Long couple of days here. On the positive side, they did not fly me out here to have me waste time.
When I left off these chronicles, I was enamored of my huge shower. A piece that had not sunk in at that time is that this is not a shower for those with any body image issues at all. The sink / counter is a single piece of glass, moulded to sink shape. Said counter floats between two columns attached to the wall, and behind the counter is a floor to ceiling mirror.
When you bathe, you stand facing this full length mirror. You are illuminated from above. It is not the sort of scene that lends itself to romanticizing ones shape. Me? I’m in pretty good shape. However, after a couple of exploratory flexes I realized that I really didn’t have the sort of body that I like staring at in the buff. Oh well. It was still opulent. I rested my coffee on one of the many marble ledges, and took sips as I showered. I’m totally not allowed to do that at home.
The gig is demanding. I’m working for a science institute of 400 people or so – about 125 scientists. This engagement is the capstone of a rather long and involved deployment. Apparently the word came from the very top of the organization that no mere vendor training would do. The local guys wouldn’t cut it. The training had to be delivered by my company – by me in particular. I have no idea whether this was due to inflated imaginings of my capabilities or by some familiarity bred contempt for the local folks. Whichever, I find myself standing in my own shadow here.
For all that, I made incorrect assumptions about the class. I walked in with five presentations ready to go. My class is generally very light on “talk” and very heavy on “what do you want to do?” I’m good on my feet and I procrastinate. If I can really connect with even one student – help them solve their problems – then I can create an avatar in the organization. My whole and entire goal on these gigs, not to put too fine a point on it, is to create people who replace me.
So first off, we did the lecture portion in a formal lecture room with no network. All the parts where I usually ad-lib and *show* people how to use a system were filled with – well – description. This was my one request – that we do the lectures in a network connected environment, preferably with workstations or laptops for the students.
I was quite enthusiastic to get to the lab part. Little did I know.
The classes I had prepared start with things like “write a hello world script, however you prefer to do it.” I generally then work with whatever language(s) people pick – so as not to get bogged down in “oh gosh, I don’t know PERL.” In this case, however, there was substantial confusion about concepts like establishing an ssh connection to a server. Edit a file? What now? “ls?”
So I had 20 people staring at me as I said what must have sounded like “mwah gar lubble stuh.” The lab was filled with the sound of people staring at me as I tried to explain that you truly don’t need to modify the defaults on ssh-keygen. Nobody had user accounts. Nobody knew how to run ssh. The class diverged … I struggled. The day wore on. We had tea. And biscuits. Seriously. In the middle of this fiasco, we broke for tea and biscuits. It was actually civilized.
Fortunately they recorded the whole thing on video. Two man camera crew. As my class caught fire, I glanced at the camera guy and thought “diediediediedie,” but it didn’t work.
So, we called it an early day yesterday. Devolved to a small group of administrators and did a more normal class on systems administration. We probably wrapped up about 10 hours after we started. After that, last night I re-wrote my entire day two schpiel to include an introduction to the Unix command line, and to provide step by step instructions on every file I wanted them to write.
I rolled in this morning with shiny new, highly detailed slides, like “let’s go to the lab and fix this thing,” and the honcho is like “we will do a formal lecture in the conference room.” I tried to convey that simply reading through my highly detailed and cut-and-pasteable slides to a room of 20 people would be … um … painful. She would hear none of it. First the formal lecture, then the lab time.
So we did it. I thought that the class really went pretty well, for all that. People appeared to learn. They were writing little scripts and running them by the time we reached the end. The cluster was seeing use. It was too good to last.
We wrapped up with the students around 6. Then the team turned on to me and started laying out customizations. The system has to power itself down if the temperature gets too high. They need linux virtualization, tied into the cluster. They need, they need. They asked if I would take a break before getting started.
Break? We’ve been here 11 hours already.
Yes, so you must need a break before getting started.
This was where I started getting a little snippy.
I think that what I actually said was something like “are these pieces that *we* will be working on, or that *I* will be working on. Because if this is a team thing, then I will join the team on the break. However, if this is one of those nights were six guys stand around and watch me code – I would prefer to get started now so that it can end sooner.”
Tomorrow is the final day here. More simple rules will apply. I will work hard, at their direction. What they get to pick is the order of tasks I attack. I will check to be sure that am still working on the most important thing. I will stop at whatever I consider the last major milestone that I can deliver prior to 5pm. I will end on success, dammit.
I will also deliver at least an hour more of formal lecture, in that godforsaken, network free lecture room. On slides which my James Bond style martini will help me write.
And then I will leave this place. This beautiful place, that I have barely seen, to which terrorists apparently have snuck, seeking to blow up a big shiny western hotel with marble showers.
On a lighter note, when I ordered my martini, with olives, my wonderful bartender smiled a huge Indian smile and said “oh, James Bond style then?”
Yes, you’re damnn right. James Bond style. Bring it on – Wed, You got nothing on today.
