“You can’t run Colocation behind a firewall that we manage,” Dave told me. The networking team leader, standing next to him, nodded in agreement.

So we went back to the drawing board. One of the guys had a brilliant idea. We can also offer managed hardware – that is, we only take care of the hardware – Plug in spare drives, push reset buttons, whatever.

“Rejected. This is HP hardware. We only manage Dell servers. Sell the customer a colo rack.”

Okay… “Up Yours” would have been the correct reply at this point, but we persevered. We changed the offer back to Colocation, write an angry email, and escalate another two levels up. By this point, this whole thing has taken us a week and the customer was quite angry. Final approval takes another two working days and the customer was now fuming. At least he knew who is not to blame.

“Thanks for the very late proposal,” he said. “We’ve really no choice, so we will do it at this price and in your data center. But I have one condition.”

“Sure,” the account manager replied.

“When you set this up, you will let Secretgeek handle it. I don’t want anything else to go wrong.”

The account manager confirmed that I will get to handle the setup. I just wished someone would tell my boss that I am trustworthy.

My direct boss (team leader) was laid off recently. The company maintains he wasn’t laid off. What they did was offer him a non-management position at, and I quote the laid-off person, “insultingly low pay”. As a consequence our team had been lead-less for a while. My current boss, let’s call him Dave, tried to hire one of his buddies. But this buddy let us wait for a month, then declined the offer because he got something much, much better.

So far, so good. Except we didn’t have any usable candidates in the pipeline at all, except one very, very junior applicant.

“I’d like to give him a chance,” Dave told us. “But I’ll need a Lead in your team.”

My colleague, let’s call him Bob, said immediately: “I suggest Secretgeek. He has the most experience here, does a good job, I think he will be able to handle this and we work well with him!”

So Dave asked me if I’d do that, and I told him I would be very happy to give it my best, and that I’d be willing to put in the overtime needed.

“Very well,” Dave replied. “I’ll run this by my manager.”

Two weeks passed, and nothing happened. Finally Dave admitted he had more applicants, including a very senior employee. “He’d be a good Team Lead,” Dave said. “Sorry but I will have to go with that.”

“Alright, your decision,” I said and went on my merry way.

After the interviews were over, Dave called me into his office.

“None of them turned out to be Team Lead material,” he confessed. “Would you still be willing to do this?”

“Of course.”

“Good.”

A few days later he announced to the other team leads that he’d be making me “acting team leader”, and that he would announce it shortly.

Some more days passed. Nothing happened.

Then I passed Dave on the floor.

“Interview,” he said. “Your new boss.”

A week later this new boss started.

Gee. Thanks so much for the trust, Dave. The very least you could have done is tell me that another candidate had popped up.

Anyway, I won’t take this too personal. It was my closest scrape to actual real “people-handling” management yet, and it was a nice dream while it lasted. I am sure I will get another chance eventually.

I am equally sure it won’t be in this company.

It’s of course not as dramatic as it sounds at first. People immediately equate UFO with flying saucer, alien spaceships, and that sort of thing. Only sometimes are they reminded that the abbreviation stands for nothing more than Unidentified Flying Object.

I was standing at the bus stop near the office, when two specs of light rose in the East and climbed slowly into the night sky, absolutely silently. They looked bluish-white to me, but then I have bad eyes, what do I know.

Several other people at the bus stop saw them too, and everybody began to wonder what they were.

It took those lights some time to approach our position, and then we heard the engine noise. As they flew past us, we could clearly and distinctly see that they were two helicopters flying next to each other.

This was the first time, except for planes on the horizon, that I saw man-made objects in the sky that made no sound. It’s quite interesting, because I always wondered how people – no matter how weak-minded – could mistake a loud helicopter for a flying saucer. Now I know.

It still doesn’t explain how people could mistake he full moon for an alien spaceship.

Uh-oh.

As a minor Christmas miracle we managed to order – and the manufacturer to deliver – by mid December.

Now it turned out though that the Ram was never plugged in. The servers survived Christmas just fine. And we still cannot plug the RAM in: Turns out the guy who was supposed to do it only brought the RAM to our satellite datacenter – and left it sitting in the rack, on top of the server.

Took us a week to figure this out. The only other guy involved was a manager three levels up. He Okayed the delay in the setup and neither talked to anybody until we began to interrogate random people.

The customer had already cancelled their contract anyway, because of bad service.

Nothing like screwing someond over on their way out.

We are supposed to begin the second half of the project next week and I have a dkzen severe issues on my list. Good think I informed my line manager early. Too bad he did not inform his boss: the cuytomer now reports a critical bug in their session management.

This thing is never gonna fly.

I wonder if I will be a scapegeek soon.