Bali vs Work

I've been deliberately avoiding saying anything in my blog here so far about how things are going at work. This is because I didn't want my whole blog to turn into one big rant. Remember before I came over I had the opinion of the people I was working with here as barely competent muppets? Well, my opinion of them has plummeted in the last few weeks. The engineers seem competent enough most of the time when you can get them to actually do stuff, but to do that you need to wade through so many layers of management and process that I nearly need to bring a new can of air freshener with me each day. And when they do stuff, they do no more than the absolute minimum needed to fulfil what they have been told to do. Before I came over we were supposed to have a public network for our application to run on. We arrived and found we didn't have one. I finally got it working after much effort - on Monday this week, or 3 weeks after I should have had it. This involved me being their sysadmin and their network admin for a lot of it, just to get it done. To give an idea how well things went, I discovered last weds week that the network, contrary to what I'd been led to believe, wasn't even cabled in! I asked for this to be done as a matter of urgency on the weds, and it was finally done on the Tues after. I then discovered that the cable monkey who'd set up the wires had never plugged them in - and he'd cut them all to the same length, so two of them didn't even reach the machines at the bottom of the rack! I ended up spending a whole day in the server room, physically having to connect up the cables to the switches myself, and make sure the network was working properly (which it wasn't)! And this is just one example of the problems. The base team won't even have a build for me for a few weeks as they're still waiting for data, so I'm running a generic build not the custom one I should have!

As a result, on Monday I was in the wonderful situation of having until Friday to do what I should have had 4 weeks to do - get the software running and bedded down on the network. I managed to get a good bit of it done before I got the network, but you never really know how these things are going to perform until you start everything up and start running data through it. So, I'm under serious time pressure to get stuff done here, and that assumes nothing else is going to go wrong (not likely to happen). Once I get the basics up and running the tweaking can be done from home, but I need that up first!

Because of this, my holiday next week is looking less and less likely. I was supposed to have the whole week off, and I was heading to Singapore for 4 days and Bali for 4 before I pissed off home. Singapore has to happen, as I have to leave the country and re-enter again to extend my 30-day visa, but the chances of having the work done in time and heading off to Bali are receding by the minute. Guess who's not a happy bunny! I may, if nothing else blows up or refuses to work, get to Bali on Thurs evening and come back sat morning before I fly home on sun. Maybe.

About the only solace I can take from this is that after this particular job is done, every other implementation should seem like a piece of cake - and in future my ass is refusing to get on a plane unless we have all the networks, databases etc we need!