(Not) Makin’ Copies

Right this second the desk in my cubicle is a mess, with various documents and diagrams spread from one side to the other and overlaid with a multitude of neon green post-it notes. I was trying to find various pieces of documentation ranging from nine months old to about four years old, because apparently that is my job now: keeping track of other people’s process paper trails which I’ve been looped in on and had the foresight to file away somewhere.

So for today’s installment of You Are Going To Think I’m Making This All Up But Really I’m Not, here’s where things stand: I was issued aq new access card for my classified workstation around mid-morning on Wednesday of last week. The new card worked, I got on to the network, checked the machine itself to make sure the movable hard drive with all my documentation files to be moved was in place and readable, and it was, so I was ready to move forward with my other this-is-my-job-now: copying hundreds of gigs of files from one place to another.

I knew that the files had to be relocated somewhere network-accessible so that the application we’re recreating could read them and make them visible to the various end users. And I knew some likely places on the network where I could drop all the files. But just before I initiated the first salvo of broadband traffic, I decided it would be better safe than sorry to reach out to my contacts inside the I.T. department and ask them exactly where they would prefer I stash the files, if indeed they had a preference. The last thing I wanted was to start (or even finish) copying all the files to one directory, only to learn I really should have been copying them to another and be forced to do just that, duplicating all my efforts.

So, the question was posed. And the answer? Whoa, whoa, whoa, how much data am I trying to force onto the network? The answer is, of course, more or less the same amount I specified when this whole doomed project got underway back in November. It’s actually a little bit more because, shocker, the system has grown in nine months. But I was told last fall that my storage needs were “no problem” so … surely this is not a big deal, right? Surely I am not going to be delayed now by a mad scramble to find suitable memory allocations for something that’s been in the works for thirty-six weeks or something like that, right?

Do not ask questions you do not want to hear the answers to. Words to live by.

So yeah, it fell upon me to go digging through my old paperwork and try to find anything establishing a precedent for giving hundreds of gigs of space to our application, basically to prove that what I thought was already in the works should have been in the works all along. And I pulled together what scraps of documentation I could and dutifully sent them along, but now once again I am hurrying up and waiting for someone to get back to me and say all right, here is your destination directory, feel free to fill it up. Does the fun ever stop? Again, maybe don't ask questions and then you won't have to hear the answers.