A day's worth of work

Cast & Credits (in order of appearance)

Cathy - Sr Mgr Financial Systems (from yesterday)
Tim - My manager
Bob - Visiting Instructor
Joe - Resident SME for Global Safety
Pat - External consultant working for Finance
Sally - Mgr Financial Systems
Kathy - I don't know who
Tom - External ETL guy working for external contracting company
Ben - Resident ETL team lead
Dave - Director of Operations, Manufacturing Facility
Rick - Resident Sr DBA 2
John - Resident Sr Architect
Annie - Resident Sr DBA 1

Note: All names have been changed to protect identity.

I got to my cubicle around 10 till 8 today morning, prioritising the things I had to get done. Ofcourse there was the string of emails from Cathy last night which had to be taken care of. Cathy is the kind of person, who despite being a business user, likes to play very hands-on (a little too much as I found out to my horror) and wants to be involved in every detail related to reporting and planning applications. So as that string of emails with the little red exclamation mark goes, Cathy here, was having issues saving her changes to the metadata model (!). The moment I read that email last night I called Tim and expressed my surprise as to how a business user was involved in modifying metadata models. I mean all the reports could break down if she effs things up! Tim replied helplessly that this was a battle he had lost a long time back. So business users can modify metadata as and when they like, and when their reports dont work like they should, we get BlackBerry'd in the middle of the night. Joy! Obviously Cathy also does not like to wait for such things, so by the time I got to my desk she had sent another email in the morning asking me if her access privileges had been modified yet.

Then I docked my laptop and realised I had to pick Bob up from front desk at 8-ish. Sure enough 8:00am I got a call from Frontdesk telling me Bob's here. Scrolling through emails, I got to frontdesk and brought Bob along. Bob is the trainer for a day long session we have organised tomorrow for the Global Safety folks and is here a day earlier to study the data and setup samples for training. After the 'so how've you been? Good! How about you?' I walked Bob to his cubicle for the day. Then I realised that the loaner laptop that I had requested for Bob had not yet reached there so I called up Heldesk to get that fixed. Till then I walked Bob to my cubicle and started explaining to him how our environment was setup and things we expect he'd go through during the training session tomorrow. The loaner reached my desk as we went through this and now it was time to set Bob up with Joe. Joe would explain the backend database which would help Bob understand the metadata model better and design effective samples for tomorrows training. That done I started walking back to my cubicle.

On his way to work, Tim called me up to discuss the scene with Cathy's request. He told me that he granted the requested privileges and asked me to speak to Cathy about it specifically stressing that this took time because Finance wasn't the only group we are working with and requests are dealt with in the order they are received. Getting back to my desk I got this out of the way and read through more emails that'd been shot during that time. Some more time and I started working on that long overdue report request. Before I realised it was 11 am and time for me to run into a meeting with the Finance users Cathy, Sally, Kathy and the consultants Pat and Tom. This was a meeting that had been postponed by 10 days, so I had no clue what to expect when I walked in. There was a big discussion about some ETL changes that needed to be done and an hour later I walked out of that room feeling, 'Gosh, that was a waste of time!'. I walked by Ben's cube and asked him why none of the resident ETL guys were in on the meeting, turned out he had no clue these changes were being planned!

I was getting hungry now and I drove Bob along for a quick lunch to the Quiznos down the street. It was a gorgeous day and felt great sitting outside nibbling on the Cabo chicken. While having lunch Bob regaled me with stories of his surfing adventures and his various successful career gigs. Post lunch, I was cruising along on my report when Tim stopped by and pulled me into a meeting with Ben, Dave, Rick, John and Annie. This was to discuss the design of a scaleable database system to support our new manufacturing facility and enable advanced reporting off the SCADA systems. All the people in the meeting, except me, have been working for about 8 years at the least, so one can only imagine how much of the discussion I was involved in. Silence is golden indeed!

That done, I got back to work and Cathy sent another email with the little red exclamation mark in the corner. Apparently one of her ETL loads was failing on her and she needed to get that fixed and in the meanwhile needed the Dev environment pointing to the production database so she could carry on with her work. This was my 2nd shock of the day. Why was Cathy modifying ETL jobs?!? Why did she even have access to do this? So I leaned over into Ben's cube searching for answers. Ben went, 'I have no frikkin' idea dude!'. Wow! I decided to not bother about this and kept chipping away at my report. I checked for time and it was 4:45 pm already. Frick! I had to implement and test user security for tomorrows training! 45 minutes later, with more ridiculous emails floating around, I completed this task and called it a day.