On this thing called work….

If you didn’t know me, you would think by my last thought that work was the only thing on my mind.  That it was the sole reason I get up in the morning.  Wanting to get up, and find out what new fun adventures await me at the office.

While I still hold true to my previous comments (that when you are at work you give it your all and do your job right the first time) I must follow it up with this.

Work is not your life, nor is it your identity – its also not your spouse.

It seems that the “new” wave (which is really a rehashing of an old wave) amongst companies now is trying to figure out how they can get as much work/time out of an employee as possible before discarding their smoldering husks to the corner and replacing them with a younger version of the previous employee.  “Officially” and per most company employee handbook regulations, work is only forty hours per week.  That is unless you are in one of a growing list of careers in which work is expected at all times, in all places, and in all phases of your life. 

Things that at one time may have seemed like perks (company cell phone anyone?) turn out instead to be the string which is used to tether the unsuspecting employees to the job 24/7.  The culture of the company has us shaming ourselves if we don’t live up to the perceived workload of working all the time.  If we don’t answer that email within five minutes of receiving it while we are out of the office, we feel as though we are going to be looked down on by others when we get into the office the next day.  “That Jim – he’s so lazy.  Why is he still here” – that is what we think our coworkers will think of us as we walk the halls. 

And yet – this is all the culture of the company.  It’s the artificial expectations placed on employees by their managers as well as the culture of their fellow employees which developed over a matter of time under these perceived perceptions.  For example: the “unofficial” rule around the company I work for is that if you have a work issued cell phone you are expected to check your email on your phone before you go to bed.  That way, if anything comes up you can address and work on it. 

While I anticipate what my company is trying to do (provide exceptional customer service to our clients) I also realize what this is not doing.  This is not conducive to a healthy lifestyle.  We need to turn off work, and leave it exactly where its at.  Work.  Our home is not the office part two, where we shed our business casual work outfit, put on shorts and sit back down to continue the work we were engaged in at the office.

Work or sleep – You can survive just on caffeine right? 

I’ll be the first to admit it.  Our connected world where everything is accessible to us 24/7 has placed our natural ability to relax and rest on the brink of extinction.

With our constant contact to the world, we sometimes loose the ability to be still and quite.  We feel that if we are out of contact for more than a few hours that our world (and our jobs) are going to come to an end.  I will be the first to admit – I am guilty of this very same practice. 

And it is maddening.

I can’t count the number of times I am laying down to go to sleep and the culture of the company hits my head.  I say “Check my email one last time – just to be safe.”  I check my email, and sitting on the front screen is an email from some name I recognize from one of our clients.  They are inquiring into something – an update, or a request for assistance, or one of a hundred other things that they may email about.  And as soon as I see that email, two distinct portions of my brain kick in.

The boss/manager in me says “well, I can get work done now instead of doing it tomorrow morning when I get in”.  The practical side of me says “well, I can get sleep now and address this issue in the morning.  The world is not going to end if this email gets taken care of at 8 in the morning versus 10pm now”  And even though the practical side of me appears to be more logical – the managerial side more often than not wins out in my own personal life.

And that is not right.

Gary Vanerchuck in his book Crush It! talks about living for your passions.  That when you are doing something you love you put in the extra time, you put in the hours, you put in the work to get it done.  When you are doing this, work no longer becomes a hassle or a chore, it becomes something that you look forward to every day.  It becomes the thing that drives you.  Deep down, that which you are passionate for will drive you to do bigger and better things.  Sometimes you will have to put in an eighty hour work week, but because of the passion involved the time will fly.  And for those who are truly in their their passion (be it a company they run, or just a job they truly love) I say congratulations, and continue to Crush It!

If we were honest though, we would realize that very few of us are actually in that position.  (I will follow this up with the fact that I am one of those lucky few)  Some people are just taking a job just to get by, to make ends meet or get that little extra income that they need for a new vehicle or other big event coming up in their lives.

But regardless of if you are a lucky person or not, eventually rest is needed.  Time is needed to be away from all the distractions and to recharge.  Time is needed to remove that feeling of burnout and replenish it with that feeling of rest. 

Beyond rest, other things in life are also important.  Family, friends, spiritual and physical exercises, communion with God, and the “little things in life”. 

The American culture is such that work is what is right, everything else can be placed on the back burner.  Why is that?  Why not life first and work is the vehicle through which we are able to live and enjoy life?

Lunch At The Desk

Another thing which companies love to do is “we are behind – everyone eat lunch at the desk”.  This seems to make sense at a first glance.  If everyone can remain at their desk, eating while continuing to do work, more things get done.  Right? 

Right?

Well not necessarily.  Even CBS News makes an argument against it.  They are citing physical reasons, but one part of it also mentions that people need a mental break, and a lunch break away from the desk provides this.

Getting that mental break is what often makes the differences between someone burning out quickly, or continuing to perform well in their job for years to come.  A mental break also allows someone to come back to a problem and approach it from a different angle and a fresh perspective after leaving it for a while.  The old saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results also applies to eating at lunch and continuing to attack the problem without taking a break from it.

