Stststammer?

One of my mentors who moved up the management chain quite quickly was a very straight honest guy who had a slight stammer which he worked very hard to control. In normal office conversations he would hesitate noticeably when speaking and would occasionally stumble over the odd word. This would get a bit worse when he was under pressure or dealing with someone showing aggression like an angry customer.  He overcame his stammer enough to stand up and present to large groups and was very at ease with customers. The only time he was totally without a stammer and spoke quickly with no hesitation or pauses was when he was either slightly drunk or angry. The trick to make sure you did not get him really annoyed was to get near him and find out if you could smell alcohol. There was the odd time it would go wrong when he was pissed and angry then you just had to listen and be very careful!

The Ted Heath Years

Just watched a program which talked about the Ted Heath years when he was losing against the miners union and others and it mentioned the three-day weeks and the power outages. I was in London working as a mainframe hardware CE in those days and we used to dread the outages as it usually meant we had to go and fix the power supplies on the systems. We used to base ourselves in the flat at the top of the building in Basinghall Street some eighteen floors up where we could look out over a large swathe of the city. You could see a whole patch go dark as they cut the power to that area. It was supposedly done on a rota system but we never managed to work out what that was.

The customers were supposed to be notified when the power was going out to try to stop people getting caught in lifts etc and also to allow the large systems to close down the programs and power off in a controlled way. Despite all this there were always some that took it down to the wire and then the power would drop, the machine would drop power unsequenced and they would not know where they were in their work flow. We got called just after the power came back, we could stand on the balcony at the flat and watch the lights come on and then as the phone rang guess which customer had now discovered their system would not come back up.

Best case was just a few circuit breakers that needed resetting, worse case was blown power supplies and logic cards. Sometimes the damage to the tapes and the recovery of their programs took hours to get back to where they could restart. It did teach a few more customers to take back ups and put a bit more discipline in to their programs in terms of check points and restarts. We still had customers who had jobs that had grown from maybe a couple of hours run time up to ten or twelve hours or more with no restarts or check points.

There was a common malaise that customers did not like to change their programs, if they worked they would just let them grow like topsy. In some cases the guy that had written them had left and in many cases they were not documented so to try to alter or change anything was a nightmare as you had to wade through all the code to try to discover what was going on. It was quite common practice to get one program and do some mods to it to try to make it perform some additional function without any understanding of the original logic used. This used to lead to some weird and wonderful outcomes. I never ceased to be amazed by the totally uncontrolled and casual way business ran their systems as there was still the belief  held by the non IT management in those days that it was all some occult art!

Expectations of Management

One thing that surprised me in my early career when I was first promoted to the role of people management was the expectations of the staff. Suddenly I was expected to sort all sorts of issues not only with work related problems but all manner of problems with life. I was expected to give people advice on their finances, taxes and personal problems. This was brought home to me one day when I was working in education.

On this day one of the other managers came in to my office laughing and swearing at the same time. He sat down and told me that he had been working on some documents on his office when one of his staff just walked in and sat down by his desk and folded his arms and looked grumpy. My colleague asked him what he wanted, and the reply was that this guy was not happy and he had come to see his manager to sort this as managers were trained to make people happy. We knew of no management course that covered this that either of us had been on!

One incident that happened to me was of a much more personal nature. I had a young attractive keen girl working in the unit that had over a few years moved from being a YTS to a technical role and then a sales role. She was enthusiastic and would have a go at any challenge that you put her up to. She was also very well endowed in the chest region and used to come and talk to me in my office about how this was a problem for her. She described how some of the male staff and managers just talked to her chest and did not look her in the eye. On several occasions she came in to my office and talked about having a breast reduction operation. I was against this as she was still young and did not think this would be good long-term.

Being the sort of person that I am I read up on the problems and side effects of this sort of operation and also some of the alternatives. One of these was a garment called a minimiser bra which I suggested to her during one of our regular discussions. Some time after this I was in my Basingstoke office with my manager and our director talking about business and as usual my door was open. I have to add at this point that both of these guys were never comfortable in the presence of women and were never relaxed when women’s problems were being discussed. During our discussion the girl in question passed by, saw me and made the grand entrance to my office with a twirl and flourish  ‘how do you like my minimiser bra! I then had to point out the two managers sitting very red-faced behind my door! At this point as they say she made her excuses and left. I then had to explain to my management that part of my role was to give very personal advice to my staff.

