The Childfree Life

Here's what my on-call week has been like:

Monday - no problems, but I had to stay up until 12:30AM to run something.

Tuesday - no problems, but I had to stay up until midnight to run something.

Wednesday - same as Tuesday.

Thursday - up until midnight, then paged at 2AM and up until 3:30AM.

Friday - up until midnight.

Saturday - paged at 7AM, our overnight processing was stuck, no errors, no pages, worked until 5PM, then back on at 7PM and up until 12:30AM.

Sunday - paged at 10AM, worked until 6PM, and I'll be back on at 7PM and likely up until 11:30PM, barring no issues.

Here's the rant part:

I'm doing all this work, someone from our development team sees me on, and wants me to help them do some testing. Um...let me think...NO!

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"There is no bad weather, only bad clothes." - Unknown

I'm convinced that I am in serious danger of freezing to death at my desk. Thankfully, my space heater is helping a bit.

I seriously don't know how I'm going to survive the 30 years that I have before retirement being uncomfortably cold for at least half the year.

We have an on-call rotation at work, and the on-call person is supposed to handle any problems with our overnight job runs (it's all automated, but there can be failures that have to be addressed in the moment), as well as any other off-hours work, like if the system admin team patches one of our servers over a weekend, the on-call person will have to hop on when they're done and verify that everything is working ok.

On-call runs from 6pm Monday through 6am the following Monday. Nobody likes on-call, it goes without saying, but we all do our part.

Except one guy; when he's on-call, he'll handle the overnight stuff, because that's the core of it, but if anything unexpected comes up, like on a Sunday afternoon, for example, he'll purposely be so slow to respond, someone else will step in to do it (not me).

We self-manage the on-call schedule, which means our manager never knows who's on-call, so when something does happen, he'll just text all of us and say, "Somebody handle this," or worse, he'll text someone directly and say, "If you're not busy, take care of this."

Team culture is such that declining to do something by saying, "I'm not on call, so-and-so is," is viewed negatively, so if someone who's not on-call gets the random text, they feel compelled to address it.

I abhor that. I like order, and I actually schedule my time around being on-call. I won't go to a play or a movie or even out to a nice meal the week I'm on call. I take my laptop with me everywhere. As soon as a ticket comes in, I text everyone and say that I'm working it, since we all get notified and I don't want anyone to think I'm slacking.

All that explanation leads up to this:

Saturday, we had a scheduled maintenance task that required the on-call guy, Thing 1. Thing 1 got online, but there were other issues that prevented the maintenance being done, so it was pushed back to Monday (federal holiday).

Monday is when Thing 2 starts his on-call week.

So, manager sends a text (with no context whatsoever, but that's a separate gripe), and cryptically says, "We'll have to do this Monday." Like a lot of places, "we" equates to "one of you guys, not me" (another gripe for another day), so there's not clear direction whether anyone specifically is being told, or if the assumption is Thing 1 will do it since it was originally scheduled for his week, and we generally like whomever started a task to see it through, or if it'll fall to Thing 2, since it's now set for his on-call week.

One thing for sure, it had nothing to do with me (Thing 3 ).

Again, this morning, another manager text, reminding that this is moved to Monday. Second text is manager passive-aggressive way of saying no one has told him who's doing this.

Thing 1 piped up and says he'd normally do it, but he has a previously-scheduled appointment for charity work.

Manager texts back that it should only take about an hour.

From previous conversations, I know what's coming next. He's going to single someone out to do it, and I've got a 50-50 chance of being picked.

So I texted back that it's a holiday Monday, lots of people probably made plans, *including Thing 2, who will be the one on-call.*"

At that point, Thing 2 responded and said he'd cover it.

Now I'm sure I'm on Thing 2's shitlist, but this kind of stuff drives me bonkers (not least of which because I'm the one who usually gets screwed into working off-hours when I'm not on call).

This should have been two emails; one from the manager saying this is coming up Monday, and whomever is on call is doing it, followed by Thing 2 acknowledging it.

Instead, it was about five wishy-washy texts back and forth before I ended it with one of my own.

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"There is no bad weather, only bad clothes." - Unknown

This is definitely a “be careful what you wish for” situation. Know how I’ve been constantly complaining about how it’s too damn cold in the office? Not any more. It’s currently 27 degrees in here and we’re all roasting. It’s like walking into a damn sauna. Just my department, though - the rest of the building is fine.

