Which manager's line is it anyway

Everyone would have or had interesting managers in the line of our work who might appear so different for pure engineers like us. Words from them motivates us to do the job sometimes and their talent of making you believe the way they want you to amazes everyone all the time. And what is more interesting are the phrases that the managers use that you would remotely use to explain in a normal casual conversation. So listening closely to the managers conversations, I picked up few lines that made me interested and I have listed down for you. May be... I mean may be... if you have more to add, please do so.

• "There are many other constraints and pulls and pushes." on why we could not get the project.
  
• "The pie has shrunk already" on the budget limitations of the client.
  
• "I am trying to understand what I have and what is right for me" on why taking the project will be difficult.
  
• "The black eye we had is vanishing" on client appreciation.
  
• "We are on a bigger driving seat now" for we are working on more important projects.
  
• "We should be aware of the environment" on knowing about your peers' opinions on the project.
  
• "Not everything is Black & White" on you can not categorize things as just right and wrong.
  
• "It is raining here" on the abundance of the issues seen in the project.
  
• "Don't disturb the apple cart" on not changing the already tested code.
  

On the First Cubicle day of 2009

Did I say that the year appears to be a peaceful and relaxing one? But as people say, not everything happens the way you think. You may also mock "You thought so?!" for yesterday happened to be one of the busiest days in the last 2 years in US. Reaching the office on the first day of the year 2009 as early as 9:30 AM, I went straight to work on the interesting discussion with the DBAs I mentioned in the previous post and it was not before lunch time that we realized that it is going to be much more interesting than we thought. To say it in simple terms, you have entered attendance twice for the last 10 days and you were billed twice but got caught during the pay day and they decided not to pay you at all. The resolution: strike out all the wrong attendance entries and go to all departments to get the salary corrected. And it was not until 1 AM in the night that you cleared all the issues and you knew you will get your salary correctly the next day. The sad part is I even had to give up go-karting race with Sachin for work. But all is well that ends well. So after another 2 hours of work on the first weekend of the year, we pray that the salary will be deposited at least by tomorrow. You too pray for the year to be little easier in the coming days.

Its a Fresh start.... once again

Happy New Year guys and girls!. A fresh year has started. Time to bring back the resolutions you lost in the previous year and new ones that you might want to add to the list that you would be lost before the next year. Am I starting my first post of the year in a sorrowful tone? Why so negative? Yeah! Why am I being so negative? Let’s start again. Time to fresh start your resolutions that you will try hard to maintain till the start of next year. That’s better I think. Good. I think this is the first New Year eve that went away without much excitement except few calls from friends and home. The year changed while I was in my home watching TV and talking to friends. No shouts or fireworks to welcome the year. But it was good. It was good to feel the New Year eve to be just another day and what’s better than starting the year with sitting on the couch and watching your favorite movie (The Dark Knight) on the TV. It is like blessing for a relaxed and peaceful year ahead. And So I slept very early in the night around 12:30 AM which is early even for any other day for me.
Believe me when I say I woke up early at 7:30 AM. And it was not to switch off the alarm and to get back to sleep. I really did wake up 7:30 AM and made few calls. But then, I went back to sleep. Another sign of a peaceful year ahead I think. So after relaxing and comfortable sleep, the New Year started truly at around 11 AM with more phone calls, Google chats and orkut scraps. Funny but common was wishing "Happy Birthday" instead of the Happy New Year". May be it should be considered as wishing the birth of the year 2009. So all went well including having work on a holiday and few interesting mails between the DBAs, developers and support that is always fun to watch. And if all these seem so normal for any other day, the blast was the Project party at Zuma Fun center in the evening. Visit the site and you will know what fun it promised.... for the kids. Now visit this photo album and you will know how great we were ... as kids. A perfect start for the New Year indeed.

The Beginning of the End

Tomorrow might be my last day in the current project. Though I have heard these words for the last 6 months, the end seems to be definite this time. The last 19 months of staring at the same status screen and recovering the same loads again and again have taught me a lot that includes both technical and managerial aspects of the project. I even learnt tips of tricks of handling the politics that run within the IT industry especially in the client space when you are not the most favorite to them and survival depends more on your smartness than hard work in creating the solution. Between the time of learning the code which God knows who developed and even He might not know who maintained, you will have to use your social skills in getting information from your co-workers who see you as a threat to their job. So it’s a tough task in getting the job done and also getting the credit for it. But there are also few good souls who would recognize your efforts in a while and you are motivated to work for those appreciation mails. This Project had not made me work longer weekends than my previous ones but this indeed made me face tougher challenges and sleepless nights as while you prepare yourself to play the blame game with other teams in the project, your offshore sometimes trip you like a lousy sidekick by pressing the wrong buttons out of sheer curiosity.
Though there are many incidents that I might be forced to create a new blog titled "My pain and the gain with the Cable Guy", I will put up a few events that are at the top of my memories.

