The March of Time

Apparently, as we age, we acquire the collective phobias of our parents. To date, I have determined that bridges are the work of the devil, and having been constructed by the lowest bidder, are inherently unsafe. I am not just refering to the Huey P. Long bridge in New Orleans, which I must add was clearly engineered by Satan in the depths of a cocaine fueled acid binge, but also the Burlington Bristol Bridge, engineered by the spawn of Satan, between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Huey's bridge is unique in that some bastard decided that it would be cool to put the actual roadway beside the damn bridge instead of inside the bridge. They have put the damn train track 'inside' the bridge,and the road surface 'outside' the bridge. Notice how much room the stinking train has.
When was the last time a train had a blow out and suddenly veered to the right? Think about that for a minute. A damn train can not turn.

The road surface of the Huey P. Long Bridge that you and I drive our automobiles across is held up by the same sort of magic you see in Las Vegas magic shows. Oh yeah. Like the trick where they have a tiger in a cage, and make him appear outside the cage? Screw that. If you are going to make the tiger appear outside the cage, then make me appear in the cage. Likewise with bridges, put the road surface inside the bridge.

Try driving across a bridge 300 feet above the Mississippi River with no side rails. Welcome to New Orleans.

The Burlington Bristol Bridge is almost as much fun. It is about 200 feet above the Deleware bridge, but unlike Huey's bridge, this piece of art has no concrete. Although the lanes are actually inside the bridge, the lanes are metal grating. If you look down,you see water. It's a two lane bridge sized for muppets pushing hand carts, built by dwarfs and traversed by frenzied people who drive according to the traffic laws of their native lands. Now the best part.

See the section between the two tall towers? They can make that section go up. Yep...they can move the damn bridge. You're driving along minding your own business and suddenly zooop! Some sick bastard moved the bridge. Who thought that particular feature would be attractive? Next time I cross it, it will be at gun point.

Mom was scared of bridges. Dad was scared of politicians.

A Barbeque Professional

I was recently reminded of my days as an Information Technology professional. In 16 years as a consultant to the likes of Hewlett Packard, Verizon, Sprint, and Bristol Myers Squibb, you see a lot, learn a lot, and develop some pretty strong ideas about how to get things done. Having acquired this knowledge, if you then abandon the consulting life for the corporate life in hopes of avoiding out of town travel which conflicts with your son's soccer schedule you need to be aware that the fates are going to deal you a screwball.

I was hired some 4 hears ago by a former client whose Unix boxes were a disaster, an absolute disaster. My first week there I received over 100 alarms a night from the unix servers. Using all of my knowledge gained in 16 years of problem solving for 'the big guys', over the first month or so, I constructed a plan to bring the unix environment into a more 'standard' configuration and introduce 'Best Practices'.....and that was a problem.

At this particular company, the use of 'Best Practices' was forbidden. The CEO expressly forbid using recognized 'Best Practices'. He also forbid note taking in technical meetings, claiming that if we couldn't remember what was decided, then the answer wasn't 'clear' enough. The environment was expected to be 'up' 100% of the time, but the infrastructure had no redundancy built into it. We had two tape libraries. One was purchased from HP, and the other was 'found'. The CEO did not believe in maintaining Service Contracts on servers after the initial warranty expired. He didn't like Support Contracts either, which sometimes made problem solving 'interesting'. One of the more interesting features of the corporate culture was that success depended on your ability to determine what Voldomort wanted to hear, and then saying it. Success was not related to your ability to deliver results.

So, I enjoyed a liquid lunch for a couple years. I kept my mouth shut, for the most part, and got the unix environment stable using Best Practices, and for my sins, was 'promoted'. Actually, the stability of the unix environment brought me to Voldomort's attention, which ment that I now had to interact with the loon and his band of lunatics. Actually he wanted me to do for the rest of the environment what I had done for the Unix environment, but without using the techniques and strategies on which my success had been built. Welcome to the land through the looking glass.

You simply can not reason with a lunatic. While trying to bring a new environment under control, I was confronted with blank stares when I explained to the imported morons that at some point, if we want things to get better, we simply had to stop doing things that we know are wrong and start doing things that we know are right. Silence. The morons had an interesting defensive tactic. When they were trying to thawart your plans, they would find the least informed person in the company who was at least one rung up the food chain from you, and get that person to make a 'decision' about the matter. More than once, I found myself in the position of having a non-technical imported moron tell me that I simply did not understand the 'technicalaties of the matter'. What is this world comming to when we have to import morons? Aren't home grown American morons good enough any more?

On another occasion, I got a lecture about priorities from Voldomort himself after I told him that until his commitment to quality exceeded his commitment to a release date, the software development guys would keep releasing non-functional software into production. I knew what he wanted to hear, but I wouldn't say it. I was an Information Technology professional, not a syncophant.

Liquid lunches got longer.

Finally, on the Monday before Thanksgiving, when Voldomort's pet monkey threatened to fire me because I would not require my entire team to be on "standby" over the Thanksgiving Weekend just in case Voldomort decided to move servers, I got mad. It was in the morning, before lunch. "That is a chicken shit threat.", I told him," Either man up and fire me, or shut the hell up." The meeting was pretty much over, and I went to lunch.

What did I care? My servers had gone two years without an unplanned outage, and I already knew my days were numbered, and it was time for lunch.

So, now I am retired from Information Technology, and, tragically, my alcohol consumption has taken a dive. I barbeque a couple of weekends a month at KC's Korner, a bar in South Plainfield, and I scuba dive. When in competition, or barbequing for one of our parties, I have been known to inbibe a bit...ok..a lot. Now, things are different.

It's important to get some things right. When you are introducing folks to the joys of real Memphis Dry Rubbed Ribs, you have to be 100% on top of your game. No liquor, because I am a Barbeque Professional.