It’s ironic when some companies try to espouse supposed work-life balance when the best thing a company can do for work-life balance would be to make you work 8 hours tops.

Consider a company where you end up spending 10 hours per day for work and work-related stuff (including team-building activities):

6 hours – sleep
1 hour – prepare for work
1 hour – go to work
10 hours – work
1 coffee breaks + lunch
1 hour – go home
4 hours – remainder

4 hours, 4 measly hours for your family, your kids, your friends, yourself. How is that balance?

Support asked for a list of log entries that indicates that the system unusable and require immediate action. So we provided them a list of fatal exceptions. The next question was stupefying: How many times should the exception occur before immediate action is taken? First, those are fatal exceptions. Fatal. Get it? The system is dead. How many time does it have die? Second, it’s immediate action. Immediate. Do it right away.

Today was the scheduled go live date of a project at work. Since it’s an onshore project, Nino and I were at our respective homes standing by to provide support. Nothing much happened until 1AM when the calls and the emails started coming in. There was a major issue and it didn’t look like phone support will do. So by 4AM, I took a quick shower and drove off the the office. By 5AM I was already at the office resolving the issue. Fortunately, it resolved pretty quick and the rest of the day was comparably less frantic and I was able to leave by 3PM. Whew!

I got to my desk this morning finding out the laptop has suffered a black screen of death. I rebooted and had to enter my SafeBoot password. Unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to correctly remember what it was and after several tries I got locked out. No worries, I thought. I simply called Tech Support and after giving out the details of my situation, I was told my problem will be escalated to Tier 1. An hour later, I got a call from Tier 1. The only problem is that he turned out to be at a different location. He said he will forward me to Tier 1 at my location. And I waited again, followed up, and waited some more. Getting impatient, I followed up again. This time, I was told that they had emailed me to go bring the laptop to them! How the heck could I have read that email? Doink!