The Beginning of the Never-ending story
Brought to onsite for created GPS reports (Please watch Wanted movie), before I could set my hands on them properly, my PM called me for a meeting. These are the exact words he said.
"Our project is in a very bad state. The client might throw us out if we do not do something about it. And it is all in your hands. I am putting you in charge of Production Support team and you must bring the team up and create a good name with the client. You can do it."
Everyone who would hear such inspiring words from your manager and assuring that the world rests on your hands; it probably would have created enlightenment in your mind and brought Goosebumps inside you. But for me, it tickled and I laughed out loud for I heard him saying the same dialogue to S to persuade him join another module. We all love our managers for their convincing words. Don’t we? But I hoped he could have changed the words at the least.

The night I almost screwed up
Not even a month of leading the Production support from onsite, I had a simple instruction to run specific jobs in the night. And that day happened to be a party night and everyone were at home and we were enjoying a good dinner. The clock struck 11 and I went on to my start the specified jobs only to find that a variation of that job is already active from 10. The schedule for the new jobs was at 10 and not at 11 which I completely forgot. Not willing to call the client to face embarrassment, I took the bold step of going through the entire code, understand it, find the pros and cons of running it after 11 and created the detailed steps to complete it successfully. The plan went on for the whole night and it took 20 hours to finish the whole load. But still I had to spend another sleepless night as I was not sure if I made any mistake that the client might notice the next day. But fortunately, everything went fine and nobody even suspected the manual overrides done on the weekend. It taught me a huge lesson. Always remember that you CAN do it, if you WISH for it and WORK HARD to make it happen. And also make sure you note down the time in your schedule correctly.

24 hours conference call and $25 movie tickets
Almost an year back during the labor day weekend, when everyone in the office were on their long planned vacations while I was just sitting in home with no plans, the server crashed and forced all of them to join the conference call. With everyone's vacation ruined and me with nothing to be ruined, we spent 24 hours in the call while engineers from various team tried hard in bringing back the crashed server to life. As the issue was not directly on my application, I had nothing to do in the whole time except keep the mobile charged and was left lying on the bed for the whole day. Though my brain tried to follow up the progress of the issue, my mind could not concentrate on the call owing to the sleepiness night. My only real work was running the test loads on the next day and declaring that all things are fine. And the reward: A signed appreciation letter (hard copy) from the client along with $25 worth movie tickets. Dedication pays off sometime with style.

The night I thought I screwed up
This happened few months back when we saw failure on a module which never had any problem before. With preliminary analysis done and the solution derived to solve the problem, we proceed with applying the fix. As the normal process, we are supposed to take backup of the data before doing any changes in the system. Even though I am always bit of extra precautious in handling the production systems and would rather be a road block than a open canal for care-free developers, on this particular day I was partially out of my mind and allowed the code execution on the production without any backups. As if it is a punishment for my carelessness, the tests failed and were showing weird output in the test environment. As I had proceeded with the production before verifying the results from the test environment, I knew I am in deep trouble. The whole weekend became a nightmare with all strange thoughts from being branded as the reckless guy in the project to getting fired by the client flashing in my dreams. Hard it was to understand that what was done is already done and there is nothing you can do to undo it. As we did not even take the backup, so recovery from an old backup is a costly option which was closer to impossible. With alarms running through my mind, it was Hemant's unimportant question whether I had run the tests on the Production environment itself. And that was when it struck me that we never ran complete tests in production and were presuming by looking at the similar test environment. A quick test finally revealed to my surprise that the production does not have any issues and the test environment was already corrupted before we had applied our fix. Breathing at last, I laughed at myself for making judgment calls without complete information. Another important lesson learnt from the day. Facts have better answers than your assumptions. It is never too late to recheck your results. Sometimes it is advisable to listen to your colleagues.

