Rebellion at TCP Towers!

It had to happen. The trolls who attempt to keep the lusers out of TCP Towers are revolting. Well, one troll anyway; Simon the SysMangler. For he can no longer stand the tension at TCP Towers and the sort of management decisions shown in "Tension at TCP Towers". The lusers haven't been helping either.

So, why have I left TCP ? I've managed to put up with writing TCP's first accounting system. I've coped with doing SysAdmin stuff, programming and dealing with some of the nastiest clueless lusers, with a few uber-lusers thrown in for good measure. However, whilst I actually enjoy the work I do at TCP Towers, there are problems.

For starters, TCP isn't actually in a tower. Its in a very small room, about 3m by 5m. This wasn't so much of a problem when it contained just John the Unstable, Phil the Peeved and myself. The addition of the Unamed One caused one or two problems. Whilst the Unamed One is very effective at keeping lusers off the walls of TCP Towers, he isn't what could be called clueful. He is also very annoying at times. On more than one occasion he has been delibrately annoying to get a reaction when the other trolls are a little bit stressed. This hasn't caused him any physical harm yet, mainly thanks to to me warning him about treading on dangerous ground. This has meant that the working environment within TCP Towers could best be described as non-optimal and at worst described as pointless. There are times when it really is impossible to get any work done. Especially when the door next to my ear is open so that I get an earful of fans. Not that I mind the air conditioning cooling down the room the trolls are in. Its just that I'd wish the fans wouldn't sing to themselves so much.

Working conditions aren't the only reason. No, there are other fun ones as well. Bad management is a problem. The boss is starting to rule from above on the day-to-day running of TCP when he doesn't actually know anything about said running. The boss also has grand schemes that never really reach fruition. A good example is how TCP was supposed to be moving about a year or so ago. TCP may have moved by the time I leave in August, but I doubt it. Its just the trolls that are being moved as well.

The amount of work I was doing was silly as well. Whilst some of this was my fault for working such hours, I didn't really mind as I was enjoying it. What I do mind is the boss not appearing to appreciate the additional work I was doing. How I would pull out all of the stops to get something up and running ASAP. I'd get the problem solved, but only after proving that lack of sleep is a really good hallucigen. The work load at TCP has steadly increased as TCP has grown. The load caused by actual SysAdmin work is fairly low. Its the development work I was doing that was causing a lot of the problems. In the early days I was just coding relatively simple stuff for internal use. Now I'm climbing the Informix cliff whilst implementing a fairly sizeable project to connect a database to the web. Along with writing some reasonably complex stuff for TCP as well.

As a result of the above, Simon the Stressed has rebelled against the King of TCP Towers, handing in his notice. The final attack on the wall doesn't take place until mid-August thanks to the notice period I have.

However, another job is now waiting me. Its a programming job. Yep, that's right. Simon the Stressed may have recovered. I'm not holding my breath to long though. I'm sure that I'll be asked to "just help out..." at some point in my new job.

Instead of a BOFH I'll just have to be a Bastard Programmer From Hell of the worst sort. The one that has been a SysAdmin and so knows all of the ways to really annoy admins :)

I think that I may well be asking if I can have root on my personal box ;)

Posted on 13th Jul 1996