Entries Tagged 'Overtime' ↓

How many times have you been tempted to trash your pager in any number of creative ways, never to be head from again?

I Hate the Pager
Isn’t it sad to think of the number of hours of our lives we’ve wasted acting as servant to the ever-insistent, ever-annoying pager? My latest experience came this Sunday afternoon as the pager chirped minutes after I sat down at my computer to work on my online businesses.

Wasted Hours
I called the number on the pager and gathered from the business person on the other end of the phone that there was a problem with a transmission from another division of the company. This is a client that’s been around for several years and the people that wrote the system have long since come and gone. My heart sunk as I realized the complexity of the issue, the outlook for my weekend afternoon, and the hopelessness of my situation.

Tech Support Sucks
Who likes spending a whole Sunday digging through poorly documented scripts, config files, and code trying to figure out how the hell a system works and why the foobar job won’t run? Everyone you call for help either doesn’t answer their phone or isn’t close to a computer so can’t help. Who blames them? I mean its Sunday, it’s supposed to be a day where you don’t have to worry about the corporate B.S. It’s supposed to be a day where you can live your life, free of the shackles of work.

Tell Someone Who Cares
Ever feel like telling someone that? They page you with this “urgent issue” in the middle of the night and you’re supposed to give a damn about it? I have no problem staying up to 2–3 in the morning working on web projects. I do it all the time, for MY own businesses. I’ll work all hours to make money for myself since my income will be in proportion to the amount of hours I work. In a corporate job, we get paid the same whether we work 40 hours a week or 80 hours a week so what motivation do we have, other than keeping our job, to bust our ass when the pager goes off?

Working for Myself
I decided working insane hours just to keep my crappy job isn’t worth it when I can make more money and be happier working for myself. Do you have to carry a pager? What are you doing to free yourself from its brutal grip on your life?

Nothing is life is certain except death, taxes, and the fact your boss will bring over an issue at 5 oclock on Friday afternoon.

I don’t know whether it’s corporate inertia, annoying clients, or non-observant testers but whatever the reason, major issues always seem to wait until the end of the day on Friday to crop up.

How many people do you know that won’t answer their phone after 3:30 on a Friday; especially if you have big plans for the evening or are headed out of town. But you know avoiding the phone won’t save you, they’ll track you down with the issue no matter where you are.

Early in my tech career my new wife and I were getting away for the weekend and she stopped by the office to pick me up on Friday afternoon. Of course, 20 minutes before she arrived something went terribly wrong with our new web interface and it was all hands on deck to fix it.

Four hours later I came downstairs stressed as hell to a fuming wife who refused to speak with me the entire drive. I should have known then and there I had started down a path I wanted no part of but I was young and naive. It won’t always be like this, I re-assured her, this was just a fluke thing. Little did I know how wrong I would prove to be.

Friday afternoon outages will always be a part of the tech industry, I’m just glad that I won’t be around the job much longer to “enjoy” them.

Don’t you just love sales people? We have a new VP of sales and my boss told me today the new VP wants to have sold $5 million worth of clients by the end of the year. Let’s do a quick review:

• In the first 9.5 months of this year the sales team has sold $2 million
• The new goal is to sell $3 million new business in the next 2.5 months

Of course that’s wonderful for the company’s bottom line but really crappy for my software team. Our job is to put new clients on the system and we’ve been busy as it is. Now they’re trying to shove in all these clients at the end of the year, just in time for Christmas. Ho, Ho, Ho. Guess what our Christmas present will be? You guessed it: work, work, work.

When he delivered the news my heart sank. Visions of long hours during the holiday season flooded my head. The only thing that kept me from kicking in his monitor was the fact that I’m on track to have my best month ever making money online. Someday, hopefully soon, I’ll walk out of that office and never go back.