Production Support Pay
June 23rd, 2005 by Ian
I got called into work this past weekend twice. I ended up having to work 10 hours total over the weekend. The timing was horrible. Saturday I got pulled away from a great day with friends at the water park. Sunday I got pulled away from cleaning/cooking for a Father’s Day cookout we were doing with Bobby’s family at our place. Of course, I was pissed.
What pissed me off was that I was being called in to help with a project I haven’t worked on in 2 years. A new version of the project was being moved to production and they were having issues. Unfortunately, since I had left the team, no one had taken the time to learn a certain piece of it. Once problems arose, they had no idea what to do. That’s when I got called.
The issues that I had to fix should never have occurred. The first issue was environment setup. During the production move, the team had forgotten to move a necessary jar (i.e. stupid admin error). The second issue was user error (they were entering bad data). Then a third issue arose that was an actual issue. This one I had to code a fix for and test in ITE. The thing that amazed me about this error is that it was consistent and easily producible in ITE. It should have been caught in their testing prior to production. I’m thinking the system was never tested, which is just plain stupid on its own.
Okay, I should get to my point. So I had to work over the weekend without prior notice, for a project I’m not on, interrupting two great days of my weekend. Usually at times like these, you get a simple “thank you” or “I appreciate you coming in this weekend” from management. Well, for some reason, this time was different. On Tuesday, my manager gave me a gift card to Home Depot. Not sure of the amount - he didn’t say, I didn’t ask, and the card didn’t specify. But any amount is a nice gesture. Then I get to work this morning and find a small card and green pouch on my desk. I open the card to find a thank you note from the group manager of the team I helped. I open the green pouch and find a gold coin with the III Forks logo on it (III Forks is a high end restaurant in DFW). There at the bottom of the coin is the dollar value - $100!! Now that makes me quite happy 
So even though I’m still not happy about working the weekend, this makes it a little better. I just think of it as my production support pay.
cmusic=Quelqu’un m’a dit by Carla Bruni
I’m guessing you would have preferred $100 cash, but hey III Forks is nice
You could make it a nice, romantic dinner with Bobby or you could invite some cow-flesh-loving friends to come along (on their own dime, of course). III Forks is about $50 a person.
Oh yeah, we have to do lunch at Texas de Brazil sometime - I have a 15% coupon.