A Story

I’ve had this recollection rolling around in my head lately. It happened a number of years ago.

Back in the late 1990s, after working for a few years in Training and Development at Lockheed, I picked up a job working as a system administrator for GTE Data Services. Good job, good money, good company. I was there on contract. Anyway, in 2000 GTE was “merged” (i.e., overrun by barbarian hordes) with Bell Atlantic, creating Verizon Communications.

It was an ugly merger. Bad things happened. At one point the new management even tried to break their communications workers union by sending 50-year-old secretaries in Florida to go work in New York winter, climbing telephone poles to do repairs. I’m not making this up. No one was safe and everyone was stressed and scared.

I left that colossal cluster-F in 2001, with the vague plan of being a writer. That’s a long story, but it’s not the story I want to tell today.

A couple years later I went through a work dry spell and needed money, so I started shopping around with the headhunters and eventually found a very well-paying gig as a system admin at – you guessed it – Verizon. It was only for a few months; I figured, what the hell, I do my time and walk with the cash and never look back. So I took the contract.

It was a different place. The management decisions that were starting in 2000 had now been rolling for a few years, and it showed. Virtually everyone had been laid off and replaced with cheap Indian H1Bs. Everything was being done on the absolute cheap, and the few remaining regular employees all lived under a siege mentality. “Former GTE” (as we called it) had been completely gutted.

First thing I was told was, my basic job was to keep a guy named Jerry from getting stressed. Apparently he had had some “issues”. The senior admin, Jerry was about 25 and in charge of running a data crunching system for the point-of-sale Verizon marketing guys; my job was to act as his junior/backup admin. And Jerry was apparently prone to stress: I was told that not long before, he had to take some time off to get himself back together. Now he was back and everyone was treating him with kid gloves.

It was a cushy job. It wasn’t a big application, seemed to be completely automated, not nearly as complicated as the system I supported over in CLEC Subscription Services. Pager calls were rare. So for three months I just pocketed cash and recharged my financial batteries.

So one day I come into work and Jerry’s gone. No one’s talking. We get into our 9am staff, close the door, and I ask my supervisor point blank: what the hell’s happening? Where’s Jerry?

Am told that he’s no longer with the company.

Excuse me? What HAPPENED?

Am told he’s back in county.

WHAT?

Sigh. Okay, here’s the deal: Jerry was a cokehead and his “time away” was actually a short stint in county jail for drug possession. He went to rehab and Verizon let him keep his job while he was on probation. But the night before, Jerry apparently screwed up and violated his probation and is back in jail and no longer with Verizon. So congrats Rob, you’re the senior admin now.

Wow. Okay.

A few days after that – the weekend – it was time for the big monthly data crunch, when our system would be in high processing time all weekend. No big deal on an automated, production class system; you sit on the pager and wait for job fails, and be prepared to jump on the computer at 2am if necessary to fix things. But on a well-oiled system, even a heavy processing period should only result in two or three fails over the full cycle.

But I found out quickly the truth, that this system wasn’t nearly production class. Or even automated. Our department manager (a short, insecure, arrogant Asian man that a friend of mine nicknamed “Pol Pot”) had taken a “proof of concept” application – an unautomated, barely tested system designed to simply show that a production class app was worth building – and billed it to the client department as a fully tested and automated production system. His plan was to use the lie to keep development funds coming, so that they could ultimately replace it with the “real” system before the lie was found out.

Catch is, you can’t run a manually operated system to appear fully automated. It can’t be done. But you can sure as hell try.

Jerry, the cokehead determined to keep his Verizon career at all costs, had been working 100-hour weeks. I didn’t know that until he was gone. Every time we went into one of these big data crunches, he worked practically 72-hour weekends, tripping all the switches and pulling all the levers to maintain the illusion.

I found out most of this on the Friday before that fateful last weekend. Pol Pot spelled it out for me, that this was what Jerry did, and this is what I’m expected to do as well if I want to have my contract extended and to keep my job.

And you know what? I gave it my best shot. Hell weekend. Probably a total of four hours sleep. And in all the chaos, I did drop a couple of balls – but saved them quickly enough, with no lasting consequences. We got through the weekend with all the data crunched by Monday morning and I was feeling fairly good about it. I came into the office on Monday morning, deeply exhausted and on a VERY short fuse, with the plan to drop off my pager with my team lead and then go home and sleep for 18 hours.

So I’m standing there chatting with my team lead – former GTE, older woman, career telecom – and she’s telling me that I put up with a lot more crap that weekend than anyone had the right to expect, but that I did a great job. And as we’re talking, I see the telltale head of Pol Pot marching around the cubicles, heading over to us.

He turns the corner and proceeds to blast me for not making the system run fast enough.

It was an ugly scene. I just didn’t care by that point: he yelled and I yelled right back. Half the floor was peeking over their cubicle walls to see what the commotion was. My team lead subtly moved over to one side, getting ready to break up a fist fight if she had to. And I’ll admit, it was awfully close.

I finally spelled it out. My contract is up in three weeks. I’m not doing another weekend like this. Period. If you don’t like it, don’t sign the contract. Life’s too short to spend killing myself in a futile, impossible effort to cover up the idiotic sins of an incompetent, arrogant little prick. He countered that I was bluffing, because no one wants to walk away from a well paying job. I answered, try me; now I’m dropping off this pager and going home to get some sleep. I pushed past him and walked out without another word, without a backwards glance.

Not surprisingly, they didn’t extend my contract.

Two months later I worked another short term tech gig, making a lot more money than Verizon ever paid me. And it was a lot more enjoyable. Since then, I’ve never had to fall back on tech contract work – every cent has been self-employed, working-from-home writing revenue.

Life goes on, is what I’m saying. And sometimes you’re just set up in a no-win situation. It’s not fair, but that’s just what happens sometimes. But life goes on and, with patience and resourcefulness and the help of good friends and family, things work out.