Josh-Kerr.com

The title is actually a bit misleading, let me explain. I work for a contract company making/designing/building/etc home grown software. It’s a nice job and I get to do something that I enjoy. The problem lies with the company that we have our contract with. I will refer to the company that hired us as Company X. Company X is a Fortune 500 company located nation wide. It’s a nice company filled with a bunch of 50 year old adolescents that cry when they don’t get their way. So what you ask. My company has the same types of people you say. Yeah we’ll this is my blog! Anyhow, the employees at Company X are the most computer literate people I’ve worked with. It doesn’t help that they’re still using Windows ‘95 on sub 400MHz machines! If they click on a short cut that points to nowhere because the out-source IT company failed to re-ghost the machines properly, its immediately our fault. After spending 20 minutes to explain the situation to the boss’s boss, that’s right I said 20 minutes to explain a bad shortcut, I’m finally able to fix the ‘problem’.

I gets even better. When we do have an actual problem, we get the lecture and then we’re unable to fix it because we don’t have access. Imagine, if you would, you’re in charge of fixing legacy software that you didn’t write. When someone has a problem you fix it on your machine because you had to spend time and money to research the problem. With the fix in hand you go over to the person with the error only to realize that you don’t have access to actually fix it for them! Speaking of access, I’m a developer and I don’t have access to run anything on my own machine. I can compile and say, “Man, that’s some gorgeous code!” but I can’t actually test anything. And to those who were wondering, no my dead line hasn’t changed. Three weeks without ‘run rights’ and I’m still being hounded to finish my work.

Sorry about the rambling/venting, just getting this off my chest. To paraphrase, I develop software but can’t actually develop because I don’t have rights. I also fix legacy software but can’t actually fix it because I don’t have rights. Fortunately, 90% of the errors on the legacy system are user errors and just require me to strategically tell them to RTFM without actually insulting them. Man I’m glad my job title isn’t IT Support! Enter sarcasm here.

I don’t get it. WTF are these militants thinking? So your pissed off that the world is against you. So why do they take it out on civilians. Doing so has indeed heightened the level of fear but doesn’t this fall under war crimes? I mean, take it out on military personal. Don’t get me wrong, I think beheading someone is sick. Hold them prisoner and if you HAVE to kill them, just shoot them in the head or something. Anything more civilized than beheading. I just keep telling myself, we all reap what we sow.

A travesty has occurred. The fan on my GeForce 3 Ti500 has died. This really sux for me since it was my best card. For now, I’m stuck playing UT2004 on a 32Megabtye TNT2 Card at the lowest possible settings…

There is an employee here at work who is a real hoot. I’m in charge of maintaining an Access ‘97 application that is to say the least, buggy! We’ll amidst my many trouble tickets I see to, I’ve meet some really interesting people. One person in particular said something to me that was the funniest thing I’ve heard. The application had an error and displayed a message box.  While he was venting on me he said and I quote, “The box says OK, but its not OK. I don’t want to click on OK because its NOT OK. Do you understand, its NOT OK!” End users, gotta love’m

What kind of husband would I be if I didn’t start blogging with the most important and obvious blogging thought? Stephanie, I love you more than life its self.