Before you all leave, can I see just the men over here for a second.
Sure, Blake, what’s up?
I just wanted to go over the dress code for tomorrow’s Quarterly Business Review. No one from the client side will be wearing a tie. You can wear one if you’d like, but it’s not expected. I won’t be wearing one.
Blake was the Executive Vice President of our company and the third ranking member of our delegation. We were going to be meeting with very senior members of the client organization. I appreciated Blake’s comment about the tie. I would definitely be wearing one, but I was happy I hadn’t overdressed.
In the 1986 movie Quicksilver Paul Rodriguez’s character asks Kevin Bacon’s character for advice on getting a loan from a bank.
Wear something nice,
was Bacon’s advice. Rodriguez then shows up in a powder blue tuxedo with a full ruffled shirt. Realizing his mistake, Kevin’s character says,
Tell them you just came from a wedding or something.
If nice is good, isn’t nicer gooder? (I may have misspelled one of those words.) Why not wear the best you have?
Because, just as Every Job Has a Uniform Even If It Doesn’t Have A Dress Code, you can go overboard on the uniform. In telling about The Creepy Mini-Me, I explained how a programmer started wearing a suit everyday. It was odd. . .and slightly creepy. A programmer’s uniform is not a suit. If you want to dress as an impressive programmer, you follow the formula:
1. Establish the dress code baseline
2. Dress one step above that
You don’t really want people to notice your clothes. Paul Rodriguez’s character got people to notice his clothes, but it didn’t help. In fact, it hurt his changes to be taken seriously.
Recently, my company awarded a special t-shirt to agents who meet a certain quality bar on their calls. As a thank-you for the work I’ve done they also awarded me the t-shirt.
I don’t wear t-shirts to work.
I wear slacks and dress shirts. In the summer I will opt for an occasional polo shirt, in the winter I add a sports jacket. And I try to always have polished shoes.
In this case, I wore the special t-shirt with my slacks and polished shoes.
Yeah, yeah, I get it Rodney, this is part of that “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have thing, right?
Not really. The Vice President’s that I travel with often wear blue jeans and t-shirts in our office, and one of them wears shirts with logos at the client offices. And the logo if for a former company.
Clothes lend credibility. Clothes affect the way you feel and act when wearing them. They can be a help to your career, but they can also be a hindrance. The late great Payne Stewart might have been able to get away wearing outlandish outfits to work, but for most of us, our goal is to have our clothes not be noticed.
My goal when it comes to clothes is for people to not remember what I wore, but to remember that they thought I looked nice. That means if the office culture is jeans and t-shirts, you should wear jeans and a dress shirt, or slacks and a polo.
If the dress code is business casual, then you want to make sure you are wearing pressed pants and a starched shirt.
(Sorry, ladies. I have no idea how to write about clothes in a gender neutral way.)
If you move too far up the clothes ladder, you become too noticeable. You become the guy in the wedding tuxedo going in for a car loan.
But, if you move just a single step up, jeans to slacks, t-shirts to polos, polos to starched shirts, starched shirts to ties, you give people several impressions:
1. You are smart – You figured out how to properly dress. It’s not an inborn trait. You had to learn it.
2. You care about the job and the client – Nothing says, “I’m listening” to you as much as voluntarily wearing a tie at a client site.
3. You might be in need of a promotion – In most companies, promotions are not a willy-nilly decision. If you look the part, it’s easier for them to give you the part.
When Blake explained that none of the client folks would be in ties, it made it easy to decide to wear one. No one probably remembers today, a week later, what I wore. But, I’ve heard enough comments from people who talked to the client about it, that the client knows I value the business, I’m reasonably intelligent, and I just might be promoted at some point.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and one grandchild.