SO?

So what does this all mean?  As workers – it is up to us to change the culture in our company.  Effective culture does not come from management down (although ineffective culture sometimes can be forced that way) but rather from the lowest employee up.  Make that change, but be respectful of your employer and work with them, not against them.  Working together, we can bring balance back.  Work is where work lives, home is where everything else happens.  Work needs to remain at the building – when we scan our card to leave – we leave all those items which we were dealing with at work there at our desk.

Do I do this all the time?  I have to admit no – but – I am working on it.  Every day I find another way to be more effective and leave more of my work at work when I leave.

I’m not perfect – but I’m working on getting better.

Hard code now, variable file later, just makes for a mess others have to clean up

They say that your biggest fan should be you.  I say, your biggest critic should be you.  Now I’m not talking about criticizing yourself internally on how you walk, or about that ingrown hair that looks like a pimple with enough puss to cover a whole city in your filth. 

No

I’m talking about being your biggest critic on the output and quality of your work.

Work has become in this day and age that dirty four letter word.  That word that is whispered secretly in the back corner of the office.  That word that you look around you before saying, just to make sure that “certain” people don’t hear you mention this word.

We approach work like we do anything else we dread.  We rationalize our presence with the lie that we are working for the weekend.  Instead of focusing on our work, the task which daily we are strive our best at, we instead focus on the mystical two days which justify the remaining five.  The weekend - the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel - arrives for a split moment and then disappears again from view.  In the blur of the passing weekend we once again see Monday come into view with the dream and longing once again only for the time to once again end on Friday.

When we don’t approach work like a sacred task entrusted to us, we get lazy.  In some lines of work, being lazy means more work for the other person who is assisting you with your job/task.  Sometimes, though, it can mean the difference between life and death.  A fireman or a police officer who is lazy and complacent about their job is not an effective member of the fire or police force.  We ‘demand’ that those who serve in these capacities be ones that are committed and devoted to their job.  Not being bored or ho-hum about the task in front of them.

I remember when I was a kid my mom would often have to tell me to “Do it right the first time.”  Quick show of hands.  Who else had to be told that more than once growing up?

But doing it right the first time.  To a kid its such a novel idea.  The concept of taking a little more time the first time around to get something right instead of having to come back and correct the same error time and time again.  True the initial go around can be annoying and time consuming, but, the end result is a product you don’t have to come back and touch that often.  Maybe a few minor tweaks here and there as things change, but not that often.  At least not often enough where this becomes the squeaky wheel which needs constant attention. 

And yet, even though were told this as a kid, how many times do we still need to be reminded of this as an adult?  We go to work each day just doing the bare minimum necessary to get the job done.  We don’t fret that one day we will have to go back and correct the errors from today – its another day – its another time – don’t worry about it now.

But we should.

We should care about the quality of our work.  We should also care that if we don’t do it right the first time (yeah – I saved my company X dollars by cutting the time for the project in half!) that eventually I or someone else will need to come back along and fix it.(and in turn costing the company twice as much as was saved originally)

This isn’t rocket science.  I should know – my ability to do math even to this day can’t go beyond simple addition and subtraction without the assistance of the all wonderful calculator on my iPhone or some nearby strangers smartphone if I don’t happen to have my phone with me at the time.

I was reminded of this simple fact recently at my work.  A little while ago I wrote and application which my company uses to assist with disabling accounts.  It helps speed things along as well as keeps things consistent.

I was enjoying working on this project – but I was doing it on my spare time.  Time outside of work.  And while it is now used for work purposes – and that was my goal to have it as such – I didn’t think quality needed to be spelled with a Q but instead K.  I skimped, I cheeped out.  I went for the fastest route possible. 

And I paid for it.  Every time something in the environment changed, or a new procedure needed to be done, I had to add new code to the application.  It wasn’t that these were new complex procedures, instead they were simple tasks.  And yet, each time I had to change part of the code. 

A little while ago I decided it was time to redo the entire application from scratch.  Make it faster, make it more reliable.  But the main thing was making it more flexible.  I didn’t want to have to write whole new code segments anytime we had a new procedure.  Instead I wanted a way where I could update a file independent of the application and those variables updated the behavior of the code.  I wanted to do it right the first(new version) time through. 

And while its taking a lot longer than I would have hoped (a lot) I know that three months from now I won’t be adding large segments of messy code to the application to make it do something.  Instead, I will be updating a simple text file with new parameters which allow the application to perform in new ways which it was unable to do so before.

I’m doing it right the first time.  I finally got it through my thick head.

Progress

I’m finaly making progress with OTK v3(Operations Toolkit V3).  It took me a little while today but I finally got a feature working that I had in my head but could never do with the current architecture of OTK V2.  This is domain substitution.  What is that you ask?  