Pin the Donkey tail

Those who do not know about the righteous explanation for the word "Assume", listen here.
Assume is actually ASS-U-ME which means you are making "Ass out of you and me". Take either the literal meaning or the common-lingo for the first part of the word, it holds right in every way. And this is important in particular to the software engineering world for the whole project will be in jeopardy when start assuming things. I first heard about this when I was in the final year and have been very vigilant in not falling to the pit and becoming one. And whenever someone starts with the phrase, "I assume that..." my mind would immediately imagine what he is changing me to and would be ready to stop him/her. A subtle phrase which means the same meaning and most people use is this. "What I think is....." All I could think is "Why should I care about what you think with your tinkling skull?" It always means that you do not know the subject and is just trying to contribute to the confusion. It is always better and time saving to clear it out with someone who says "I know that..."
Through some means, I was out of the "assume" and "think" world for sometime. But I was sucked back to the world of assumptions when we started our new project here. It is about constructing a hydro-electric power plant and replaces the thermal power plant to move towards eco-energy. The problem is that everyone in the team only knows that there should be dam before we can construct the power plant. Neither are we clear on whether there is any dam over that place nor the size of the plant if and all the dam exists. So we started making Donkeys on each other. (I prefer to use the literal meaning). One person said "I assume that the dam is already built and I think we only need to build the power plant." Another stated, "Probably the dam is smaller. We will make the dam larger for our large power plant." I too had a question. "How large should the power plant be?" Again the only answer we had is "I assume it should be for the village near the dam. So it should be smaller". With me being made a donkey, I did not want to leave things as it is and so I joined the group and started drawing donkeys. After all, we will have the meeting with the client only tomorrow to clear things out. Till that time, we can have some fun. "I think that the dam is present. But we might need another dam on which the plant will function." I added to the assumptions. Thus in few days, we created so many donkeys that we could make a sale either to the Indian kids who are scolded to herd donkeys by their parents or it will be easier to sell in America due to the upcoming elections. Again, I am not sure why they refer donkeys with the elections in US. But discussion on that topic will deviate from this post. So, with so many donkeys unleashed, we waited for the meeting which finally happened today. And guess what, we had drawn a huge donkey and even with blind-folds, we were able to stick its tail in the correct place so easily. We had made perfect donkey clones and the fact happened to be that the dam was built for a different purpose and they already have a small power plant for a different purpose. So we might have to build a new dam and a new power plant for which "how" is not yet answered. This again has invited more donkeys to be drawn and we will continue that in the coming days. It is always tough to avoid donkeys (assumptions) in the initial stages of the project. But we are trying our level best not to affect the ecological system (project deliverables).

PS: Please take the above post in a lighter note as I "know" we are bound to make donkeys in the early stage of the project and it is also important to brainstorm the possible options when the requirements are not aptly put on paper by the client.

When two S'es' meet

I am just back from one of the most entertaining and everlasting healthy discussion between the two S'es' (Plural of S) of our project. To help you identify them, let us just say one S "sucks" in foosball and the other left me "stuck" in this project for the past 6 months. It would always be interesting to watch the discussion between the two of them. We just hoped that we could get popcorn to munch while enjoying the showdown. Whether the discussion is on the design or the code or even the formatting of the excel sheets, the meeting that is supposed to be for 10 mins would extend to 100 minutes and will still go on with no sign of completion. If you are wondering what could possibly be pulling the meetings longer, give a hi-five. We are also wondering the same. But one point we could notice is that there will be long thought process put on the root cause of every problem they would talk from medieval history of the project to the modern hard-rock theme music of the client which is absolutely fine except that the problem will always have a tap root system (read Botany 6th standard book) which extends deep into the soil for which you would have to dig the dirt to the same or more depth than that of the actual issue to find the root cap (at least check wikipedia) or the root cause. And people like me who are just standing and watching the dig will be having our own fun watching it. You will not be surprised if you can find time even to read all of Viswa’s lengthy (but interesting) posts.

And on this eventful Friday (the servers crashed again), the fun was at high and loud as it took the whole weekly meeting duration leaving me with no time for my supposedly knowledge sharing session that I was not even aware of. What a perfect Friday!

The black-out - Office or the mind?

Thanks for your prayers. I am safe and back in home alive. I do not remember much of what happened in office. I think the Men in Black must have erased our memory with the Neuralizer. Probably they invented a memory manipulator now and my memory is transformed. Because all I can remember was having lunch in an Indian restaurant and playing Tennis against Ferraro and Dent in my Sony PSP. There is also a two hour black out inside my mind. But my memory was again manipulated to make me believe that I slept in the afternoon. So with no evidence of an alien invasion or break out of a scientific experiment on a four eyed and two headed monster, the world just goes on with not even an incident being reported by CNN. An impressive work by the secret agents, isn't it? I think so.
Anyway, though I am bit upset that no one tried to help us with lead coated refrigerators for saving us from Nuke detonations, it is forgiven for there doesn't seem to be any plan for that as we are all asked to report back at our cubicles tomorrow morning as usual. Damn it you lame aliens or monsters or whatever they were.

