twin atlantic

weather has been unbelievably good the last 2 days. almost the 2 hottest days we have had all year and its set to continue through the weekend. all that shit i was talking about the air changing and summer leaving us, turned out to rubbish. it was very hot in the sun today at lunchtime. i checked and its exactly the same temperature in LA. maybe this is the gods saying that if i cant go to LA, they will bring LA to me. all i need is a muscle car and thats me set. 

am starting work at noon tomorrow again and working till late again tomorrow and i have to be back at work at 8:30am on saturday. am really hoping i am finished by noon on saturday. work today was as stress free a day as i have had in a few weeks. did a few bits here and there, but didn't have the senior PM breathing down my neck, and usually i would go over and ask for work to do, but i really could do with a few quiet days, to get rid of the pounding headache i carry with me most of the time. 

went to the gym and after a work out and 10 minutes in the steam room, my headache was gone and i felt normal and unstressed. am going to try and not get too stressed out, but unfortunately its not entirely up to me. 

spent the afternoon today, looking up cars and hotels in california for the new year. the world seems like such a lovely place all of a sudden and its all because of a couple of days of sunshine. it will get darker and colder but in the meantime its good for the soul. 

today i have mostly been listening to twin atlantic - make a beast of myself. 

somebody i used to know

i ended up working sunday morning as well, but i had enough by 1pm and i just cycled to the gym for a work out. i get stressed when i dont go to the gym, and i need it for my mind as much as my body.


this week so far has been all go as usual. today i had to build a cluster, install and configure 3 production ESX servers, and configure applications and check 12 other trading servers. quite frankly there are not enough hours in the day to get all that done, and i am going to have to try and finish it all off tomorrow. i am also going to be working late on friday and going to be in the office on saturday as part of the datacenter migration i am working on, which is the project i was originally supposed to be doing. i should actually be be doing all the prep work for that and all this other stuff is extra. its mental.


i have had contracts where i got frustrated at not being given enough work to do, or just repetitive work, and this is most definitely not like that. i jump between 2 or 3 different project in a morning, as opposed to being stuck on the same piece of work for months on end. if it wasn't for the fact that all the stuff i get given is overdue and under serious time pressure, with trading teams wanting them a week ago, it would be a lot of fun. instead it can be quite stressful, but thats not a bad thing if its not an unreasonable amount of stress.....which it sometimes is.


i go from contracts that are painfully dull, to this one which is crazy busy. i have 4 months of not working, and now they want me to work every single day including weekends. lots of time, no time, very slow, too fast. oh well, i can't complain. times are tough out there for a lot of people, and i am being paid well and learning a lot as well. 


anyways, i found another tune for my california mix tape.
today i have mostly been listening to goyte - somebody i used to know. do yourself a favour and listen to it without watching the video. it distracts from the song and i dont like it. its a very very good song.

 

shit people

i worked both days last weekend and i had to work till 11pm on last night, and i did another 11 hour shift today. i also am going to have to work tomorrow (sunday).
the senior project manager gave me 40 servers to check and finish off on wednesday, that he wanted done before the end of the week so they would be ready on monday morning. it was already going to be a tough task. he then told me i had to build some backup servers for a new datacenter on thursday and spend the whole day making that my priority instead. i did so and delivered the backup servers on the same day. he then told me i still had to get the 40 servers finished, despite making me losing a day in doing other stuff for him.

i was also supposed to be working on my own project (ie. not putting out fires the chancers have started), and we had a big migration on friday night and today. i started work at lunch time yesterday and although we thought it would take till 2 am, we were done by 11pm. i then had to be at work for 8:30am this morning to check and finish off the move and that took till around 5pm. i then stayed back to do more work on trying to get those 40 servers done, (by a miracle i only have 3 servers left to do, after a herculean effort on friday afternoon), and then i went home because i had a splitting headache and was just generally annoyed and pissed off

on friday afternoon i had a conversation with the senior PM where told me that my orginal project was not my priority any more and i had to finish the servers which were already very late. i was just stunned into silence that he was jerking me around like this and just walked back to my desk shaking my head in a 'yeah...ok....whatever.....what a shambles' kind of way.

