Locked for editing

I was standing in the accounts office today, and saw someone double-click to open an Excel file.

Excel then reported that the file was locked for editing, and who it was locked for editing by. Say, it was locked for editing by someone called Jane.

So what did this person do? Did they go to Jane’s desk to ask that the file be closed, or close it themselves?

No, don’t be silly. She asked a coworker, then the rest of the people in the office, then got up and walked around, looking at screens.

Then she came back, looked at the message again, and said “oh,” and walked off to Jane’s desk.

Head, meet hands.

Garden Leave

I was told today that I’ll probably be allowed to leave the organisation early, as soon as I get a few things ticked off my list.

“I understand you’ve handed in your notice,” said J, “and I want to talk to you about that on Wednesday, if you’re around. As a you-and-me thing, not a company thing.”

“Sure,” I said. We then talked about our committments for that day, as I may be going on a junket with a colleague.

I was then given the good news that as soon as I get the one thing that I’ve currently got open on my desk sorted and closed, then I can go. “No point in postponing it, really,” J shrugged.

Looking forward to what Wednesday brings. I’ve been mulling this over in my head: if they ask why I’m leaving, what do I say?

I’m tempted to just say “look, I don’t want to leave with a cloud over me. This isn’t the job for me, and I’m not the person you need in your organisation right now. I don’t want to annoy anyone and I don’t want you, or CSL, to annoy me. So it’s in everyone’s interests for me to go.”

We’ve come a long way, as is detailed by my writing on the wiki. I’ve started writing a “user manual” for the new network manager, which, I imagine, will be the person that I took over from (who has since been reinstalled elsewhere). There’s the content management system on the website, oh and the bits of the template that you need to edit to do this, that and the other. Oh, and the bit of flash – that needs to be handled like so. And the DNS on the network is a little flaky – oh, I’ll need to put that bit in about the OpenDNS system, and the support system that we use. Ooo, the email. That’ll need documenting. And the hosting. And, and, and…

I’ve got my work cut out for me, but I think the best thing to do is get the network documented, get my head down and get out. The sooner I leave, the better.

Does anyone have any advice on what I should say at my exit interview?

Meanwhile

If you read earlier posts, you’ll note I’ve had my fuel card taken off me, which means I’m back to charging them for business miles.

I’ve got to drive to the branch office tomorow, which is over 80 miles away.

There and back, 160 miles, at 40p/mile, that’ll be at least £64 I’ll be charging them for fuel that they’ve actually already paid for.

Winner!

I resign

Well, I handed my notice in today. I printed it off at around 11am, and then pondered what it was I was doing.

Then, I copied my documents onto my laptop, and download DBAN, and booted my PC off it.

(Note to the non-technical: DBAN irrecoverably destroys data on hard drives.)

After a bit of motivation from The Wife, I took my letter of resignation, sealed in an envelope, and asked my boss if he had a few minutes.

“Sure. Let me just bring my laptop.”

You know, to make sure that I had his full attention.

He let out a coy smile when he saw the envelope. He sat down, and opened his laptop. I handed him the envelope. The smile was replaced by the frown of an angry Dad when he read the contents.

“Ok. Thanks.”

And with that, he closed his laptop, and returned to his desk.

I shuffled off downstairs, and heard nothing further.

Well, I didn’t authorise it

J came downstairs earlier today and announced that the company was having a tax review, and if anyone had any questions. “How will that affect me and my fuel card?” I piped up. First mistake.

In March ‘07, I asked K, the person who looks after the money, if I could have a fuel card. K obliged and promptly ordered me one. Since that day I stopped keeping track of my business mileage, as it would have been rude to claim for mileage when I wasn’t paying for my fuel.

Around April/May time I asked what implications this would have on my tax. “Not sure,” came the reply,so we (me, K and my boss P) mutually and informally agreed that, because I was paying for my car and the wear and tear, they’d pay for my fuel and not tax me for it.

Case closed.

Roll forward fifteen months, I’m sitting around the table with the three of them looking at me.

“Who authorised your fuel card?” said P.

“Well, I don’t know,” came my reply. I looked at K. “If memory serves me correctly, I asked you for it,” tipping my head towards K, “and you just sorted it out for me. I also spoke to you about it,” looking at P now, “as I was unsure of the tax implications, and we all agreed to overlook it until we had answers.”

“No I didn’t,” came P’s reply.

“Don’t you remember?”

“If I’d have done it I would have remembered, but at no time at all have I had a discussion with you about your fuel card,” P insisted. “V didn’t know you had one, J didn’t know you had got one, and I didn’t know you had one, so I don’t know who authorised it.”