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I turned twelve years old this weekend. It was completely unexpected. Not the least because my birthday is not until December, and I’ll be fifty this year. But for a couple of days in August I was twelve. When I was twelve I lived at mother’s house with my older brother. I spent last weekend at Mom’s house. I was in one bedroom he was in the other. But, I’ve spent time at my mother’s place over the years and it didn’t transport me back in time. But, as you can imagine, this weekend was not like other weekends.
When I was twelve my brother and I travelled from Seattle to Fairbanks , AK. This was before September 11th. Travel was different. Like us , it was more innocent. Innocent enough that two boys could freely roam the trains that link the terminals at Sea Tac airport for hours without a care and without a parent.
Yesterday I flew home to Salt Lake City on Alaska Airlines out of Sea Tac. My 8:10 PM flight left from gate N10. To get to the N gates you have to take the train.
The same trains I roamed when I was twelve. This time I wasn’t as interested in getting the first car and staring into the abyss of the tunnel as the train’s headlights stabbed holes in the darkness. But for just a moment I remembered being twelve. But, it wasn’t the train that took me on a journey through time and space back to the summer of 1977. That had happened days earlier.
The Good Old Days Really Were Better. Nothing is ever as sweet as a first kiss. Nothing ever tastes as good as the first bite of ice cream. Nothing ever matches the first trip to Disneyland (Better Than Disneyland.) We do the same thing in business. The programming language we learn first is eventually replaced by languages that are more powerful, more feature rich, more intuitive. But nothing really matches your first program. (Good Thing I Didn’t Test It First.)
I have a friend who is a social media expert. He’s brilliant. His job is to work with the leadership of some of the largest Fortune 500 technology companies and help the executives master social media. He meets some resistance at times. He explains to the executives
If you cannot master 21st century technology, people will question whether you can run a 21st Century technology company. Now, do you have a Twitter account?
Sure. It’s installed on my phone. It is right here.
It’s asking for a password. What’s your Twitter password?
I don’t know. I’ve never clicked on it before.
It’s tempting to rely on the adage “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” Didn’t these executives show competence? Didn’t they build their companies, often technology companies into some of the biggest companies in the world? And they did it without knowing their Twitter password, or logging into The Google. (Okay, that last one might have been a president.)
I was the Messaging Team manager at a 30,000 employee non profit corporation. After upgrading from Novell GroupWise to Microsoft Exchange, we decided to install Microsoft Lync. This was in 2010 and my company did not have an instant messaging solution.
The program manager had to go to the highest levels of the company to get approval for this new IM application.
I’m not seeing it Bruce. Our organization has been around for over a hundred years. Why do we need this program?
Employees will be able to instantly communicate with anyone else in the organization.
But, doesn’t email do that already?
Email is “store and forward” technology. That means the messages are copied to a disk and then forwarded to the recipient. It is not instant.
Seems pretty fast to me.
Instant messaging is more like a text version of a live conversation.
You mean like my grandkids do with their text messaging nonsense? I don’t think we want our employees texting people all day or chatting, or whatever you call it. We want them to focus on actually doing work!
Bruce knew that he wasn’t going to win using a direct approach.
So, what are we going to do?
Do? Stealth. We can certainly roll it out to the IT department. Watch, in a month other departments will be begging to get it too. In six months we will have all the tech teams and a year from now, people will scream bloody murder if you try to take it away.
Bruce, was wrong. It only took four months for the entire company to insist on having it. And the following year when our data center crashed, Lync was the product the tech teams wanted brought back online first.
Twenty first century tools for a twenty first century company. My friend got his execs to embrace social media. It doesn’t matter if they understand why they need to be on Twitter and LinkedIn, and Instagram, and the rest. It’s enough that they trusted the marketing guys to be good at their jobs.
Programmers might look to COBOL or Pascal or BASIC with a certain amount of nostalgia, but they couldn’t get a job with the languages they learned when they were twelve. Twenty first century languages for twenty first century programs.
I would have never remembered the Sea Tac train rides from my childhood had I not spent the weekend reliving it.
So, what transported me back in time to my childhood? A unique combination of events and people.
