Not Really BOFH*

When I worked at Saga, the guy who booked all of the staff flights had a sign by his desk which read: A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine. As it happens, he was always incredibly helpful when you arrived at 5:30pm and told him you had to be in Timbuktu by morning, but the sign always reminded you, as you stood there anxiously watching him work his magic with the Galileo, that it wasn’t his fault if today’s only flight left half an hour ago, or you had to connect via Amsterdam, Johannesburg and Kathmandu to get there.

I am tempted to put a copy of that sign above my desk.

Today our company has a new project starting up, doing some very lucrative analysis of certain documentation for a client. Unfortunately the project team didn’t really think through their IT requirements ahead of time so, when they found that it was r e a l l y , r e a l l y s l o w to open a 160Mb^* spreadsheet over the network, especially when two other people have it open simultaneously, one could detect a certain note of panic creep into the voices: This is a project with a hard deadline.

You can be certain they are worried when you get a call from the Project Director within minutes of speaking to the chief analyst. As it happens, the PD in this case is a pleasant guy who, unlike some of his colleagues, doesn’t ramble, doesn’t expect the impossible and treats IT like professionals, so we had a brief chat about his concerns and the options available and agreed a course of action.

Once settled upon a plan though, along comes the gotcha! – it turns out that some of the analysts are based in a branch office. Accessing the files over the network will be even slower, if not impossible for them – but the PD doesn’t want the data to be copied off-site for security reasons. Hello, rock. Hello, hard place.

In the end we got it sorted by arranging for the analysts to do their processing directly on a server, rather than doing it on their own personal machines. It’s a fairly neat solution although it did mean I had to do some fancy footwork with the security, as the server in question hadn’t quite finished being used by another project.

Still, it ended up with everyone working away and happy. Plus I was only half an hour late leaving work – which isn’t bad compared to some ‘last minute panics’ I’ve had to deal with.

A job well done, I think.

^* No idea what BOFH stands for? I'll probably get drummed-out for telling you, but if you surreptitiously check out this link it might clue you in...
^** For all the laymen out there; 160Mb = very big!