It’s not my fault.
Those are four words that should never be spoken in a work environment. You probably shouldn’t say those words in any situation, but certainly not at work.
This is not a “customer’s always right” post. Well, maybe it is, but it’s really about controlling what you say.
Several years ago I was working with a client on a big project. The project team was pretty big. I was the program manager on our side. The client team had a new project manager. We were at the beginning of the project.
We didn’t have a project schedule yet. We were barely into the planning phase, although we were doing some early prototype testing. The client dev team was building the custom app that we were running, and they were way behind schedule. The software was coming on a CD. We were a little sensitive about security. We were a lot sensitive about security.
I was attending a weeklong conference. The conference wrapped up on Thursday. Friday was a travel day. But, the conference was in Seattle. And I was living in Seattle, so Friday was a work from home day.
I got an email Friday afternoon,
TO: Rodney Bliss
RE: You have a package at the front desk
I didn’t think much of it. Monday, I went into the office and was caught up in the usual “been gone a week need to catch up” work. I got in early so I could head out early. I grabbed the package on my way out the door.
Late Monday afternoon I got an email from the project leader,
TO: Rodney Bliss
RE: Rodney, we want to start the pilot tomorrow morning. We’ll need the users at both your sites ready at 9:00AM with the updated app installed.
Tuesday I had a lunch meeting in Maple Valley. I was going to be home on Monday, and I didn’t have a way to get the CD to my tech team. It’s about an hour from my house to the office. There was no way it was going to work to try and get to the office.
TO: Project Manager
RE: Testing Tomorrow
We aren’t going to be able to do the testing tomorrow. We’ll try to get things setup for Thursday.
Wednesday was a bit of whirlwind. I was in the office early. I got the CD to the tech guys first thing. They got started installing the software and sharing it for our Denver site to also download. I also identified the 10 workstations we were going to use. The test stations could only be used for testing. We had to take them out of production.
By Wednesday EOD we had everything in place to test on Thursday. I wasn’t particularly happy. In my week back after being gone for a day, I’d just sucked up two days on testing that I had no clue was even planned. I figured a 48 hour delay on less than 24 hours notice was pretty good.
Well, no good deed goes unpunished. Thursday morning I got on our conference call with the client.
Rodney, will Cleveland be joining us?
What do you mean?
We need testers from the Cleveland office as well. It’s the only office that has design staff.
Ah. . .they will not be joining us on this call.
So, another round of calls to get the software to the Cleveland team and get more workstations moved out production. Friday morning we did another call and another set of tests. Fortunately, the new app ran flawlessly. My annoyance at having to run a fire drill was offset by the fact that my team had done a fantastic job of pulling stuff together on short notice.
Remember me saying no good deed goes unpunished?
Monday I got an email from my Executive Vice President. He was about three levels above me. It basically was a long email chain starting from the project manager up through her management chain to senior managers and then across to my senior management chain. It gave great detail about how I had screwed up the project.
I don’t get angry at work. It’s never worth it. But, here I had the Senior VP telling me to stop screwing up the project. The sad thing was, it really wasn’t my fault and I honestly couldn’t tell anyone. I certainly couldn’t tell the VP.
You might be thinking,
But, Rodney, it really WASN’T your fault. Just explain that to the VP.
The thing is, the VP doesn’t care. People at his level get paid to not care. Well, he cares about the project. But, he doesn’t care who screwed it up. He just wants it fixed.
I emailed the VP,
TO: Senior VP
RE: Do you want me to respond to the issue, or just make sure it’s fixed?TO: Rodney Bliss
RE: I already apologized to them and gave them a commitment. Just make it work.
So, you know what I did?
I responded with a simple: “Understood.”
And that was it. Sure, it wasn’t my fault, but no one cared. And I needed to not care either.
Customer always right? No. But, if they are wrong, you can’t tell anyone.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
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LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2018 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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We’d like you to grant one of our investigators access to an account.
Sure. What’s the name?
We can’t tell you that.
Oh, they knew the name. But, they couldn’t share it with me. I was the team manager for the email team at a major non-profit. Actually, I was the manager for the email and SharePoint teams. But, the SharePoint guys never really got much love. Everyone wanted to talk about email.
We had just migrated from Novell Groupwise email to Microsoft Exchange. Exchange had a pretty powerful “big brother” feature. Actually, it was a suite of features. With Microsoft Exchange, the company had access to anything and everything in the system. And we could access those features without the user ever knowing about it.