First the people. I was sleeping at my mother’s house because she was holding a family reunion. All my aunts and uncles were there. My mom’s cousins were there. But what really took me back were my own cousins. And my second cousins. These were kids I had grown up with. Our family was fairly close. We held lots of get togethers at my grandmother’s house growing up. Granny and Papa are long gone. Gran twenty years ago, and Papa about nine years before that. But the people were there.
And this was more than a reunion, which we typically only have when someone dies. This get together was to go through some boxes of pictures and mementoes from my grandparents. So, while they may not have been there in body, they were there in spirit.
And I was twelve. And so were my cousins. We picked up like it hadn’t been twenty years since we had last seen each other. Of course we all have kids now, but somehow it seemed okay for a group of twelve year olds to have grown children of their own. My two adult daughters attended, and the oldest brought my grandchild. But, it was okay for a twelve year old to have a grandchild. The most surreal moment was when I got a text message from a women that said,
I hope you’re having a great time. The kids are doing fine, but they really miss you.
And just like that I was no longer a happy twelve year old hanging out with his cousins and having a good time. I was so much more and so much happier.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and one grandchild.
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You know, you can board at any time, right?
I don’t mind waiting. I’m not any different than you.
Actually, he was. But, I respected him the more for refusing to acknowledge it.
In some ways, I’m a pretty emotional guy, especially when it comes to the flag, the military and old time country music. But, this story isn’t really about Boxcar Willie or Hank Williams Sr.
I get a little misty eyed when I hear the Star-Spangled Banner. This summer we attended some local hometown rodeos. (Not My First Rodeo) At the beginning a young women comes out on a horse trailing the Stars and Stripes behind her. At one rodeo she raced around the arena fence. The flag stood straight out behind her as the horse’s hooves kicked up a cloud of dust. She stopped in the center of the arena as a man sang the greatest national anthem in the world. Yep, I cried a little. I always do.
My five sons are all Boy Scouts. Each time one of them conducts a flag ceremony, I get choked up with pride in family and country all rolled into one.
My family, like many American families has a long history of military service. My father was a soldier because he was forced to. However, he served honorably. My brother was a captain in the Army Reserves and National Guard. Our Bliss line traces it’s origins back to Captain Abdiel Bliss who fought at the battles of Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill. (Abdeil Bliss Hero of the Revolution, But Was He Really A Captain?)
My second oldest daughter decided after September 11th that she wanted to join the fight to defend our country. She was eight at the time. She’s an ROTC cadet and an Army reservist.
I couldn’t be prouder to tell people my baby girl wears combat boots.
My current job is to work with our biggest client who, while not a military organization, exclusively serves the military community. It humbles me at times to get to play a role in making life a little less stressful for military families. One of the things you hear our call center agents say on every call is “Thank you for your service.”
And that brings me back to the conversation I referenced at the beginning of this post. Yesterday I met a soldier named Shriver. He was waiting to board the same plane that would take us both back to Salt Lake City from Dallas Fort Worth gate A8.
By way of introduction I said,
I appreciate what your doing.
Thank you, sir.
We talked like the strangers we were. As they called for the next group to board, a ticket agent came up to him.
Can I see your boarding pass, please?
He handed her a well worn printout. She returned a moment later with a new pass marked FIRST CLASS. Shriver hardly looked at it, although he humbly thanked her.
I followed the ticket agent back to the desk.
Do you always do that?
Every time if we have openings. American is pretty military friendly. And my Dad was in the Navy. He raised us to appreciate their service.
I returned to the young soldier who was patiently watching the line of people getting on the plane.
You know, you can board any time you want, right?
Yeah, but I don’t want to make them wait. I’m not any different than you.
Well, I have a job that pays me really well. You have a job that pays you pretty poorly.
He offered no objection to that point.
And no one shoots at me no matter how poorly I do my job.
I’m more likely to get blown up than shot.