feeling a bit embaressed about being so disorganised and running such a shambolic project he came over a few minutes later to my desk in a bid to appease and sympathise with me. i mentioned a few posts ago that i was worried that one day my internal monolgue that is running in my head which says stuff i shouldnt really say out loud, was in danger of coming out one day. well it kind of happened when he came over to my desk. at the end of his motivational speech he said " well there are lots of problems in the project and ....", at which point i had listened to enough bullshit and butted in and said "the problem is there are too many shit people on this project!". there was a bit of a silence and he stopped what he was saying, shrugged and walked back to his desk. i think he could see the steam coming out of my ears and thought best not to push his luck.

because we finished at 11pm last night and not as 2am as expected, i went with 3 of the other guys to a bar for a drink, after a long evening of work. i dont usually talk about work with them in too much depth, and it was the first time i had spoken to any of them outside of work. turns out the senior PM is regarded by all of them as a bit of a joke and utterly useless. i knew he was, but i had kept it to myself. they already knew what i thought about the chancers, but it was interesting to hear their scathing critiques of the senior PM. you feel vindicated when people you respect have a similar view. you know its just not personal, or you dont like the way he talks. he is genuinely and by common consensus utterly incompetent.

anyway, these last 3 servers out of the 40 are ones i have problems with. one is a cluster, and i just dont know how they install clusters and to what standard and rules they use, and one of them is just busted. come monday morning i know i am going to get shit. after getting the backup servers delivered in 1 day last week and working late into the night and most of saturday on my own project which went smoothly, i guarantee they are going to give me shit for only doing 37 or 38 out of 40 servers, that the chancers should have done weeks ago, but didn't. fuckers!.

i just need to keep thinking of the money. i think i will write it on the palm of my hand "its all about the benjamins" to remind me when i am getting shit from them on monday. it might help my internal monolgue to stay internal as well. am feeling very much like ed norton at the beginning of fightclub, lack of sleep and nothing but work and my internal monolgue starting to take over.



today i have mostly been listening to lonely island - i'm on a boat.

what a life

the air has changed. despite having this shittiest summer ever, the air was still different the last few months since may, in that it didn't cut like winter air. well today and yesterday on my cycle to the gym, i could feel the air had changed and although it wasnt cold, it wasnt the same. we now start the long slide into what will inevitably be a wet and dark winter. what joy!.

had two really hard workouts at the gym this weekend. i think it was partly because i have been working these last couple of days with stuff that needed to be done to get the project the chancers are working on, delivered, allbeit late. stayed behind at work till 7pm on friday and then i connected in from home last night and worked from 8pm till 3am. did another hour or two today just checking my own work. anyways, because of that i think it made me really hit it hard at the gym, more than usual. i felt really great for it, till my last exercise today, where i reached over to put some weights back on their stand and i strained the top of my back, just below my neck. its feeling a bit better since i have been home, but i think i will have a stiff neck, the next couple of days.

what with lots of time spent working (need to keep thinking of the money), hurting my neck and the weather getting shitty, i have started to put together my california playlist for my next trip, whenever it maybe (hopefully january). i think this next tune will be on it.

today i have mostly been listening to noel gallagher - what a life. i am working next weekend as well, and it looks like i will have to work most saturdays between now and december 10th. i will have to keep thinking of the money, but i think i will be on my knees by november. what a life.

bite the hand that feeds

i was going to try and post about something other than the shenanigans going on at work but its the only thing happening recently.

 the chancers rebuilt a production database server. unfortunately they rebuilt the wrong one and blew away all the work that had been done to configure the databases and application settings. the database administrators were not very happy at all. luckily it had no data on it yet but it was going to be used next week and had it happened then, it would have been time to hand in your door pass and be escorted from the premises.

part of me is really glad it didnt happen when it was in use, because that would have been a huge disaster. it would have had data for one of the main trading applications and the fall out from it would have hit everyone including people not involved at all with it. but there is a part of me that does think it would have got rid of the chancers once and for all. i got the impression that they are not going to be let go and we are going to be stuck with them for the rest of the year judging by conversations and planning for the rest of the year.

anyways i had another run in with the chancers over this database server today, and again it was like talking to obtuse, stubborn idiots. worse of all, they showed no contrition at all. i wasnt even involved in the project this database is used for, but i was merely asked by the database admins to check out why they couldnt connect to their new production server, and i was just helping them out. 

we all make fuckups and shit happens. no one is perfect of infallible, but when you do make a fuck up you tend to shut your mouth and take responsibility. what you dont do is start saying random names of other people and start blaming them for your fuckups especially when there are emails proving they sent you the right server names to rebuild and it was you that then made a mistake and ended up doing the wrong ones. its crystal clear in black and white. no one was expecting apologies or anything, but i certainly wasn't expecting the agressive confrontational arguments expunging them of any responsibility whatsoever and just naming other people to blame.