S.O.S - The Black out

There may not be much time.

So let me say it before the laptop goes down too. There has been a black-out in our office block. All the computers are down and the elevators have stopped working. The only light that is lit in our floor is the bulb in the photocopy room. And I am not sure how long we can survive without the Air-conditioner in this hot temperature of 86F. It might be luck that it happened in the morning when the sun is still out. But clock is ticking and if the power doesn't come back, it might get darker inside. For what it's worth, I might get a chance to slap the ones I would like in the dark. There are already talks about possible Alien invasion or US military's secret project running beneath our office building. And who knows what hell could have been let loose. The last time I checked the head count; there were 10 in our team with the head still attached to their torso and life still flowing through them. We do not even have a shot gun or an axe to defeat the zombies. I even checked inside the long row of drawers that no one has ever opened in the past one year. There were only papers, rotten food and a dead rat though. But the good thing that came out of all these is that the never-ending project might get shutdown forever for the administrators never knew and will never know how to recover the backups. Time is running out and I think I cannot continue more. If you happened to read this, I want to let you know that I always tried my best to be good to "Everyone^*" all my life.
Also please ask the Fed-ex to send us some lead coated refrigerators immediately just in case that the US army decides to nuke our place. (Yeah yeah.. I saw the new Indie movie.)

*-"Everyone" may not include everyone and depends on your position to me.

It feels Good to be Evil

Muhaahhahaahaaaa! It feels so good to be evil. I know it is wrong to laugh at others' suffering. But I could not resist smiling at Mr. Ribbon breathing hard and getting heated up during the discussion with Mr. Biscuit. As I explained already about Mr. Biscuit in my pervious post, he has been acting as the showstopper for everyone in the development team. This time, the victim happened to be Mr. Ribbon who was constructing the new Kennel for the client's pet. Something to say about Mr. Ribbon is that he had once tested my temper on a different situation when I was making the boat house. His suggestion to build the house in the shape of a boat tested my third eye but I rubbed it away saying "I know what I am doing". We finally settled down to keep the roof in the shape of an inverted boat. Coming back to the current situation, I happened to the spectator for the meeting between Mr. Biscuit and Mr. Ribbon and I enjoyed and cherish every moment of the meeting would be an understatement. Though my pure heart tried hard not to laugh at one's suffering, like a dark comedy movie, there I was devilishly snickering all the way. Questions on the capacity planning for the kennel and whether the kennel should have a ring bell were interesting as hell. But there were genuine and valid discussions like fixing a door and window and Mr. Ribbon was stepping into the world of hell slowly. If the meeting had lasted for another 10 mins, I am sure we would have seen a showdown between the two and could have been a perfect start of the day. But they decided to continue the fun on a different day and I went back to my desk starting to write this post, Mr. Ribbon probably to bang his head on the wall and Mr. Biscuit to wait for the next unprepared victim.

Finally it happened to me too

I once read a forward. It was nice with the picture of a small kid praying with closed eyes.

God give me Courage.

God give me Health.

God give me Wealth.

But God, please

don’t give me Strength.

For I will break my manager's skull.

Funny it was and was not different from what most people in IT industry speak about. Surprising though, I have not felt that I had such nerve breaking managers yet. And there were not many difficulties with the client too to make me pray that hard. Of course, there were and are few, I would prefer be stuck inside a worm hole (Not the one in the space). But never had a chance that would push me to drop my pen to avoid it hurting the other person. And that was until last week for I had the opportunity to pray like that kid in the email forwards.

Well-known for creating issues out of no where and prone to claim superiority over others; Mr. Biscuit was one I always tried hard not to judge. Marked as shrewd, cunning and in general a huge show-off trying to get attention all the time, he was also a best person for everyone to mock for fun. Lucky enough to see things from far side all these time, but this month brought us closer for building a small tree house, he being the customer and myself the engineer designing the house. The early weeks went on as expected with him asking for 40" widescreen TV to a swimming pool inside it. I was as usual calm with myself and decided to keep a iPhone instead of TV and a mug of water for the pool. Requirements were finalized and the team worked on the tree house building on the impractical necessities. After weeks of hard work with little hocus pocus and a drop of Felix Felicis potion, we were ready for the review last week.