Why, what do you do?
I drive the large transport trucks.
Like eighteen wheelers?
Yeah, but mostly we drive the big gun trucks that protect convoys.
How long have you been in?
Two years.
How old are you?
I’m eighteen, sir.
You joined at sixteen?
Well, I signed up as a junior in high school. I did basic between my junior and senior years. And then this summer I went to AIT.
Are you planning to make a career of it?
I’m hoping to be accepted to officer candidate training once I finish college. I’m going to be one of those cranky old guys that they have to kick out when they get too old.
The line was finally finishing up. I thanked him again and we headed down the jetway.
Yes soldier, in many ways you and I are very different. And I’m glad that we are. I’m grateful we have young people like you willing to drive trucks, and do a thousand other jobs in defense of our country, including those who volunteer to be the point of the spear.
The fact that you see no difference between us gives me great hope for the future of our youth and our country.
Thank you for your service.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife and thirteen children and one grandchild.
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A panel van is good for many things. For example, I have a friend with a panel van who uses it to move equipment. He paints “Free Candy” on the side during Halloween as a joke.
What panel vans are not known for is great visibility. Randy, a friend of my dad’s told me of an experience he had with his panel van. He was turning left out of a parking lot. But since his van was angled to the left already, it was impossible for him to see traffic coming from his right. Fortunately, he had a friend sitting in the passenger side seat who could see the oncoming traffic. Unfortunately, his friend wasn’t particularly good at sequencing.
We have a particular login process that our agents have to follow at the beginning of their shift. It’s about a 7 minute process, if it happens exactly correctly. At one point agents enter their credentials into a webpage and click LOGIN. Unfortunately this particular webpage gives no indication that it’s actually logging the agent on. That wouldn’t be too bad except that this page takes about 40 seconds to load.
As anyone who’s ever sat and stared at a spinning globe while a web page loads can tell you, sometimes you click on the button again. In the case of this particular page, clicking the button a second time doesn’t do good things.
Sequencing is a big part of what a project manager does. There are dozens of pieces that go into a project plan. I have to track multiple deliverables from a half dozen different departments.
But, tracking the deliverables is only a portion of a good project plan. In addition I need to track which pieces of the plan need to happen before other pieces. Last week as we were driving to complete the latest phase of my project, I had to deal with a wireing crisis on Monday, a week before we were supposed to be done. I realized that if we didn’t get the wiring closet done on time, the network group wouldn’t be able to get the switches configured on time. If the switches didn’t get configured on time, the desktop team wouldn’t be able to image the desktops in time and we would miss our date a week later.
Sequencing is critical to a project.
Just as it’s critical to our agent login process. If during the 40 second delay the agents grow impatient and click the LOGIN button a second time the login process immediately fails and they have to start over. Even with lots of coaching we constantly have to remind agents to NOT CLICK THE BUTTON AGAIN.
At least the agents don’t cause physical harm to anyone when they screw up the sequencing.
The guy sitting in the passenger seat of that panel van didn’t understand sequencing either. There were two pieces of critical information he had to communicate to the driver.
1. When to pull out into traffic
2. A truck was currently headed their way
Unfortunately for my dad’s friend the passenger screwed up the sequence. What he said was:
Go for it! . . .after this truck
Just getting the information released isn’t enough. You have to get the order right.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife and thirteen children and one grandchild.
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We are NOT yet signed off on the project.
Isn’t today your deadline?
Yeah.
So, what happened?
Security won’t sign off on our site. There’s a gap around the turnstiles, and the doors don’t close on their own.
Security’s going to fail you for that?
Oh, I’m not gonna fail.
What do you mean?
I mean I just called the facilities manager. We’ve got until midnight and I’m not leaving until we get it fixed and security signs off.
There I sat on an empty 325 person call floor; me, my manager and our security analyst, waiting for contractors to be called back at 7:00 pm on a Monday night. My manager decided to stay and lend moral support.
