Today our customer discovered a big problem in our production system. As usual I got called into a conference call to discuss the plan of attack. Our manager had drawn up a 6 phase plan, ranked in order of importance.The problem occurred in the back end part of our system. The guy responsible for that piece would do most of the heavy lifting on the resolution. However our manager asked who was going to do what tasks. He first asked our lead DBA what he would do. Essentially the DBA said he would do nothing as it was somebody else's problem.
Then my manager came to me. I volunteered for the lowest priority task on the list. It also seemed like one that was fun. My team lead said he would help if needed, but he committed to nothing. I tell you. These leads are smart guys. They make it sound like they are team players while they slip out the door and go home.
It seems like I got tricked into doing more work for this problem. It was for a good cause. Our back end developer is overworked as it is. So I reluctantly agreed to take another one of the six tasks required for completion of the problem. Now I need to come up with my own plan to get some of the new guys to start doing production support. Then I won't be stuck in these conference calls and taking work home all the time. Time to start planning.
