Blogger was down for most of the day and night yesterday. In a way, for me at least, that was a good thing 'cause I managed to get a little more sleep than usual. Evenings around this joint usually begin with dinner followed by network (gag) and local news and weather. Carolyn and I then try to catch up on anything we have not discussed earlier in the day. That is getting harder and harder for us, as she is becoming quite difficult to understand. It's frustrating for both of us.
We then prepare Carolyn for bed and after she is asleep, I sit down at the computer. I sometimes stay there until long after midnight because I find it difficult to sleep these days. I seldom sleep for more than four hours before rambling around the house for an hour or two. I'll then return to bed and sort of nap for another hour or so before giving up and starting another day. Tired. The new normal for most of us, I guess. Most of my friends have the same complaint, although the description of their insomnia seem not quite as severe as mine.
Anyway, I suspect someone in the IT department at "Blogger" managed to crash the whole system while trying to fix a bug - there had been a few minor outages previous to this one. That's an interesting term, "bug." Back in the day, real bugs did real damage to early computers and now when anything at all goes wrong, an army of IT types go insane trying to find the bug. Back then, the tech would expose the innards of the machine, physically locate and remove the bug, button it back up and hope for the best. Virtual bugs are more difficult to spot than the ones encountered by the first generation of IT workers and the pest control guys of today, and now it seems to take much more than bug spray and a pair of tweezers to fix the problem.
I have been at war with the IT guys ever since they first lied to me. That first lie was told in 1967, and I have never forgotten it nor forgiven them. I was promised a four day work week if only I'd learn to change the paper punch tape when the blight on the counter started to beep, and trust the information it provided me. Yeah, right. Everybody knows how that has worked out forty-five years later. Now IT equipment takes up most of the budget we used to spend on real people, and nothing ever works.
I dreaded Monday morning the last couple of years of my career. IT came in late every Friday, after we all had left for the week end, and "fixed" all the problems. More often than not, by the time Monday rolled into town, they had done their job and gone home to whatever cave was available. We worker bees would sit at our desks, push the "on" button and wait. There were lots of times we'd wait til the IT guys could be reached at home, dress, drive back to work, and turn on something they had left off.
As a pilot, I'm used to something we call "checklists." I start at the top, work my way down the list, and by the time I'm ready to leave the ground, so is the airplane. I've never taken off without starting the engine. Why is it such a simple procedure is not used by IT guys? I'm sure Plato or some other great intellect has thought about this and has the answer, but so far the body of work on this subject remains hidden far beyond my humble ability to locate it.
Seriously, computers have done a lot to improve individual productivity, but they have not helped at all with day to day job stress. In fact, I believe they are a major cause of the increase in the health and mental problems that are being experienced these days. There's less physical activity on the job, and the workplace is filled with more stressful positions than it was fifty years ago when I began my career. I fault the revolution brought about by the universal usage of computers for this change.
That said, still, I thank Blogger for this forum and for providing a place where I am able to scream my frustration with this subject and many others far more ably than Peter Finch could do by yelling out his window. My screams are heard around the world, with regular readers from continents I have not even visited. I'm amazed. And, Blogger has provided this space, at my command ninety-nine percent of the time I wish to use it, for free.
This forum really is a miracle, unavailable at any price, before these times.
I am not a programmer, but I have worked in or with IT groups for much of the past 30 years. Most of them do it wrong. Before you roll out a new feature or utility or software release, you should launch it in a test environment that duplicates your everyday software configuration but is completely separate from it. The big companies do it right, but everybody else cuts corners -- either the "test environment" isn't an accurate duplicate, or not enough testing is done. Or they just make changes on the fly directly to the production environment. IT at my current job is the worst I've ever seen -- they don't give them the money to do it right.
ReplyDeleteI will say that, as far as business is concerned, computers have always been about allowing you to do the same work, or more, with fewer people. That's the way it was sold. Whether those fewer people would be happier was not part of the equation. And there is more stress.
I have grown to hate email on the job -- people use it to make endless, basically thoughtless requests and demands that they could not make to your face successfully -- because you would immediately point out the problems in their request. But they make the request and copy management and then run off into a million meetings. So you have to spend a lot of time writing a formal rebuttal and taking their points apart and copying your boss to justify yourself and point out that there might be trouble from Mr. X... who needs it?
At any rate, that's what I hate about IT on the job. But the "real" Internet, the place for the rest of us, I've always loved. It's been a place where people can express themselves and share what they like. And where you can get the "straight poop" although it's always up to you to decide who you believe. Wikipedia, for example, is a brilliant creation. Blogs make it possible for anybody to have a website now, where back in the day it was more difficult.
'Morning, Boomer. The IT workers used to love stopping by to work on my machine. I was the "grumpy old guy" who tried to help them whenever they needed something from me that was covered by my job discription. I never got upset with them nor blamed them for the problems with our software.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, several different IT Department Directors over the course of my stay at Hinderance By Government headquarters did feel my discomfort. I constantly questioned their ability to run the department, asked "Why" when idiotic dictums were issued in their name and in general let them know how I felt about the value of a machine, compared to a actual person, in all aplications save those requiring unending calculations and data storage and retrieval. You'd have hated my emails!
They were always unhappy with me. Gosh, I guess I was almost as successful making their lives miserable as they were disrupting mine!