On first look, he was even pleased with the ladder we had put to climb the tree. But then he complained that the number of steps is even. We decided to break one spoke on the top. Slowly we climbed up. Once we reached the entrance, he was worried that the door is opening inside. It was hard to convince him that if he tries to pull it outside, he would fall from the tree house. As we went inside, more and more comments poured in ranging from need for fireplace, ping-pong table inside this small 50 sq feet cabin and concrete lining inside the house so that the construction will be strong. Though I was able to control my anger to all these comments or requirements on the "Day of sale", my anger temperature shot out of the thermometer when he suggested building the house on the ground instead of the tree. But sill he wanted it to be called a "tree house". I wished that I could really build a tree house; make him stay inside and finally lit up the tree. The hell broke loose after that as I gave him one among the five. Heated arguments and exchange of spells and curses went on and on before he walked off saying that the house looked smaller than the tree. I was just glad he got jinxed at last.

What was so significant on this was this was the very first time, I have lost control of myself in a meeting and I don’t regret anything in it. All that mattered was that being right in what I do, I deserve the right to say what I feel is right. Customer or your manager is just a person on the service you provide. You can do your best to listen and understand them. But never must you loose your self-esteem for any reason. I hope that I can maintain the same as I travel through my career and meet more challenging persons in the future.

Dusting the Production server

It has been more than a year since I stepped into the never-ending production support story of our project. Originally planned to be shutdown by August 2007, the project is still healthy and active. Though there were many signs of shutdown before, there would always be extensions similar to the completion of highway projects in Bangalore. After crossing many barriers, a new deadline of 31st March 2008 is currently placed.
This is different from the previous deadlines because we are really asked to plan for planning the shutdown (you read it right). And as a first step, we decided to clean the dust covered servers which have many uninhabited directories similar to dungeons in a castle. There would be bulk of files which were created in some place of the history and were never used. It was also like cleaning the closet after years of dumping clothes and items one over the other and by digging into it, one might find things which are long forgotten and for which we would have searched everywhere except the closet in time of need. And in a very similar manner, I found so many backups which occupied almost 50% of disk space and log files of more than 100,000 in number and also personal directories of all the old developers who worked in the initial stages of the project. It was a delightful experience to recall the initial days of the project with very primitive codes that have undergone hundreds of changes by now. Also the personal directories containing test scripts and backup files with interesting naming conventions became good time pass for the day.
And as if these are not enough for the day, I found an interesting file which I think if displayed here would not be a problem of Intellectual Property Rights Violation. For the file can be considered as relevant to the project only if a Cable services client is ordering turnips and lettuces as part of the Eat-while-you-watch campaign. You can find the file below without any tampering or change.

$ cat vegetables
dishes:5
turnips:8
lettuce:15
potatoes:15
green beans:32
carrots:104
yams:104

I hope who ever created this file in the production server remembered to buy them as his wife ordered. Or could there be a secret code that will place the order for these items automatically in Wal-Mart everyday? There are still more dungeons to explore. So I will update later if I find anything more interesting than this.

Scent of the Bench

For those who do not belong to the fast-growing Indian IT industry, "Bench" is a state in which the person is paid for not doing any work as there is no project for him to work on. He/she who is in Bench is provided with 2 hrs lunch time and an hour break after every 15 mins of staring at the blank computer scren. Sleeping in the dormitory in the office hours is a bonus subject to the vacancy available due to the increasing number of bench (non)workers. The term "Bench", I believe is derived from sports where they call the reserved players as "The Bench". A fast check in Wordweb dictionary tells the same.
Every person working in Indian IT industry would have experienced the taste of Bench at least once in his career. Though being in Bench appears to be a luxury for most persons, there are some unlikely persons like me who find it otherwise sometimes. Belonging to the side with very few persons of Satman's What if theory, the day without work appears very difficult to accept for me. Though few days of bench time is acceptable to me, when it extends more, it becomes a different situation. For example, when I returned to Bangalore from UK and was waiting for the US VISA, I was not allocated to any project which in other words, "I was in Bench". The first 2 days went fine as I was busy chatting with all my old friends. But when I pinged them on the third day, there came the unexpected reply, "Busy now! Will chat later". Then when I tried to get my colleague from previous project to the canteen, he replied "Can we go after an hour. I have a meeting now". It was as if the whole world is away to save the world and you are left playing with marbles. Not ready to use the bonus of using the Dormitory, I wandered around the campus watching my fellow "bench-sitters" doing the same as me. Finally, I had to spend the rest of the week reading John Grisham's "The Broker" and Chetan Bhagat's "One night @ the call center" under the comfortness of the bench(real park bench) beside the trees. Blissful! someone might say. Sitting under the trees with the breeze blowing softly over you brings sleep too. I do enjoyed it for a while. But when the books were finished and days passed, it appeared so different that I felt I was not in office at all. The guilt of getting paid for reading novels started to awake in my mind(damn it) and it also created an envy on all my colleagues who would rush to work early from lunch. Finally, I went on to the managers to hunt for some work to keep me away from getting mad at myself. Yeah! I know what you are thinking. I am a big LOSER.

