Who's Your Data?

At DLT we have a chief scheduler for all professional service and consulting projects. We call him “The Cleaner” after The Harvey Keitel character, “The Wolf” in the movie Pulp Fiction.

The Cleaner juggles resources and keeps projects on track. He has a saying that I think helps him cope with the day-to-day turmoil. His catchphrase is, “It is what it is.” He has been laying that one on me for about six months now. The other day I was talking to our Recruiter and in response to a mistake I had made regarding the qualifications of an engineer needed for a project he said, “It is what it is”.

And then, this morning I was talking to my wife about some tragedy and her concluding comment was, “It is what it is”. This phrase is getting around a bit. It is today’s version of “sh*t happens”, “as if”, “you go girl” and the ambiquous “Not!”.

I don’t want to go all Andy Rooney on you, but it seems that there is a purpose in all this phrasing. Some defense mechanism that helps us cope with our collective human foibles. If I had studied psychology in college instead of philosophy and theology I could probably tell you what that underlying purpose is, but since I didn’t I don’t know. Instead I will tell you a story.

A week ago The Cleaner was trying to find an engineer for a project. The project was to last two months. It required a very specific, highly technical skill set. We had the skill set on staff, but the engineer was committed to another project that started the same day. The two month project was for a high profile government customer. The high profile customer begged us to free up our qualified engineer. The Scheduler worked tirelessly to change almost every engineer’s project to accommodate this important customer. As The Wolf said in Pulp Fiction, “That’s thirty minutes away; I’ll be there in ten”.

The schedules were completely changed by late Thursday night. The project started the next Monday morning. Travel arrangements were re-done. Fences were mended. The Scheduler was ecstatic. Monday afternoon the important customer called him and said, “We don’t need your guy after all”. The Scheduler was professional about it, but clearly in a mood to use his catchphrase. He asked if he could call the important customer and say something impolitic. I decided to play Manager and call myself. The customer was semi-apologetic. He did say that they might need our engineer the next Monday if things didn’t work out. I said, “Sure, and monkeys might fly out of my b*tt”.

Posted by Matt Hamilton at 02:31 PM | | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

How come nobody is cursing or throwing things?

I participated in a throw down between Microsoft, UNIX (variety Solaris) and open source proponents (me) for a customer in DC last month. It was a very young crowd except for yours truly. Young and disturbingly nice.

The Microsofties politely made their points about the upgraded high availability features of Vista and their ability to operate in a five “9’s” environment. The Solaris dude talked about the blazing speed of Sun’s new processor. I spoke eloquently about the beauty of open source systems and how cheap they were.

It was all over in half a day. At the end, everyone shook hands and promised to keep in touch. I could have sworn I saw the Sun guy going off to lunch with the Softies (and the lion lay down with the lamb).

I was ticked off. There was no blood on the floor. No one raised their voice to contradict anyone else’s position. There was no passion. Normally I can be counted on to raise the temperature a bit. Everyone was so darn nice in front of the customer that the best I could muster was a few guffaws and some general throat clearing.

Seven years ago I was involved in a major rollout of a UNIX based application at a state government agency. The Microsoft crowd was so incensed that management had chosen a UNIX solution; they took one of the application vendor’s salespeople hostage and barricaded themselves in the server room. OK…they didn’t really do that, but they were very upset. So upset that they refused all attempts to implement the new application. Two years and many millions of dollars later the agency was forced to throw out the application and buy a Microsoft compatible product.

Now that was passion. And a waste of taxpayers money. I was on the UNIX team, so my dog lost that hunt. Still…I admired the MS team. They won. They won and they rubbed it in our face. They laughed at us in the cafeteria. How come nobody does that anymore? Are these twenty-something wanna-be gangsta hip-hop loving engineers just a bunch of wimps?

Posted by Matt Hamilton at 05:07 PM | | Permalink | Comments (2280) | TrackBacks (0)