“Hey Bob, how do I get PHP to connect to Oracle?”
Dude, it’s called Google. I’m a sysadmin, not development support. Oh, wait, yeah, I am development support. But not like that. Geez, get a damn book or something.
“I have a chunk of code I can give you as an example if you want.” Trying. hard. to. be. nice. because. you. are. a. knob. and. I. am. busy.
“Oh, I have code that has worked in the past. It just doesn’t work now. I think you’re missing the Oracle part on those new virtual machines.”
Why didn’t you just say that to begin with, dick? Cut to the chase.
“You’re right. Those don’t have the Oracle stuff built in to PHP. Did you say you needed it?”
“I don’t know. But I do need it.”
I know. He didn’t ask for it. He needed development, test, and production environments with a web server. That’s all he said.
“Okay, I’ll put it on my to-do list.”
“Cool, whatever. Thanks.” I am way too cool to converse with sysadmins.
At this point I chucked it into my to-do list for later. Current backlog: ten business hours. Two hours later, though, this guy shows up in my cube. I’m on speakerphone working with another team on a bunch of problems that are preceding a big server upgrade we’re doing at 5 PM.
“Hey, can you put them on hold or something?”
Excuse me? Maybe you could fuck off or something. Now is NOT the time.
“Um, we’re in the middle of a bunch of stuff. Send me an email.” Trying. hard. to. be. nice.
“How’s the Oracle thing coming?”
“I haven’t looked at it yet.”
“What do you mean by that?!?”
“I have become entangled in an upgrade that has decided to go sideways because of high-order ASCII characters that are sent in spam. I’ll fix your Oracle connectivity tomorrow and shoot you an email.”
“I’m leaving on vacation tomorrow. I told the customer it would be ready this afternoon.”
Thanks for including me in your plans, dickweed. It’s 3 PM, I have two hours to get this upgrade fixed up and go get my car from the shop. You could have also been a little less terse earlier and warned me that you were going to shit all over my afternoon. Alternately you could have asked for what you needed originally. It’s only by luck that you have PHP installed, but no surprise that it isn’t what you wanted.
“When are you leaving today?”
“I’m leaving now.”
“Okay, so I have a week to get this done.”
“No, I am going home and I’ll do it from there. It’s that important.”
“Neat.” I want to go tell this guy to cram it up his snooty ass. “Why don’t you go home and IM me and I’ll see where I’m at with these other problems.”
He starts to say something. I raise my hand to indicate that I’m done. Talk to the hand, bitch.
“Go home, IM me from there,” I say.
Then I remember that I didn’t mute the speakerphone. Oops.
“Geez, is that how developer X treats you?” asks my colleague and friend on the other end.
“Yeah,” I reply. “Ain’t it cool? He asked for that stuff, no rush, two hours ago.”
“So what’s the difference between our problems and his? These are a rush, too.”
“The difference is that you’re not going to flip out when I say that I have to go get my Jeep from the shop in a couple minutes.”