into the deal to prevent the same (if only for a specified time period). I’m amazed that the people doing the buying felt this way on one hand. They’ve ‘re-invented’ their own product no less than 3 different times and ended up w/ the architecture that SFEE has. It seems fairly apparent that if you keep ending up w/ the same result after three completely different ‘do-overs’ that you would EMBRACE a product that already has that architecture, not kill it. On the other hand, we were seriously kicking their ass in the market, so I can see buying and killing.

The whole thing just really taints my impression of the company and my desire to stick around for the long haul. It also takes the edge off my desire to continue fighting them to make them see the value of SFEE. You see, the people who made the decision to kill SFEE made it pretty known internally that the decision had been made thusly. Then, when they reversed their decision, they did NOT communicate the same out to the same depth internally. Therefore, there are a non-trivial amount of players who got the first message, but not the second.

And my daily life is much harder because of it. Meh.