this has gone from one of the best contracts i have ever had to one of the worst and its all because of these idiots we have to work with. had a dicussion with the senior project manager and i told him of some of the issues. he said he knew it was not working and the project is not organised in the right way, but its too late in the day to re-organise it and we just have to get through it. he also said that all the work was coming to me and my team lead to install applications, finish off and check because the chancers did not have the "right skillset", to do the work and were not as familiar with the systems. i told him i had been there 3 months and was a newbie whilst they had all been there over a year. if there is supposed to be someone who isn't familiar with the systems its supposed to me. shit, it is me and there are still lots of things i am finding my way around.

i felt like saying didn't he think it was odd that the guys that earn the least are the ones that are more able. am not pleading poverty because i get paid very well, but its not as well as those chumps. 

at one point, i did say that installing most of the applications was not rocket science and that i could teach the cleaning lady how to do it in about 10 minutes. i bet she barely earns 11 grand a year and would be delighted to get 11 grand a month. 

my team leader is back tomorrow as he had a day off today, hence today, me having to deal with blown out producion servers and being left to explain to the database guys how a server they had spent days configuring and testing needs to be done all over again because of some chancers. i should have got the chancers to speak to the DBA's. why did the senior PM lumber me with this shit in a tacit acknowledgement he didnt want trust or want the chancers clearing up their own shit. am turning into the janitor. my teamleader can deal with the fall out tomorrow. i had enough of that shit today. by being wheeled out to deal with this, it looks like i am so how responsible for the chancers, when actually i want nothing to do with them, i dont work WITH them, and i barely speak to them. 

anyways, i have almost finished reading 'dancing in the glory of monsters' a book about central africa, particularly the Congo. its an incredible account of events that happened over the last decade that was completely ignored by the news channels and mainstream press. 4 million people died between 1998 and 2004 mainly in eastern Congo through conflict and disease in the midst of a massive humanitarian crisis which was completely ignored by all western governments. 

its a shameful account and proves that our politicians are just paying lip service and choosing causes that fit their own agendas and national and economic interests and that the media are complicit in following the political and economic agenda. i can not recommend reading it highly enough. its utterly profound and sad but it makes you think long and hard about life and justice and equality and humanity and how these things are not just missing amongst some despots, dictators and warlords in central africa, but by our own prime ministers and presidents who ignore such great suffering so easily. read it and if nothing else, at least you will be informed. 

today i have mostly been listening to nine inch nails - bite the hand that feeds. 

US president at the beginning of the last decade was Bush II and we had Blair. both could have saved millions of lives in central africsa. instead they chose to let them die whilst they pursued their own personal econmic and strategic agendas in the middle east and south asia resulting in the deaths of thousands of their own troops, trillions of dollars and hundred of thousands of afghans and iraqis. both are now multi millionaires. quite an achievement for people that have been public servants for most of their lives. they could and would never bite the hand that feeds. 

   

drive

forgot to set my alarm and so was about 25 minutes late for work this morning. no bother, as i did a few hours over the weekend and i had stayed back most evenings last week as well to try and finish off the work the chancers should have done but hadn't. i put in my timesheet an extra day to be billed for the week. i should have put down more, but i didnt want to take the piss. as compensation for working the weekend i decided to treat myself and bought some nice new g-star jeans. i have a company that i trade through. its the way freelancers do it and my company has one employee, which is me. i have to give my employee some perks for putting in the hours because with out his work i wouldn't get paid. :-)


feel much better after a pretty boring weekend but never underestimate how much better it can make you feel when you get a good sweat on from exercise. i think thats one of the reasons why i was in such an angry mood all last week and why i had so little patience. i didnt go to the gym on the sunday before last week and also football got cancelled. i had no outlet and it was nothing but a torrent of shit coming my way. i feel so much better today and it was all from a couple of good work outs and bike rides.


work was same as always. i am still in the most shambolic project ever. its run by idiots and being implemented by chancers. oh, and i found out how the chancers managed to get their jobs. i had been wondering about it because the interview i had at the firm was a pretty decent technical grilling from the head of the windows team. it was only about 45 minutes worth of questions but he asked about lots of stuff across virtualisation and citrix and windows and clustering. it did make me wonder that the chancers surely could not have had an interview like that as they would have failed miserably.


