HasturCom: The Madness Out of Space

Or, The Thing That Should Not Be

Here at HasturCom, different teams do the same thing in different contexts. So there's my team, which specializes in supporting websites for external HasturCom business. There's also another team, identical to mine, which specializes in supporting websites for internal HasturCom.

Now, this arrangement actually makes lots of sense to me, as far as it goes. The problem arises because it goes a lot farther than that, and not in any kind of good or wholesome direction.

Both these teams are organized under the same department head. All of this department's "customers"--HasturCom employees who are responsible for taking care of HasturCom's business--submit their website support requests to this department.

Ideally, they'd submit their request to the appropriate team within the department: To the External team for external business, and to the Internal team for internal business. But in fact our department does not communicate these kinds of fine distinctions to our customers. So our customers just submit their requests to both teams.

The next step, then, is for whichever team is responsible for fulfilling the request to proactively respond to the customer, take ownership of the request, and carry out the appropriate fulfilment tasks. But this never happens. Internal requests will sit in the joint team queue until somebody from the Internal team gets around to responding to it.

Or until my supervisor decides that it's a perfect opportunity for the External team to go "above and beyond", and volunteers us for the work. This sucks.

A dude whose supervisor is worse than mine

What sucks even more, though, is that my teammates get antsy when they see these Internal requests in the queue, because they know that if the Internal team doesn't get on them soon, our supervisor will assign them to us. And we don't want this.

So when my teammates get antsy, the often tag me, as the New Guy, to make sure that the Internal team takes charge of the request. This also sucks. Imagine you're at your place of work, large and in charge, maxing and relaxing. All of a sudden, some other dude, who is totally not the boss of you, gets all up in your email inbox, all like "dude, you're responsible for this, get on it", and "somebody other than me needs to do some work around here". That dude, the one all up in your email inbox? He's kind of a jerk. I don't want to be that dude.

I mean, I'm really polite and business-formal about it and all. But still. Running around telling other people to do their jobs, however politely, is not my idea of Fun Times. It'd be different if I was the boss of them. Then I'd totally revel in my power, and rule with an iron fist over my loyal subjects. But the Internal team is not my loyal subjects, and I have no power over them. I just end up having to be a jerk to them anyway.

And it gets worse. The real madness here is that even within our own department, it's not always clear which team is responsible for what request. There is no consistent nomenclature. Even my teammates, who have been here twice as long as me or longer, don't always know if "shoggoth01" is an Internal or External server, or if "Shambling Horror" refers to an Internal or External project.

The madness reaches epic levels when our customer actually does know to which team he should forward his request:

CUSTOMER: Internal Team, please modify the webserver on shoggoth01, to support the Shambling Horror project.

INTERNAL TEAM: External Team, we think "Shambling Horror" might be your area of responsibility. Can you take this on?

Note here that the Internal Team apparently has no qualms about being jerks all up in my email inbox.

MY TEAMMATE: Container, please find out who is responsible for this request.

ME: Well, if shoggoth01 is an Internal server, and Shambling Horror is an internal project, it should be the Internal Team's responsibility, right? I'll ask them.

MY TEAMMATE: In fact, it is the Internal Team's responsibility. I've told them to take care of it.

ME: . . .

And then I lose 12 SAN.