It’s Tough Being Organized
Actually, being organized generally makes my work-life that much better. What’s tough is dealing with those who aren’t organized. What’s even tougher is letting go of tasks that you know are important, require attention to detail and demand that, if problems arise, they must be resolved even if the resolution has to take place days after the fact. This is why I use a planner, even if I don’t follow some of the more radical and bizarre angles of this particular system of planning. I don’t give two shits what planner a person uses, but it’s gotten to the point where I’ve had to insist that some of my coworkers get some sort of system going. Downoad Sunbird, fer crissakes!
I can no longer sit back and watch these tasks, which I used to manage, devolve into chaos and confusion. Specifically, I’m talking about managing backups and the tape media upon which these backups are stored. If I ever walk into our lab and discover a month’s worth of cases stacked, unopened and still sealed, all over the room I think I’ll probably have an aneurysm. If I ever grab a bunch of tapes and try to restore a month’s worth of data only to discover that two of the tapes in the media set have been mixed up with another media set by the person who ships the tapes to Iron Mountain, I’m going to punch that person in the nose and then have an aneurysm. If I ever discover that those two tapes that got mixed up have already been recycled into the system, I’m going to punch him in the nose, kick him while he’s down and then have an aneurysm. If I find out that my backup plan is fucked because a weekly job (that should still be safely offsite, in this rare case) never got re-run after it failed, I’m going to shrug my shoulders, quit, go get drunk and then have an aneurysm.
Managing tapes is a pretty simple gig. Yeah, you need to pay attention and not have fucking three months worth of various tapes scattered about the lab so you don’t end up mixing up media sets, but I would expect that of any person who values their work. I know it’s simple, because I did it without problems for a long time. I know its simple because two other coworkers also ran the backups during various parts of their experience with this group and also never had major problems. So the fact that there are multiple major fuckups in the space of a few months indicates to me that the folks running the show now ain’t getting the job done. Problem is that I’ll probably end up getting fired, because the last meeting we had about the backups the boss forced me to be the head honcho of tapes since there were so many fuckups. Therefore, this is all my fault because I didn’t spend enough time standing over the shoulders of those doing the work. Of course, nowhere in my title does the word “Manager” appear, nor have I ever been given a raise to compensate me for the elevated responsibility of babysitting two people. That doesn’t matter, because I’m on the hook and I should have known better than to trust unorganized people to keep things as important as backups running smoothly.
Guess I better get back to hanging tape.
