Cubicle-Cultures
3 Walls, Plenty of Stories
Journal for the week of 4/3/17
4/3/17
0750 — In.
0852 — Two meetings cancelled already today…life is good! Texting back and forth with my youngest. She just saw La La Land and loved it. Me…I thought it was bad but I’m not a fan of musicals. I’m partial to Moonlight and Hidden Figures.
From the cubicle: My loud neighbor is back from vacation and has someone at her cube. It’s great to have her back, breaks up the monotony. The person at her cube is pseudo PM. She has quite the ego but is great at her job so I guess there’s a fair trade off.
1143 — A friend of mine is coming up from our FL facility and will be able to work from my building for half a day. She’s one of our TOP programs participants…TOP = Talent Optimization Pipeline. They’ve basically become interns which is a step down from the positions they left. Total screw job. She has been assigned to our server team and lucky to work with them. That team is one of the best in our IT division. Quite a challenge, she’s up to it, but pissed that her duties are something interns can do. I don’t blame her. The whole TOP program isn’t going as well as management thought it would. Either way it’s good experience and I think they have the option of going back to their old positions when it’s done. It’ll be great to finally meet her and thank her in person for the help she’s given me.
From the cubicle: My boss has been suffering with hip pains for a long time. She’s a marathon runner and is very active outside of work with other things. She just sent an announcement that she’s finally going in for surgery and will probably be out of the office for up to 10 weeks starting in early May. I responded back asking if I’ll be in charge while she’s out…no response from her yet. First thing I’d do…give everyone the weekend off. No doubt they’ll thank me for my generosity. I may even toss in an ice cream social but no promises on that.
From the cubicle: I’m not a big fan of small talk. In fact, I dislike it a lot. I get it when folks ask about things, i.e. family, sports, current events. Biggest problem is that I’m a repeat offender. I’m can be fairly social and have no issue speaking with folks but it can really get me out of the zone if I’m coding or answering emails. It’s a real bitch to get the zone back. Breaking a thought process that you’ve been in all day can be counter-productive. Again, I’ve been guilty plenty of times but have learned to very politely tell folks I’m busy and I’ll get back with them…which I do and no doubt it breaks their concentration. Karma….
1519 — I just got off the phone with arguably the best contractor I’ve ever worked with. He’s an expert on a couple of applications that me and a colleague work with and I couldn’t be happier with his help. In the past, I’ve had contractors that are just as good but usually not as helpful. He’s saved our collective asses twice in as many months. I’d love to see him as a full-time employee and hope that someone can bribe him enough to get him on board. He’s an expert with distributed systems, application deployment therein, WSDLs (A XML format for describing network services as a set of endpoints operating on messages containing either document-oriented or procedure-oriented information)*. It really makes my day when I get to work with someone that nice and knowledgeable. His manager is one of the best in the company. She sent a short survey out to folks that have worked with him in the past and one of the questions was if we would consider hiring him full time if in her position, of course I said yes. She is also awesome. I’ve worked with her for a few years and she cares a lot for her people and has their backs.
1602 — So far…so good. Need to last ~28 minutes till the end of the day.
1628 — Out.
4/4/17
0730 — In.
0751 — We have a “Breakfast with the CIO” today from 0800–1000. Basically a meet/greet/kiss ass time for 2 hours. I’m still debating on going but probably will for all the above reasons. Politically it’s the right thing to do but we all hate TF out of politics here. It wouldn’t surprise me to see other upper management here. Our CIO is the best in the business. A great man with even greater vision for our IT department. He has respect from everyone including the rest of the C-suite. I’d follow him into war if he asked. There…there’s my ass-kissing for the day and I’m not ashamed to admit it.
0812 — Ooops…the breakfast is tomorrow. I’m still standing by what I said earlier.
0907 — Just found out one of my guys promoted some coding to a test environment and we didn’t know. This has the potential to fuck stuff up BIG TIME. We were supposed to coordinate together and he didn’t wait. NOT COOL! This better not kill everything we did. It’s all due today for testing. I’m fucking pissed!!!!!
1316 — It’s been a whirlwind day. We got the code from earlier promoted and testing will commence this afternoon. I also got hit with some ATM stuff that I didn’t do yesterday. My mentor on that wasn’t happy but we walked through it till he was. At this point I’m burned out. It always comes like this…last minute requests. Even my mentor was getting slammed with requests that he has no control of which is typical. Everyone wants shit at the very last moment and I know he was getting it worse than I did.