The problem was that it was necessary to actually know what mailbox you needed access to in order to access it. The investigators knew this of course.
You know I have to know what makilbox to grant access to, in order to give you access, right?
Of course, but we can’t tell you the name.
Why not?
Well, someone was walking passed the office of one of our senior executives. . .you would know him if we said his name. . .and they thought they might have seen something on his computer. We want to check it out.
Without causing suspicion if it turns out to be nothing?
Exactly.
So, we had a problem, my team had the skills to grant access. They were good at their jobs. Just as the investigators were good at theirs. But, the investigators couldn’t grant access. . .and my team couldn’t know the name of the suspect.
The solution was to break some of our security protocols. Is it still a problem if you break the security protocols with the security officers?
In any case, it was the only solution I could think of.
The process was pretty simple. My engineer met with the security officer alone in an office with a laptop.
Even though you’re with security, as you know, our policy of least privilege means you don’t have access to the email access control lists.
Right.
If you’ll look at my screen I’ll show you how to grant access to Rodney’s mailbox from the list of users. Then, I’ll leave the room and you can find the person you want to investigate and grant yourself access to that mailbox.
And when we’re done?
I’ll show you how to remove your access from Rodney’s mailbox and you can then do it for the other one.
I guess I might have been concerned that security was technically investigating my mailbox too, but I wasn’t worried. As with most investigations, security was extremely close-lipped. We never found out if the person had been doing something unethical or illegal.
But, I was just happy that we’d found a way to investigate someone without actually knowing their name.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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(c) 2018 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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I have a good friend who is an anti-vaxxer. I’m not even sure if that’s a politically correct term, or is offensive. (If someone knows a better one, let me know.) She’s a very smart woman and certainly not someone who would be accused of conspiracy theories. In fact, she’s less anti-vaccines and more a skeptic, especially of the vaccination schedule and the contents of vaccines.
She has done extensive reading on vaccines over the past several years. This post isn’t about vaccines and how effective they are or are not.
She’s a very good friend and that allows us to have what might otherwise be contentious conversations. You see, I think vaccines are safe and effective. We are on opposite ends of the spectrum on the issue.
But, again, this isn’t about the effectiveness of vaccines.
My friend couldn’t understand why I thought it was okay to force people, especially kids to put chemicals in their body. . .even if it’s for their own good. It seems to fly in the face of conservative principles of less government and fewer laws.
My friend and I are both politically conservative. And she’s right. But, there’s a more important principle than personal choice.
As conservatives, my friend and I are both opposed to abortion.
Pro-choice advocates give many of the same philosophical arguments as anti-vaxxers. Their arguments are not about conception or clinics or doctors. Instead they talk about privacy. They talk about “my body, my choice.”
Many pro-choice supporters don’t understand why pro-life people are so emotional about the issue. “Why should they care what I do with my body?” is the question we hear.
Anti-vaxxers remind me of people who believe the earth is flat. There’s lots of science to suggest they’re wrong, but they insist that the true story, the real evidence is being surpressed.
I think flat earthers are wrong. You probably think they are wrong too. But, I don’t really care if they are wrong. I mean, I don’t spend any thought or time trying to convince them that they are wrong. And if I had a good friend who was a flat-earther, I think we’d just agree to disagree.
Why? Why do I care about the vaccine discussion and abortion but not flat earth?
Because, it’s not about opinions. I care about the first two for the same reason I don’t care about the flat-earthers.
A flat earth believer isn’t going to hurt anyone. I guess, if they were a rocket scientist, that would be a problem, but for most everyday things, a flat earther isn’t a threat to anyone.
To a pro-life supporter, the same can’t be said about an abortion. Pro-life supporters believe that there is no difference between a fetus and a baby. If one deserves protection, so does the other. If someone suggested they could kill their 6 month old child because “my child my choice” everyone, pro-life and pro-choice people alike, would rightly be outraged. To a pro-life supporter, that same outrage is warrented to protect a six month old fetus.
And that’s what makes pro-vaxx people so passionate. It’s not about privacy. It’s not about choice. It’s about putting other people, especially the very young or the very old, at risk for preventable diseases. People who choose to not get vaccinated, or not have their children vaccinated, increase the likelihood they could spread disease to people who cannot be vaccinated.
