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MurrayDelph

(5,293 posts)
8. I'm a retired Unix/Linux SysAdmin
Tue Aug 9, 2016, 06:13 PM
Aug 2016

who was laid off from a multinational corporation six years ago.

Every quarter, knowledgeable US workers were replaced by (theoretical) temps, who were employed by a sub-contracting firm also owned by this multinational corporation.

The expertise of these replacements seemed to be, when something went wrong, to send a email to those of us who were still remaining (even if not in their specific function area), with a request to "please do the needful."

One time, I was on-call and spent several hours in the middle of the night playing "Who's on First," because neither they nor I knew how to restart their application:
them: "Please start the <name-of-App-which-in-this-story-I'll-call-Murray>"
me: "OK. There's no program called Murray on that system, what's the name of the program to start it?"
them: "It's the one that starts Murray"
me: "I got that. What's it called?"
them: "It's the program that starts Murray."
me: "There is no program that references Murray. What's the name of the startup program?"
.
.
.

Eventually, someone came on line, who knew the product well-enough to tell us that, while Murray was the name they referred to the App by, the actual product was called Ralph and started a process called Fred.

Once I successfully ran Ralph and it started a process called Fred, I was able to create a new batch job titled Start_Murray.

I never found work after that company, but unemployment and subsequent retirement is better than working for those jerks again.

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