Sometimes I think the strangest things
I've had this guy working for me for the past two days. Michael, a Chinese guy who's studying banking and finance. He's also a qualified interpreter. So what's he doing for me? Data entry! Boring data entry; name and address type stuff. But he sits there each day quietly plugging away at it and seems quite happy. He's a nice guy, tall, slim and very softly spoken.
So, we had a bit of drama with our accounts department today. Their electronic banking data would not submit into our database. Since I (and my partner in crime, who's currently on holidays) look after the database, I had to work out why. Now we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars here, so I wasn't about to rush into doing something I wasn't sure of, but the guys I work with started to panic and wanted to call my boss (who's interstate right now) and/or get in a consultant to fix the problem. The thing was, nobody had worked out what the problem was.
Now, I'm all for teamwork and helping people out - it's part of my job...but don't tell me HOW to do my job and when I say (after some analysis) that the problem is in the data, not the database program a) believe me b) there's not much I can do c) it's up to the accounts department to find out where the error is and resubmit the data.
This would be easy if the accounts staff were not also on holidays and the senior accountant had his teenage son working on the data importing. Did I mention we're talking multiple files of hundreds of thousands of dollars? So the teenage brainiac, after I successfully imported one file, wanted to make sure it worked so he tried to import it AGAIN. How much brain does it take to work out that if you import something twice, you get twice the data?
At this point, I stopped being my nice passive geek chick self and raised my voice, said the F word more often than I care to admit and called the teenage brainiac an insect.
Eventually, I managed to do most of the work the accounts department said they couldn't do, but told them the rest was their problem. They didn't like it, but what can I do? I'm a tech geek, not an accountant.
Later, I'm back at my desk and watching Michael tapping away and it occured to me he probably thought we were all a bit highly strung - me explaining to 3 other tech guys that NO we don't need to get in a consultant OR call our boss, them suggesting we just keep restarting the server to see if that'll fix it ("yes guys, you can handle the calls from the other users who you've crashed out of the system in the middle of something"), and the million and one phone calls to the accountant and his freaky teenage son.
It got me thinking. I wonder if Michael ever gets mad or yells, or swears, or even leaves the cap off the toothpaste. I bet he doesn't, coz at one point I looked over at where he was working and I couldn't even tell if he was there or not. I could see the back of his chair, but a monitor was in the way, so I couldn't see him. He's just one of those guys who blends in.
Maybe I couldn't see him because he doesn't belong to our crazy world. His quiet, passive, content world just seems to have merged with ours for a while. And I wonder who's on the outside looking in, me, or him?
So, we had a bit of drama with our accounts department today. Their electronic banking data would not submit into our database. Since I (and my partner in crime, who's currently on holidays) look after the database, I had to work out why. Now we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars here, so I wasn't about to rush into doing something I wasn't sure of, but the guys I work with started to panic and wanted to call my boss (who's interstate right now) and/or get in a consultant to fix the problem. The thing was, nobody had worked out what the problem was.
Now, I'm all for teamwork and helping people out - it's part of my job...but don't tell me HOW to do my job and when I say (after some analysis) that the problem is in the data, not the database program a) believe me b) there's not much I can do c) it's up to the accounts department to find out where the error is and resubmit the data.
This would be easy if the accounts staff were not also on holidays and the senior accountant had his teenage son working on the data importing. Did I mention we're talking multiple files of hundreds of thousands of dollars? So the teenage brainiac, after I successfully imported one file, wanted to make sure it worked so he tried to import it AGAIN. How much brain does it take to work out that if you import something twice, you get twice the data?
At this point, I stopped being my nice passive geek chick self and raised my voice, said the F word more often than I care to admit and called the teenage brainiac an insect.
Eventually, I managed to do most of the work the accounts department said they couldn't do, but told them the rest was their problem. They didn't like it, but what can I do? I'm a tech geek, not an accountant.
Later, I'm back at my desk and watching Michael tapping away and it occured to me he probably thought we were all a bit highly strung - me explaining to 3 other tech guys that NO we don't need to get in a consultant OR call our boss, them suggesting we just keep restarting the server to see if that'll fix it ("yes guys, you can handle the calls from the other users who you've crashed out of the system in the middle of something"), and the million and one phone calls to the accountant and his freaky teenage son.
It got me thinking. I wonder if Michael ever gets mad or yells, or swears, or even leaves the cap off the toothpaste. I bet he doesn't, coz at one point I looked over at where he was working and I couldn't even tell if he was there or not. I could see the back of his chair, but a monitor was in the way, so I couldn't see him. He's just one of those guys who blends in.
Maybe I couldn't see him because he doesn't belong to our crazy world. His quiet, passive, content world just seems to have merged with ours for a while. And I wonder who's on the outside looking in, me, or him?
posted by E in Oz at 5:32 pm
these thoughts escaped my brain at 5:32 pm
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