Noss/Profs IDS

I wrote in an earlier post about the internal mainframe based email system where each of us had a unique ID based on our location server and the first 6 letters of our surname and first letter of our first name. I discovered the format of these were written as a set of corporate guidelines when I asked if it was possible to change certain peoples as they found them an embarrassment. I had no problem with my bagules@volts1 but among the staff was a fairly well-built girl whose name was not far from Sally Barnarby and she was not amused to find her ID was barnars and suffered a few inappropriate comments from some of the other staff.

One of the Problems with Drink

For a company that was based on a teetotal ethic we managed to drink vast amounts in the 60s, 70s and 80s. There was a culture in the city of London where we all met up after work at the nearest hostelry to the office in Basinghall Street. In fact when we moved our base to South Bank an ex salesman started a wine bar as near as he could to the office and he made a mint, in fact I think it is still going.

The worst culprits were in Banking branch as the customers had bars within their buildings for staff use and all the senior managers had a bar in their offices stocked by the bank. I had regular weekly meetings with my three accounts, Midland started at 1000 and we would have a coffee followed by G and Ts and then go across to Wheelers fish bar for lunch where the order of the day was a bottle of Chablis each. Barclay’s started at 0930 and that usually commenced with strong drink with a break for coffee and then back on to the booze. The part of Nat West was an afternoon meeting which usually ran on quite late in a vain attempt to drink the managers fridge dry.

One particular incident that still makes my chuckle is when I had been in with the managers whilst my guys had worked on a particularly complex HW problem which they fixed just after 1800 and then came to let me know. The customer invited them to join us for a drink and started plying them with very strong rum mixes. About 2 hours later we were well oiled and thinking of going home, when we noticed that one of my CEs was missing from our now very merry band. I was still conscious enough to remember that this guy was diabetic and was a bit concerned that he might have had a hypo and become unconscious. We all split up and started searching, this was in a huge computer suite over 4 floors and we were not sure he was still in the building. We all agreed to meet up at the lift well every 20 minutes so when we went back my senior engineer was stood there laughing and he then made us all follow him in to the gents.

When we got in to the gents there was on trap door closed and this voice ranting from within. It was my missing CE and we asked him what his problem was, he shouted back that he had needed a crap and must have fallen asleep and when he came round some bastard had been sick in his underpants! We eventually got him out and sort of dressed and in to a cab to his house. He was still ranting as they drove off about getting the bastard back for puking in his pants!

Distribution List problems

In the 80s IBM was using an internal mail system based on VM known as PROFs or NOSS and this meant that you could get your mail at any screen connected to the internal mainframe network. I could read my mail when I was in Paris or any other location. We all had our own specific address and this was a combination of the local system name and a mangled version of your surname and first name.  You could make up your own ‘nicknames’ or short versions of peoples IDs to save typing the whole thing in every time. You could also build distribution lists that covered groups of IDs so as a manager I had several of these to send mail to my direct reportees or the management team or the whole unit etc. Some of these distribution lists were set up by the unit and so all the staff could use them. When you fired off a  note the system would list who it had been sent to as it delivered it in to the distribution network.

This worked well for the most part but on one occasion a slip by one of the guys in my team caused alarm for him and amusement for the rest of the unit. This person was chatting up one of the other members in the unit and must have decided to set up a nickname for the subject of his attentions. He then composed a long note stating that his intentions were honest and long-term and that he was really not like his reputation of ‘ wham, bang, thank you maam!

This all came to my attention when he ran in to my office in a state of panic to ask me not to open a note I had just read! It turned out that his nickname for his amour was the same as a unit distribution list set up to send mail to all my staff. As he left my office he received a cheer from the people in the support centre as they had all by now read his note. I think his relationship died at this point.