turns it, that all the chancers have known each other for quite a few years and all worked together at their last bank. the leader of the chancers got a job at the hedge fund through being friends with a senior project manager (who was subsequently sacked a few months ago), and he then got the other 2 chancers in when they needed resource. no real interview and all done through personal recommendations, and even if there had been interviews, it was they who did the interviewing and they were obviously going to pick their friends.


there is a lot of that going on at various banks i have been at. lots of people kissing ass and trying to get jobs through friends. i am not a big believer in it, because as much as you might know some great people, its just as likely they are horse shit, and interviews should always be conducted by other people in the firm with no connections to that person, and that clearly doesn't happen.


whenever your position is dependent on someone else and not your own skills, you are going to get found out, and thats what is happening now. a few project managers that were involved in this project got sacked a few months ago before i started. another project manager had his contract not renewed and was let go a few weeks ago. this has left the chancers exposed with no protection or buffer and now they have to stand on the quality of the work they produce, and the quality is not good enough to keep them standing.


its going to be a long had week, but i will get through it. i also have to work next weekend but its stuff to do with my own project, so it should be all good and i get paid extra. even with buying a pair of g-stars, these 2 extra days will have paid for a return to ticket to los angeles. it feels better when i think of it like that. all i need after that is money for a cool car.


today i have been mostly watching the trailer for drive. it looks wicked.

debacle

have posted most nights this week cataloging the debacle that i have become involved in at work, and so this is the final friday evening installment. it was service as usual this morning. i finished off the last couple of pieces of work on servers that the chancers had said were ready, but were nowhere near and sent them over to the application teams to use. i didnt hear anything back from then, so like the rest of the servers i have done i think they might be ok. 

i did some work for my own project that i have been assigned to and then asked for more servers from the chancers to check. they have badly missed deadlines and as soul crushing and demotivating as it is to fix the fuckups of people that are paid miles more than me, my own personal instinct is to try hard and and just get this stuff delivered. i ended up sitting with the main chancer and the senior PM whilst they tried to figure out which servers i should do next. i cant transcribe how the conversation went but rest assured the chancer was as belligerent and obtuse as anyone i have ever some across in my whole career. he simply would not give an answer to which servers were done and were of the highest priority that needed me to fix. 

i sat there initially in utter astonishment at the childishness and stupidity of his belligerence but after 10 minutes i could feel my blood starting to boil. i wanted to just shout in his face "i am trying to help you, you stupid cunt, so answer the fucking question and give me the information". "rest assured i would rather have nothing to do with a fucking chancer like you, so if you dont want me here, feel free to tell me to fuck off and i will be on my way and carry on delivering my own work whilst you drown in a river of shit you created through your own ineptitude. good luck and good bye dickhead".

obviously i didnt say it, but i do think its inevitable that one day my internal mental monologue is going to come out of my mouth and i am going to end up calling someone a stupid cunt in front of everyone in the office. 

anyways, i wasn't interested in their childish argument so i got up and walked to my desk. a couple of hours later the senior project manager sent me the details of servers i could check. what an astonishing waste of time and money and energy. i really want nothing to do with any of them. 

from what i have seen of the rest of the people in the hedge fund, they appear to be the best of the best in all the departments. there are £30m/year traders poached from goldman sachs. there are some of the best techies i have ever some across in all the banks i have worked at, and not only are they technically very good but they are all friendly and approachable. guys that have done projects at all the biggest investment banks in the world. there is a concentration of great talent that is easily among the best in london if not the whole of europe..........and i get stuck with the fucking idiots. shit, i really hope i dont get associated with this debacle of a project. they must be getting infamous in the firm for running £3m over budget and missing all the deadlines. i hope they don't lump me in with them. my side of the project is running smoothly. i am only there to help them and get it delivered. i am the fireman who is just putting out the fire. i didnt burn the place down. i promise it wasn't me!!!.

as usual the chancers seemed to dissapear from their desks this afternoon never to be seen for the rest of the day. after they had gone i was at one the chancers desks and i saw print outs of their spreadsheets and reports for the servers they had completed building. it was all lies. they had marked on their sheets that they had finished building servers and handed them over to the business when in fact i was checking those same servers and had not finished them and so they had not been handed over to the business. there was another group of servers that were marked done and handed over to the app team that my team leader was finishing off and i saw the list of issues he had come across and there was something wrong with every single of the 20 servers he had looked at. 