You know Rodney, that gap doesn’t look big enough to get through.
I could get through it.
I don’t think so. I’ll bet you $5 you can’t.
He owes me five bucks. Eventually the contractors showed up and fixed the remaining items on our security checklist. We had many hours to spare, but for a project that spanned months, it was way too close.
Here’s a picture of them from several weeks ago.
What happened?
Simple. I gave away my buffer.
Like me, my manager is a Project Management Professional (PMP.)
You aren’t supposed to add a buffer. You are supposed to treat everyone like adults and give honest estimates.
Yeah, I know. I didn’t agree with that part of the PMP certification. See, if the Desktop team misjudges their estimate and you miss your deadline, sure the Desktop team looks bad, but it really comes back to the PM.
Oh, I don’t know. . .
Of course it does. You look pretty weak if you say, “Well, it was that other team that made me miss my dates.” They might decide, “Maybe we should hire a Project Manager who can bring his projects in on time.
Good point.
This particular project looked deceptively easy. Six weeks out every team, Desktops, Networks, Security, Facilities, Telecom, they all told me that there would be no trouble making an August 1st date. Since my deadline was August 11th, I was feeling pretty good.
And then we were short 15 computers. The contract requires 325 working workstations.
And then the Network team realized they were short some critical cables that would put us past our date.
And then the guys building the wiring closet ended up with twice the number of ports. (Baking Pans and Wiring Closets.)
And then, when all of those crisis were overcome, the physical security wasn’t in place. The frustrating thing is that we’ve built 8 turnstiles as part of this project starting four months ago. And yet, every single time they forget to cover that gap.
Proper PMP protocols say no buffers. And yet, if you do not hold back a portion of the buffer, every team will decide that they can eat up the buffer you share with the team.
Looking back, I should have set August 1st as a “firm” date. Would we hit it? No. But, I’ve been a project manager long enough to know that people will work toward a deadline. Had we known two weeks ago that we needed more computers, we could have ordered them rather than scrambling to pull them from other buildings. We could have resolved our wiring closet issues weeks before the true deadline.
And I wouldn’t be sitting on our call floor at 7:00 pm the night of my deadline waiting for a contractor to come back to fix the turnstile gap.
Of course, I would be out the $5 I won from my boss, so there’s that as a positive.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife and thirteen children and one grandchild.
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So, is there much travel involved in this job?
Oh, probably not. What would you say, John? Maybe 5%.
Yeah, 5% tops.
It’s a good thing I like my job, because they totally lied about the travel thing. I’m getting ready for my fourth trip in four months. And I have my fifth, sixth and seventh trips already booked.
I used to travel a lot. When I worked for Microsoft I went to some really exciting places, Dubai, Greece, Colombia. Adopting we’ve been to Haiti, China, India and another trip to Colombia.
I’m pretty good at packing. It’s a good thing too, since I do everything via carry ons. That $25-$50 checked bag fee is crazy. Being a carry on road warrior, I have to be very careful about what I pack. Too little and I end up running out of clothes. Too much and I can’t fit it into the overhead compartment.
I got to thinking about other trips I’ve made. Last month I went camping with my son and his scout troop to Southern Utah. Here’s what I looked like.
Camping and hiking for me is all about comfort. The pants and shirt are that space age, quick dry material. I normally wear hiking books, but we were wading through a river. The hat is so I don’t need sunscreen, and the walking stick is because I’m pushing 50, but my knees are way ahead of me.
When you are hiking for any distance, especially in Utah in the summer, water is your number one concern. Yes, we were wading through a river. I suppose you could drink the river water if necessary. But, deciding to take or not take water was less a function of where we were going and more a function of preparedness. It’s just a rule. You pound it into the scouts, “Take plenty of water. . AND DRINK IT!”
One of the busses that took us to the trailhead had a picture of an attractive female camper sitting overlooking some of Utah’s famous red rocks. The caption read:
Got Water? Well drink it, you’re in the desert now!