From the cubicle: Talking with one of my kids and she’s about to get fired from her job. Her boss doesn’t treat her well and there’s been friction since day 1. She does marketing and event planning for a major corporation and, apparently, the boss doesn’t like having anyone doing that in his store; claiming he’s done it for many years and doesn’t need the help. She has no other job to go to and plenty of bills to pay. It’s hard as a dad to be powerless in these situations. She’s an adult, today is her 25th birthday, and I need to let her handle her life. Still… I’ll admit I’m an overprotective father for all 3 of my kids…all girls. They’re in their 20s and doing well on their own. All I can think of at the moment is scooping her up and bringing her here to live with my wife and me. This is killing me.
1618 — End of the day is near. My kid didn’t get fired, her last day is the 15th if she makes it that long. Just one big fucking mess after another. Looking forward to getting TF outta here and having a cigar.
1630 — Out.
4/5/17
0819 — In.
From the cubicle: Our “Breakfast with the CIO” event is today from 0800–1000. Our manager is supposed to pass out vouchers with designated times so we all don’t have to crowd in the tiny room where the food and coffee reside; she’s not ain’t in yet and I’m hungry AF!! The donuts better be from Krispy Kreme or I’m going to protest.
0851 — Half of a cinnamon roll and some decaf obtained, shook hands with the CIO, and back at my desk. Painless and all done in about 5 minutes. Not much of a crowd but going early was key. The food and coffee are from Panera which is ok with me. Krispy Kreme will have to wait.
1022 — About to go on a conference call with another team that isn’t happy with me. My team has a Service Catalog entry (quick-turnaround requests) that another team, Computer Security, does. The request is for granting access to a particular screen…that’s it. The crux of it is, my team doesn’t grant access to anything. If internal customers need access, write/read, Computer Security grants it. I’m hoping it will be a short call. I had to submit a Service Catalog request just to put it on their radar so it could be discussed. It’s just bad customer service to bounce requests around.
From the cubicle: Anyone that uses the word “anywho” is permanently on my shit list. PERMANENTLY! One of my colleagues enjoys using it way too much. At some point she’ll use the word “sammich” while having lunch. That’s the point when I’ll finally walk out of here.
NOTE TO READER: You may have noticed that many of my references are geared towards female colleagues. The total employee population of my company is comprised of over 60% women so don’t take it as sexist when I make the references. Nothing to see here people and don’t try to turn it into something it isn’t.
1350 — A good friend of mine just stopped by to say hi. He came by to thank me for a “shout out” I gave him in our IT newsletter. He’s also involved in a project I’m on and I completely forgot he works here. In fact, I see him everyday and just didn’t make the connection; I apologized for that. He is a server guru and a joy to work with. It’ll be a few days till I get passed my faux pas.
From the cubicle: My youngest just alerted me that my niece is getting a divorce. I never heard she and her soon-to-be ex were having difficulties. My niece and I traded a few FB messages and she’s ok. Her rationale is that she’s growing personally and professionally where he is stagnant and she doesn’t want to be in a relationship like that. The young lady is wise beyond her years! A very strong-willed kid, worked and, I think, paid her way through college and grad school herself. RESPECT! I still wanna beat the shit out of her ex but we’ll see if it comes to pass. His fucking loss.
1616 — Had a conference call with management about the monthly report mentioned earlier. They seemed to like what we provided them and suggested some cosmetic changes and adding a tad more info. Easy stuff. I also had the opportunity to give a couple of colleagues some serious props for the work they do. One is in a performance rotation; she came to us from the business to learn what we do and have been nothing short of awesome. I love working with her. The other is a PM I work closely with. She put the majority of the report together and did a beautiful job. We have a lot of diamonds in the rough but they’re not being utilized as promised. One example is having them drone through documentation and suggesting edits, that’s intern work and a slap in the face to them. These folks came to us with specialized knowledge and skills that aren’t being used to their potential. I’ve lobbied for one of them to be assigned to my team but she was farmed out to another sub-team. She was perfect for us but it is what it is.
1632 — Out.
4/6/17
0823 — In.
