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Two days. I can make it. Two days is all I need to endure. I'm typing this on the bus and was just thinking about the morning ahead. My boss is holding a meeting to review reports he directed Joe and I to do regarding every device in the corporate network and the risk associated with running that equipment... shit like potential for outages, mean time between failure, business purpose of device against risk it posed if down, mitigation of each risk as defined, cost associated with those risks, whether or not the money has been budgeted to allow mitigation. Total bullshit. Fluff. Let me give you an example... let's say you have a few thousand routers and switches on the network and a certain percentage of those are modular. Let say you run for years without a failure on the chassis, but have had a handful of failures of port adapters or line cards (modules) over the years and they were different module types and the mode of failure was unrelated. Let's also say that depending on where you are in the network, there are redundant failover mechanisms and alternate pathing so the network self heals, yet in other parts of the network that doesn't exist. How do you generalize to the platform level and associate statistics. Obviously, you get your statistics where most people get them... you make them up. I would rather not complete the document than turn in bogus numbers. What a shit sandwich. After that meeting, we all have to meet for our weekly engineering staff meeting. The have deteriorated in content over the last couple of months to talking about how many different ways we can turn in the same time reporting so "The Bobs" have pretty graphs and charts to better outsource us with... joy. After that meeting, I have another meeting with my boss to discuss the asinine idea management presented last week of consolidating our distribution and access layered network into a collapsed core design... big, big mistake. So Joe and I have to present pros and cons and try to convince them since the opinions they used to pay us to bring to the table are worthless under the new management. "This is a good idea because it looks simpler." Actual quote. I feel like I'm duct taped in the backseat of the car Thelma and Louise are driving off the cliff. Hang on and enjoy the ride to destruction. After we present our expert opinions against their idea, we have to provide this stuff in writing. I've decided I'm going to carbon copy the vice president. I may get fired over it, but I won't support a piss poor design like that... I'd rather resign than watch a bad decision of this magnitude get implemented. It would be bittersweet to be in the I-told-you-so situation, but I'm not willing to be the little bitch that has to fix it when it doesn't work. I'm guessing this probably brings us up to around lunchtime. After the lunch part of the day, I have another meeting with my boss to discuss the flowcharted workflow and procedures associates with the way we audit all changes made to routers and switches on the network. I got tagged with this because I'm the guy that has been doing all the configuration change auditing on a daily basis. Basically, I get up in the morning and review every single fucking config entry that was made anywhere on any router or switch on our entire global network and justify in a written report to my manager, his boss (my director), his boss (my VP), and the VP that oversees network security... daily... that the changes were all good and within our corporate standards and that they pose no danger to the network at this time. My stamp of approval so when something breaks, I'm already covered in gasoline... all they need is to flick the match my way. WOOF! Kill da wabbit! Kill daaa waaaabbit! Everything these days is a witch hunt. Every single aspect of any activity that goes down at work now is followed shortly by my boss or his boss inquiring about who they can pin it on. It sickens me more than you can imagine. So, after at leat half of my day has been wasted on useless meetings, I must find time to do my real work. The sad part is, my boss and his boss actually believe that if they take up our work day with their proven unproductive agendas, that Joe and I will finish all the work associated with out actual job after hours or at home. Wrong. I would not have a problem with that type of thing if the things we were doing had an ounce of good. Unfortunately, they are misguided and evil. This entire post is making me wish I was riding the bus to the bar instead of work. This situation could easily be rectified by a half dozen double Crowns. Ugh! I'm done bitching. I'm just gonna get some coffee for my constitution and some KY for the ass reaming Joe and I will take yet another day and try to keep my chin up.

I hate.