Diary of a Wolfeman

So, Saturday morning up at dawn to drive up to Lakewood Washington (known for it’s ..umm… fog?) to “get the player tracking software installed and running.”

Yeah, right.

Bossman and I arrive at 9am to discover that the programmer who is doing this did not catch the flight last night due to ‘a problem with the plane’ and instead caught a morning flight. Okaaay…

So, we’re here, what’s the server doing? Been turned off because there was no reason to have it on for the last three months? Ok, that makes sense. How about the end terminals? Been turned off and stuffed into kiosks for a year-and-a-half because they bought them waaaay to soon? Okay, they’ll need updates then.

10am- Proggy rolls in. 11:30am- Proggy is finally ready for a meeting, but his laptop drive just kerplooied due to extreme age. That was his development environment. Casino manager takes this amazingly in stride. Break for grubbage.

12:30pm- Proggy decides that current network infrastructure has somehow been changed in ways he does not like, and we must re-arrange certain things to bring everything on to one network. Comes up with stupid reccomendation which we ignore, and simply install a second NIC on the server. *Poof*- Marketing now has access. And you were saying…?

1:00pm- Proggy decides that instead of simply installing what he has already put together and testing, he must rebuild his development environment on a local computer first to fix anything that might be wrong.

2:00pm- Proggy claims that “someone” has completely borked the permissions on the computer he has chosen as his new devel box and it must be nuked. Commence 4-hour pave job.

2:45pm- Proggy decides that problem is also evident in the server’s Active Directory, and it too must be rebuilt. We opt to just re-install the Directory to default settings and rebuild the user list, as there are only 5 computers in this directory.

I could go on and on and on here, but you get the idea. This guy is a total fuckwit, and very lucky to be breathing at this point in life. He lives in ‘Vegas fer chrissakes, and they know how to dig the hole first down there, if you know what I mean. We were there until 10:00pm Saturday night chasing all of his little rabbits for him, and he never got a damn thing done. His plan when we left was to finish the rebuild of his devel box and then start fresh in the morning.

We got back there at 9:00am this morning to find that he must have left right after we did – his devel box was just as we had left it. We ended up having to buy two more copies of WinXP Pro to replace a duplicate license and an actual Media Center Edition install. (Which fucktard bought that?) He came out of his little hidey-hole at 4:00 to install the software onto the demo box, showed it to us as almost working, and split by 5:00 to catch a plane home with instructions for the manager to test the build and email him any problems.

My hours: total=21, split 12/9 server/workstation, cost=$2,511.00
Boss hours: total=21, split 9/12 srvr/wkstn, cost=$2,403.00
So, the casino spent $4,914.00 to get almost nothing done. No, wait – add in our meals, travel and hotel and it’s closer to $5,400.

I’d take it out of his pay.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 21st, 2005 at 12:34 am and is filed under Geekery, Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.