on urgency

There are various ways of expressing urgency in Spanish.

Ya
Ayer
Cuanto antes
a la brevedad

Am I missing many?

I doubt it. I get tons of emails during the working day that are all "urgent." So lets analyze this... if I have ten urgent things in the queue, and I get an eleventh - is it really "urgent?" It's just as much in the queue as the other ten things, right?

Maybe its a cultural thing, I don't know. If you live all your life in a place where the practice of customer service by companies is not only dead, but probably never born yet, then maybe when you go to work within a company you might have the skewed idea that you should tell everybody that everything is urgent, even when its not? (Customer service by small businesses is quite good, assuming you are asking for something they do 1.000 times a day. But if they have more than, oh, three employees its a different deal.)

But I have set my sights on and declared war on the practice that everything is "urgent."

Anyway, a situation arose at work where a workgroup all uses a particular server. The workgroup doubled in size but the server was an afterthought. Of course, when the server ceases to function under all the load, I get the call. The "urgent" call. But they're all urgent...

So I go along with the request to "monitor" the server even though it needs a priest (last rites) more than it needs a technician. I "monitor" it, make a change that seems to make sense - but since I did not ship a magic wand down here to magically upgrade hardware I cannot do more than that. Meanwhile The Powers That Be finally make a decision and then actually the purchase related to that decision for a new server. Meanwhile I am offering to move databases temporarily to other servers but it gets pretty much ignored.

Well, the new server arrives last week. But I'm working on another "urgent" request having to do with a cellphone that cannot get electronic mail, for one employee - meanwhile an entire workgroup is suffering this server that's completely snowed under. Ok, whatever.

So Thursday morning it shits the bed again and I get another visitation from the project manager or whatever the hell it is he does... and he's all fired up about the server being unavailable again. This evolves into an eventual lecture, by him, in front of his boss - about the need to keep a keyboard and mouse plugged into the server at all times because "I don't know if you know this, but sometimes when you plug the keyboard and mouse into the machine after it's booted up, it sometimes doesn't recognize it." Hmm.. thanks for the tip, buddy but I did pick that up in the previous ten years of working around this stuff. Any other little gems and I'll check with ya, m'kay? So during the course of getting the keyboard and mouse plugged into it (it was "urgent") I unplug the power to the domain controller as well as one and only mail server for the company. At that point this dickhead's boss is lecturing me about "You need to be more proactive" about server maintenance.

POW TO THE MOON. (and it explains my previous entry from last Thursday...) Given that I don't have authority to buy hardware or even initiate the process, I think offering to move databases is pretty damn proactive!

And this is coming from the same guy who should have bought a server (and is technically qualified enough that he should foresee the need) along with hiring his new employees.

So this morning when plug-in-the-keyboard-guy descends upon me again and insist I do something NOW/cuanto antes/ya/a la brevedad/ayer about the failed server all I can do is offer to reboot it - which will temporarily alleviate the problem for an hour or two. I tell them quite clearly its overloaded and there's nothing more I can do - and the response is a series of statistics that, if you boiled down into a smart search phrase for Google, would result in a number of articles about servers they are indicating they are overloaded.

However, offered the opportunity to reboot, or not... no choice is made so I do nothing. Performance is slow until everyone goes to lunch, over the lunch hour the poor thing recovers, and life goes on.

And plug-in-the-keyboard-guy has now stopped speaking to me, which is perfectly fine.

The moral of the story... urgency is fine and good in an emergency but it shouldn't be your "plan A" when your lack of planning has exploded on you.

Oh well, off to the gym to work off all this frustration.