"The servers are being retarded" and "A fat woman sat on me on the bus" come to mind in reading this post. I think I've been here too long.

Certain dictionary definitions saved me on the retarded one at least.

In any case, the Internet's a big place... plenty of people to offend.

I find it highly amusing that you get yelled at for anything regarding lj.

I was thinking the same thing, just replace "amusing" with one of brad's quotes.

Also, you could always go work at Linden Lab; I think they get bonuses for server downtime.

Hooray for office politics and people who are too fucking fragile to hack it in the real world.

Wake up kids. People get pissed off in the real world. People use words like "fucked up" and "piss-poor" in the real world. Bummer if your feelings got hurt. My sleep cycle is way more important than your fucking feelings.

Whiny crybaby bitches.

I left one job for this kind of bullshit, I'd leave this job if it happened again. Thankfully, so far, everyone is very willing to say "fuck" or "goddammit", and noone has gotten their feelings hurt. Because apparently, we didnt hire 2 year old crybaby bitches.

How much of that is a function of living and working in California, vs. being in a corporation?

I don't follow ... ?

I love work drama; it's the reason I got put on anxiety meds! Too bad I keep leaving them at home...

Three other people I know have told me they are on some sort of drugs because of their job. I wonder if there is a study on that.

Wasn't disaster recovery with multiple datacenters a major bullet point in 2005? Whatever happened to that?

thus the downside of working for someone else. Fun.

I can only speak for myself, of course, but as a 58 year old conservative, Catholic, Republican wife and mother who has been out of the corporate workplace since 1977, I was not at all offended by your word choices and, in fact, find your honesty and forthrightness very refreshing and highly amusing! As for corporate sensibilites, those who took offense and yelled at you should have been on the floor of the brokerage firm during my tenure in the financial market. There was daily, vehement cussing in English, German, Yiddish, Hebrew and something that passed for very bad French but was barely understandable. The trading floor was far worse, the air there used to turn blue with regularity. Manny on the Bond Trading Desk used to habitually answer the phone shrieking "WHAT IN THE F--- DO YOU WANT?!"

Manny on the Bond Trading Desk used to habitually answer the phone shrieking "WHAT IN THE F--- DO YOU WANT?!"

Man, I thought I was the only one who ever answered a phone like that.

My infamous phrase at inreach was "You all should be shit-canned and replaced by a fucking retarded monkey".
I've mellowed out a bit since then and just use the phrase "fucking retarded".

hahaha. I love that phrase.

At my job one of the management innovations this year has been that no one is allowed to say that a broken feature or infrastructure element is "jacked" or "jacked-up." The actual jacked-up stuff, however, is allowed to remained jacked.

Heh. I got in trouble for saying "pooched" but not "fucked", go figure. Go Go Corporate America.

"Indirectly hurt one or more people's feelings" was a big reason I quit the Big Corporation Job. Every time it happened, the person's feelings weren't even hurt, it was just some fucking stupid busybody ambition-towards-being-a-middle-manager bitch not being able to mind her own business.

Aw, this makes me miss working with my ol' buddies. An incredibly smart bunch and we respected each other's acerbic criticism. We just wanted to make the system better.

"Operations" is a different world.

For some reason I'm reminded of this.

I'm not sure for whom your apology was intended, but I found it more offensive than your original email :-D

I'm offended by this post.

How sad that their feelings were hurt. Sounds as though your original email was doing just what an after-action report should be doing: pointing out what went wrong and could be done better.

Tha's one thing MySQL does get right. I've never been criticised for saying what needed to be said.

"No good deed goes unpunished."

If it were my code or system that was "piss-poor", I'd be a little miffed, and I'd probably say something about it. But I'd probably wait until the crisis was long gone and say it carefully, face-to-face.

That's the thing: it wasn't anybody's. I seriously can't pinpoint anybody for any of the problems. It's just crap that needs to be collectively fixed.

Some of my other coworkers, on reading this post, were like, "Uh, what email? ... what, THAT one? I don't get it."

We had this happen, sort of, in my office... and it's only six developers.

One developer's checkin message included "Fix xyz's fix"... they didn't talk for a month.

One of my co-workers has several times made commits with messages including “Mart is a nazi”… which amuses me, rather than offends me.

(Though I'm sure there are people who that would offend on various levels. Don't work for my company. ;))

"power outage"... Mmmm. If you could see, how many people here, in Russia, told me - "No! There is no power outage - it`s Kremlin`s lie!" :)

Thanx for fixing it! :)

Srsly, people just need to learn to ignore you. Or have fewer feelings...

It's time you moved on anyway...
;P

I think you should start peeing in the coffee pot to get back at them.

that would be a piss-pour.

I think a lot of managers have been through psychological BS seminars or trainings where they've been told that really, the most important thing is to never, ever offend anybody, even if the building is falling over and it's their fault.

This is the rough equivalent of saying to an army general, "I don't care if they're fragging their own officers and they can't hit the side of a barn with a shotgun. You just need to keep their self-esteem up, and we'll win this war. So don't say anything mean."

-Max

I think you make that list, and then you put it aside. Then you get drunk. Then you read it. Then you read it again. Have someone else read it. Then send it.

the email was probably just something that seemed "inappropriate" and could be safely criticized. my guess is people's feelings were actually hurt because you stepped in and busted shit out quick and didn't sit around letting less competent people slowly resolve the problem.