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[15:35] Blergh
Date: 6/8/05 at 11:35PM
It appears that if there's one thing I haven't learnt it's reading ALL of the documentation BEFORE you make a damn fool of yourself start working on something. Let me paint you the scene...swirly lines...swirly lines...swirly lines
I finally got to go to work today after technically starting last Wednesday....that would be a full working week, a full working week which I spent reading doco. There is a trick that most people know (well, most people I know - this could be an IT phenomenon) of reading for "fact position retention" rather than comprehension. There is no way that I could have remembered everything that I read in the last 7 days but I do now have little signposts stuck in my brain of which documents to refer to when I need more info on a certain subject area.
My jobs today were to:
a) Get into the bloody building without assistance; and
b) test the unattended installation processes of a monitoring server
In that simple word lay the seeds of my undoing. For the most part the project on which I am working is installing agents on servers as opposed to installing the servers that the aforementioned agents talk to.
So, I get two documents e-mailed to me. The first to arrive covers the Unattended Agent Install, the Unatteded Server Install arrived a while later. I grabbed the first one, obviously without engaging any kind of cognitive process, and as it fit with the theme of my previous reading so well my brain stayed in signpost-mode and I started blindly following the steps....luckily I couldn't get very far as I had to try and copy 7Gb of install data (sheesh!) over the network and I ended up talking to my boss whilst still in the data gathering stages of my first foray. Luckily I'm so anal about things that I don't actually DO things the first time through, I pretend to do them and see what data I need and what might go wrong. He pointed out that I was not doing what I was meant to be doing (yay me) and completely refrained from calling me a prat, which was nice. I then went on to read the right document and do the wrong thing out of that as well, because I DIDN'T READ IT ALL FIRST.
I'm a little upset with myself for this, mostly because the most spectacular mistake of my career (well, thus far anyway - no point in putting limits on myself now, there's always room for escalation) came about from exactly the same thing. I read a document and started blindly following instructions without actually thinking about what I was doing....and destroyed a server that took a lot of people several months to build. That time I was lucky in that I had a whole weekend to reverse the damage and a few knowledgable friends to call on. It caused a managerial battle but no real technical damage was done - well, none that I didn't reverse and I learnt a lot that weekend :)
I hope that by writing this and pointing out to all and sundry (Ha! I know no-one's actually reading this) that I'm a prat (someone had to say it) will prove to be a cathartic experience for me and that I can move on and not repeat my mistake again. We'll see I guess.