While I went away from the "bench days" soon after, sometimes I face the bench in hidden forms even while working in a project from onsite. This includes the last few days in which the important work I had done in office is writing proverbs on the white board of my cubicle and finding out how much time it takes to walk from my cubicle to Srikanth's. But still, when Satman asked while returning from lunch at 2 PM, if I want him to drop me at home instead of office, I said no.

I had left the ipod in office and I need it in home.

Gains reveal the losses before

I found a reason to hate my employer today. Working in an Indian IT services company; you are expected and bound to work after hours. To be politically correct, After hours starts when you are snoring loud in your sleep. If you do not usually snore, then you are unlucky to have no after hours and you must work 24 hrs every day. But this had never been a problem to me. For me, it is like what the hell. It is just another hour of staring at your screen. Not a big deal. So things were the same and fine till yesterday. We are working on the client site where after hours are perceived in the dictionary way. Any minute after 6PM at local time zone is termed as after hours. For some, any time after they leave the office (might be even 2PM on Saturdays) are termed after hours. And people don’t really like to be disturbed with work at that time. And for the last few days, I had been following the client time leaving office early by 6PM itself. Don’t ask me why? Many of my colleagues are aware of this blog and they would know the secrets.

So anyway, I was back in my home very early yesterday and after seeing the evening show "Hoodwinked" took a short nap. It was at 10PM which is the time I used to return from office, my phone started to beep. It happened to be a colleague from the client side who wanted me to look at check some code. Though the code was just two lines, the call went on for at least 10 mins more on the courtesy "Were you sleeping?", "Sorry for disturbing you so late?", "I feel so sorry", "You are really helpful" and so many regretful words which made me doubt if the time was 3 or 4AM. 10 PM was the time, I usually think about dinner or time to relax away from work. In the next 15 mins, the job was done and I had to end the call after getting compliments for being so helpful. I felt I was saving the world again. This was not really the reason to hate my employer. If thanks and praises were not enough for working for 15 mins in the early evening, I found a large packet of 100 chocolates at my desk in the morning. Though my employer had given such compliments through "Thanks" mail and Pizza for dinner, a pack of Hershey milk chocolates for 15 mins of work post office hours is like getting paid for working after hours which is a strange thing to happen in Indian IT industries.

Granted with the benefits
I deserve; angry I am,
For the rightful rewards
I was denied earlier.

Reject to Rejoice - A fake false interview

Welcome back! This is Iris reporting from the Injey's cubcile, the all-in-all Production Support and Quality Assurance technical Lead. He is recently noticed for rejecting every Migration submitted by the Development team and also been the main person in raising Hemant's barometer to the highest for the last 3 months successively.

Iris: Hello Injey! We are thankful to you for sparing few mins admist your busy schedule.
INJEY: Its always a pleasure, Iris.
Iris: Tell us INJEY, how do you feel about rejecting every migration from the developers.
INJEY: Its really a big achievement. I am thankful to all the developers for that.
Iris: What do you think made it possible for you to achieve this?
INJEY: Well, it is basically "The Will to Reject". And you must also have the "Unwillingness to Work". After all, if you approve the migration in UAT, you will get more work.
Iris: That is interesting. Do you think that more you reject, the less the client satisfaction?
INJEY: That is a wrong assumption. The more I reject the migrations, the more we ensure that the client believes our commitment to quality. So we are adding client satisfaction.
Iris: So how do you feel about the developers INJEY?
INJEY: As I said before, I am very thankful for them. Without their minor mistakes here and there, I would not have been able to reach where I am now.
Iris: Thats so wonderful to hear. How do they feel about you?
INJEY: Hmmm... I never thought about that. (laughing) I mean... I think... They are making me a happy person by helping me reject more migrations. Obviously, they are working towards making another person happy and they should feel happy themselves.
Iris: Which migration do you think was the difficult one in getting rejected?
INJEY: Hmmm... Thats a tough question. My eyes are so sharp, that I would easily identify a defect whenever I want. (laughs again) But to answer your question..hmmm... (looking up)... the UPDATE query that they sent last week was a tough one to reject.
Iris: So how did you reject that? It must have been painful.
INJEY: Yeah! It was a very difficult situtation. If I approve the migration, I will have to wait 30 minutes before going to lunch. So I spent 5 minutes in checking each letter of the UPDATE query and finally identfied that he had given AMOUNT = 0 instead of AMOUNT = 0.00. It was a serious standard issue. I immediately sent it back to Hemant whose barometer shot up again and a critical weather alert was issued on the developers.
Iris: That is really amazing. What do you like to convey to everyone inspiring to become like you?
INJEY: Always remember Nobody is Perfect. So no migration can be perfect. Reject to Rejoice.

