Another day in paradise

You know it's gonna be one helluva long week when you wake up to realise it's just Tuesday. As I went to work this morning, I was about to find out what lay in store for me. Inspite of hitting snooze twice, I somehow managed to get to work by 8. To my chagrin, white BMW guy had once again beaten me to my favorite parking spot; cursing him I pulled up into the next spot available.

The first hour went by quite normally and I was just about beginning to think - hmm it's not so bad after all. But that's when the routine madness was about to set in. So a user calls me up and tells me Cognos isn't working. I go yeah it is, it's all up and running, I'm working with it right now. She explains that by Cognos she meant that one of her reports was 'acting up'. When she ran the report in the standard HTML format, the result set gave her a summary of 174 rows and when she exported the report to excel she was getting 178 rows. Excel, according to her, was magically adding up 4 rows to the total. Then I had to explain how the first four rows in the spreadsheet were report header, report title, column name and a blank row and then she found peace in life (and hopefully a little embarassment too). This is why I love all business users - they make us IT folks look like the smartest mofo's that ever walked this earth!

Sometime later my manager stopped by and told me that although the HR due date for the 'Employee Performance Planning 2007' was later this month, he would like to see the first cut of my goals by EOD. Coming from a consulting world, I had never ever been through this before and my only goals for each year would be to stick to the current project and spend as less time as possible on bench. Ofcourse, my manager was totally aware of this and it led to a long unscheduled one on one. During this, I was explained how individual goals should line up with department goals which are in turn lined up with corporate goals. We white-boarded potential initiatives that I could list as my goals and at the end of an hour agreed that the list was too long :P However, that gave me some direction to get this BS done and out of the way.

As soon as we were done there, we broke for lunch with a coupla other teammates. Nice as it was outside, we decided to hit one of the places at La Jolla shores for lunch. Hogging on a smoked salmon sandwich and getting our time in the sun, we reluctantly returned to work after a relaxing drive by the oceanside.

Most of the afternoon was spent getting things off that white-board onto paper and completing pending tasks. As is anyone's guess, the comic moments kept cropping up alongside. I'll leave the technical crap out of this one, but essentially a developer was trying to view what he did not have access to, and he thought he should, since he could see it on his team mates computer but not his. After I rerouted this request, the DBA's helped take care. At the end of the day, I did manage to turn in the 1st cut of my Performance Plan to my manager. Hopefully, that's one monkey off my back until same time next year:)

Post Title : Phil Collins - Another Day in Paradise