Plumbers and Janitors

After a long trip around the Panhandle, I’m back at home.  I think I drove 250 miles today in my trek to get things ready for PCI 2.0 compliance.  It ended up being about a 10 hour day, but I enjoyed it.  It’s not every day you get to see good actions and results.  Maybe more on that later.

I find a lot of people in my industry don’t really spend the time or effort to achieve much.  Whether it be a chain or a person, they all seem to be drawn to mediocrity.  Either that, or I just don’t know what motivates them.  It’s very likely they don’t know what motivates themselves, either.  Just a lot of slouching towards the weekend with no real goal in sight, and no plan. 

I think I read in one book or another that the average IT person is best equated to a janitor or a plumber.  Both experience the same problem.  It’s in how they deal with the problem that makes their job descriptions different.  The problem in question for a janitor and a plumber is a leak.  A janitor spends most of their time mopping up the same leak.  They deal with the same problem over and over again.  A plumber finds the source of the leak, and stops the leak. 

With that idea in mind, I set out to be a plumber.  In order to be a plumber in the IT world, you have to know a lot and you have to begin to understand root causes.  If you are app’ing 5 Ruby II’s a month (not to be confused with a Ruby 2) due to lost program on a reboot, then you need to figure out how to solve the problem.   The solution is app the Ruby.  The problem is not the random power fluctuation.  The problem is the Ruby doesn’t hold on to its programming.  So the answer is replace every single Ruby battery pack.  Guess what?  You then forget how to app Rubys because they retain memory through a reboot.