Ok lemme see, besides not getting too smart because it won’t do you any good, the whole place is infected with stupidity anyways, so no matter how smart and observant you’ll allow yourself to show off, you’ll end up the most stupid human being, not only that, you’ll be blamed for it.
Can you imagine being blamed by stupid people!
So, the 10 things I learned today at the customer:
- Do NOT, and I mean NEVER EVER in the life of me I would say it any calmer, do NOT parade your smart ass.
- Donkey work, okay this is important, focus please, donkey work is THE ONE AND ONLY thing that works at the customer, stick to it like glue that won’t go.
- Never even THINK that there would be a working internet connection, or else people will get smarter (God forbid man, God forbid!).
- Never schedule anything after a customer visit, dude it IS infinite in essence. And do ye know why? because stupidity is infinite.
- Do not be a planning psych, 99% of the time, things DO go other than planned, I mean sometimes you feel that the plan is to go OFF the plan. [Plan for Today: Deployment][Reality: Deployment, Database Migration, Database Setup, Demo, Requirements & CR Gathering]. [Plan for Today: Deployment at another customer site][Reality: Oops we forgot to tell you that you'll be meeting with head mesh3aref le hay2et mesh 3aref eh for comments on the report bta3 mesh 3aref eh].
- Throw yourself esteem in the garbage on your way to the customer, you’ll be treated like trash by people who ‘nothingness’ is an upgrade for their state of affairs. I had once to stand before some kind of general to examine me with his dead eyes, to decide whether I’m respectable/safe enough to walk the halls with my ThinkPad or not.
- Be a good hearer, not listener, I mean pretend to listen .. but what you actually do is just hear, because man if you listen, if you summon your strength and actually listen, you’ll perish in seconds. (after throwing up internally for like a hundred times).
- Organizational hierarchy, chain of command, customer focal point, engagement manager, analyst and all those fancy words we study in our ACed classrooms and conference halls .. HUH are a very sad hoax. Chances are you’ll do ALL this in the course of 30 mins to 6 hours at the customer site. Sometimes you turn into a technician who fixes the network cable, resolve a server issue, or even answer a question like: “Howa DB2 da leeh batee2 keda, da SqlServer asra3, howa leeh maynfa3sh neshtaghal beeh?”.
- Remember the old time joke of the disconnected power supply or network cable? It’s NOT a f***ing joke! (and seems it never will be!)
- Have lots of credits in your cell, lots of money in your wallet, a flash memory, a portable HD, another two of those with two members with the files backed up, and above all, have LOTS of patience. [If you find that they have turned off USB slots, guess who's screwed without Blank CDs!]
Last exciting piece of info, if you want to witness Murphy’s law in action before your bear eyes, request to join a customer visit, I mean I never really saw it actualized that seriously .. maskhara!
I love my job, I love my job, I love my job!,
[ibhog: you're in denial]
[ibhog: not too proud of it man .. not too proud ..]
LOL, the beauty of working at an IT company for the governmental sector.
yes, though it sometimes gets very ugly :D