And that’s the important point. When it comes to discussions of vaccines and abortion, why so serious? Because it’s literally a matter of life and death.
For the flat-earth discussion? Not so much.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2018 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.
– My Dear Mother
The email was unexpected.
Rodney, we need to start the testing of the Verbo software. We have scheduled a meeting for tomorrow at 7:00AM. Please have your workstations configured. The files were sent to you on Monday.
It was quickly followed by a meeting request for 16 hours later. And it was only Wednesday.
We had talked about the Verbo rollout for weeks. We would eventually have to install it on all of our user workstations. But, to start we were only going to install it on ten stations.
The problem was, I wasn’t in my office. I had the day scheduled off. And we had not discussed the scheduling for this testing. I told them no. I was one of several partners for this client.
Rodney, all the other partners are able to work on this timeline.
Ever get compared to your brother when you were a kid?
Your brother managed to get home before curfew. How come you are late?
I didn’t like it much when I was a teenager either.
The problem with this request was that I had to coordinate with multiple teams across multiple locations. Specifically I needed to work with my operations team and my desktop support (DS) teams. Operations I could get on board immediately. I worked with them daily. But, DS had an SLA, a Service Level Agreement. Basically, that was the amount of time they requested to complete a support ticket.
Typical SLA requests required 5 days. I also worked with my DS team a lot and I knew that I could get them to push through a request pretty much as fast as I asked them to.
What should I have done? Should have dropped everything and pushed that request through at all costs? Should I make my partner wait 5 days.
What should have happened was a meeting request should have been sent as soon as the Verbo files were ready. Then, I would have been able to prep my teams and we could have done the testing on Thursday like they wanted.
What ended up happening was that I went back to work on Thursday and immediately rallied my team. I didn’t drop everything, and I even gave my DS team as much time as they needed.
As I expected, they made it happen on Thursday and we rescheduled the testing for Friday. It wasn’t out of any sense of pride or a desire to exert my authority. I just didn’t see the need to use up some of goodwill with my local teams to meet an artificial deadline that I had no part of setting.
Their lack of planning wasn’t my emergency.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
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LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 29 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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I didn’t want to. I really didn’t. I tried everything I could think of to avoid it. In the end, I had no choice.
This is a grinder. It’s kind of like a circular saw. But, it’s for metal. It can saw through metal, but it can also “grind” down metal.
Grinders have one purpose, to fix mistakes and break things.
If you have to grind your weld to make it look good you are a grinder not a welder.
– Welders everywhere
I bought the grinder when my daughter had a minor car accident and I had to cut a top radiator support bracket out of a car at the junkyard to install in her car. I also used the grinder to cut the mangled one out of her car.
Like I said, it’s for mistakes.
I recently helped my daughter check the brakes on her car. I handed her an impact driver with a 19mm socket and had her remove the lug nuts. She managed to get seven of the eight off, but was having trouble with the last one.
I laughed and shook my head and wondered how was it possible to mess up something as simple as removing a lug nut with an impact drive?. I took the driver from her and quickly. . .realized the lug nut was stuck. It was really stuck. It was so stuck that I finally lowered the car back to the ground and put a breaker bar and a 24″ extenstion on it.
Archimedes helped me again. With a long enough lever, I was able to put enough torque on the bolt that something had to give. It broke. The stud broke off inside the nut.
My simple “check the brakes” exercise, as so often happens, had turned into something more involved.
If you’ve ever changed a tire, you know that your wheels are secured to your car with lug nuts. What you might not know is that the bolts that the lug nuts attach to are called “studs.” Some cars have four studs for each wheel. Cars with more powerful engines typically have five studs per wheel. Pickup trucks might have six or eight studs. Semi-trucks can have twelve.
And I had just broken one of these studs. If your car has four studs, it’s really not a good idea to run with only three. I wasn’t worried. I have replaced studs on cars before. The stud is a pretty simple setup. It presses through from the back of the metal hub. The lug nuts secure the wheel to the rotor and the hub. It’s one of the simplest repairs you can do. Mostly you do it with a hammer. You pound it out and then you pound the new one in.
With the stubborn stud now effectively neutered, I jacked up the car again and removed the wheel. Next the brake caliper came off. (They didn’t need to be replaced after all.) Next, I had to remove two screws that secured the rotor (that big metal dinner plate looking thing you see when you change a tire) to the hub.