From the cubicle: Shitty weather today, the windows have zero light coming through and we’re hearing that there’s a possibility for hail. Un-fun when you drive a Corvette. I was invited to go to a concert in DC tonight but if the weather is as predicted I’ll not be going. There’s a slim chance that the guy that has the tickets may not go due to getting checked out for a groin issue, probably a hernia but I think he’ll be fine. Problem is…he has the tickets but he said he’ll get them to me one way or another. I just hope he’s ok, dude is a good friend of mine and fun to hang out with.
0940 — I’m on 2 adobe sessions (screen sharing) and 1 conference call, soon to be 2 conference calls all at once. Whoever said “you can’t be in 2 places at the same time” needs to revise that statement.
From the cubicle: I had to take a mandatory “Shelter In Place” training course online. It was 10 minutes on what to do if shit hits the fan in case of bad weather, hazmat issues, and shooters. Basically a fight or flight thing. Living in the DMV, all 3 are a daily occurrence, mostly the shooters but I don’t work in DC so I’m not too worried about that. I moved to this area, Northern Virginia, 10 years ago and have been through 2 earthquakes which were more like the Earth having a stomach pain…pretty harmless. It’s not like you can run from one of those; stop/drop/cover is the company procedure. Hazmat issues are usually on the major highways and the Beltway; I’d prefer those to happen at the Capitol or the new administration in general. My buddy just texted me…he can’t go to the show, he’s in too much pain. I wished him well and a speedy recovery.
1342 — An average day so far. Meetings all went well, I have another at 1400 to go over a document that will be submitted for our Service Catalog. Not much to look at, my job was just to proofread and make suggestions. Not much red ink this time around, the person that writes these for me is showing improvement. We’re currently under a tornado warning. Everyone’s phone is going off with that EBS broadcasting sound. ANNOYING!
1502 — An excellent meeting for proofreading! Very happy with the work.
1600 — Got off a depressing call for a Visa update. We have a deadline of Monday to get some testing done and it’s not looking good. We have no valid test data, just got a rep from the business that’s not well versed in how to test, and looking a 2 days worth of errors (because Visa is going in earlier with their updates) when we go to PROD. I expected the 2 days of errors but we have no choice because our implementation window is on Sundays from 0200–0600 and are bound by it. Keeping things in sync is key but Visa can do what they want and everyone else has to scramble. We’re ready for PROD but haven’t had any validation…not good. The last thing anyone needs is to implement to a live environment and then discover errors, makes us all look bad. This last minute shit isn’t worth the anxiety.
1630 — Out.
4/7/17
1217 — I’ve been working on proofreading some documentation for management and a colleague. The management doc (which is really a report), as my boss said, needed “wordsmithing”. It took me and another colleague about 2 hours to complete it. There was a shit ton of edits needed. A bit of broken English combined with too much detail took a while to rewrite. The doc is a very high level explanation of improvement in terms of overall run times for our end of month (EOM) processing for member research sections and marketing. The other doc was a resume for a friend that wants to apply for internal jobs. She’s already in a good spot but is ambitious to do other things. The resume needed a lot of work, plenty of red ink but they were only suggestions not criticisms. It boiled down to formatting and verbiage updates. It took ~45 minutes to do but I’m always happy to help out a friend. Her tech and business skills are vast. She’s been here a while and has a great reputation so I have no doubt she’ll find something better in the company.
From the cubicle: Static electricity is NOT your friend. I go out for walks to break up the day and, when I put my coat on the hanger, I get a shock that makes me swear out loud. The pop sound it makes is clearly audible to others sitting around me. I need to cut down on my F-bombs.
1514 — My one meeting got cancelled at 1500. Best type of meeting…a cancelled one.
From the cubicle…sort of: My boss asked me to put up a sign to claim a ledge cube, a desk at the end of a regular row of cubes, for a new person on our team to start on Monday. Since she is having hip problems (surgery scheduled next month for a replacement) I volunteered to put the sign up. Not even 2 minutes later another manager IM’d me asking why I put the sign up. She had already claimed it for someone on her team…the fight was on! Not really, I directed her to my manager and they worked it out. Then a contractor that’s sitting on that ledge came over asking if he was moving or not. I told him not to worry about it and now my manager says to put it back up. Cat fight at the Cubicle Coral and I have no weapons to protect myself. Reminds me of Mongo from Blazing Saddles, “Mongo only pawn in game of life”, that’s me at the moment…a hapless pawn.
1624 — Out.
Thanks for reading this messy set of experiences. You are more than welcome to click the heart below and let your friends know that reading this is a sure cure for insomnia.
