In A New York Minute

It amazing how fast something can turn to shit.

I left for vacation a happy employee, loving my job and happy to go in every day. Now? Not.

It started while I was on vacation. There had been some rumblings about problems users were having staying connected to my systems. What I do for a living is install and maintain a system where hospital staff connect remotely to medical software running here at our datacenter. More and more often, at certain times of the day, people were getting errors and even sometimes were unable to recover from those errors and reconnect. I'm pretty good at what I do and I'm pretty diligent about making sure my systems are implemented correctly. The problem did not lie within my systems.

While I was on vacation, the shit hit the fan. An outside consultant had been engaged, and I began getting frantic phone calls saying everything was down and I had to log in and work from my vacation. Sure enough, the contractors had done some of the stupidest things possible and really messed things up. I worked for several days, sometimes until 3am working out the issues. Every day there was another call, another problem.

When I returned from vacation things were still bad with my application. The contractors had made several changes, but nothing was solving the problem. A great many of the changes had caused additional problems however, and I remedied most of them as I worked essentially every moment I wasn't sleeping or driving.

I remember on the 2nd I arrived at the office to find the conference room full of people working on the issues. I joined in and worked though the day, without leaving for lunch. The rest of the folks left at 5, but I stayed until 8pm with one other contractor. I grabbed some food on the way home because I was very hungry, throwing the food down my throat as I rushed home. Sure enough when I walked through the door Mrs. Bogey was holding the phone telling me someone from work needed my help. I logged in and stayed on that call, hanging up only to join another call that went until 12:30am. Just for fun, the CIO called in to check on how things are going and said "I heard Duggle was MIA." WHAT. THE. FUCK. I was the least "MIA" person working there. I was extremely IA all fucking day.

The conference call on Saturday night wasn't productive at all because I couldn't get the contractor to listen to a thing I was telling him, so I suggested we go into the office on Sunday. That was a much more productive day but I was in the office for 12 hours working on bullshit. Good thing I'm not the church goin' type.

Later that week "the problem" had been solved (guess what, NOT MY SYSTEM), but I was still busily repairing problems caused by changes the contractors had made. Really, every single thing they touched was broken. Nobody could connect to the website because of a change they made to the XML broker that didn't work. Nobody could connect to the software because a drive they were using to store profiles had filled up. Every little thing they did had one small mistake that caused the entire system to fail. On Wednesday he accidentally shut down a new VM incorrectly so that it was installing four hours worth of Windows updates. We worked for a few minutes trying to get it to fail over to the backup VM while the updates were installing and he said "the updates will finish and then the users will be able to log on. So lets move on to something else." I blew my stack. "NO FUCKING WAY CAN THE USERS WAIT FOR FOUR HOURS."

By last Thursday morning all the major issues had been fixed (by me) when I heard from a coworker that the CIO had sent a personal email out thanking several members of the staff for working so hard to resolve the problem. I was omitted from the list. I thought maybe I was left out because I DARED to go on vacation, but one other person on the list had been on vacation. Not only that, but his system was actually the cause of "the problem" and I had inquired about it a week before xmas. He assured me at the time it could not be the cause. RIGHT.

So I wasn't in a very good mood Thursday night when I got a phone call asking if I would help with some emergency upgrades. I was told "I could say no" but I'm not that kind of guy. I helped with the emergency even though it interfered with some personal plans of mine. Missing them was very painful for me, and turned out to be very costly personally.

On Friday I had my annual review and while it wasn't particularly bad, it didn't go as well as I had hoped. It seems like the CIO has it out for me, and every single raise and promotion goes through his office. So when I left on Friday, I gave my notice.

It only took 10 days for me to go from loving my job to it being unreasonable for me to continue. It's amazing how fast things can change.