clawing my way down hill
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The past two days have been a mixed bad of good & bad. On Thursday morning I had my weekly meeting with Ali to discuss the status of moving Support under Colin. Every meeting thus far has been relatively uneventful, and this one was as well for the most part. The thing is that I've started to notice a trend, and I think its intentional on Colin's part. Right after my meeting with Ali, things start to get ugly. Colin returns to his dirty tricks, and generally pisses me off. Going into the weekend, I'm generally really annoyed and start working a mental list of things to talk to Ali about. Then as the following week progresses, Colin manages to squirm his way out of everything so that by the time of my next meeting with Ali things are relatively good again. This has now happened for 3 weeks in a row. Anyway, I gave Colin a positive report card, and Ali asked me some interesting questions. He wanted to know if the weekly Support Status Update that Colin releases was written by me. I told him that I write about 90% of it, and then Colin fills in the rest, and edits some of my original content. Ali then asked me if I was still in contact with DeWayne. Now this question was odd, and really out of left field. I was honest, and told him that i've spoken to DeWayne once since he left. I did mention that there are times when I wish DeWayne was still around because I'd like his perspective on things. Ali asked me if there could be someone else I could turn to, and I told him that I didn't feel that there was because the longterm relationship that I had with DeWayne is what fostered my trust in his advice. I suspect Ali wanted me to turn to Colin for advice, but right now I can't see how I'll ever feel comfortable turning to Mr. Weasle. Every encounter with Colin is a mental marathon, trying to outthink one-another, and probe eachother for information. How can I ever feel comfortable opening up to someone like that when I can't trust him with what I'm telling him?<br />
So later on Thursday at the Engr Management Meeting, Colin starts foaming at the mouth about some automated FAQ generation tool, and tasks me with researching it. I attempt to ask why this is necesary, and got ignored.<br />
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Move ahead to Friday morning. First thing on Friday I had a meeting with the CFO and Colin to get approval for new hardware that Support needs. That meeting went really well, and was prolly the highlight of the past 2 days.
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Later on Friday morning I had a disturbing puzzling meeting with the Directory of Engineering (Mark), and Colin that was titled "Harware and production systems". The meeting turned out to be barely related to its title. Initially there was some discussion about the server that Mark had been bugging me to reload. I agreed outright to reload the server (or more accurately to replace it) once spare hardware was available, and Support had documentation on how to properly backup & restore Fusion. I stated very clearly that I was going to proceed because I wanted Mark to be comfortable with the OS on the server so that he could provide support. So Colin, being the slimeball that he is, asks me if I feel its neccesary to reload the server, or if I'm just doing it to appease Mark. i was honest and I responded that I didn't think it was neccesary as there haven't been any issues related to the OS since an initial one two months ago that I promptly tracked down and resolved. Oddly, Colin took my side, and said that he supported my desire not to reload the server. I still commented that I planned to do so once both conditions had been met (new hardware + documentation). After that point it just kind of went down hill with both of them ranting about how engineering does things, and implying that I didn't understand. It was obvious that they had an agenda, yet I wasn't made privy to it in advance.<br />
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