these idiots actually think they are getting the work done and its all going smoothly. they seem to think its just the occasional server that is coming to me or my team leader to check and that everything goes to the app teams when they have done their bit. in fact every single piece of work they do is now checked by me and my team leader and after we have fixed the dozens of issues, we pass them on. going through his spreadsheets, i saw that there is not a single piece of work they have done that has not gone through us. 

anyways i heard that the main chancer had confided into one of the other guts that he was thinking of not taking a contract renewal if offered when his contract runs out in 2 week. i suspect he might know the writing is on the wall and wants it to seem to people at the firm he decided he did not want to stay as opposed to the firm not offering him a new 3 month deal and kicking him out mid project. please let him be let go. 


its a £126m lottery jackpot tonight. i bought 2 tickets and i promise i will give a significant proportion to charity. please let me win it. i dont want to have to go back to the idiots on monday morning.

next week i hope to return to writing banal posts about work and gym and football. 

today i have mostly had a headache.  

450

hope you have digested your food when you read this because it might be about to come up when you read the next part. the new chancer gets paid £450 per day and most of the time the he claims for one day on the weekend as well as overtime. thats about £11,000 (~$18000) per month. that quite a lot more than i get paid. i wouldn't hire him to stack to toilet rolls in a supermarket, and i stacked toilet roll for a few years on the weekends while i was in high school and all the way through university, and i know whats involved. 


i am still tasked with fixing all their fuckups and today i had to go over to where all 3 chancers sit to ask about one server in particular, which was in a worse state than all their other work they have produced. one question about a server suddenly turned into them turning on me asking why i was questioning their work and where i was getting my information from to say that it was done wrong and needed re-installing from scratch. 


they clearly got very defensive and to be fair i would feel a little put out if someone came to my desk and told me i had done it completely wrong. on the other hand, no one comes to my desk saying i got it completely wrong because i went to school and have used the literacy skills picked up from reading 'spot goes to the farm' and 'the village with 3 corners' when i was 4, and am now able to read server build sheets as well as stories about billy blue hat and talking dogs. 
anyway i didnt rise to what they were saying to me and went back to my desk. 


about 2 minutes later the main chancer came to my desk and started up again. i let him off once already but i wasnt going to let him off twice. it goes against the 2 basic rules of contracting which is 1:contractors should be seen and not heard, and 2: never offer an opinion on anything unless specifically asked. 
i figured he was a contractor at my level and so the rules didn't apply to him and i gave him a very calm and considered critique of his justifications for his mistakes (ineptness) and the ad hoc, time wasting, confusing and "utterly pointless" process he and his fellow chancers were using and trying to impose on me and the other 2 guys in our team. the way you are doing it is clearly not working because if it was you wouldn't be in the situation you are in now of failing to deliver every piece of work. not 1 or 2, but every bit of work.

"you are needlessly duplicating information in your pointless spreadsheet and not using the server build sheets, which contain the definitive requirements of what each application team needs, which when they make changes to it, are not reflected on the spreadsheet you are using because thats a cut/paste of data at a point weeks before". 


"you wouldnt be picked up on all these issues if you used the server build sheets which contain all the information you need. there is no need for a seperate checklist. the buildsheet is your checklist, and the standard you are supposed to follow. as long as you do whats on the sheet no one can question anything you do". 


"i have no reason to record every tiny issue i come across on a server when i build it. i am not here to record trivial issues, we are here to build and deliver application servers to the business to the requirements they want, not what i choose, and no one is interested in an incorrect network or storage presentation during the build phase. they just want it fixed and expect us to use our skill and initiative and want their servers at the right time".


