I’m headed to Baltimore tomorrow. My contract got extended until Wednesday of next week to finish out a troublesome customer.
Seems that a Wipe/VTOC of an 8830 went horribly wrong, and the decision was made to power-cycle the box.
Anyone who has worked with ANY major frame-based storage vendor knows that powering an array down that’s been running for 3+ years continuously is a bad idea.
So after parts were replaced we find ourselves back on track, but now with almost no chance of being done before the Wednesday deadline.
And 3 days from unemployment I find myself faced with an experience I’ve not felt since 2001. I’m at the end of an engagement without a replacement. I should have seen it coming, though with good reason I thought I was safe from this one. You see I went into this well aware that EMC has a bad habit of purging right before the holidays, but had a contract that was supposed to carry me through April so I thought I was safe. I guess you’re never really safe and no contract is really worth the paper it’s printed on if the person you have the contract with is a major corporation with it’s own legal team. So contract broken, I find myself staring down the business end of a lull. Thankfully the customer I’m at is none-too-happy about this and arranged to have me kept on for a couple of extra weeks.
Oh there are possibilities. A few EMC residencies around and about (a couple of them asked for me by name, a singular honor), a few unaffiliated EMC jobs, datacenter moves, consolidations, and the like. But those are not what’s caught my attention.
One interview i’ve been on involves the opportunity to learn something new. HP-EVA, Hitachi, NetApp type new. Things I’ve heard of but never really gotten any stick-time with. A real chance to broaden my horizons. This is a good place for me to be I think. I think I’ve gotten myself way too pidgeon-holed with EMC andit has severly limited my options. This new opportunity is also much more sales than service, which I think my EMC experience will add up to a big edge. I also think that I never again want to find myself with one company/client holding all of the cards. I will dive head-long into this if the opportunity presents itself. I’m nothing if not predictable. Give me something new to learn and I won’t sleep until I know it.
But for these last few days I’m still an EMC person. I will continue to give the usual 110%, and will probably be at the customer site until late on wednesday trying to make sure I’ve gotten as much done as I can.
Because this is who I am. I always give my all, and put everything I am into a project. I think I can count maybe one month in the last 12 that I wasn’t 100%+ billable. This is why customers like me, this is why they request me by name.
I’m sorry EMC has chosen again to play the part of Scrooge this Christmas season. They lose a lot of GOOD people during the purges, because these are the ones that get hired away. When January comes around and they realize they don’t have enough hourlies to fill the onslaught of end-of-year orders, they have to hire them back. They end up getting back the ones who couldn’t find a gig right before the holidays. In short they end up hiring back the ones who were passed over by other vendors, consulting firms, and the like.
It’s reverse-darwinian selection at work.