J said “the first thing V said to me was ‘who is he to have a fuel card? I don’t even have one. Why does he need one?’ and even I don’t have one.”

“All I know is I asked for one and I got one. I don’t really see how this is my fault.”

“We just need to know who authorised it,” J said.

“Yes,” P said, looking at me.

The tone of my voice changed slightly. “Are you incinuating that I authorised it myself?”

“Well, I didn’t authorise it, nobody else sat around this table authorised it, so we need to find out who did.”

“How exactly would I have ordered my own fuel card after I’d only been working for the company for three months?”

New job

I’ve been offered a new job today, so hopefully I won’t have to carry this blog on for much longer.

“Completely knackered,” says clueless user

The trouble with being the person responsible for something is that if something goes wrong with said items you’re responsible for, the people who use the items lose all basic troubleshooting ability.

L greeted me on the way in this morning. “I know it’s early, but my computer’s knackered,” she said. “The monitor won’t come on, the computer won’t come on, and the phone’s dead. Other people’s phones are working though.”

I cocked my head at her, like a dog shown a card trick. Immediate thoughts: four-way extension cord has been switched off or fuse has popped.

Upstairs we went, to take a look at her desk. “See?” she said, pressing the power button on her monitor. I took a quick glance at the plug sockets, which are all mounted at mid-wall level. There was one, with fairly thick, white flex, that was switched off.

“Come and stand here, and look where I’m looking.”

Disgruntled admin gets 63 months

From The Register

An IT manager who sought revenge for an unfavorable job evaluation was sentenced to more than five years in federal prison after being convicted of intentionally triggering a massive data collapse on his former employer’s computer network.

Jon Paul Oson, 38, of Chula Vista, California, was sentenced to 63 months behind bars and ordered to pay more than $409,000 in restitution, according to federal prosecutors in San Diego. He was immediately taken into custody after the sentence was handed down on Monday. It is one of the stiffest penalties ever for a computer hacking offense.

Oson was hired in May 2004 as a network engineer at the Council of Community Clinics in San Diego, a nonprofit that provides various services to 17 regional health clinics in Southern California. He performed well in that role and five months later was promoted to technical services manager. He ended up bitterly resigning a year later after a performance evaluation cited interpersonal difficulties, according to court documents.

Read more

New Server = My Fault

I’m not sure if I’ve previously written about this, but I get the blame for everything at work. If it’s broken, it’s because of something I have done.

A few months ago, I was asked to make things on the network better, and move it off the ageing crappy Dell server that the whole network was relying on. So I threw in a shiny HP server, and slowly migrated services over to it.

One day, I moved all the Exchange boxes over, and all the clients on the network happily recognised that their mailbox had been moved and readjusted. Several weeks passed after the mailboxes had been moved with no problems being reported. Fantastic.

There was one member of staff who works almost permanelty from home, on the VPN. I got a call at 7pm, and he said that his email wasn’t working, and conveniently he needed to get to an email now, and that it was so urgent he just wanted me to undo whatever it was that I’d done to make everything work again.

I’ve done this job for seven years now so I’m an expert at keeping people calm and making them realise that, maybe, just maybe, it’s not actually my fault, and it might be something that they’ve done or haven’t done.

Oh no. Not this guy.

I needed to get a look at his laptop to see what was happening. Can I just get you to download a small program so I can connect in to your laptop and take a look? “Look, I just want you to fix this. I don’t have time for you to mess around and play with my laptop. There’s nothing wrong with my laptop. Just fix the servers.”

Doing The Website

When I write these I’m trying to be as objective as possible and not let my feelings get in the way of what I’m putting down.

I was asked to do the company website a while back. The design brief was “something modern and extensible”. So I had a scout around the web, found a design, and created a photoshop mock-up of it. “Yep, that’s fantastic,” the Directors cheered in unison.

So I spent a week designing a Joomla template around the photoshop mock-up, then a week populating it with “relevant” sample content and a bit of news, and then arranged a meeting with the Directors.

“We don’t like it. It looks like it will be too much hassle to keep updated. Can’t you make it so we don’t have to update it?”

The design brief now includes the criteria that stale content has to be acceptable. So, the dates come off the articles, the “Latest News” section goes and is replaced by static Press Releases and so on.

“I just don’t like it,” is the next piece of constructive criticism. “Can’t we make it so that it makes us look like a big company? Like, err… ” taptaptap “this one?”