"i keep a note of current issues in my notebook and in my head. no i don't put it on a spreadsheet so everyone in my team can read it because quite frankly they are not interested and have their own work to do. when my team leader asks me the status of my various applications builds i can update him verbally and vice versa". 


i should have launched into a tirade like this and asked him "where did you learn your trade?!!"




the new project manager who i have my doubts about, sat with our team of 3 at lunch time and we briefly spoke about the issues. i didnt say anything harsh in front of him about the chancers, but when he asked me about various issues with the chancers, my silence and rolling my eyes should have spoken volumes and the fact that when he asked me what the specific issues were i was finding on the servers, there being mistakes on every single one, should have given him an idea of what was happening. 


i heard that 2 of the chancers are coming to contract renewal time at the end of the month. i will be astonished if they get renewed, but then again, i am astonished they were hired in the first place. completely utterly inept not just for someone you might pay £11000/month to, but to someone you would pay £11000/year. i guarantee we could hire a couple of grads straight out of uni that would work twice as hard for a quarter of the price. 


had to go to the gym tongiht. football got cancelled. some of the guys couldnt make it tonight and one of the guys went to see cannabis corpse, the death metal band tonight. i needed to get the aggression out, and i also was told that its likely i will have to work most weekends to clear up the chancers shit. 


apologies about the long post just venting. oh well, its not like you missed out on an action packed post. its not like my life is that exciting anyway. :-)


today i have mostly been listening janes addiction - irresistable force

videogames

got hit with a tsunami of work to do this morning when i got into the office. senior project manager asked me to complete 40 trading application servers by the end of the day. sorry dude that ain't going to happen and the sheer fact you are asking me makes me think you are a chump. after taking a look at some of the servers i discovered that the chancers had been given these servers 7 weeks ago to build and get ready. in that 7 weeks, they put an OS on there, but they are on the wrong network, no storage and no applications have been installed and configured. they spend 7 weeks doing 30% of the work and i get 1 day to do the remaining 70%. that can not be right.

my team leader asked me to send a mail to the chancers stating how to install the apps and give them instructions and tips. i did so this morning. i then bumped into the senior PM who after speaking to the chancers then came over to me and told me that the chancers "didnt WANT to install the applications". i didnt really know what to say that. the voice in my head replied "do they WANT to get paid?, clearly not because they do not WANT to do what they are employed to do". i just nodded and smiled and said i would discuss it with my team leader. the senior PM should have just turned round to them and said, i dont give a fuck what you WANT to do, i am telling not asking, and if you don't like it, there is the door".

in the midst of all this shit, i still have my own work to be getting on with but i have had time to do hardly any of it. i have ESX clusters to expand, i have storage migrations, i have new VLANs to present to ESX hosts, and i have my own server builds to finish, and i am not getting to do any of it because we are drowning under an avalanche of work that the chancers are refusing to do.

5pm on the button they had all gone home this evening whilst i stayed back again to try and sort out their shit. i might suggest they fire the fucking lot of them, pay me £800/day and i will work 15 hours a day and get shit moving and delivered. its not like they are contributing to delivering anything. if they were not here i dont think anyone would notice. whenever they need any of the work to be delivered the managers automatically come to me or my team leader now, and when i do my bit, it is officially signed off and goes to the application teams, at which point they cross it off their lists as being delivered.

i said yesterday i was quite enjoying it. i was then, but i wasn't today. have got a splitting headache. i should be getting ready for southern california. i should have my muscle car booked at the airport, have my california 2011 playlist ready, have my hotels booked, tickets to see a band play at the music box or troubador, shopping list researched, tickets to see the galaxy play, presents for my friends kids who i stay with in san francisco, details of new beach towns to stop off at and a couple of good books. instead i am shovelling someone else's shit.

today i have mostly been listening to lana del rey - videogames. 

bullet with butterfly wings

the chancers are back this week and once again i get tasked with checking their work and once again its incomplete. one of them came over to my desk asking me about Tibco installs and what the engineering standards were for it and just whining. i told him how i had been told to do it by my team leader who has been at the firm 9 years, and knows about how most stuff gets done, and the chancer just questioned it and came up with possible alternative methods, which when you analysed it, would not work, so were not worth discussing.

its one thing to have a discussion about something that might work, but your method goes against the rules set by engineering department, so they can be dismissed. there is no conversation to have here. after gently pointing out a couple of issues with his suggestion, he then said the way i was doing it "would be a sackable offence at barclays capital", and made sure everyone around us heard. 2 things to point out, firstly the way i configure it is the correct way of doing it, and secondly, we don't work for barclays capital so who gives a shit about whats correct there. this is a hedge fund bitch and this is the way we do it, so if you like barclays so much, i suggest you fuck off back to them.