THE ABOVE CONVERSATION IS A PERFECT EXAMPLE OF COMPLETELY FALSE INFORMATION THAT PEOPLE MIGHT BE RUMORING ABOUT.

But indeed, the introduction was true though.

Sugar, Apple and Pizza

Yesterday was one of my best days in US. It started very good at 9 AM(thats when I woke up) and rushing to office in the rain enjoying the moody climate which tempted me to get back home and sleep. But of course, the phone call from offshore reminded that I better be in office to face the database failure. But then, things went on for a toss with 2 hours meeting with the client trying to figure out how we can fix the sugarless coffee. Should we add more sugar or buy a new coffee? Client finally decided to mix salt instead of sugar. This immediately raised another question on how to differentiate salt and sugar and another 3 hours meeting was held to brainstorm the differences. It took the whole day to explain the client that tastes are different while he was still reluctant saying that both start with the letter 'S'. The final verdict came out to use sweetener instead and the team is working on mixing the day old coffee with sweetener.

But these fights over coffee are usual in our project. We have had our fights on Tea, Milk and even donuts. But what made me dejected completely was that it happened yesterday on the day of the release of Mac OS X Leopard. My dream plan of owning an Apple T-shirt was spilled by the useless talks on stupid coffee. If you do not understand, Apple was giving out free t-shirts promoting the new OS release. And to add to the fury, Saravanan showed himself in the new X marked t-shirt. He had went to the Apple store without me. I wanted a change badly and we went to Cici's Pizza for dinner.
The moment we entered the restaurant we realised that we are in for a treat. The regular buffet was over, but the owner was kind enough to give us personal buffet with any pizza made to order. And the menu was not just the pizza. There were salads, pasta with two sauces and three types of dessert. The pizza was served hot directly from the oven. If this is not enough to make you drool, there was a full plate of hot garlic bread which was so soft that it melted in our mouth. All the day troubles were forgotten in an instant infront of the tasty and delicious food. What a wonderful day it was!

Database crash - Pulikesi style

ஆஃப்ஸோர்:

offshore:

ராஜ ராஜ
Raja Raja

பிரோடக்ஸன் செர்‌வர் போன
Producton server pona

ஊ.ஏ.ட் ரிபேர் ஆன

UAT repair aana

காக்நோஸ் ஃபேல் ஆகிய
Cognos fail aakiya

ஸ்பேஸ் இஸ்சு இருக்கிற
Space issue irukira

பெர்பார்மன்ஸ் பிராபிளம் உடைய
Performance problem udaya

பிராஜக்டுக்குறிய
Projectukiriya

சப்போர்ட் லீடு

Support leadu
வரார்.. வரார்.. வரார்..

varaar.. varaar.. varaar

புலிகேசி (ஆன்-சைட் சப்போர்ட் லீட்):
Pulikesi (onsite support lead)

கவனித்தீர்களா, இவன் என்னை இன்செல்ட் செய்கிறான்.
kavanitheergala, ivan ennai insult seikiraan

உதவியாளர்:

Assistant:

எப்படி லீடு அவர்களே, ஒண்ணும் புரியவில்லையே

eppadi leedu avargale, onnum puriyavillaiyae.

புலிகேசி: இன்னைக்கு பேக்கப் இல்லாமல் டேடாபேஸ் கிரேஷ் ஆனதை சொல்ல மறந்துவிட்டான் இவன்.
Pulikesi: backup ilaamal database crash aanathai solla maranthuvitaan ivan.

ஆஃப்ஸோர்: அயய்யோ! மன்னித்துவிடுங்கள் சப்போர்ட் லீடே!
Offshore: ayaiyoo! mannithu vidungal support leadu!

புலிகேசி: அது! க.க.க.போ

Pulikesi: Athu! Ka.. Ka.. Ka.. Po

You know what!

Exactly at 4:02 PM,

(click here to know)

Something happened

(click here to know)

But it is nothing new

(click here to know)

You can easily guess

(click here to know)

What else could it be?

(click here to know)

Isn't it obvious?

(click here to know)

Don't even bother about it

(click here to know)

Its the same as every other day

(click here to know)

You know it already

(click here to know)

You want me to say the words?