Customer Moment

One project I spent a large amount of my life on was to get a very complex UNIX system working for London University. This was a three-tiered system with a large mainframe as the hub with RS 6000 boxes as a layer of cluster servers below this and in to the RS boxes were lots of PCs as the clusters. This was the only system of its type we ever built and installed with 3 versions of AIX running, one mainframe, one RS and one PC version. The PCs had to be modified to stop executable code being loaded by the students. We were also running some UK Academic network code called Coloured Books that also had to be rewritten to run on AIX.

This was very early AIX days and also a very complex installation so I spent a lot of time on site working with the IBMers and the customer staff to discover and resolve problems. The idea of this whole system was that any person using this system could log in from anywhere within academia and find their files etc and work on them at any time. One day I was just leaving the office of the academic in charge of the whole system when this really angry wild-looking guy barged in and started ranting. His point of pain was that he had been working on a major thesis and had updated and added to it on a regular basis, he had added a major piece the previous day but when he tried to find the file this day it was not there. He believed that all his work had been lost and was very distraught and threatening all sorts of mayhem.

We managed to calm him down and promised we would look in to his problem. It was after some investigation that we found the problem in the area of ‘quotoring’ and it seems that AIX had a unique bug, if when you had worked on ones data and then filed it, the system looked at its size and if it was too big for the allocated space it would dump it and not even send a message to the user to tell them it was too big or anything. This was the subject of an immediate and high priority APAR which was fixed surprisingly quickly.

The good news was that every night we backed up the mainframe so could go back and find the guys work with just the last entries missing. I also thanked him for his discovery of the big hole in the software!

False Floor madness

One of my many roles in my 33 years was as manager in the CE education unit providing both technical and non technical training to CEs and this was based in Sudbury just North of Greenford. The building we operated in was made up of two 9 story tower blocks and with a central services block for lifts etc. Part of my domain was hands on technical training so we had to provide multiple machines for the CEs to familiarise themselves with the hardware. At this time the program was expanding so I required more lab space so took over the complete 3rd floor in the southern tower. It was then decided to false floor the whole area and this was duly planned and scheduled to be done. It happened that the actual work took place while I was on holiday and upon my return the location service manager was keen to show me the completed floor.

I went with him to the third and when we walked in there was ramp inside the double doors as this was required to wheel the kit in from the services lift in the central block. When I walked to the far end of the floor there was a ramp at this end as well. When I asked why we had wasted all this money on this second ramp the services manager told me it was needed in for disabled access in case anyone in a wheel chair needed to get out that end. I then asked him to remind me what was beyond these double doors, he quickly came back with the response that it led to the fire escape and then I saw the light in his brain flicker on for a brief moment as he realised the significance. This meant he had spent a load of money to save disabled people from navigating one step off the false floor so they could get easy access to 6 flights of concrete stairs!

The ramp was left in place as it would have cost more money to remove and replace with level floor.

Nepotism

Although it was a large corporation I did come across the occasional case of senior people trying to use their position to further the career of family members. It was fairly rare but one of the most glaring examples I ever got involved with was in the mid 90s when working within the AIX/RS6000 unit. I had got release to hire as the unit was showing a growing business and a profit from the support centre. The next thing I know is that I am contacted by HR to say they have a candidate for one of my hiring slots who just happens to be the daughter of one of the VPs in the States. I agreed to see her on the proviso that she had a work permit and could pass the necessary interview and tests.

The interview day arrived and this fairly presentable girl arrived and we went in to first interview mode and sat her in with one of my senior techies and me. She told us that she had a degree from one of the most prestigious colleges in the US, I did not recognise the name and it was not one of the IV league. When asked why she wanted to work in the UK and in our unit her response was that she wanted to do Europe and this seemed a nice place to base herself. We asked what she had studied and it was a general degree covering many areas including computing so the techie asked her about what she had learnt during these semesters. Her reply was that is was last year and she could not remember. This seemed to happen with every subject she listed and we were running out of questions and then I noticed that included in the list of study areas was politics and history. My techie who had originated in one of the eastern bloc countries then asked her to describe the differences between socialism and capitalism.

