Remote Control

I've been grounded.

I knew this was going to happen.  They made a bunch of us IT geeks redundant at the end of last year and now we are a much leaner team (read "wild-eyed and panicked").  My former colleague is now my boss and is running the show but he is doing the work of five and hasn't  come out of his office in a week .  He kept calling and e-mailing me over my holiday saying "when are you coming back?" and "you don't really need to stay on holiday do you?"  I could see what was coming.

Two seconds after I set foot in the London office I was handed a heaping pile of orphaned projects  and told to plant myself behind a desk and manage them.

At this very moment I should be in Bogota working with the local office on a massively complex deployment but my travel plans got shit-canned because it was deemed necessary for me to play wing-man for my new boss instead of supporting a site that desperately needs a grown-up to help them through this transition.  I was told to do it remotely and that, ladies and gents, has been a new experience in frustration and exhaustion.

Don't get me wrong, the tools are there: between e-mail, IM, VoIP, Skype, RDP, VNC, etc. etc., I can sit in my living-room in London and with a wave of my God-like hand fix problems that crop up 5800 miles away.  I'm like one of those guys who sits in some office complex deep in the heart of Texas and pilots drones over the mountains of Pakistan.  Except that I'm sorting out why a server didn't migrate to a new domain and not raining death down on unsuspecting villagers.  A subtle difference.

The higher-ups who made the decision to keep me tethered to a desk instead of in the field where I am most effective are willfully ignorant of what these projects entail for the guys on the ground.  I was told to write down everything I do and send it to the team on-site.  That is both bullshit and a fucking insult.  Checklists are fine when you are starting up a plane but not so good when both your engines get knocked out by birds and your options are certain death or some crazy-ass river landing.  

I'm not saying that what I do compares to gliding a brick with wings down like a stone skipping over a pond.  However, I am a firm believer in the value of experience over education when it comes to making rapid decisions in the context of one's personal area of operational expertise.

In my line of work nothing ever works right the first time.  Getting something to work at all is generally quite an accomplishment and having that something work two times in a row is considered by many to be an experience close akin to religious rapture or sexual climax.  Why should Geeks waste time fucking when simply getting a VB script to run without errors releases the same endorphins and you don't even need to cuddle after.

What the bastards in the suits don't realize is that the only reason these god damned projects work is because my boys and I drag them across the finish line on our shoulders.  We go to these sites with all the information we can gather molded into a game-plan based on a model we've used dozens of times before but no matter how much we think we know about the location, no matter how many times we've tested our scripts and arranged our sacrificial ducks, 90 seconds after the last user has left we start fighting a swarm of bees.

If I'm not there, if someone who has done one of these projects before isn't around, then panic sets in.  I heard fear in the voice of the IT Director in Colombia yesterday when we were going over our last minute preparations.  What could I do?  He was facing the spinning knives and I was sitting behind a monitor in London.  

25 hours later and I'm still there.  My colleague and I were up until 4:00 in the morning, pulling remote controlled bunnies out of hats.  A machine would go down and I'd resurrect it, 30 people couldn't get their mail?  Sorted.  Databases refuse to backup?  I'm on it.  They threw us problems and we put out the fires.  Bring it on.

23:28 the next day and we're still mopping things up.  One big piece of the shit sandwich is still missing and I'm hoping to get to work on that before too long.  There it is- just plopped down into my in-box.  Time to open up a well worn bag of tricks and hope I can keep typing until dawn.