Being the middle man sucks. What sucks even more is being the first middle man in a chain of middle men. My server went belly up, again. This time, my admin got pissed and said he didn't want to do it anymore. So, I found a new ISP and got the process rolling on switching over to new hardware. In an effort to make things easier on the users, I ended up making them harder and possibly costlier. Actually, everytime that I tried to make things easier for the users, something went wrong.
Back to being the middle man... So, a customer has a problem, I depend on other people to fix the problems, so I call up my new admin and let them know what needs to be fixed. They call up the old admin and ask them to do something and 4 hours later, we have the problem solved. Unfortunately, that was one of the quicker solutions. We have had some problems for two weeks now. The issue is, we find out one thing is wrong and fix it which leads to another issue. But for each of these issues, which all take in the neighborhood of 5 minutes to fix, we have to go through this whole chain of middle men.
Of course this would all be much easier if the two ends would just talk to each other, but the problem with that is there are really three ends and none of them speak the same "language". Having a real user talk to a real engineer just causes the engineer to curl into a fetal position and makes his eyes to roll up into his head. One solution would be to put the fixing end (engineer) in the position of being a user. That way, the fixer would know IMMEDIATELY that an issue was found and they could fix it.
Lessons Learned:
Lots of pain for a little while is better than a little pain for a long while.
Make the maintainers of a system actually use the system.
Posted by carl at December 8, 2003 12:12 PM
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