As my company we use Xmedius for our e-fax solution.  Unfortunately - and this is a big sad pile of fail - the interface to said application is a horrible MMC snapin with the ability to sort an already alphabetized list of email accounts - but no ability to sort or filter the list of actual data of accounts tied to fax numbers.  Due to this (and other issues) whenever a company changes their domain - for example from @examplethisislong.com to @example.com - there is all of a sudden a disconnect.  The data in active directory does not match that of our exchange environment which does not match our xmedius environment but matches our ad environment. 

Big pain.

The exchange <-> ad environment sync is easy to accomplish(if not a little time consuming to let everything run) but it can be done easily.

The other portions - syncing ad(or exchange) with xmedius is highly impossible - especially without backend database access.

So that leaves us at a quandary - with data that is not easily updatable in an autonomous fashion - what to do?

When I first looked at the issue it was a daunting task - something which could and should not be taken lightly.  But I had an idea (along with my idea for virtual role groups - another time perhaps?) to use domain substitution when checking email accounts against the read only version of the xmedius database.  Obviously the substitutions would need to be stored in a database - and not just use the list of domains available (since jsmith@longexample1.org may be(and probably is) different than jsmith@longexample.org) in active directory.

this required some creative thinking and debugging - especially after running into a particularly nasty “bug” in powershell’s database methods used to populate an array with the results of a database query.  For whatever the reason - the database query upon being fed into an array would always return the number 3262 - no matter what query I in fact was performing.  Im not sure why this happened - but it took me a good while to finally find the exact line doing this.  It didn’t help that the code I had written was running as a background task for powershell either I suppose.  A simple |out-null was able to resolve the issue but it brought to light another fun issue. 

Sometimes you can not plan for what the end user is going to present to you datawise.  I know - I should know that already.  I do- just that sometimes you need a good reminder - in this case a good swift kick to the pants when debugging whould be enough to keep me in line.

I think this week - the ability to disable accounts will finally come to OTK V3 - the one major fun part of the whole process is going to be the “virtual machines” which go off of triggers. I will need to create - have not created those in a while and I am looking forward to the challange.

Maybe one of these days I’ll post some screenshots to show how things are going.

Too Long

It has been too long - too long since I have done anything on here.  I would like to say that I was too busy with life - but that is an excuse that has been used too much and too often.  But I can promose this - life has been busy and it has been something that has not stopped.  Especially now that I am officially an operations engineer - im trying to learn everything that goes with this role and at the same time trying to find a way to balance life and being a professional more and more.

One thing that has been great and I have enjoyed going full speed into is working on OTK V3 - and making it domain and setup agnostic.  Its been a fun experience on making something from scrath and making it multi-threaded.  That has been the key - as the interface no longer hangs when procssing and doing operations - operations that used to completly hang up the old version of the toolkit.  Man - toolkit v1 was a start - but now that toolkit v3 is coming out - it will be something which will make even the current version of the toolkit look like something which was made by a third grader

Weighted Heart On The Eve Of My Birthday

Birthdays. 

They only occur once a year and usually are a joyus occassion which you celebrate with family and friends.

This year, however, I find myself on the eve of my birthday with a heavy heart - and not sure if celebrating is the correct way to proceed at times.  Whilst I know that it is never good to just dweel on the things in life which put you down (otherwise youd be in a constant depressive state) I also am a realist and know that some things - no matter how much you try - affect you more than others.  As the clock is close to turning midnight signifying that I have survived another rotation around the sun on this planet called earth - things just keep weighing down on me and I just keep asking “why?”.  I ask this - then remember - everything is out of my control.  Actually, its out of every humans control.  And in this I find hope.  In the fact that God, in his infinite power and wisdom, is the one driving the whole thing - bringing together everything for good.  Sometimes we don’t like - from a human perspective - what that looks like.  Sometimes we see what happens and look and just wonder what is going on.  And yet it is not the wondering which is wrong - as it sometimes can be a mechanism to draw us closer.

I don’t know what the future holds - God does - and while these items may weigh on my heart heavily - I know the ultimatly in the end - no matter my opinion or thought on the matter - God will have his final say in what happens.

With that in mind - if you do happen to see these words - pray.

Pray for the Boyd family - as David Boyd was swimming in a river in Arkansas and swept downstream.  Pray as the search and rescue teams look for him - and by God’s grace - he is brought home safely.(For those who don’t know - he used to attend Fellowship Baptist Church in Racine until he moved down to AR.  He is an amazing person who was always serving and you could see (quite literally) had a heart for God - and until I hear otherwise - I believe he is still out there waiting to be rescued) -http://www.baxterbulletin.com/article/20110526/NEWS01/105260315/Search-under-way-man-missing-Buffalo-River

Pray for the Davis family from Cornerstone University.  Details are few - but Ryan Davis who worked at the campus died this past week unexpectedly.

Pray for my mother - shes undergoing surgery soon to remove a mass from her colon while at the same time doctors are finding more areas which are wrong and may complicate the surgery further.

Three things - all out of human control - and relying on the strength and power of God.

Three things to pray for.

Three things to think of.

And three things to watch God do miraculous things through.

Until then - 

Paul