RSSThe saga begins
Jun 24
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Work is becoming increasingly frustrating. For those of you who don’t already know me, I work as a database administrator for the US Marine Corp. More specifically, Marine Corp Logistics and Supply Battalion. While working with the Marines usually has it’s share of perks, my patience is being worn thin as of late. This is mostly because the Marines don’t understand exactly what I do for a living. They find it hard to imagine that someone actually gets paid to sit in an office and make sure things run smoothly. They’ve had every opportunity to understand. In the past 6 months, every single time that I’ve missed work due to an official function or vacation, turmoil ensues. By now it should be very clear to all involved that I am a vital asset to their organization. Apparently it’s not.
Three or four times a day, someone will barge into my office with some menial request to fix something minor. Maybe their barcode scanner isn’t working; even though there are dozens more to choose from they feel compelled to stop whatever they are doing and tell me about their dilemma. Since my job doubles as wireless network engineer, system administrator, and C programmer, it’s hard to tell what I might be doing prior to the interruption. To the Marines, it all looks like I’m screwing off.
One day I noticed that the amount of work I was doing was directly proportionate to the number of running programs I had on my system. I noted that when I was really sitting in the air conditioned office, screwing off, I would have only one or two programs running. Usually Firefox, and one secure shell terminal. When I was busy, my computer would have so many windows open that each of the icons were but tiny little slivers across the windows task bar.
I immediately started to think of ways that I could identify to the Marines that I was busy. I wanted something that would actually monitor my actions, and warn the Marines that I was indisposed so they would not break my concentration while mentally working my way through a recursion, or thinking of how to best query data from three tables with no primary keys. (hey, I didn’t write the system!)
The problem, I noted, was that I needed something non-technical. Something anyone could readily recognize without putting much thought into it. Not that Marines are stupid, they’re just trained not to think for themselves. “A big red stoplight is the only thing these guys will understand.” And TrafficStop was born.