(click here to know)

Come on! Just leave it

(click here to know)

If you insist very much

(click here to know)

Here we go again!!!!

(click here to know)

The server is gone. Poyae pochu!

Intha Ullam Ketkumae More!!!!!

What else can i say!
[+/-]Click here

The server crashed again!

Crash-d-ay 2: Crash or a curse

I wanted to name this post as Crash-d-ay 2: Crashdays, mainly because sequels to many animal movies will have more creatures and will be named in Plural. Few examples are Alien, Anaconda, Garfield (the sequel had two Garfield cats though nothing acted like Garfield), 101 Dalmatians and more. But when things went chaotic, I had to consider it as a curse and that’s why I chose the current title.

Now hear the news. As if my post triggered the curse, I am facing so many crashes and a day with all the servers running fine has become a dream. Let’s face it. Just two weeks after a Production server crash that led to 48 hours outage, if we face crashes in two other production servers, there must be some suspicious activity going around.

1. It was last Wednesday night that one of our severity-2 production servers crashed bringing down some twenty loads. The recovery had to be done very quickly and was completed with just 1 minute to spare before the jobs would get timed out.

2. It was Thursday afternoon few minutes before I can leave for lunch, the application server crashed terminating all the severity 1 jobs that ran for about 4 hrs and would have completed in the next hour.

3. Same day, I called my roommate and he said "Oh my God!" instead of saying "Hi!” At first, I thought he mistook me for God. But then I found that his system crashed the same moment, he picked my call. Do you think its coincidence? I very much hope so.

4. Sunday Morning, I was woken up by the offshore team with the news of another server crash. With my thoughts left on the server all the day, we lost both the cricket matches and I was bowled out for a duck in the first match. I couldn’t concentrate on the game was all I said to the press after the match.

5. Tuesday night 2:40 AM. Offshore woke me up about the failure of the same server again. This time, it was worse with the server offline for the whole night. I was left as they would definitely wake me up anytime to start the applications. At last, with off shore’s help, I took short naps and the server was back online at 9 AM. The day was pretty bad as the server was still not stable and we had to monitor it closely.

6. Wednesday night 12:11 AM, offshore called. I know the reason before they could say anything. The server crashed again. With the on-call UNIX person fixing the problem in less than an hour, I was so happy, I could sleep well. But then the offshore connectivity was interrupted and I had to work till 4 AM. With all loads recovered and offshore trying to help as much as they can, I took a short nap.

7. Thursday morning 7AM. I was woken up with the usual greeting. "Server crashed again". The server is still not back to normal and we had to do most of the tasks manually. So there I am awake waiting to hear another crash.

Sorry for making this post more like a system log. Looking at all the server logs I am still not back in mood to write a funny post. Now if any of you are experts in Vaasthu, advise me on the direction at which we should keep the server to prevent it from further crashes. Or even a ritual is acceptable. No dark magic or a voodoo though.

Oops! I did it again.

I am the creator of my own demise. I always bring troubles to myself with my slippery tongue and illogical brain. Starting from the letter I wrote to HOD about the college intranet to the frank (insensitive as told by my friends) opinion on religions, all the problems are created only by me. And this time, my credibility was put under test as I claimed the blame for rolling off Satman from our project. And trust me, I had no hands in that incident. Satman works(just for words) as a contractor in our team and had been with us for more than 10 months. So when time came for him to be released from the project, our PM talked to him and gave him "The Date". Though one might be happy to leave this project after 10 months of scratching the same desk, he have to plan for his India trip right away and it is worrying that Thanksgiving day is still a month away, so getting all gadgets and flying to India is not an cheap option here.

While we were brainstorming on these test cases(yeah yeah.. its called chatting), Pradeesh came up in AIM and was asking about "The Date" to Satman. With devil's mind at work, Satman replied that I betrayed about Satish to our PM and that gave him the boot. It was fun after that as he kept on complaining about me and my evil plans to replace Satish. By this time, Pradeesh was in big shock and couldn't believe that I would be such a sinister. I just prayed that he should not say that he expected it very much from me. So after convincing him that I indeed betrayed Satman, thanks to my few chat messages on how I planned all the way to be the spy for my PM.

After having fun for a while, we invited Pradeesh for a chat and laughed for we made him a fool. He too laughed away and left a note saying that others from the team were listening to that chat session and all concluded not to trust me! The problem with rumors is that you might cut the trunk, but the branches will still keep growing and spreads everywhere. Now that I have made Pradeesh that it was just a joke, but how am I going to stop this fast spreading hoax???

This is what we call

"என் தலையில நானே மண்ண வாரி போட்டுகிட்டேன்"