Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Forgiving Mistakes

    My main phone line at the house has been on the fritz for about 3-4 weeks. Yes, we still have a main line and it’s a legacy holdover from having that number for a decade and it links do our DSL account. We may get rid of it at some point, but for now we wanted it working. We actually weren’t aware it was down until a service repairperson told us when they arrived. We checked, and sure enough, no dial tone.

    My wife and I are somewhat savvy and we tried to debug it, but it was down. With travel and holidays, it wasn’t until Tuesday morning that we called CenturyLink for service and I was pleasantly surprised by a technician arriving in the early afternoon.

    He tried a few things in the house, then set up a tone generator and drove back out to the street. Yep, he drove. My driveway is 1/4 mile long and it’s another 1/4 mile to the paved road, and a mile and a half to the main road.

    About ten minutes later he came back and said things were fixed. We checked, and sure enough, we had dial tone. He then explained what happened: our line was cut.

    I was surprised and worried, until he explained that when you service lines in the boxes, there is often a little extra wire on a connection. Small scissors are used to snip that off and clean the connections, but there are a lot of wires in there and sometimes one gets accidently cut by a tech. He surmised that another tech was in a hurry and accidently got one of our lines (we have two). He apologized again, we shook hands and went on our ways.

    My Reaction

    I wasn’t quite sure how to react to the situation after that. Should I complain to CentuyLink and seek some credit on our bill? Should I vent on the Internet about shoddy workmanship? In the end, I told my wife it was fixed, explained what happened, and we both let it drop.

    Andy Leonard wrote a great piece on stress during the holidays with a very important section on forgiveness. I forgave CenturyLink because it seemed like the right thing to do. A few dollars on my bill aren’t worth the time it would take me to call and the aggravation I’d cause myself and some customer service representative in order to file a complaint and seek credit.

    I make mistakes at work. Heck, I make them all the time, and I don’t expect to be banned, burned at the stake, or excommunicated for them. They’re mistakes. I learn from them, I try not to make them again, I try to do my best, but I know that there will be a few that I make.

    I expect my co-workers will make mistakes, and I have to live with some of those. I might be annoyed, or inconvenienced, but I understand that most of the time they are just that, mistakes.

    I wonder sometimes if we’ve forgotten how to forgive in this world, forgotten how to tolerate the imperfections that exist in all of us, and in the work we do.

  • Thinking Time

    My Thinking Time

    I have a friend that is responsible for working with clients, helping them to design solutions for their businesses, write statements of work, and develop proof of concepts. This friend also finds 4-5 meetings a day on their calendar, usually lasting from thirty to sixty minutes. That’s not an uncommon workday for many people in technology, which always amazes me.

    There was a time when I managed multiple DBAs and worked to remove them from meetings whenever possible. It was hard, with the workers always feeling like they wanted to know what was going on, and managers always wanting staff available for detailed updates if needed. Too often I felt that staff time in meetings, and performing updates, was wasted. Managers should take quick updates to meetings, and handle the coordination as much as possible.

    Andy Warren (LinkedIn | Blog | @sqlandy) always talks about how important thinking time is, and over the years I’ve learned that’s important. The work that we do is knowledge based. By definition that requires thought, creativity, and most importantly, time. We need to have concentrated time to think, and to work out how we want to attack the problems we face, without the pressure of producing some specific solution.

    I know it’s easy to view thinking time as an opportunity to waste time, and some people surely will waste the time. However for those of you that work hard, and that are trying to solve issues, it’s important to get some thinking time, time when you’re not actually writing code and step back to view the problem from another angle. I’d encourage you to take some time to just think over the holiday season, when there usually is less work going on, and see if it can help you produce higher quality results.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Back and Refreshed

    It’s my first day back at work, other than a few minutes answering a couple posts on Saturday afternoon and a double check of the newsletter on Sunday. I had 6 work days off in a row, probably a record for me going back a decade at least. It’s rare that I’ve taken 5, and even then I’ve often worked through email.

    This time I didn’t.

    All my email comes to the iPhone, and to my laptop, and I could see the “unread” counter rising throughout the week. I didn’t check, however, trusting that important items would be handled by the rest of the publishing group at Red Gate and that most other things SQLServerCentral related could wait a week. Even on Saturday, I just flipped through a few “fun threads” just to see what was happening and ended up answering a few posts that appeared on the front page and looked interesting. Mostly for fun, and procrastinating the need to dig some holes in the yard.

    It was a refreshing week, and while I was happy to come home after 6 days in the mountains, I was also glad to have a few more days off this past weekend, and get a few things done around the house. Nice, refreshing, and a great break.

    Now if I can just schedule a few more, shorter, breaks before the end of the year.

  • Snack Attack

    One of my favorite snacks

    This editorial was originally published on Jan 11, 2007 and is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.

    OK, I’ve done a bunch of editorials on security this week. It’s been in the news, it’s a new year, everyone’s making resolutions to implement better security, some bugs were found, so security has been a topic. Actually it was last week when I found these links and started sketching topics, but that’s another story.

    So today I wanted to take a break from the serious stuff. I found this link awhile back, Snacksby, which is an interesting idea. It’s an idea that a friend actually pitched something similar to me years ago, but she never got it going. So with that idea, this week’s poll is:

    What’s Your Favorite Snack while working?

    I know, I know, not a great poll question for the IT crowd, but maybe something will strike your fancy. Maybe you’ll discover a new snack from a response from someone else. Maybe I’ll get to be a spokesman.

    The only thing that I’ve usually craved when I’m working, and it’s pretty rare, is a Dairy Queen Blizzard, preferable something with peanut butter in it. There used to be one a block over when I worked in Virginia as a developer. The team would walk over a few times a week when the weather was warm for a break.

    Since then I usually have water and diet coke at my side, but that’s about it. Still once in awhile I swing by for an afternoon snack and quick sugar rush.