If it weren't for all the users, our systems would be stable.

I have been working on email issues for the better part of the last 2 days. It turns out a change was made on our gateway email servers that has impacted every single one of my servers. The change was made on Friday afternoon. People started noticing enough to ask about it late Monday morning.

Last night, I got a workaround for the problem figured out. I implmented it on the servers, I thought really needed it. I also emailed all the engineers letting them know the status up to that point. Today, I spent nearly the entire day trying to figure out the solution to the problem, and implementing the workaround on other machines.

Early this afternoon, one of the engineers replied back to the list saying to the effect of "Thanks for the fix, but why was there a change in the first place? Was it tested? Why didn't anyone notify us?" This was followed by a paragraph of whining. My initial response was to reply to the list, and let her have it. (It's not like I caused the problem, and it's not like she's the only person impacted by it. Her last statement "Where can I bill my time?", which was the one that got me the most.) I decided to squelch the inital response, and didn't mail back to the list. I considered emailing just her, but didn't. I figured anything I would say would first of all not be very productive, and second of all, the guy that actually broke the thing is sick, and I don't want everyone calling him driving him crazy and not letting him rest. I figured that I've been the bad guy before, I could do it again, no problem, really.

Anyway, her director emailed back this evening, saying he was only emailing the list because she did. His response was if she had questions about where to bill her time, she should ask himself or her chief engineer, but she should bill it to the products she supported. He noted that I was just trying to identify my involvement in the situation, I wasn't attempting to give a detailed analysis in the situation, and she shouldn't shoot the messenger. He pretty much told her to chill out.

Sometimes I don't actually need to bite people's head off, others can take care of it for me. In the meantime, I skipped a meeting for a project that's supposed to be cancelled, but the project manager has nothing better to do, so he is still pursuing it. They ended up calling me during the meeting to ask stupid questions, I snapped at them a few times, then basically ended the conversation. 2 minutes and 56 seconds. A new record, even for me.