Cruising is finally coming into this century
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Finally, ML starts to heat up! I'm always connected on holiday, but I'm not sure it's a good idea. Just because I love my life, doesn't mean it's not healthy to have a 2 week break from it. Time to reboot. Time to refresh. Time to realise what is important in your life.
Or in the words of Tom Waits:
*I never saw the morning till I stayed up all night
I never saw the sunshine till you turned out the light
I never saw my home town until I stayed away too long
I never heard the melody until I needed the songI never saw the white line till I was leavin' you behind
I never knew I needed you until I was caught up in a bind
And I never spoke I love you till I cursed you in vain
I never felt my heart strings until I nearly went insaneI never saw the east coast until I moved to the west
I never saw the moonlight till it shone off your breast
I never saw your heart until someone tried to steal, tried to steal it away
I never saw your tears till they rolled down your faceI never saw the morning till I stayed up all night
I never saw the sunshine till you turned out your love light, baby
I never saw my home town until I stayed away too long
I never heard the melody till I needed the song* -
@PSX_Defector said:
@Hubtech said:
PSX, i'm a one man shop right now. MSP. i can't be gone for a week at a time. not sure why this seems so personal to you.
If you are a one man shop and cannot take vacation, why not hire a goon? Or are your customers so pissy that if you dare take off a day they will up and quit using your services? I know doctors who are able to take months off at a time, and they deal in life and death. If a customer requires so much babysitting that you can never leave, that's not a good customer, that's an abusive relationship. "Oh, he didn't mean to yell at me for something he screwed up, it's my fault for not explaining it better". Sound familiar?
I'm sick of this mentality. And I'm gonna call it out like I always do. Complete and utter bullshit. Scott may know some things, but he is dead wrong here. And any employer who demands that you always be available will only find the desperate and insane. We have interests, enjoyment, lives outside of what we do. I do not define myself by my job title. A job is a means to an end, the easiest way to make the most money for the least amount of effort. Someday perhaps I will reach a point where I do what I want and get paid for it, but today is not that day. And until that day comes, I will take off as much time as I please and tell my employer to kiss my ass if they dare call me when I'm having relations with a lady friend.
Maybe we are doing what we want to be doing. Maybe everybody is different? Maybe the reason you're so up in arms about this is because you dont like what you're doing. I dont hire a "goon" because I like the relationship I have with my clients, and i'm still looking for someone who will maintain the quality of service I provide. Take a step back and look at how silly your posts look. You've flown off the hinges a bit dawg.
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@Hubtech said:
Maybe we are doing what we want to be doing. Maybe everybody is different? I dont hire a "goon" because I like the relationship I have with my clients, and i'm still looking for someone who will maintain the quality of service I provide.
As an other one man shop, I get it. Hire someone else, I would love to, but sometimes the reason a one man shop is a one man shop is because there is not enough work to pay two men.
Anyway, I am looking forward to time off. Last year I got 3 days out of town after Christmas and a week in the mountains of Georgia. The first was very relaxing for me. I could quickly and easily check emails, support tickets a few times a day. I even took 5 minutes to answer a frantic business client's question. Now the cabin in the GA mountains, well that sucked since we had no phone, no text, email etc. 14 of us using 128kb wireless connection. I didn't even have Sprint service. By the 3rd day, I didn't worry as we left the cabin daily for excursions and 5 miles down the road, everyone's phones and tablets went off at the same time showing us what we missed.
Next vacation I am hoping that I have better coverage not just for work, but I was also a week with Netflix. I could live without the social networks and luckily I was able to DL my Kindle books while in town or I would have gone crazy.
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@technobabble said:
@Hubtech said:
Maybe we are doing what we want to be doing. Maybe everybody is different? I dont hire a "goon" because I like the relationship I have with my clients, and i'm still looking for someone who will maintain the quality of service I provide.
As an other one man shop, I get it. Hire someone else, I would love to, but sometimes the reason a one man shop is a one man shop is because there is not enough work to pay two men.
