I found, when working on a program or a computer problem, that the best way for me to approach it was to work alone. Other people distract me from the line of reasoning I'm following; sometimes we'd get side-tracked on irrelevant arguments while I waited impatiently to get back to working on the problem. In fact, sometimes when working with others, especially those with limited knowledge, I'd get so thrown off track that I would have to walk away so I could think about it later.
One of my managers was so impressed with my ability to get to the root of any problem that he told me he wanted to lock me in a room and just throw me some raw meat every now and then. I liked the imagery. I once told an interviewer that I worked best when in a room by myself with two slots in the door: one for problems in, the other for solutions out. I got the position.
The last few years that I worked in high tech were very frustrating and disappointing for me. I had gotten used to being the guy who everyone else looked to for solutions. Even when I didn't know the answer, I could usually point them in the right direction. However, I was on a contract where I was working in a team and often was called upon to solve a hardware problem at some remote location at 3:00 am with a hysterical operator giving me only part of the story, and a frustrated tech at the other end telling me something else altogether. I hated it. The work environment, other than the middle of the night pages, was great and the pay was very good. But I was bored out of my mind and disappointed that I sometimes could not get a handle on a problem when in situations like above.
The fact that there were unstated rules made it even more difficult for me. One time I had spent the entire night walking a tech through the rebuilding of a system from backups. The family had tickets to a ballgame the next day. I slept from about 6:00 am when the restore finally finished to about 10:00 when I got up to grab a cup of coffee and head out the door for the long drive to the ball park.
The entire family was in the car and I had just started the engine when my pager went off. Stomp back into the house and call the operator. He starts babbling something that, after being up all night, I had to keep asking him to slow down and repeat what he had just said. He eventually realized that I was in no condition to help him and asked me if he should call the backup on-call person. Go ahead, I told him, relieved. I slept through most of the game in my seat.
Monday my backup was furious with me. Apparently the operator was not supposed to call the backup, only the prime on-call was allowed to do that. She was so upset that she didn't speak with me for about 18 months--which made things awkward as we were both members of a small team and our desks were next to each other.
Early in my career I was managing a system for an office group. The machines were running All-in-One, a document-tracking application from Digital Equipment. I had just started the contract and was still getting the hang off All-in-One when a DEC support person upgraded the application. My phone started ringing. Everyone's old emails had disappeared. The package provided a simple interface for email; it kept track of where emails were in a small file in each individual's work-space. Knowing that much, at least, I checked, and, sure enough, when the expert applied the upgrade he had allowed a new empty copy of the tracking file to replace the working one in each person's account.
So, I figured the simple approach would be to restore the original files, which, fortunately, were still on disk--and so I did in short order. Then the phone started ringing again: everyone's old emails were back, but any new ones they had created earlier that day had disappeared. Of course, between the time that the techie had installed the upgrade and when I had restored the files, all the messages were being tracked by the new file. You know, this situation should not have happened at all. Application upgrades are supposed to be planned with all the steps laid out clearly and with a backout plan in place in case something went wrong. Also, you never did an upgrade on a live system while people were working. You did it off-hours with users locked out of the system. However, experts usually considered themselves above following basic routine procedures. And now we were stuck. My "solution" had actually been as poorly implemented as the original upgrade had been.
Now my manager was in a panic. She didn't know very much about computers and relied on me for all the technical stuff. I was trying to think of a way to get both files, the old one and the new one, back together again so that the users could access all their email. However, she kept insisting that I had to do a restore from backup tape. "Restore from what?" I asked. She had an idea in her head that if we restored the backup from the previous night somehow everything would get fixed. I tried to tell her how absurd that was: the backup had been run before today's emails had been created. I had already restored the old files from disk and there was no point in doing it again from tape. She hated it when I tried to deflect her from her set path.
She was the boss. So, I spent the next several hours spinning tapes. Of course it didn't work because that day's emails were not on any tape. She was insistent, telling me to backtrack to the last complete system backup and then restoring all the days in between one at a time. Nothing I said would penetrate her thick skull that files that had never been backed up to tape would not suddenly appear if you used tapes from different dates. It took hours to do each restore (systems and tape drives were not very fast in those days).
The clock crept around to 2:00 am. I told my boss I was too tired to spin any more tapes and needed a break. So, she braved the computer room to pursue her pointless exercise. Finally! I had a chance to look closely at the system and the files. I determined the structure of the tracking files and then looked up some file-management documentation. Bingo! I could merge the two files together using simple data processing commands. So, I did it. Voila!
I went to the computer room to tell my boss I had fixed the problem and we could go home. She was thunderstruck and asked me to show her what I did. I typed the command and the two file names, and, sure enough, all the user's emails were now available. If she had left me alone from the beginning I would have gotten there about 12 hours earlier and saved a lot of overtime.
She was really ticked off with me because by solving something so simple I had shown her how useless her approach was. When it came time for my annual review, she crucified me, citing how my arrogance had caused system down time (how I got blamed for all the downtime is beyond me). She quoted some similar incidents where problems had proven to be beyond her abilities to solve while I casually fixed them. That demonstrated all sorts of nasty things about me.
I never once, in my entire career, had received a negative annual review. In fact, our boss had her re-write that one and she left the department soon afterwards. (I took over her position and I was a lot more reasonable with those reporting to me than she had ever been. In fact, the boss had to ask me to tone down my reviews of those reporting to me; they were too positive.)
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