Short week, high expectations

Here’s as brief a summary as I can manage of what’s up with the demands of my job right now: as always I am responsible for a few custom-built internal systems that facilitate people doing the business our agency is responsible for. They use other systems to carry out this business as well, one of which is transitioning from the unclassified network to the classified network. In response, one system I am responsible for has to follow suit, and by default I am responsible for making this happen.

I can’t make it happen on my own, of course; that would be far too simple. So I have to submit the request to other people who could move a system from unclassified to classified status/environment, and I have to make enough noise to guarantee that said request is not ignored or forgotten, and when said request is completed I have to test everything out and make sure they did it right, &c. &c. If anybody gets stuck with those kind of once-removed responsibilities, it makes perfect sense that it would be me, so I’m not complaining about that. Part of me wishes I could roll up my sleeves, wade into the tangled wires of the server racks myself, and make everything happen that needs to happen, but another part of me suspects that the whole enterprise is too complicated for anyone to have that level of access and authority, so that basically amounts to wishing for some impossibility of non-existence.

We (the most affected parties within my agency and I) have known this clearance-upgrade moment of reckoning was coming for a long time now, probably since the middle of the summer, which negates somewhat my ability to complain that this task is being unceremoniously dumped on me out of nowhere. But, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years of government contracting, it’s that sometimes things spoken of in the future tense never really come to pass, so spending too much time today trying to prepare for tomorrow is often a waste of time and energy. And on top of that, the original estimates were that my system would have to migrate by the end of the year; this has suddenly become my most urgent, double-plus-critical responsibility because the admins of the system transitioning ahead of mine decided, seemingly out of the blue about two weeks ago, to stop all support of the unclassified side effective immediately. So my deadline jumped from year-end-if-it-actually-happens-which-we’ll-see to A.S.A.P. Which is always fun.

So I can’t really complain about the timing, or the nature of the bureaucracy and all its apparatus, or the work itself. I guess maybe I’m not actually complaining? Just explaining, I guess, especially since I’ve been on a bit of a roll with the blog content (occasional belated-and-backdated post notwithstanding) but I feel like it could all come to a crashing halt if I get pulled into an all-day meeting (or more than one) about how excruciating the catch-up process in jumping classification-levels is going to be. If that does happen, at least now you’ll know some of the backstory in advance and my abrupt silence won’t come as such a surprise.