obviously i didnt say that to him. even though i knew i was right, i checked again that the way i was configuring it was right, and it turns out it was. anyways, i carried on installing the rest of the applications on the trading servers he had allegedly finished and were ready to hand over. around 5pm after all the chancers had gone home i bumped into the senior project manager who manages that team and he asked me how the servers were looking. i could have covered for the chancer and said they were fine, but it would then make me look bad because it would then raise the question, why did it take me 3 hours to check 6 servers. i decided to tell the truth, which was those servers were nowhere near being ready to be handed over to the application team, because none of the applications had been installed and so i was going through each server configuring them correctly and fixing issues. i stayed behind an extra hour this evening to get it all done.

why is it that people that are incompetent have no idea they are shit?. i am not that great at what i do, but i miles better than the chancers and yet i don't throw my weight around and make lots of noise and whine about Tibco installs or oracle installs or how messed up the automated build process is. it works fine for me and when it doesn't i try and use my brain a little and figure it out. i dont go round marching to peoples desk hassling them and talking shit.

will be interesting tomorrow. the chancer sent a long email to the head of engineering as well as a dozen other people wanting clarification on how to do a Tibco install. he doesn't know it, but he is making a rather public tit of himself.

this post might make it sound like i am not enjoying work and its becoming a hassle. its the opposite actually. i really am enjoying it these days and all the work i do is being really appreciated by the trading application teams because i am the one that sends them servers built and installed and configured correctly and they think i am a fucking hero, for handing them servers that are a week late because the chancers were fucking around for a week. all is peachy.

today i have mostly been listening to smashing pumpkins - bullet with butterfly wings.

keep your head up

it was the last day of summer yesterday, not that we have had much of a summer even by the lowly standards of london. i read a story in the news where they said this had been the coolest summer in 20 years. i fucking new it!. sometimes you think you are just remembering your childhood through rose tinted glasses and the long summer days playing football in the park and sunshine and hot days were just your imagination, and that in actual fact it may not have been like that. turns out it actually was like that though. this has been the shittest summer i can remember in a long time. it rained most of the afternoon and i couldnt cycle to the gym today for my usual sunday session. i didnt want to leave the house and get the bus and then walk. i could not face it, so i just stayed home and had a good clear out and clean.

work is ok but its getting quite busy indeed. my team leader said we should take it as a compliment that whenever the management want an important piece of work done for the project, they send it our way, but it does mean we have lots of work and we are on it pretty much all the time. was given a bunch of trading application servers that needed to be ready for this week and was on that on that the last few days. we also have our own work for our part of the project as well, so its really is piling work on work. the days are flying by.

the other team of 3 techies are back from tomorrow, as 2 of them were on holiday last week. jesus!, holiday!, 2 of you at the same time?. have you not got any work to deliver?. i would usually be going on holiday to NY and LA this friday but i have postponed it, because this project is too important and we need all hands on deck. i heard that the other 3 techies came with in a whisker of all being fired 2 weeks ago, when it was discovered how many fuck ups they had done. the PM that talks too much looks to be on his way out as well. they have stripped him of most of his responsibilities because he was not able to deliver and there were too many mistakes being made.

i will be very surprised if he makes it past the end of this month, when his contract expires. he had been with the firm over a year but word around the water cooler is that he will not be offered another 3 month deal. i had my doubts about him from the first time i met him. he talked way too much, made far too much noise and didn't appear to put in as much effort into DOING work as he did TALKING about work.

both he and one of the chancer techies both seem to be living in denial. the PM has just bought a very expensive and large house and the chancer techie wears a £6,000 watch and spent thousands of pounds on his stereo. makes you wonder how they will survive when they get let go, and given the level of work they produce, it makes you wonder if they could get anything really good that pays as well. one of the other techies in another department has a really flashy watch and goes on expensive holidays, but he can because he is very good and really knows his shit. he could get laid off tomorrow and he could easily walk into something else paying as much.

i always remind myself not to get to extravagant and keep my feet on the ground, and not get caught up in the whole investment banking/hedge fund lifestyle. i am good at what i do, but i am not that good and there are lots of people that i am better than, but i have also met lots of people that are miles better than me. you need to maintain some perspective and am lucky in that my friends and parents would probably think less, not more of me if i spent 6 grand on a watch, although i did treat myself to a new phone last week, which is very nice indeed, and my old phone was starting to die.

anyways, if this was a normal year, i would almost certainly be flying off to new york or LA this friday, but i am not. its going to be a tough few months for the remainder of the year, and its just my luck that it would have been sweeter than normal given our shit london summer. will be there soon, cruising to the beach in a dodge challenger.

today i have mostly been listening to ben howard - keep your head up.