Back in the world of Bugs

"John" did an amazing thing today; he finally restored my access to the Yahoo bug tracking system! You can imagine my shock and dismay after first seeing my access restored and second realizing that I had about a week worth of work that had to be checked in / merged / reconciled.

It always amazes me when companies talk about the "standard interval of time" to do something (or its shorter more telecom-centric version of it, the "standard interval"). The words "standard interval" recall to me the fun days of working at telecom companies, where no matter what task you were requesting of the incumbent (monopoly) phone company, there was always some lengthy "standard interval" attached to it, that tended to be missed anyway. It didn't matter that through the entire interval, practically nothing was done until the last 10% of the time remained, and from a certain philosophical perspective, that makes sense to me (having to guarantee work in a certain timeframe when you have lots of other jobs to do competing for your own limited resources to get them done, plus the wonderful notion of "all nighters" and deadlines), but I used to imagine that standard intervals were so formalized that a person at such a company would leave for a bathroom break and drop a "standard interval: 60 minutes, escalation available" sign somewhere in their cube.

In this case, "John", who was able to shut my account access off (with fairly poor justification) within the same business day, needed more than a week after the bosses had agreed to restore access due to the standard interval associated with activating Y! bugzilla accounts.

The bug that he took over was still there, but he had removed the word "please" from the subject; now it was a more direct message about how this bug shouldn't be touched as it had been repurposed to detect certain kinds of activity in the bug tracking system and tests would break if anything in it changed (and other bad things might crawl out and find you in the night).

I resisted the urge to open another ticket either about "finding a sense of humor" (P3, don't want to alert YNOC again) or "Please create your own bugs for system tests so that we don't break things when you steal bugs and apply bogus reasons to them" (P5), and file it as a blocker / dependency against the other. If he missed the humor in the first one, he'd probably miss the humor (and the passive aggression) in the second, and I don't really agree with passive aggression anyway (at least when it's not funny).

So, let the whiffing continue. And if you order a pizza for delivery, make sure you wait at least the standard interval of 1 hour before wondering where it might be (adjust for traffic, weather, locale, time of day, ingredient rarity, and doorbell ringability conditions as appropriate).