times when you hate your job

[timwilky]

Normally I am pretty lucky and enjoy my job. But at present I am fairly P.O.ed

I act as a project manager, developer and anything else for the in house IT Dept. But recently I have been pulled back into the hosting centre I set up about 6 years ago because the manager has walked out and one of their hosting specialists has gone long term sick with stress.


The guy on sick was supposed to have migrated an application onto new hardware in august for an awkward customer. I have brought in the application suppliers to do the migration and they tell me.

1) I need new licenses as part of the app is keyed to the server name and ip address
2) License is £12,000 and the customer will not pay as they say it is upto us to provide it as part of our hosting provision
3) the application has failed to index any documents since February 2006 as no application administration is done
4) the customer now expects the hosting team to administer their app.

I am piggy in the middle I have already spent £3,000 on establishing what the problems are. It is going to cost a further £20,000 to resolve but the customer is refusing to spend a penny as they already spend £6,000 a year for our hosting service (8 servers, 2 oracle clusters and unlimited bandwidth).

Now my boss is unhappy. He is getting his backside kicked that we are failing to deliver, we are overspent and no guarantees that the problems will be resolved.

The customer is unhappy that we have not administered their app. (Hosting only contract) and it is all my fault and making complaints against me. I have only worked with this customer for 4 weeks and brought in to resolve their long standing problems. Everyone is running round blaming each other, but as the project manager the smelly stuff is sticking to me. It would appear the customer expects us to provide application specialists. yet it is a custom application developed by 3rd parties on behalf of the customer. We have no documentation. They expect us to provide 24*7, 7 days a week support when they pay for a 9-5, 5 days a week service. We have already moved their databases onto fault tolerant clusters free of charge.

There are time when I wish I could tell internal customers to go and find somebody else to do what they expect for the price they are prepare to pay. I am seriously over budget on this with no end in sight. I now understand why the original project manager has gone off with stress. My holidays have been canceled to allow me to spend my time on this project. The company has promised that they will buy back 10 days of my entitlement and allow me to carry a further 5 days into next year. The wife is threatening divorce as I have not been home for the past 2 weeks.


Oh happy days.

sorry you p**sed off. deal with the wife first mate ... make her happy tonight, you need a stable home to go back to for a good moan ! Wine, music, candles ..... you know the score, you never know you may feel better for it yourself

This might help :-

Jeeez with that going on I'd tell them thanks but no thanks. Still half of it was double dutch to me.
Surely with your credentials you could walk out and into something better, or is it not that easy?

Similar thing happened to the wife this week, people off sick with stress have left her to pick up the pieces. She was working 8am till 8pm. So I told her to quit, she got a new job yesterday paying 2k more than what she's on.

Were all human after all!

Originally Posted by DanDare

Jeeez with that going on I'd tell them thanks but no thanks. Still half of it was double dutch to me.
Surely with your credentials you could walk out and into something better, or is it not that easy?

Similar thing happened to the wife this week, people off sick with stress have left her to pick up the pieces. She was working 8am till 8pm. So I told her to quit, she got a new job yesterday paying 2k more than what she's on.

Were all human after all!

Thats great new for her! Sometimes I do think men have a more straight forward, black or white, approach to life .... and it can work. Bet she glad she listened to you

[SoulKiss]

Dont know if you are looking for the following - but just in case.

Point 1 to address is same as TC's suggestion - get the wife on-side - with 10 days wages and 5 days carried over you can promise a nice week away on the "found" money the situation is providing. Try explaining the home stress to your boss and see if the company can do anything with regards to this "after its fixed" break.

Now that the important bit is done you can deal with the rest of it.

Havent got a solution just yet (well dont have the time to write my thoughts down to be honest) but will give it some thought - main thing to consider is "Can you do without this job until you get another one?" If the answer is yes then quitting IS an option, but I suspect quitting isn't an option personally and you would get much more satisfaction from solving the problem.

But with the "I dont have to be here do I?" question answered, you can get yourself established as having the position of strength in your relationship with your boss - let him know you can quit, but you relish the challenge, but need his support, not his hassle.

Work from there, document it all and when its finished, speak to him about a huge pay-rise/bonus.

