League Of Red-Headed Gentlemen

Well. I'd planned to be more prolific, but ah, well. Anyway, here's an update.

So my boss dropped by my office to encourage me to get more proactive about picking up tickets and working incidents.

Which is fine, and I've been eagle-eyeing the pager and ticket queues for the past two days, waiting for something to pop.


Only, nothing ever does.

I mean, I get all kinds of pages, but that's only because my team is cc'd on all ticket creation messages created by another team for incidents relating strictly to their area of responsibility.

Yestreday afternoon, I asked one of my teammates if I was missing any mailing lists, and there's stuff going on that I'm not aware of. She says, no, not really.

It's just usually pretty quiet.

Meanwhile, my boss also encouraged me to get involved with what my other teammates are working on, and what our peer-teams are working on. Which, again, is fine.

Except that our peer-teams don't communicate for shit. I've been pinging these other teams for two days, in a polite, friendly, way: "Hey, we're really interested in seeing how you guys are using tool foo, which we're thinking of implementing ourselves; when can we get together and chat?" Nothing.

And whenever I go to my teammates to get in on whatever projects are allegedly keeping them busy 25/8 (seriously, supposedly my team is incredibly overworked and understaffed), they always reply that I should focus on the one thing [a particular brand of appserver] and not get all confused by having three or four different things I'm trying to learn. Do one thing quickly and well, rather than four things slowly and poorlly.

Which is fine, except that like I said, there's no WebSphere action right now. I've already done practice installs and configs. I've already read the manuals. And the pager just refuses to blow up with incidents I could troubleshoot and resolve.

Not only that, but I come from a pretty solid generalist background, you know? Environments where I'm expected to have three or four different things going on at the same time. Two or three different operating systems. Multiple hardware platforms. Several different customers each with their own requirements and specifications. A variety of application server platforms.

And incidents every day. Not like this, where it's one customer type, one application server platform, no hardware, no OS, and no incidents to speak of for days at a time.

I'm beginning to wonder if my teammates have some sort of cultural bias against me. Maybe they see me as a "big dumb lazy American, who eats cheeseburgers and watches American Idol all day". Like, they can't trust me with more than one thing at time, and they're trying to gently ease me into the greater challenges of this job.
Which is fine. Seriously. I'm getting paid to learn how to be a better coder. Even if my team is made up of crypto-racists, they're very polite about it. It's more funny than anything, really.