A person who can't lead and won't follow
makes a dandy roadblock.
Author unknown
The California Recall Election
McClanahan on the NARA Trigger Warning
In past posts, I may have discussed in 2004 I moved to Maryland to take a contractor position at National Archives in College Park. I worked on a Siebel based application which allowed veterans to order copies of their records, as the principal database administrator and Unix system administrator. Most of the application's clerical workers were based out of St. Louis. There were a variety of technical things I did to tweak operations. For example, occasionally we would have a network glitch which would hose Oracle connections to the database. The problem was a cap on Oracle processes, which meant that reconnections would be a problem with the old connections persisting. My predecessors used to reboot the database (probably a 20-minute outage) to free up processes. I think someone had costed out outages as costing over $10K an hour. I developed a quick utility that expired all the old sessions in mere seconds.
I also probably also wrote about when I discovered that one of the drives in a RAID-1 configuration (mirroring) on my test database server was defective. So when the field engineer replaced it, he noticed that the redundant power supply on the production database server wasn't in use (it had to be plugged in an alternative socket). God knows what idiots installed and/or signed off on the installation not noticing the redundant power supply wasn't powered on. Now I ran into bureaucratic hell. I couldn't get management to sign off on connecting the redundant supply during business hours. Not only that--I was dealing with absurd work rules. I, a mere human, couldn't be trusted with the complex task of resetting the plug into another socket. (How did my apartment management ever trust me with plugging in my toaster?) No, I had to have a PROFESSIONAL ENGINEER do it. (I guess this would be like the NFL banning touchdown dances unless you have certified dance training at an approved studio.) I couldn't do it until 7 PM (because my St. Louis users had guaranteed uptime until 6 PM CDT). I had to call the engineering section, and the civil service manager wasn't about to have one of his people stick around until 7 PM. When then? 4 AM. So I ended up driving in before then. The dude never showed. Security wasn't about to call management. I went down to the engineering section. They didn't know anything about it, and they weren't about to do anything without a signed work order. I went to the server room and asked the night shift operators if they had seen an engineer shown up. They started laughing hysterically at me. I went back to my cubicle and dashed off a quick email to my civilian boss in St. Louis. When I came back to work later that morning, I confronted the civilian manager. He argued that the engineer had gotten caught in one of those famous traffic jams at around 4 AM in the morning and got there at like 4:05 AM but I had already gone. The lying son of a bitch didn't know I was on site as late as 4:30 AM and had written emails to that effect. I never got so much an an official apology over all this. Contractors are second-class citizens. (Yes, I eventually got my power supply connected. My St. Louis boss was a civilian.)
More on the political front, I think I've also posted these observations in older posts. I worked in a cluster of cubicles, many of which were occupied by civilians (government employees). This was in 2004; JibJab had some viral clips of Bush and Kerry. Maryland is deeply blue; I think there is one Republican in Congress, and Governor Hogan is one of the few Republicans to win statewide office in recent memory (we had a one-term predecessor, Ehrlich, when I first moved here, but he had been the first one in over 30 years, since Agnew, Nixon's running mate). I'm sure there may be some Republicans in civil service, but I never knowingly met any. Anyway, I often heard many civilians crowd into cubicles to laugh at JibJab's caricatures of Bush (on government time), but more disturbingly, I heard one civilian boasting over how he was bottlenecking things until "President Kerry" takes office. I don't know the nature and extent of this "Deep State" conspiracy, but I always worked hard as a contractor no matter who occupied the Oval Office.
All this doesn't bear on the trigger warnings and other politically correct rubbish that McClanahan mentions here, but it doesn't surprise me based on my anecdotal experience.
Miseducated
Choose Life
Political Cartoon
Courtesy of Pat Cross via Townhall
Musical Interlude: #1 Hits of 1978
The Bee Gees, "Night Fever"