Anyway, I am looking forward to time off. Last year I got 3 days out of town after Christmas and a week in the mountains of Georgia. The first was very relaxing for me. I could quickly and easily check emails, support tickets a few times a day. I even took 5 minutes to answer a frantic business client's question. Now the cabin in the GA mountains, well that sucked since we had no phone, no text, email etc. 14 of us using 128kb wireless connection. I didn't even have Sprint service. By the 3rd day, I didn't worry as we left the cabin daily for excursions and 5 miles down the road, everyone's phones and tablets went off at the same time showing us what we missed.
Next vacation I am hoping that I have better coverage not just for work, but I was also a week with Netflix. I could live without the social networks and luckily I was able to DL my Kindle books while in town or I would have gone crazy.
Northwest GA?
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@Hubtech said:
Maybe we are doing what we want to be doing. Maybe everybody is different? Maybe the reason you're so up in arms about this is because you dont like what you're doing.
Again, it's a means to an end. I really don't care what I'm doing or whom I'm working for. It's a job. Is it what I want to get paid to do? No. I want to get paid to sit on the couch, smoke pot and play Xbox all day. Shunyata.
And once again, this narcissism permeates into everything. "i'm still looking for someone who will maintain the quality of service I provide" Really? Have you even tried? Have you found nothing but morons who can't hold a mouse? Are you really so much better than anyone else that if you let someone into your circle who doesn't meet your warped sense of capability you would lose all your customers? It doesn't matter if you have enough business or not. If you are small enough not to require a second person, you don't have enough customers to justify 24x7x365 coverage. And odds are, you are most likely not charging enough to justify this service level. So when you finally keel over and die, they will come into a rude awakening when they find out that everyone else charges twice as much for the level of support they are expecting.
I see this within our organization as well. People wrapping their arms around their specific client, not allowing anyone to perform really any substantial work because they want to control it. They are afraid that if any of our goons start working, they might do a better job than them.and they will be out of a job. This mentality is dangerous and self destructive, both from a business perspective and a mental health perspective. Hoarding isn't considered good, but look at what you are doing. You horde work hours.
Everyone is different, but this work non-stop even while on vacation is not normal. Don't act like it is.
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@alexntg We stayed in Blue Ridge. Nice town, loved the countryside. Because of the weather, we missed out on tubing!
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@scottalanmiller said:
@PSX_Defector said:
@scottalanmiller said:
If you are lone IT or a CEO...... Are you really saying that they aren't that important?
Yes. Ultimately, yes.
CEOs do no work. A CEO could go missing or die and an organization will still function. See August Bush IV, who was too busy letting chicks die in his bed than to run the organization, yet attracted and safely had a merger with InBev.
A lone IT guy will either stay a lone IT guy burned out by the entire situation or does as I did make the entire environment hum to remove the need for the person. It's infinitely unhealthy to be in the former, and infinitely boring in the latter.
A paraphrase of the safety credo from AT&T would fit best. No service is so critical and no service so important that we cannot take the time and find a backup for your position.
You need to work in the SMB for a while. Only working for large shops gives a skewed view of the world. You have very different priorities from a lot of people. Nothing wrong with that. But you give up a ton over ideas like this.
I get more vacation time, more flexible hours and higher pay because I'm willing to be more flexible. Say it my way, it sounds like you are the one addicted to work.
Even in the SMB, there's someone to cover for vacation. There's no change during that period, just maintaining the status quo. One doesn't expect a full duplication of manpower, but for every job, there should be someone who can cover by poking the other person's stuff with a stick. If I'm on vacation, I don't expect anyone to do any ground-up system designs without me, but I'm sure that someone would be able to reset a stuck VM or fail over to a backup host in my absence. I've seen CEOs take vacation and delegate key authority to others for the duration. In the lone IT guy situation, if they have an on-call MSP or even cross-train another employee for the basics. When I was a lone IT guy, I had one of the customer service reps cross-trained to be able to reset passwords, etc. I'd have a spare computer ready to go, so that if one died while I was away, they could swap it out and carry on.
In larger businesses, there are processes and controls in place to deal with this. Smaller publicly traded firms are held to SOX, which implements many of these controls. In the manufacturing world, enterprise customers often want these controls in place prior to doing business.
