Closing Time

Goddamn I hate when the phone ring. It was Meathead, my new manager after his recent promotion and the latest management shuffle. Having himself spent so much time kill floor he's much more tolerable and understanding of our problems than any of my previous headaches.

"Hey, Dog. I need to see you in my office." Fuck. What did I do now?
"Gimme five to write up this ticket solution and I'll be there."

"'Sup, Meathead?"
"It's coming up on the end of the fiscal quarter. We have to close tickets."
"I'm still trying to answer all the ones I've got! By the way, what can you tell me about a corrupt RAID-5 superblock when an fsk returns 'bad inode number 0 to ginode'?"
"Oh, hey... fuck, man! Ask TT if he can help you with that. I have an emergency conf call in 15 minutes with the other $MyLevelManagers and our boss. Stop what you're doing and close all the tickets you have which are customer-close-initiate or have expired response dates."
"Sorry. Can't do it.
"You have to!"
"Nope. I'd like to help you out but I can't."
"Look, you have to close these tickets!"
"I don't have time. There's no way I can do it and follow the brand-new ISO9K process. To complete the mindless masturbatory exercise in uselessness and fill in all that shit takes more than an hour per for any open ticket."

They sprung this one on us a couple weeks ago in a useless meeting (redundant, I know), in which a PowerPoint presentation was sadistically read at us and repeated. Lies were told about how this has been mandated for ISO9K compliance -- ISO9K makes no such requirements, only that a process exists and is fully carried out. Among the required entries in each ticket are a rephrasing of the question, a research item even if the question is "Does your software run on an Atari 800?", an initial suggestion, an internal entry justifying that suggestion, and so on.

I've been having some fun with justifying my fucking suggestions, among them:

• Space færies from the planet Scripplick came to me in a daydream, interrupting my Tower Defense game.
  
• Thanks to a very large meal the previous evening, the suggestion was one of many items which exited my gastro-intestinal system minutes prior to responding to the ticket.
  
• Because I said so
  
• I first tried to extract an answer by pulling every nth word from MacBeth using the Fibonacci series. This failed so I tried again with the original Pulp Fiction script. While this latter result was infinitely more amusing it still left much to be desired so I went over to ITToolbox and yanked the answer written by one of our former colleagues.

"Fuck the process, Dog!"

Huh?

"We have to close the fucking tickets! Fuck the process. Close your tickets!"
"Can I have that in writing please?"
"I just told you to do it."
"Yeah, and in a few months when I'm reviewed I don't want this showing up. As soon as you send me the fucking mail I'll close 'em. You'll be amazed."
"I don't have time," he answered.
"You take one minute to mail me that ISO9K requirements are suspended for end-of-quarter closing tickets and I'll move from the top of your list of expired open issues to the bottom."

Two minutes later he was on the phone again. He'd fired off the mail but wasn't about to wait for our shitty server to take its sweet time in delivering. He promised I could look in his Sent Mail folder. I set to work.

Twelve minutes later I'd closed out 32 mooks and there are another dozen or so I can knock out this week.

I think I'm finally getting a little better at this game.

Five Things At Once

I have to make quite a few decisions in the course of my workday. The biggest decisions are made when prioritising who gets my help based on what needs to get done within a particular time frame.

I currently have 22 open tickets at varying stages of completion. Eight require updates. I have a pile of mail to sort through and many specialty info requests from colleagues.

I don't know; maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way. I'm pretty sure the way I do things makes sense but perhaps I just don't understand something. Here's my prioritising dilemma. I don't have enough time to complete all of these:

1) Three colleague requests for Unicode info (one due to an escalated ticket)
2) One request from Sales for Citrix info (deal is dependent on answers)
3) A big customer who always answers my questions within hours and has an active TAR who I can also consult with, and whose system I've currently set up to test on the machine to my left.
4) A smaller customer who received a complete answer eleven days ago and didn't respond, who also didn't respond to the automatic "Please update your fucking ticket" mails sent seven and four days ago, and who decided yesterday that he wants maximum escalation and is demanding a phone call from me two hours after I expect to leave the office and refuses to explain what he wants or if he's even read the fucking two-week-old answer ago much less actually tried to implement it.
5) Editing/rewriting two technical documents (deadline for completion is tomorrow at 10:00a.m.)

I'd start with #3 since the testbed is already set up and while that testing (which requires occasional interaction) is running, knock out the escalation in #1, then answer #2, go back and finish #1, and then deal with #5. That's the plan anyway, and it looks workable.

The man behind Item #4 can suck a fart out of my ass. If I call that fuckwit I could be on the phone for anything from five minutes to five hours. But maybe I'm missing something. Perhaps my logic is fallacious. To the best of my knowledge this customer isn't extra-super-important nor politically connected/sensitive. So why do I know that blowing this one off is going to cause me more grief than failure to complete any of the others, all of which have a greater importance on every scale I can think of?

Whichever choice I make will inevitably be wrong to someone; my concern is damage control -- minimising the overall level of Wrong. No matter what strategy I use, it's a game I appear never to be able to win, Professor Falken.

Item #4 ain't getting done today. Not by me, anyway.