Whirling doom

[sobrique]

Do you ever get that feeling, that doom is whirling overhead? I do. Because this place has been 'in a bit of a state' for a while now. Nothing _specifically_ wrong, just damn near everyone busy. This means things start ... slipping. Falling behind. Not getting done.

And in systems admin, this means disasters waiting to happen. Just had my first - data recovery from 3 days ago. Filesystem hasn't been backed up for 5 days.

Unfortunate that.

Problem is, there's more 'things'. Not specifically backups, but stuff that has just slipped down to-do lists. Because 'it'll wait'. And wait, and wait, and wait, and the jump out on you on a really crappy day, and beat you with a stick, because you screwed up.

And you know you screwed up. Oh yes. You _didn't_ check that thing properly, and you went on holiday with not enough free tapes in your backup library.
Sometimes, shit just happens.

Other times, it gets built up until you get an explosion.

Comments

[lostdreamer666.livejournal.com]

Arse.

[velvet-nothing.livejournal.com]

Deep breaths, hon. You can't be expected to remember *everything*, and you seem to be expected to.

[necessitysslave.livejournal.com]

I think I can more than sympathize with you.

The company I work for has been doing worse than that for 2-2.5 of the 3 years I've worked for the company.

We have gone through a series of managerial types. most of them are of the opinion that the network will miraculously fix itself. so now we have the state that if certain components fail we have large scale outages (people without the services that they pay for) and quite a few of those could have been avoided with good maintenance.

Our customer saving team will throw money at customers to keep them even though the profit we get from the average customer is less than the smallest amount of money that they give out. so for most of the customers they save they are loosing the company money. ps. did I mention that you could go into this department straight from school and get the equivalent wage of about 40k through bonus's and you loose money for every customer you allow to disconnect.

Every department that is actually doing the company good is being squeezed and tightened until it hurts. The quality of work (which was always questionable is now atrocious and getting worse).

The company is giving the impression of an overweight 70 year old doing a belly flop into a pool of piranhas from 60ft. But am I worried for my job? Not too badly because the company appears to be surviving inspite of itself for the last 5-10 years!

So possibly it won't be too bad. Possibly .....

But the one rule that applies inside my company and others that I have seen is, cover you ass.

If things do fall over because of something that you have not had time to do or not had time to do properly then document and submit how much stuff is falling behind. Request Help ie an increase in the size of your dept, even if you know it will be denied. Then when things do fall over say that you are understaffed and that is the reason.

sorry for the mammoth post

[jorune.livejournal.com]

sorry to hear this, I know just how it feels. The nagging worrying sense that something somewhere is wrong, but you can't put your finger on it because you have loads of stuff happening around you. You desperately try and fix everything to just make a little time to look at something else and someone comes along and dumps some more stuff down. The little thing gets passed over and over until it too forms a little bulge

[mcnazgul.livejournal.com]

Document. Report. Review.

Repeat every month with an update (preferably face-to-face as e-mails just seem to vanish...) Unfortunately, the little ants tend to get bigger.

And yes, there is a big cloud of impending excrement waiting to touch down on a fan or three it seems.