Her reply was ‘ Capitalism works’ and when we tried to get any deeper information re this profound statement she could not give any. At this point I terminated the interview and sent her off to her family in London. I then called the managers in our unit who were aware of the situation and told them that I was not prepared to waste one of my slots on someone who was a lot dumber than a lot of UK graduates that we had turned down as they had fallen below our requirements. There was then a debate on how best to turn her down without upsetting her father. Eventually an email was sent with a load of management weasel words included about what a wonderful person she was but her talents did not really align with our requirements and she would be better used in another area. The response to this was a very curt note from her father on how stupid and shortsighted we were as a management team to miss out on the skills of his wonderful daughter. I wanted to reply with the truth about how he had wasted his money on her education and how dumb she really was but was advised that it would not be politic to do so!

Job satisfaction

One thing that I realised during my long time working in technical support was the level and degree of job satisfaction alters depending on the particular role that you have. My first job as a hardware CE gave a daily regular dose of low-level job satisfaction in the way the job presented problems and you went in and resolved them within a short time so at the end of nearly every day you could say you fixed a number of problems. The fact that sometimes you had intermittent bugs that took time to resolve was overtaken by the ones that you could fix there and then. When I moved up to be a specialist the problems become more complex and the time to fix became longer but again there was closure and the degree of  satisfaction when fixing a particularly complex bug was much greater than the everyday problems I had worked on before.

When I became a first line manager there was very rarely any quick short-term satisfaction. Everything you did was much longer term and often only transient in its feeling before you were presented with the next challenge. The sort of things that you could measure and watch progress were meeting annual targets, getting the level of salary plan, career progression and development for your team. All of these were long-term. In my early days as a manager I was getting very frustrated with my progress with some issues and one of the older more mature managers who was about the age of my father came in to my office when I had been throwing my toys out of the pram and gave me some counselling. He said he could understand my frustrations and lack of patience as I had been a good fixer as an engineer but I should learn that being a first line manager was like coming in to the office every to find some one had diarrhoea and you spent all day clearing it up but when you came in the next day it was all over the floor again!

One learnt to live with this and the further up the management chain I went the more frustrating life became. There were some jobs that did give a short-term buzz such as when I was an education manager running the new hire programs, then I would get 24 or so new hires every couple of months and see them develop and progress to their graduation dinner and there was a real sense of achievement in that. The obverse of this was when I had EMEA roles and trying to get teams in other parts of the region to work together and implement new practices, then I could understand why most European countries had been at war with each other at least twice in the last 100 years. I became aware of all the small prejudices and nationalistic tendencies that made making progress so slow. This is maybe why I do not believe the EU will ever really work.

I spent a long time in software support as a manager and also as a service delivery planner and the job satisfaction in this area is even more tenuous to find. The basic difference is based around the fact that hardware normally delivers the function when it arrives and the engineers have to fix broken bits etc to get it back to the same level of function. Software is delivered with defects within it and when the customer finds a problem, the software support guys try to get as much detail and if it is a discovery that is a new problem they then have to write-up all the symptoms and parameters and send this off to the developers. The developers  or change team have to recreate the problem and then write and regression test the fix and then this eventually gets to the customer.

In my time with mainframe and midrange SW the number of discoveries was very low, in some code less than 1% of the calls were new undiscovered problems that would result in an Authorised Problem Analysis Report/ APAR. The number of defect calls varied by product,  in the MVS world we had a relatively high percentage of defect calls but a very low user problem rate as this was a high skilled group , in AS400 in the early days we had 99% user error rate due to the low skill levels of the users. The job for most SWCEs was to listen to the customer, search the database and order and ship Program Temporary Fixes/PTFs and then wait for the customer to apply them and then if it fixed the problem they would then close the call.

I was involved in the set up and development of the AIX support centre and the one thing we tried to achieve was continuity, by that I mean that once a problem had been opened the same CE would be responsible to follow it through to the end. This was achieved by making sure that all the centre staff had a high level of training in their product area, the customers all had named staff who had to be qualified and they were the only people who could place calls and we used to follow up to closure. This did give the staff a better sense of satisfaction and they established a rapport with the customer contacts. The other significant thing was that we started charging for support which stopped the customers from making spurious calls as we had experienced in the early days when they would call us rather than read the manual.