[geeks] observations and rants.

[Bill Bradford]

On Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 02:30:32PM -0500, s at avoidant.org wrote:
> Yeperoo. In 2000, I happily jumped ship when OS/2 was phased out of the
> place i'd been working because I found it hard to switch to a
> subordinate position under someone with whom I'd been an equal. It was
> all done on good terms, but I couldn't go from senior OS/2 admin to
> junior AIX and feel good about it. I had another job in 3 weeks, and it
> only took that long because I was picky.

Mine:

Had regional ISP.  with "datacenter".  Boss walks through datacenter one day, as
he always did.  Noticed an E450 plugged into the wall (generator power) 
instead of the rack power strip (UPS and generator).

Note that this E450 had been setup/installed over six months before, at the
same time as a bunch of other E450s.  Nobody remembered *who* had set it up,
for all we knew, it could have been the boss or the head networking guy.

Other sysadmin and I got called in.  Got chewed out (and I mean, yelling, 
screaming, personal insults, and tools thrown around the machine room, by
the boss).  Got told we were idiots, and that we would both report from then
on to the new PFY junior-admin-just-moved-up-from-tech-support.

Then, "Go home for the rest of the day, before I do something I'll regret".

I went home, started calling in favors and sending out resumes.  

Went in the next morning.  Boss shows up 2 hours later.  I eventually go into
his office to talk to him, and he starts chewing me out again.  I told him I
wasnt there to get my ass chewed, but to decide if I was going to stay with 
the company.  I took some "Vacation" and the rest of the week off.

This was a Tuesday I think; I left my pager and cellphone on my desk and 
drove home.  This was 10am or so.

At noon, I had a lunch "interview" with another local ISP, who put an offer on
the table (but it would have been a pay *cut*).  That afternoon, I had some
tenative bites on my resume.  

Went in Saturday night to talk to the other admin and the head networking
guy while they were doing maintenance.  Other admin told me that the afternoon
after I left my stuff and went home, the boss apologized and told us to forget
everything that had been said, the PFY was no longer our manager, etc.

I cleaned out my desk Sunday afternoon, left my pager and cellphone on my desk,
and slid my cardkey under the networking guy's door.

I resigned via e-mail the following Monday morning, unplugged my ISDN line,
and never went back.

Funny thing is, from what I heard, it was another couple of weeks before they
actually took down that E450 and moved its power cord.  Note that the machine
never actually went *down* or was affected by where it was plugged in.

Two years later, they tried to rehire me. 8-)

Bill

-- 
Bill Bradford
mrbill at mrbill.net
Austin, TX