Now, all that was left was to pound out the old stud and replace it with the new one. I got out my one-handed sledge and started pounding on the stud. And, like the stubborn lug nut earlier, it wasn’t going anywhere. I didn’t have great visibility behind the hub, but it appeared there wasn’t enough room to pound out the stud.
That couldn’t be right.
So, I went to the movies. YouTube is a backyard mechanic’s best friend. I looked up how to replace a stud on a 2001 Honda Civic. (Yes, you can find literally any topic on car repair.) And it was here that I realized this would be unlike any repair I had ever done.
When you consult reference material, it’s a good idea to consult multiple sources. With car repairs that means you look at the professionals’ videos and the amateurs’ videos. In this case everyone was unanimous: you had to grind away part of the axle.
This made no sense. Grinders are for fixing mistakes, not for repairs. There was no way this could be the proper method. You don’t grind down portions of your car. But, the more I looked, the more convinced I became that this really was the suggested method for installing a stud in a 2001 Honda Civic.
So, with great trepidation, I put on my face shield and took a grinder to the left front axle of my daughter’s Honda Civic.
I ground down the axle. . .It felt really, really wrong!
I also ground down the side of the stud, to make it fit easier.
It took a long time and many starts and stops to finally get just enough of the axle ground down for the stud to fit.
Success. . .but it still felt like a mistake
The test drive went smoothly. The repair was complete. But, I just couldn’t shake the idea that I’d broken the car to fix the car.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2018 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Auto repair, like many endeavors, requires the use of force. . .but not too much.
Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.
-Archimedes
Put enough torque on a bolt and one of two things will happen. Either the bolt will break free, or it will just break. The toughest bolt I ever tightened was 250 ft lbs. It was the pinion nut when rebuilding a differential.
Every bolt has its breaking point. If you tighten them too far they break. So, it’s important to not push things too hard.
But, sometimes, very rarely, you can indulge your inner He-man.
Whenever you change your engine oil, or have it changed at a service location, you also need to change the oil filter. The filter does just what the name suggests. It filters impurities out of the oil.
The oil filter is one of the most unique “bolts” that you’ll put on a car. It actually acts like a large nut. It screws onto a threaded shaft. What makes it unique, is that you are only supposed to screw it on finger-tight. No tighter than you can tighten it with your fingers. There are no other bolts or nuts that get treated like this.
You might think, what’s the harm if you screw it on too tight? The problem is in trying to get it back off later. There are actually “wrenchs” that you can use to get them off.
I recently bought a new car. Well, new to me. I recently changed the oil. That’s a pretty routine task. And if you learn to do it yourself, you can save yourself about $40 every 3000 miles.
My new car is a GMC Yukon. Its big V-8 engine takes 6 quarts of oil. Only 5 1/2 if you don’t change the filter. But, as I said, you should always change the filter.
And it was at that point that I ran into problems. The filter is really accessible. That’s a plus. Often they are hidden and tucked up under the engine. In fact, I had a friend that owned a Porche. To change the oil filter, you had to lift the engine. Two thousand dollars for an oil change.
But, my Yukon had the oil filter right down where it was easy to get to. I even had access to it without having to get my arm under the draining oil pan. It was perfect.
Access was easy. (Taken of the second filter)
Except it wouldn’t move. Not a bit.
I tried twisting it as hard as could. My fingers slipped off the indented metal surface.
Time to move up. I got my oil filter wrench. It’s a canvas strap around a metal pipe. You wrap the canvas strap around the oil filter and twist the pipe. It works well. Most times.
Not today. The harder I turned the wrench the more I ended up denting the filter. The wrench was not going to move the filter.
Time to up my game. . .again.
There is literally no use for a used oil filter. It’s a bad idea to throw them away. Instead you should take them to an auto parts store. They will recycle them. Oh, and take your oil there too. Don’t dump it out, or throw it in the garbage.
Anyway, knowing that I was never going to need the filter again, I decided I had additional options available to me. Basically, I could do whatever it took to get that filter off my Yukon. In fact, I now had to get it off the car since it was crumbled like an empty beer can.
A dagger through the heart finally killed it
The next step was a dagger through the heart. Seriously, I took a large metal punch and pounded it straight through the filter and used it as a built in handle to turn the filter.
And it worked. The filter came off.
Generally you don’t have to impale the filter to get it off.