Is a comfortable office temperature really too much to ask for?

Someone brought a space heater to work today and tripped the breaker twice. It's why we have the "no space heaters" rule. They will trip the breakers. Every. Single. Time.

^^Yep, there's plenty of office that ban space heaters for just that reason, and also because many of the older-model space heaters that do not turn off automatically when knocked over are fire hazards. I have a space heater (I try to avoid using it if I can, but we've all read my complaints about how cold I get), but it's a new model that automatically switches off if you so much as accidentally hit your foot against it.

The nice, shiny, brand new building that we moved into roughly six months ago already has a leak above my coworker's desk. This building is way better than the one that was here before that we worked in previously (it was a tear-down re-build type thing), but sheesh - I'm always amazed at how buildings can have so many problems right from the get-go.

Not so much a rant, but rather poetic justice.

A while back we had hired a new, fresh college grad (against my warnings) who turned out to be as I expected - a douchebag. He was an entitled, "libertarian" (read: insufferable ass) twat, who spent his days pontificating on everything, and arguing when he wasn't treating us to his glorious wisdom about the world. He was one of those wankers who picked apart every single thing for the sake of argument, mostly.

He argued that because he didn't have to show up for work at the start of his scheduled work hours, because nothing specifically said that he must show up for work *at the office* at 0800 and stay until 1700. It merely stated that his "work hours" were 0800 to 1700, but it didn't say that he had to be *at the office*, and therefore he could be in the car thinking about work, so that counted.

He vaped in the office because the "no smoking" rule didn't apply to vaping as it predated vaping, and therefore couldn't apply to something that hadn't existed yet. When office policy was changed to include a vaping prohibition, he stated that he didn't assent to it, so it didn't apply to him.

He alleged that I could not have Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, and a variety of other streaming websites disabled on his computer because there was nothing that said he couldn't watch TV, listen to music, etc. at his desk. Somehow he missed the fact that he was using company property, so we got him there. He then brought in a tablet and started to do the same by using his phone as a hotspot. He was warned that if he didn't do his work, he could be fired. He said he had to be warned and given an opportunity to stop before we could fire him, oblivious to the fact that he received his warning right then.

He constantly argued the definition of "business casual", and stated that the only way we could enforce any sort of dress code was to specify exactly what he could wear and not wear.

Long story short, he found out what a "probationary period" is, and his ass was sacked. Those of us who sacked him received a terse email from him about "providing bad references", and "interfering with his ability to earn a living". As his only employer post-college, he had the chutzpah to ask if he could use us as references in his post-firing job search. I told him "yes", and left it at that. Whenever someone has called about him, I've given a record of his employment, up to and including the well-documented events that led to his termination. He was angry that we'd apparently given "bad references". The legal team responded to him, stating that whilst we agreed to be references, no *written* guarantee was made as to the sort of references that would be given. He did love to espouse how if it wasn't written, it wasn't applicable to him.

Holy shit. And these young-uns wonder why they have trouble finding a job ...

It scares me that some of these kids can really be that clueless. We had one here that turned up for work every day looking like her pimp had dressed her, and apparently she was mortally offended when HR told her that her attire was inappropriate for a professional workspace. She didn't last long either ...

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Some people meditate. Some people caffeinate and vegetate.

The Zero Waste Club at my work is doing a “trashion” show in a few weeks - essentially, they’re putting on a fashion/art show, where everything will be made of repurposed materials. Since I run the Green Team on campus, I figured we’d better enter.

I now find myself needing to put together an outfit for the show in three weeks. I found a tutorial for how to make yarn out of old t-shirts and the Green Team helped me cutting some of them up. But I still have to knit them all into something wearable. And I’m ending up doing most of it in my spare time, since it will look a little suspect knitting at work. It’s gonna be a stressful rush to get this done in time.

The heat went out at work last night when it was bitter. I never got whether it was a power outage, or if it was just a boiler problem. Fast forward to about noon when a pipe burst. I don't know if the two are related at all, but we had no water in the building as they shut it off, so we had no bathrooms. Everyone had to go home, and we might not be up tomorrow. I also found out I'm going to Buffalo, NY next week. Buffalo in early March during a cold spell. Should be fun.