If you look at my picture above, you will notice on my left side a green 2 liter Sprite bottle. That was my water for the hike up the shaded canyon through the water.
I didn’t drink anywhere near two liters. If I’m so concerned with not overpacking for a business trip, and I knew I was hiking up a river, why bring more water than I thought I would need?
Preparation.
You just never know what might happen. The bus might break down and you have to walk miles down the canyon in the sun. Someone might have not brought enough water and you have to share (Ten Virgins and Life In The Desert.)
We do the same thing in business. Businesses spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes even millions of dollars buying equipment they hope they never have to use. Like artillery men fighting with bayonets, if you have to go to your tape backup something is seriously wrong. In my current role, I have to design call centers. We recently discussed buying a new DS3 circuit (no I don’t really know what it stands for.) Because a DS3 circuit can handle 660 calls. And with our expansion, we could conceivably have more than 660 agents taking calls at the same time. But, we don’t just have one DS3, we actually have two.
Why do we need another one? Because we never expect to use both circuits at the same time. One is just there in case something happens to the other one. Like my extra large water bottle, we bought more than we expected to need.
Even with my plane trips, there are certain things I pack that I don’t expect to use. I generally have some emergency cash and enough snacks that if I get stuck somewhere without a chance to get food, I won’t starve.
But, I don’t pack any extra water on those trips. The TSA guys just make you pour it out.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife and thirteen children and one grandchild.
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How about Village Inn?
Sure. Too bad we didn’t eat here yesterday.
Why’s that?
Free Pie Wednesday.
My friend Toad (yes, that’s his real name) and I were looking for a place to eat last Thursday. After 11:00 in Provo, UT your choices are limited. Our first pick was Burger King (You Don’t Get To Pick Anymore.) But, they closed at 11:00. Village Inn was a choice of convenience. It’s about a block away from the Burger King.
As we were eating we decided we really did want pie even though it wasn’t free. But, strangely the waitress never came back to ask us about desert. She didn’t even bring us a check. We were slightly annoyed. However, when we got to the counter we completely changed our minds.
At what point did you know what you wanted to be when you grew up? I have a daughter who is in the ROTC and the Army Reserves. She’s starting her Senior year at Utah State University. She will apply to Veterinarian grad schools and most likely get into anyone that she wants. After grad school she will go active duty and join the Army Veterinarian corps. This is a career that she charted 7 years ago. She’s one of the few people I know who figured it out early.
Part of our dinner conversation was Toad discussing the process of trying to figure out what he wants to do next in his career. He’s a writer, and a lot of other jobs as well. He’s had quite an eventful life in 26 years.
We have many mutual friends.
You know that Robert is a writer for Forbes, right?
Yeah, we invited him to LTUE (Life, the Universe…And Well, Not Exactly Everything).
He makes something like $200,000 per year. And yet he never set out to be a writer.
At 26 he certainly didn’t anticipate being a writer. And you know Howard (www.schlockmercenary.com) story. When he started doodling in 2000, he had no idea he’d be a professional cartoonist.
Yeah, he couldn’t even draw.
And that’s my point. You might be doing something right now that will turn into a career.
One of the best jobs I ever had was a position I ended up getting by accident, and initially I didn’t want it. I was working for a large non-profit organization. A management reorganization eliminated my position. Like many companies, my company didn’t want to lose a trained employee. So, they put me on the bench. For a few months, my role was to find a new position. Eventually a former manager tapped me to be on his team.
I want you to take over the monthly maintenance process. It’s broken, and I really need someone to step in and fix it.
Sure, I’d love to.
I was lying. I’d seen that process. It was really screwed up. Even though I think you should accept the jobs that no one wants. I was willing to make an exception.
