Seen and Not Heard

Children should be seen and not heard. Silence is a woman's best garment. Aren't proverbs great? But I'm done with being quiet.

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Competent people

Sometimes I wonder if I really am somehow more competent than almost everybody else … I usually conclude I’m just conveniently forgetting my own mistakes or else the specific person I’m comparing myself to really is just less competent than most. Like the other day when I got a call from a co-working explaining he was at a users computer, logged on as them, and getting a message that they did not have permissions to run the program… “Do they have write permissions to the program folder and the registry key?”

“Well… I haven’t checked… I’m logged on as them right now… so I can’t see permissions… do you think I should log on so I can check that?” The ellipsis (…) are to show how slowly the man talks… each ellipsis is a long pause… during which, I’m pulling out my hair, because my phone is ringing, I have phone messages I haven’t had time to check yet, and I have people (plural) waiting in my office to speak with me. Keep in mind, this person makes more money per hour than I do, and after getting a permissions error message from a Windows application, he hasn’t bothered to check or test any Windows permissions.

Even people I do think are usually competent, sometimes I have to start pulling my hair out over… I’ve got a big project right now, but I’ve also got about 10 other pretty big projects that I can’t let slide. So sometimes a group of us are working on the big project and I get called away to work on something else. When I get back, some problem we had been having is suddenly solved. “So, we know what that problem was?” I ask the people present at the solution… “We know how to get around that in the future?” They assure me they have everything under control… until we try to do the same thing again… where I manage to not yell at these people (I thought I was being big, even though I knew I just wanted to bitch out), until I manage to figure out how to make it work (so much for them being responsible for this part). Naturally, after I had my light from the heavens and made the problems disappear, we discovered other problems with someone else’s work. *Still not going to bitch out.*

I know it isn’t actually this bad, but sometimes it really seems like anything I’m trusting other people to do falls apart. When something I am doing falls apart, it’s almost always someone else who specifically did something they should not have. If I screw something up (cause, it’s not like I don’t make mistakes sometimes), I always seem to see them faster (and/or ask for a second opinion faster), than anyone else.

I’d really like to know people who can actually do that they say they can do.

Saturday, February 07, 2009

Learning New Stuff

About two years ago I was given the task at work to take files already created by the county, modify them to work with the Sheriff's Department system, and create a map that would display in our system for dispatchers and deputies in the field. This map would display calls as they came in, and show the location of deputies once we got AVL working in the vehicles. Naturally I had to get the AVL working too.

Keep in mind, I knew nothing about any of this stuff before I was tasked with making it work. I've never taken any classes in Geography, and I'd never worked with GPS before. I was told to make it work, so I set out to do so.

As soon as we had a semi working map, and could test with a vehicle, I looked up all the documentation on how to program our GPS devices, the modems in the cars, and found out what protocol was needed, where the packets needed to be sent, everything... except it didn't seem to work.

Finally, the guy working with me from our provider asked me, "Stupid question, but do you have a GPS antenna attached to this modem?"

I paused a moment. "Stupid answer," I told him, "but of course not."

I now tell this story to the people I'm trying to teach how to program these modems. I figure it makes me a little more human when I hand them pages of written instructions, including carefully scripted AT commands that need to be typed in, and I can do it and explain it, and troubleshoot, and deal with and explain any issues that come up, without ever looking at any notes (we're talking a half hour procedure here, assuming all goes well).

This Sunday I'm flying to Houston to take a week long class on HP Blade PC's. I've been working with the blade's since December. We have HP writing a special fix for us. At this point, I'm half expecting to be correcting the instructor... "Sorry, but actually, unless you have the fix, which HP is still working on, that feature doesn't work with XP SP3."

I'm just hoping that by the time I come back I'll at least know enough to not have the "stupid answer."