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@technobabble said:
@alexntg We stayed in Blue Ridge. Nice town, loved the countryside. Because of the weather, we missed out on tubing!
Nice area. I used to live about an hour from there.
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@alexntg Loved everything but the slow internet!
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@alexntg One of the reasons I was looking at Continuum vs GFI was the optional support desk.
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@Addie said:
Friendly reminder be nice please I don't want to shut down this thread.....
I'm a little confused, how is this thread not a nice conversation? I haven't seen any name calling, just lively debate......
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After I read "Time Management for Systems Administrators" by Tom Limoncelli (http://www.tomontime.com/) and seeing the perspective he put on the value of time off and away made me think differently about technology and how I use it. For me it's not about not loving tech. I love technology, because it keeps me learning new things and understanding problems better, while giving me a method of solving said problems.
It's the noise that builds up over time that causes me to want to disconnect / reset. That's vacation for me, a period of calm, where I can catch a breath, do what I want to do (be it personal tech projects or just simple sitting my rump in sand watching the waves roll in. I achieve calm, which makes me happy and allows me to think more clearly.
But if being connected is what you like to be even when on vacation and it's not affecting you, your family or your health, more power to you.
(This is not a personal attack on anyone)
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@Bill-Kindle just see PSX's curse laden rant mid way up, that is what they are talking about
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@david.wiese all I saw were the [moderated] tags. But that's the PSX way.
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@Bill-Kindle said:
@david.wiese all I saw were the [moderated] tags. But that's the PSX way.
Who do you think put the [moderated] tags in there?
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@Dashrender said:
@Bill-Kindle said:
@david.wiese all I saw were the [moderated] tags. But that's the PSX way.
Who do you think put the [moderated] tags in there?
I guess I was late to the party. Point taken.
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@Bill-Kindle said:
I'm a little confused, how is this thread not a nice conversation? I haven't seen any name calling, just lively debate......
On the contrary, Scott has repeatedly been called a narcissist. I would say that counts as name-calling. It's also, completely untrue, and an illustration of how little the name-caller actually knows Scott. Confident? Yes, and with plenty of justification for it, but not a narcissist. That's like calling a confident woman "bossy".
On another note, who knew that this topic was going to spark such heated debate? I feel a bit like I threw a match over my shoulder into a pool of gasoline.
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@Dominica said:
@Bill-Kindle said:
I'm a little confused, how is this thread not a nice conversation? I haven't seen any name calling, just lively debate......
On the contrary, Scott has repeatedly been called a narcissist. I would say that counts as name-calling. It's also, completely untrue, and an illustration of how little the name-caller actually knows Scott. Confident? Yes, and with plenty of justification for it, but not a narcissist. That's like calling a confident woman "bossy".
On another note, who knew that this topic was going to spark such heated debate? I feel a bit like I threw a match over my shoulder into a pool of gasoline.
At the least, it's put me off wanting to go on a cruise now.
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@Dominica said:
@Bill-Kindle said:
I'm a little confused, how is this thread not a nice conversation? I haven't seen any name calling, just lively debate......
On the contrary, Scott has repeatedly been called a narcissist. I would say that counts as name-calling. It's also, completely untrue, and an illustration of how little the name-caller actually knows Scott. Confident? Yes, and with plenty of justification for it, but not a narcissist. That's like calling a confident woman "bossy".
On another note, who knew that this topic was going to spark such heated debate? I feel a bit like I threw a match over my shoulder into a pool of gasoline.
I've been looking back through and I see now what you are saying. I originally read it as narcissistic behavior, which I don't really agree with that terminology in this context.
As for a match & pool of gasoline, who are you, The Joker? /jk
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@Dominica said:
It's also, completely untrue,
Enabling. It's what's for dinner.
Scott's wrong on this subject, using a narcissistic justification and is showing serious dependency issues with regards to working. That's my amateur psychological opinion of the issue at hand. You want a professional one, you picked the wrong member of the family. I calls it like I sees it.
This goes beyond "bossy" or "confident". It's drifting into the "I'm right, I'm always right, because I know everything about everything and you are always wrong" mentality that Scott exhibits at times. RAID5 anyone?