But, then a funny thing happened. I found that I liked it. . .a lot. I got to design new processes. I got to work across all 27 portfolios. I got to work with engineers and senior management. And in 18 months we turned the Monthly Maintenance Project from one of the biggest headaches in our portfolio to one of the biggest successes. It was one of the best jobs I ever had.
I had no idea that I’d thrive at that job. I certainly didn’t go looking for it. And that was the advice for my friend Toad. To recognize that sometimes the best destinations are not the ones we set out for in the beginning.
Like our experience at Village Inn. As we approached the counter to get our bill and pay, the waitress gestured to a stack of pie boxes.
Do either of you want a pie?
Huh?
I bake them fresh everyday and it’s obvious these are not going to sell today. I’d rather give them away than throw them away.
Sure.
Why? Well, because. . .pie!
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife and thirteen children and one grandchild.
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Rodney, I’m thinking about pursuing a career in IT.
How many times have you seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail?
Is that a movie?
Are you more of a Star Trek or a Star Wars fan?
Neither.
You’ll never make it.
Juan didn’t think much of my list. Maybe it’s a generational thing. When I was starting out supporting WordPerfect Office (Back Where It All Began) it was not uncommon to hear someone respond to a reported problem with,
It’s just a flesh wound. Come back here I’ll bite your kneecaps off.
It’s these type of common experiences that help transform a group of individuals into a team. Maybe for your team, or your industry, it’s not space opera and silly British comedies. But, finding a common ground is critical to your success.
And for IT, if someone is older than about 35 they probably know the air speed velocity of a sparrow.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife and thirteen children and one grandchild.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com
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A young couple had recently married. The young wife decided to cook a roast. She prepared the seasonings, and her roasting pan. Just before placing the roast in the pan she sliced a section off of the front and the back and prepared to put it in the oven.
Why do you do that?
Do what?
Why do you cut the ends off the roast?
I don’t really know. It’s the way my mom always prepared a roast.
So they called the young bride’s mother.
Mom, why did you always cut the ends off the roast before baking it?
I don’t know. It’s how grandma always cooked it.
It so happened that the woman’s grandmother was still alive. She called Grammy.
Grammy, why did you always cut the ends off the roast before you put it in the pan?
I’m in the middle of a months long project at work. We are converting an entire building to be used exclusively by agents for my account. There will be over 800 agents when we are fully staffed. We have to remodel the existing space to prepare for my client. We did the first floor several months ago. We completed the second floor a couple months ago. The third floor is scheduled to “go live” on Monday.
This is the stage of the project I have to watch very carefully, a single delay can have a cascade effect that would cause me to miss my delivery date next week.
I got a call from the network manager.
Rodney, we don’t have enough network switches for the third floor.
I’ll meet you at the IDF closet on 3.
I was literally in the parking lot headed for my car when he called. As I climbed the stairs (The Stairway Crew) I tried to think how we could have missed ordering the right amount of network equipment. Ordering new equipment takes days if not weeks. If we couldn’t solve this with our existing hardware, I was going to miss my date.
Okay, Jerry, what did we miss?
The number of ports.
There aren’t enough ports?
No, there are too many. Like double what there should be.
We have 360 stations. We need one port for each one. How many ports are there?
Six hundred and forty eight.
Why would we wire 648 ports for a floor with less than 400 seats?
I don’t know. They said this closet was supposed to match the first and second floor closets.
You mean those closets also have double?
I don’t know. All I know is that I don’t have enough switches for 648 ports. Even with my buffer, I can’t handle more than about 400.
Can you just wire the ports that connect to a cubicle?
Sure, but it’s not going to look pretty like the other closets.
I’m not worried about pretty at this point. I’ll settle for functional.
And just like that, we are back on schedule. But, it got me thinking. I found the building manager and had him let me into the 1st floor IDF, or wiring closet.
Sure enough, as I looked at the rack of switches I could see that about half the ports were inactive. The active ports had reassuring blinking green lights. The inactive ports were totally dark.
