Now it's Tuesday:
Life is something better, a little. I poked the right
places and got upstream to expedite my host IP changes
(expedite, as in, I requested them at 5PM and they got them
online by 9PM). Overall I think I could do much worse than
this provider, and the PHB is planning to test that theory,
but that's a different story.
I found a nice tool to generate almost all my DNS-related
files. Well, nice by Windows standards. It's
called "Simple DNS Plus", (if you care, take a look at
their home page) and
it's a basic and cheap Windows DNS server. I cannot vouch
for it in any production way (I just didn't try it out that
way) but what it does do -- what I hoped it would do and
what it turned out to do -- is generate pretty nice zone
files. It also has a feature to automatically update
reverse zones, but the file it generates is in BIND 4.X
format. Oh, well, that's an easy enough translation.
Didn't get to a lick of production work today, and I don't
really care - I came thisclose to telling clients that in
so many words. See, I worked nearly every minute last
month, I didn't get to bike at all this summer, and when
John left I got stuck with all the things he used to do
+plus+ all the things I used to do. Net.Slavery? You bet.
And I figure that the only reason the PHB thinks it's okay
is because I -will- work 22 hours a day and sleep in the
server room where it's nice and warm and the server fans
shut out the phone and other noise. I'm essentially
telling him that things are fine when I do that. If I
limit myself to 10-12 hours a day and get 10-12 hours of
work done in that time, he can't have any problems with my
work, and the angry clients will tell him what he needs to
do.
And they do. Got one today who has a whole fleet of
different products we host, but they basically fall into
two classes, monthlies and quarterlies. We've always
charged the same for each monthly or quarterly, and when a
new one comes out we still give the same terms.
So the PHB has been worried about his bottom line lately,
and he's eyed this client as one of the ones he thinks we
undercharge (actually, we undercharge everybody, but that's
still another different story), so he wants to see all the
contracts. That John the Departed drew up, and swears he
dropped on me but I swear I've never seen. So we can't
review our current terms, and I suspect we don't have any.
In fact, the last time I scoured the orifice for these
Legendary Contracts was a couple weeks ago when said client
wanted to introduce a new product and quoted the
traditional figure. PHB says "I dunno, I don't think we're
charging them enough" (and since I'm basically working full-
time for this one client, PHB's probably right). So this
week (in DNS hell) said client sends the new data over and
asks about getting a formal agreement signed. I punt it
(BCC, natch) up to the PHB, who promptly calls me and tells
me he thought this was settled a long time ago. I point
out that what was settled was that we're not charging them
enough, and maybe this project is ripe for us to float a
new price model based on the actual time and overhead
involved, and PHB says he can't do that without a look at
those Standard Contracts, so we better tell said client
that we'll do it, and then next week we'll review the
Agreements in Hand and figure out our fair price.
Ummm... Nope, I can't figure out what's wrong with that
either. Except maybe that now we're locked into another
year at a figure that I know is too low, that the client
knows is too low, that even the PHB knows is too low, and
yet somehow -we- --all-- agreed to.
At this rate, I can't wait for Thursday. I mean,
Wednesday. Er, Friday.