That’s why it’s important to not overtighten your oil filter. And sometimes. . .it really is okay to use as much force as necessary.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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(c) 2018 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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It snowed last night in Utah. It snowed about 3″. That’s not really a lot. And it was “lake effect” snow. That means it was very light and powdery. My kids shoveled the driveway this morning and I took time at lunch to shovel the sidewalk.
But, even with the freezing temperatures and the new snow, the warmth of Spring filled my soul today. See, about 600 miles South in Peoria, Arizona nine men dressed in Mariners blue took the field against nine men dressed in Oakland A’s green.
Well, I assume they were wearing those colors. I didn’t actually see the game, the first one of Spring. Instead I listened to it over the internet. I didn’t get to hear the entire game. I missed Ichiro’s first hit of the Spring. At 45 years old, he’s trying to do what few have been able to do, continue to play professional baseball into his late 40’s.
But, then Ichiro has done a lot of things that few others have.
Today isn’t the start of the season, of course. The fact that Seattle won 8-1 doesn’t mean a thing. Managers are trying out players and pitchers. Winning isn’t nearly as important as evaluating the players during Spring Training.
Official Opening Day is scheduled for March 28 against the same Oakland A’s that Seattle faced today. The game will be played in Toyko, Japan. That helps explain Ichiro’s interest in making this years’s roster. He wants to take the field, possibly for the last time, in front of his native country.
Ichiro is an anomoly on this year’s Mariners team. Last year, the team made a strong push for the playoffs. They missed out, although they did finish with a winning record at 89-73. However, when the season ended and the Mariners found themselves on the outside looking in, they started a youth movement. The team traded their veteran players for other teams’ rookies and prospects.
The team will be terrible this year. The management knows it. The fans know it. Even the players know it, although in interviews they give all the right answers. Youth movements take time to develop. But, Ichiro is old. He’s talked about playing until he’s 50. If anyone could it would be him. And as a Mariner’s fan, he’s one of the bright spots on a roster full of unknowns.
Today for just an hour I immersed myself in the sounds of the game I love. The voice of the announcers haven’t lost a step since last fall. I could smell the grass under the Arizon skies. The crack of the bat, the sounds of the crowd warmed my tiny office in Pleasant Grove, Utah.
Despite the snow and ice, Spring is coming. In Arizona, it’s already here.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2018 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Matthew 6:27 Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?
My oldest son loves basketball. Unfortunately he has two disadvantages. First, he’s had health issues that make it hard for him to do sustained physical activity. Second, and more importantly, he’s not very tall. In fact, he’s decidely short, just barely over five feet. But, he loves to play.
My second oldest son, only four months his junior, is 6’5″. Tall enough, obviously, to be a force on any team. The only issue for him is that he doesn’t like basketball. I cannot remember the last time I saw him pick up a ball.
In fact, life is somewhat inconvenient for someone who is taller than six feet tall. Clothes are hard to find. Cars don’t fit. Beds are too short. People expect things from you. They ask you to reach things on top shelves. And, of course, they think you play basketball.
I’ve often thought on my sons roles and the scripture from Matthew. One son would add to his stature given the choice, and his brother would remove from his.
I remember an old Twilight Zone episode, The Last Night of a Jockey, starring Mickey Rooney as a 5′ tall former jockey. He’d been banned for cheating. As Twilght Zone episodes do, it introduced a mythical element. The jockey gets a single wish, although based on his past life of crime, he doesn’t really deserve. In a flash of insight he makes his wish.
I want to be BIG.
The jockey falls asleep and on waking realizes his wish has granted. He’s now eight feet tall. He’s estatic. What he’s longed for his whole life, or so he thinks, has been granted.
Just then the phone rings. It’s the racing commission. He’s been reinstated. He can race horses again.
There’s just one problem. He’s now too big to ride a horse. He grows to be ten feet tall. A giant, but an ungainly one. Twisted and hunched, he is no longer fit for his former employ nor any new one.
He wasted his wish. He could have wished for a victory at the Kentucky Derby. He could have wished to perform a heroic act. Instead he wasted his wish on himself. And his short-sightedness cursed him.
I trust my sons, if given the gift of a wish, wouldn’t waste it on shrinking or growing their stature. Instead, I expect them to go out and achieve their own wishes.