And then I realized why we had twice as many ports as we needed. Jerry got his number of ports from David, the VP of infrastructure. David looked at the existing architecture and replicated it to make our new plan.
Our call floor uses VOIP phones like this one I have in my home office.
VOIP, or Voice Over IP, phones hook up to a network port. In turn, the computer plugs into the phone. We do this so that the computer and the phone extension are tied together. However, it also means we only need one port per cubicle that will handle both phone and network connections for the PCs.
However, before we got the VOIP phones, we had phones that needed their own connection to the network. So, in the old configuration we needed two ports per cubicle. We were absolutely replicating the previous configurations, but we didn’t really need to. We were wiring the closet as if every cubicle still needed a separate voice port.
This is same reason the young bride cut the ends off her roast. It’s how her mother and her grandmother did it. Grammy, however was the original “roast cutter.”
So, Grammy, why did you cut the ends off the roast before putting it into the pan?
Well honey, my roasting pan was always too small. It was the only way I could make it fit.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife and thirteen children and one grandchild.
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Tell your friends about this!
I don’t know. But, I suspect the more financially successful you become the less you swear.
Really? Like what?
Oh, you know, your typical blue collar construction worker type, we expect him to swear like a drunken sailor, but someone like Bill Gates, wouldn’t need to.
I almost hated to break it to my friend. Bill Gates, not surprisingly, in addition to being the richest man in the world and the founder of Microsoft, was a bit of a local celebrity in the Seattle area. I was working for Microsoft, but lived out in Maple Valley, about 40 miles outside Seattle.
The only time I’d personally seen Bill (you got to call him Bill if you worked for the company) was at the company meetings. (The Time I Was Convinced We Were Attacked By Terrorists.) But, I worked with a lot of people who had worked with him individually. I was about to shatter my friend’s perception.
Swearing has a place in the IT field. I’m not saying that it’s right or wrong to swear, but if you go into IT, you should expect to hear it. Often it’s the typical day to day conversations that a profession largely dominated by men brings out.
“What the . . .”
“Son of a . . .”
You know what they are, and I do too. I’m not typing them because personally I choose not to swear. I can only remember breaking that personal rule a couple of times. The most famous was when I fired a guy named Sam. (He Also Deserved To Be Fired.)
My friend Dave (Heartmindcode.com) regularly swore but was trying to stop. We had a swear jar that Dave had to put $5 in every time he swore. He really wanted to stop, and he put a lot of money in the jar. I told him if I ever swore I’d contribute $50. When Sam expressed disbelief at being let go, after falling asleep on site at our biggest customer, I decided it was worth the money.
What the #$%@ were you thinking?
There are some people in computers who take it too extremes. My friend Janice was interviewing for a PM role at Microsoft. Our training team had been shut down and we were all looking for new jobs. She was really good and went through several rounds of interviews.
During the second or third interview the person she was talking to suddenly got up and started screaming and swearing in her face.
Odd? Yes. Even for Microsoft.
His explanation was,
If you can’t handle that level of confrontation, you aren’t cut out to be in this group.
Not really. He was just a misogynistic jerk who was a little too attached to the supposed “power” of his position. (Sometimes You Have To Be A Jerk – No, You Are Just a Jerk.) Fortunately, I’ve never been part of a team or a company where my aversion to swearing was seen as weak or ineffective. If anything, it’s viewed as a strength, since you sometimes have to have a more robust vocabulary if you are going to skip using the shortcut words.
I’m not sure your interpretation of Bill Gates is quite accurate.
What do you mean?
When someone has a new idea for a product at Microsoft, they have to present to Bill. It’s a make or break meeting, and typically managers will get someone to coach the new person if they’ve never presented to him before.
Why do they need coaching?
Because it can be a little unsettling when the richest man in the world gets up in your face and yells, ‘THAT’S THE WORST F&*%ING IDEA I’VE EVER HEARD!
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife and thirteen children and one grandchild.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com