
I didn’t get to watch the company burn, but that was a good thing
Longer ago than I care to recall I was slowly outsourced. It started with a company announcement of the fact. Seeing the writing on the wall my supervisor quickly found another job. I was hoping for a promotion and better odds of surviving the cut. Ah, to be young a foolish again. Instead I got to train my new boss. I managed to get him mostly up to speed before the outsourcing company decided it would be less paperwork to replace me than to hire me. I had a week left with the company and needed the money, so I did what I could to train my replacement.
The twist on my story is that while I worked IT I was not in an office, but an oil refinery. For those of you who have never visited an oil refinery I think its best described as an active construction zone with chemical hazards. A place where oversized, six-wheel, extended cab trucks and chemical resistant coveralls are as normal a breathing. But really set the mood I would like to recall my safety trainer: “If there is an incident and we don’t know where to find you, we will leave you to die” and “this oil is under so much heat and pressure it doesn’t need a spark, it’s just looking for air”. Great way to set the tone for my first day of work; I still don’t leave the office without telling someone where I am.
Most sane people would be glad to leave such a job behind, but like all my stories, it gets worse.
You see with the IT shake up cubes were moved and computer were refreshed. When the head of the pipe line inspection got a new computer, she needed her safety systems set up again. In any oil refinery there are hundreds of miles of pipe pumping everything from crude oil to jet fuel. Pipes that must be inspected on a regular basis for weaknesses. One hair line fracture in any of those pipes could cause an explosion that would not only level the plant but cause an earth quake that would be felt up to 500 miles (805 kilometers) away. The problem was that the system was a weird combination of a local install of the safety system and a Citrix virtual install. Before we were outsourced there were only two people in the company who understood how it worked, both were let go.
I spent my last week, while not training my replacement, arguing with the offshore helpdesk that I was not trained to fix it. I had to leave before they worked that out, but as I never felt the earth quake I’m pretty sure it got fixed.