And I hope all of you find yours.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2018 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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It was late for my commute home. I was returning from a team event in Salt Lake City a few days ago. The freeway was unusually crowded for a Tuesday evening. But, it wasn’t so much that the freeway had more cars than usual. It was that construction had shut down the three righthand lanes of the freeway. That in addition to the fact that the carpool lane has been shut down for months.
Spindly orange construction cones planted in the Spring blossom into huge orange construction barrels in the Fall.
It seems that the stretch of freeway between my home in Pleasant Grove Utah and Salt Lake City has been under construction for the entire time I’ve lived in Utah, off and on for 30 years.
And I’m thrilled with it.
You might find it curious that I enjoy these construction zones. I don’t like driving through them of course. I drive a full size SUV. The lanes that are not closed down have been narrowed. At times I feel my fenders are hanging over the lane lines on both sides.
The reason I’m happy for the construction zones goes back to 1980. I was 15 years old and a freshman in high school. My brother was a junior. Our high school basketball team was playing in the state 2A high school basektball tournament at Key Arena in Seattle, the home of the NBA Seattle Sonics.
Our high school was in Olympia Washington. Olympia is about forty miles south of Seattle. During the tournament, we made multiple trips from our home up the I-5 corridor to downtown Seattle and back again with the game was over.
Our team went on to win the championship. I can still remember the drive home. My brother driving our car, and our friends in their cars around us on the freeway. We all probably were driving too fast, as high school kids will. Fortunately, all of us made it home safely.
You know what we didn’t have to worry about on that drive home all those years ago?
Traffic cones.
My family still lives in Olympia. I’ve had occasion to return to vist, most recently just a couple weeks ago. My lovely wife, my brother and his fiance all flew into Seatac last week to attend a family event in Olympia.
Once again we were driving South down the I-5 freeway. There were construction cones this time. Washington Department of Transportation is frantically trying to widen the freeway to relieve the terrible overcrowding that for years saw the population of the Puget Sound area explode and the number of freeway lanes remain stagnant.
The problem the DOT has is that the area around the freeway is heavily developed. Houses, shopping malls, universities, factories. They all compete for space along a precious strip of land between the Sound and the mountains.
And for years, nothing was done. I’m probably underestimating, but it seems there are the same number of freeway lanes today as there were all those years ago when my brother and I were celebrating the success of our high school.
I drive up and down the I-15 corridor between my home and Salt Lake City nearly every day. I can tell you there are definitley more lanes today than when I first made this trip as a young college freshman headed to BYU in Provo.
Not only are there more now than then, there will be more lanes next year than this one. As Utah experiences a population explosion, the load on I-15 will only continue. And by all appearances, the Utah DOT plans to keep up.
So, go ahead and curse the ubiquitous orange barrels that seem to be native residents of our Utah freeway. For my part, I will smile as I crawl past them on my daily commute.
For I remember the championship of 1980.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2018 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
Tell your friends about this!
I know the drill. I even wrote about it. (How To Talk To A Programmer (And Get Results.))
The process is really simple. Don’t ask a programmer to do something for you. Simply ask him if it’s possible. He’ll say no, of course. Then, wait for a couple of days. He’ll come back and tell you that he’s figured out how to do it.
I have one report that I own at my company. It measures the availability of our systems. I’ve worked on the report off and on for years. A few months ago, one of our account managers came and asked me to provide additional information in the report.
Sorry, that’s not possible. We don’t collect that information. I can’t add it to the report.
You know what happened?
Sure, you do.
A week later I went back to the account manager.
You know, I’ve been thinking about that. I think I’ve figured out a way to rework the report to provide the information you were asking about.
Two weeks ago, my manager asked about an additional change to the report. Where I had been reporting by product lines, now they wanted me to report by individual users.
Sorry, that’s not possible. We don’t collect the names of the impacted users. We only do aggragates. There’s no way to add it to the report.
Yeah, that was two weeks ago. You know what happened?
Sure, you do.
I’m meeting with the extended team. We’ve gathered in Salt Lake City from all over the country. I was talking to my manager before our meetings.
You know, I’ve been thinking about that change. I think I’ve figured out a way to rework a separate report and get that information.
The downside is that it’s going to take about 25 hours of programming to rework my report. I have to rewrite hundreds of lines of code in dozens of Excel sheets.
The thing is that I know the technique. I just didn’t think it would end up being used on me.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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(c) 2018 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved