Well, That Was Awkward

A couple of days after achieving my six-year work anniversary at AOL, I got laid off.
With that in mind, having just hit the same milestone at my current job two days ago, I was a bit unnerved this morning when I received an invitation to a mandatory meeting with my SVP in the afternoon, particularly given that there were several HR representatives included among the invitees.
Fortunately, while the meeting did concern a major reorganization, I was not directly impacted by it, nor was anyone on my team.
Unfortunately, the same could not be said for many of my colleagues.
Added to the general “that sucks” vibe of it was some serious awkwardness.  During the meeting, they put up a color-coded org chart showing who was and was not impacted by the reorg.
Along with a handful of others, my team kind of stood out as being and island of the unaffected color in a sea of the blue that represented the people who were affected.
(My team not being affected was also specifically mentioned several times.)
Obviously my sympathy for the others wins out over my feelings of personal discomfort, but as my team and I walked out while the others were being handed pamphlets that outlined the details of their potential severance packages – they have the option to re-apply for the limited number of positions that will be available, or to try to find another job somewhere else in the company – I have to say that I felt like we were getting some pointed – and pointy – stares in our direction.
Still, while it definitely is a shame for all those affected, and they have my sympathies…well, I’ve been through this kind of thing so many times that I’m kind of inured to it.  It’s pretty much the nature of the beast, and it’s a potential reality that those of us who work in the industry face every single day.  (And will continue to face.)

Why Do I Work So Hard?

Because my boss could kick my ass:



Related:

Boss:  Don't start being mean to me.  You're going to make me cry and then you'll feel bad.
Me:  You don't get to play the girl card with me.
Boss:  Fair enough.

An Off Day And A Day Off

Today, everything was just...off.
I was reminded of an episode of Dexter and one of the Treehouse of Horror episodes of The Simpsons.
In the Dexter episode, he's having an "off" period, and they illustrate this - to great effect - by running the usual opening title sequence, in which we see Dexter engaging in his morning routine, in the middle of the episode (complete with theme music), except that everything is just going wrong.
For example, the opening shot of the title sequences is a close-up of a mosquito biting his arm, which Dexter then swats before getting out of bed.
In the "off" version, we get that same shot, except that he misses the mosquito.  Similar mishaps ensue with the rest of his morning.
Similarly, The Simpsons episode runs the standard opening title sequence, but everything goes disastrously and fatally wrong.
In my case, I woke up with a headache.
Upon going into the bathroom to remove my Gentle Molding lenses, I found that the right lens hadn't properly adhered to my eye, and had lodged itself in the inside corner.  This had caused my eye to become irritated, made it a hassle to get the thing out, and had prevented me from getting the vision-improving benefits of wearing the lens.  So my vision in my right eye was a bit fuzzy.  The left eye, however, was just fine, which threw things out of whack, because normally, even when my vision is at its best, it's always better in my right eye than in my left.
I then proceeded to just completely bungle the rest of my morning routine, doing things out of sequence, or forgetting to do certain other things entirely.
Despite the headache, I decided to try working out.  The warm up on the elliptical went okay, though it wasn't terribly pleasant, and I soon got on with the rest of the workout with minimal discomfort...until I did some chin-ups, at which point my head started pulsating like something out of a science fiction movie.
So, okay, no workout.
I took a long hot shower, hoping that it would help with the headache - which seemed like a sinus problem - and to prevent myself from leaving too much earlier than usual, having shaved time off my usual routine by skipping most of the workout.
I got out to my car and found that my remote key wouldn't unlock the door.  Usually, I keep the key in my wallet, as I just need to have it near the car for it to work, so I took it out and tried unlocking it by actually using the button on the key itself.  The key didn't light up, so I figured the battery was dead.
I went inside, replaced the battery, and found that it still wouldn't work.  So it was back inside to find my spare key - in which the battery was not dead but dying, which caused problems later in the day, such as delays in locking/unlocking - and, eventually, was on my way later than I normally would be.
Naturally, it was raining, and naturally everyone on the road was in full panic mode.
The day wore on with nothing in particular going wrong, but even so, everything still felt off.  It was like walking through a dream, and not a particularly good one at that.  Still, given how irritating my dreams often are, that actually added to the dreamlike quality.
My boss, noting the redness of my eye, and my general malaise, asked me if I needed to go home, but I told her that I would stick it out.
After all, today was the day I was going to be recognized for being nominated for the MVP Award.
As I mentioned a while back, we recently had an All Hands meeting.  Normally, during the recognition portion of the meeting, they recognize not only the members of the organization who were winners of awards, but also the nominees.  They also, normally, recognize people who have achieved professional certifications.
Since the previous meeting, I had been nominated for two awards and achieved the PMP certification.
For the first time ever, in the interests of keeping things moving, they elected to not recognize award nominees or certifications.
I was pissed.
I mean, I try not to be paranoid, or take things personally, but when my name should be brought up several times, and they deliberately choose not to mention the things that would cause my name to be brought up...well, it felt personal.  (I don't think I'm entirely paranoid, either, and maybe someday I'll explain why I think that is the case.)
So, regardless of how off I felt, as I told my boss, given how much bitching I did about not getting recognized at our All Hands meeting, I was damn sure going to get today's recognition.
I did tell her, though, that I fully intended to leave after the recognition thing.
Afterwards, when we were discussing the little ceremony, she said, "Go home.  That's your MVP Award from me:  you can leave at 2:30."  I said, "I was going to do that anyway."
This got me a "Shut up and just let me pretend I'm doing something nice for you."
She then decided that she would give me one of those coupons that managers have been given to hand out to their employees, like the one I got a while back from my (former) Director for a half-day.
In this case, I got a full day.
In the "For" section of the coupon, she wrote "Losing the MVP Award."
Meh, it's still a day off, which is better than an off day...

More Of Whatever The Hell It Is I Do All Day

Because I don't feel I've bored you enough, I thought I'd post more about my job, starting with some of the acronyms I encounter on a daily basis:

PMO
OSS
VSS
CMDB
CMTS
ORT
UAT
EMS
PMS (No, not that kind)
RNOC
TOC
EOC
RACI
BTS
BPS
OMSE
SLA
MSA
SWOT
KPI
MARS
...and so forth.
Are there even more than that?  Oh yes.
Do I know what they all stand for?  Yes, actually.  (To make matters even worse, some of them stand for more than one thing.)
Do I find that sad?  What do you think?

He Who Laughs Last Department:
Post-reorg, our group has been trying to focus on quantifying the work we do in the form of easy to understand metrics, in part to show how overburdened we are.
As part of that - and to help better align the enterprise-wide processes, and to account for our new responsibilities - we're putting a major emphasis on definining our processes and requirements, and requiring other groups to adhere to them when they engage us.  (It's actually a major victory to have them engaging us at all, and even moreso that we're getting them to engage us before new products launch.)
Towards that end, we're looking at ways to streamline the engagement process and to make it easy for external groups to know exactly what we require and to provide it to us, and, in my estimation, the best way to do that (right now, at least) is to put our Entrance Checklist online on our SharePoint site, so that people can have a single location where they can go to fill out the Checklist without having the confusion of e-mailing files around and running into version control issues.
Unfortunately, our current deployment of SharePoint is...not great.  So while it's a workable (in theory) solution, it's far from ideal, but our only option is to turn the Checklist into a survey.
A new project was recently announced, and my boss and I agreed that this would be an ideal time to (finally) get the revamped Checklist online and start directing people to it.
So that's what the hell I was doing all day yesterday.  Well, for most of the day, at any rate.  I also rewrote and revised some process docs.
I ran into some problems - due to the limitations of our SharePoint site - right away, so the whole thing took longer than it should have, and finally I had to tell my boss, "Yeah...let's just send them the actual Word doc version of the Checklist; I don't think I'll have this up and running today."
However, I kept working on it until the bitter end.  Or at least close to the bitter end.
A bit before 2 my boss came around and said, "Get out of here, willya?  Go, have a good weekend.  I'm not stressing about the Checklist."
I wasn't exactly stressing about it either, really, but I had come to feel that the survey was mocking me.  I could hear its derisive laughter.
Still, I don't argue when the boss tells me to leave early...especially considering that I had to leave early anyway because I had an eye appointment.
On the way to my car I had something of an epiphany, and realized that I'd been approaching the survey all wrong.
So I thought, "We'll see who's laughing come Tuesday morning, survey!"

Technically Incorrect Department:
Boss:  You're more technical with that than I am.
Me:  Yes, I'm more technical than you in general...which is bizarre, considering that you have an Engineering degree and I have an English degree.

At The Movies Department:
On Tuesday my department had a joint "team outing' with another department, which involved going to the fancy new theater here in Leesburg and having a catered lunch, and then taking in a movie.  We each got to choose whatever movie, playing within the outing timeframe of 11:30-4, we chose.  I opted for Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
It was okay.  It was certainly better than being at work, and it was free, so I hardly have anything to complain about.
Plus I worked from home in the morning, as it hardly made sense to drive in to work for a few hours, then turn around and drive back to Leesburg.

Whatever The Hell It Is I Do All Day

I often refer to my job as being “whatever the hell it is I do,” upon which I also often append “all day.”
I refer to my job in this fashion because 1. My job, while often hectic and challenging, is pretty boring. 2. The actual details of what I do are difficult to explain. 3. I try not to take my job (or myself) too seriously.
Well, prepare for 1, because I’m about to take a crack at 2.
(Nothing is going to change 3.)
First of all is my title:  Senior Analyst – Integration.
The obvious first question is, “Who gives a shit?”
However, the second obvious question is, “What does that mean?  What sort of integration are you analyzing?”
Well, the thing to consider is…I mean…well, it’s kind of like…hm.
If pressed, in a more serious setting, I generally respond with, “I’m essentially a Project Manager.”
That’s all well and good if you know what being a Project Manager entails, but there are, no doubt, plenty of people out there who don’t.
So.
I suppose that I should first explain a term and concept:  NOC, or Network Operations Center.
Longtime readers may recall that for several years I worked in a NOC – particularly those longtime readers who worked in that NOC with me.
In any case, here’s one definition of NOC:

Stands for "Network Operations Center." It is the central location where a company's servers and networking equipment are located. The NOC may reside either within a company's campus or at an external location. Smaller businesses and organizations often have an internal NOC, in which local technicians administer and monitor the servers. Larger companies may have a NOC setup at a location developed specifically to house server equipment.
[…]
While NOCs are used by all Web hosting companies and ISPs, they are also useful to companies whose services are not related to the Internet. Many companies use a NOC to manage internal communications, administer employee e-mail accounts, and backup data. Because maintaining an Internet connection is vital to most businesses today, most NOCs are monitored 24/7, with automatic alerts that notify technicians when servers or network connections are down.
(Source)

This definition is essentially correct, with the caveat that in some companies, such as the one I work for, the NOC isn’t necessarily where the actual equipment is located.  Actually, I’d say that’s the case with most companies, or, at the very least, it’s not where all of the equipment is located.
A NOC is, however, a centralized location for monitoring, troubleshooting, and repairing issues.
In any case, as a cable company, my company provides a wide range of products and services to individuals and businesses, such as Internet access, telephony, and video.  As a result, there are all manner of devices, data connections (fiber, coaxial cable, etc.), and software applications that can – and do – stop working at any time, for any number of reasons.
And that’s where the NOC comes in; they need to be aware of the breakdowns, and have to work to restore service as quickly as possible.
And that’s where I come in.
My department’s function, historically, has been to ensure that as new products and services which require monitoring and troubleshooting support efforts from the NOC are rolled out to customers, the NOC is ready and able to provide that support.
In terms of actual deliverables, this means providing support process flows, operations guides, training and training materials, ensuring that the NOC techs have access to all of the necessary tools for monitoring and troubleshooting, escalation contacts and procedures, verifying that all of the previously-listed items actually perform their intended functions, and, ultimately, getting the NOC management to say, “Yes, we are officially ready to support this product or service.”
And that would be the “integration” mentioned in my title, though to be honest, “integration” is a holdover from our group’s old name, “Integration Services.”  (We’re now called “Operational Support and Readiness,” and we’re part of a – slightly, for the time being – larger group called “Service Transition.”)
In terms of day-to-day activities, this entails reading through technical documents and network architecture diagrams that describe what the product or service is and how the associated equipment and applications it runs on actually work, identifying the potential failure points, attending lots and lots of meetings with the cross-functional project teams that are actually designing, documenting, and implementing the new product or service, and working from there to determine what the expectations are of the NOC, what the NOC will need to do in order to deliver on those expectation, and how the NOC will do it.
Understanding the specs and architecture documents requires being at least passingly familiar with the terminology and device functionality – you may not know exactly how a switch works, for example, but you do understand what it does – or at the very least an ability to identify the people who are familiar with it and can explain it to you, and you have to be able to translate all of that into terms that someone who may be only slightly more (or even considerably less) technically skilled than you are can understand.
So other than going to meetings and reading through technical documents, what do I actually do?  Well, as mentioned, I write operations guides, I develop training materials – sometimes I actually provide the classroom-style training – all of which I’ve distilled from the information gleaned in the tech docs and meetings, but also through a defined requirements process and checklist that spells out exactly what I need to have in order to provide the NOC what it needs.
That entails managing individuals and groups outside of the NOC and my department who have – in theory, at least – the information I need, which can mean wading through office politics, departmental rivalries, personality clashes,varying levels of expertise and knowledge.  And sometimes the information, for any of those reasons, and many, many more, might never become available to me, in which case I still have to ensure that the NOC can support the new product or service.  How do I, and the other members of my team do that?  Honestly, I don’t know, but somehow we manage.
Mostly I think it’s creativity, a high tolerance for frustration, and a stubborn refusal to just let things drop.
Of course, there are all sorts of other activities beyond what’s involved in preparing the NOC to support new products or services, such as documenting and refining our internal processes, archiving project materials, serving as a SME (Subject Matter Expert) on various processes and tools, administering our internal Web site…
Recently, after the reorg – or “Functional Realignment” – the scope and or scale of what my team does has expanded a bit to include other groups, which means we’re no longer as exclusively-focused on the NOC as we had once been.  Basically, while we have had three people added to the team, and some of our old responsibilities have transitioned to other groups, the net result is still that we’re doing much, much more work with very few resources.
So, yeah.
That, in a wordy nutshell, is whatever the hell it is I do all day.

Perchance To Dream

This past weekend was an especially irritating one at work.
As I’ve mentioned in the past, there are different stations on our desk that we take turns working . Thanks to the way things had rotated, Thursday was my day to work the busiest and most frustrating station.
Luckily it turned out to be a relatively easy day, though still more irritating than the other stations usually are.
Still, as Scott pointed out, I at least got it over with right away and didn’t have to have the thought of working that station hanging over me for the rest of the weekend.
Of course, that was before Scott was out sick on Saturday, the day he was supposed to work that station, and I had to fill in for him.
Saturday is usually the easiest day to work that station, though, as most of the issues that we deal with on that station are Monday through Friday sort of problems.
Not so this Saturday, which apparently felt it had to go out of its way to make up for my relatively easy Thursday.
Throughout it all I kept semi-jokingly repeating Dante’s whiny line from the movie Clerks: I’m not even supposed to be here today!
Oh well. At least it’s over now.
Until the next weekend.
But for the record, that’s how I spent my St. Patrick’s Day, though given that I’m not Irish and am no longer a practicing drunk it’s not as though I would have been out celebrating anyway.
Still, the stress of work and the fact that I hadn’t slept too well on Thursday and Friday night left me pretty tired when I got home, so I went to bed relatively early last night.
This, of course, only meant that I woke up incredibly early, so I didn’t actually get any more sleep than I would have if I’d gone to bed at the normal time.
Even though it was still dark out when I woke up I couldn’t manage to get back to sleep, so I got up and sat around doing pretty much nothing for about an hour before finally taking another crack at sleep.
When I did, I had semi-lucid dreams about having semi-lucid dreams.
It was very strange, and I have to wonder if dreaming about dreaming won’t tear a hole in the fabric of spacetime or something.
(I’m reminded of that episode of The Simpsons in which Homer is at work daydreaming, and we see that he’s daydreaming about napping, and that in his daydream about napping he’s dreaming about eating.)
In any case, I was dreaming that in my dreams I couldn’t quite control the action, but I could at least direct it to some extent, all of which led me to a room full of hot chicks who were very…friendly, which ultimately led to disappointment in the form of me waking up, both in the dream and in reality.
Or did I just wake up into another dream?
It’s hard to say; most of my dreams, like reality, tend to suck, so anything’s possible, I guess.
Once I did get up I eventually whiled away the hours by doing some more search engine submission. Talk about a dream come true!
At one of the submission sites I encountered this error:

Error
The url submitted belongs to the directory or is in process of acceptation

Yeah, it’s just like they tell you in rehab: acceptation is the answer to all of life’s problems.
Wait, I just realized that Word isn’t flagging that as an error. Acceptation is an actual word? WTF?
This isn’t a dream: it’s a nightmare!