David

[SoulKiss]

Originally Posted by DanDare

Jeeez with that going on I'd tell them thanks but no thanks. Still half of it was double dutch to me.
Surely with your credentials you could walk out and into something better, or is it not that easy?

Similar thing happened to the wife this week, people off sick with stress have left her to pick up the pieces. She was working 8am till 8pm. So I told her to quit, she got a new job yesterday paying 2k more than what she's on.

Similar position here - was working in a fairly stressful job, lots of responsibilities, working weekends and some late nights, then due to a shuffle I was let go - exactly 1 day before I would have been there a year - so something funny going on, but my contract did have a clause in it which allwed it to happen - oh well know better next time.

However next time is even better - not allowing for extra NI and Tax that I have to pay for being a contractor, I have earned as much in the last 2 weeks as I would have done in a month in my last job.

All my fears of contracting had been blown away before I got this opportunity, from being made Redundant a year ago, to what happened 2 months ago I dont see this as a job with less job security, I am in more control of what I do.

Not saying that getting out it THE solution - in fact my previous post said otherwise, but try taking control of this - get your boss to give you goals - not some vague "fix this" - but to detail what the fix is. Then when you go to him saying that it will take £12k to fix to his spec he cant argue against it and its HIM who has to come up with the solution then.

Tim, pretty much as SoulKiss said.

Get the wife on side, that's more important than any job (in my case at least). If it's a case of loosing the job, or loosing the wife, I know which I'd choose, without hesitation.

Personally (and this applies strictly ONLY to me), if I were in your situation, I'd be talking to my boss (which you probably already have done). If a customer wants more than they have a binding contract for, they pay for it, or don't get it. End of conversation.

Once that my boss has agreed to that, I would then take it as authorisation to tell the customer to take a running jump.

The last time I did that, it worked out well, luckily. But this was an external customer, and we literally left them high & dry. We spelled out exactly what parts of their contract they had violated in the past, and that we'd got them out of the sticky stuff on more than one occasion, and that due to new demands we (including my boss & company chairman) considered their contract null and void, and from that point on, we would be refusing to deal with them whatsoever until a new contract was formed.

The idiot at the customer site that was making demands of us outside our service contract was promptly fired, and his replacement happily signed a new world-wide (except North US) contract with us, and service resumed. They then paid for all change requests they had submitted.

If it hadn't of worked out like that, I had the backing of the company chairman himself. So I was in a good position anyway.

In your situation, you're in a position that you're not supposed to be in, so if the above isn't an option, try asking for someone else to replace you in that capacity, so you can go back to your old one. They'll probably say no, but it's worth asking. Then I'd be considering just not turning up again (like the old guy that did what you're doing now).

[Biker Biggles]

Don't you just love employers?
All hail fellow well met isn't life great and aren't we doing well when it suits em,then dump you and **** on you as soon as look at you when the going gets tough.
We are all just numbers to them and totally expendable.Best to keep that in mind.

[timwilky]

As I said in my opening line, Normally I enjoy my job. So walking out is not the answer. There are times like this when the pressure is on and I work extremely hard. Then when the pressure drops I coast a little and get to take the odd long weekend with the corporate goodwill I have accumulate etc.

I am just suffering a little with grief on the domestic front. The wife does not understand I don't have a 9-5 job and cannot simply switch off and come home at the end of the day. Instead I end up p1ssed in a hotel bar etc.

I am just feeling a tad unloved. The customer wants an immediate solution that I cannot provide. My boss understands the issues, but has to be seen to be expediting a solution. I am at the mercy of 3rd party suppliers without a support contract and a rapidly disappearing contingency budget trying to resolve problems other have run away from.

Give it a couple of weeks and I will no doubt be posting about times when you love your job

Originally Posted by timwilky

The wife does not understand I don't have a 9-5 job and cannot simply switch off and come home at the end of the day.

I know that feeling well tim Best of luck with the stress. For me, the wife is usually causing more stress than my employers & clients combined. But then, she doesn't know what working is like, she hasn't worked in the last 7 years (other than staying home & looking after the kids).

At least you have the hotel bars! Currently looking for that winter escape. Summer is great, dissapear on the bike to relieve stress.