Its so "Office Space"!

Its the holiday weekend so not much to report this week, actually kind of been a bit boring. Was talking to a guy at the beer bash a sort of Berkely-kind-of-dude-whos-done-it-all type. He was pretty cool for being old and bald. Anyway, he was telling me this story. Apparently this is all true but have no way of verifying one way or another.

The story goes like this. There was this total dick in Sales, Business Development or something. You know the type, Oakley's and a suit each day. So he totally makes a mess of a contract with some supplier. Henry gets really pissed and storms out of the meeting. Apparently the guy is shitting himself. Its Friday so he goes home. Comes back the on the Monday and Henry says nothing, does not even look him in the eye. So the guy thinks "Ok, I'm in the shit but I have a job".

This goes on for a few weeks. A few weeks turns into a few months. A few months turn into a year and a half.

But as the Berkley guy told me, and he swears he was told by a VP, Henry actually sacked him on the spot. He just carried on turning up each day for another 18 months before he finally quit for another job. Fucking idiot! Didn't he see that he was not getting paid?

This place is so Office Space its not funny. Talk about life imitating art.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 2 bottles (one down from last week)
Shots : 1 x Tequila, 1 x Bourbon (three down from last week)
Dinner : 4 nights (3 x pizza)
Weight : 163 lbs

Production trip after trip!

Wow, I thought last week was bad. I was getting back to normal with some crazy bugs for the shopping feature. Then over came Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir and I thought "Oh hell, not again". But sweet, he came and gave me a pat on the back and we had a shot of whiskey.

Literally seconds later his BB was ringing and then I was a tidal wave as BB's around the floor went off. "Oh fuck" were the only words he said before running over to DJ's area. DJ's team run the web site and they all can walk on water. Seriously, one guy was in Desert Storm and walked across a burning lake of oil to nail some sucker from the Republican Guard. How cool is that!

Turns out that American City Bank were coming for an inspection. Made sense after giving us a pile of green. What happened was that some dick from the operations team went to tidy up the data center, pulled the wrong plug and everything went down with it. Databases, network, you name it.

The guy was dressed down (rightly in my view) at the company meeting by Henry and then marched out of the building. I think that's right. You got to stand up and be accounted for in a place like this. With awesome opportunity comes great responsibility. And if you can't cut it then Henry has to show you the door.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 3 bottles (down five from last week)
Shots : 5 x Bourbon (three up from last week)
Dinner : 4 nights (2 x pizza, 2 x Una Masa)
Weight : 162 lbs

We got more funding, awesome!

Henry is just so cool. I finally got to hear him at the company meeting. At the beer bash afterward I went up to introduce myself. He then spent 15 minutes one-on-one with me to explain the big picture. I'm just a small cog in his big machine, it blew me away that he would spend that sort of time with me.

He was in town to tell us all the most awesome news. American City Bank of North Carolina have invested in us! He told hows its been living at the Omni hotel in downtown Charlotte and eating at P.F. Chang's (yum yum) every night. He said it was hell, but all worth while to secure further investment in building out the platform.

But boy, he really told us how it all is, how the platform will really sell us and give us a 30x or even a 40x valuation over our revenue. He made some comments to a bald Asian guy in glasses that "I'm not going to talk about revenue, you don't need to know that". But wow, awesome funding to build out this platform. Wow. We are going to be bigger than Google.

The only thing that freaked me out was the brown loafers without socks that Henry was wearing. But, I love this company despite that.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 8 bottles (six up from last week)
Shots : 2 x Tequila (two up from last week)
Dinner : 4 nights (3 x pizza, 1 x Thai, 1 x Una Masa for the funding celebration)
Weight : 161 lbs

I feel sick!

I think the late nights, drinking, stress of my first production trip all got to me. My boss ("Can-I-Have-A-Latte-Sir") spent the week chewing my balls. I spent the first hours trying to figure out what a "production trip" was, just to find out that its similar to a trip of a power supply... all the lights go out, rather than a "crazy trip at burning man, you were like blue dude!".

So I fired up the debugger and asked for logs. "You can't have logs or access to production". Its something to do with compliance or control or something I didn't get. So I tired and tried my best. Then my boss came over, "Fucking idiot" was not a great introduction to a hack-a-thon of console access, editing XML files, restarting JVMs and other stuff that I really did not follow. It was tough looking over his shoulder, but wow he knew his stuff. This guy is god.

I don't think I'm good enough for this place.

This weeks food and drink
Beer : 2 bottles (same as last week)
Shots : zero (same as last week)
Dinner : 4 nights (3 x pizza, 1 x Indian)
Weight : 159 lbs