A Crusty Old Programmer Waits for Jane
In the early 2000s, I was working for a contract shop that did some work for state agencies. Government and software are a bad combination, not like a peanut butter and pickle sandwich, which somebody could conceivably like, but more like a peanut butter and fingernail clipping sandwich. Nobody's happy.
One in particular that sticks out in my memory was an unnamed department of about 140 people. We'd signed up to write some software for them, and we were bopping around talking to some of the stakeholders, which is to say, everybody.
When they get to see new faces in a government office, everybody from the janitor up is suddenly a stakeholder.
We came to one lady who actually had some information for us in her Mythical Spreadsheet® (every office has at least one), the repository of all data without which the entire building would probably implode.
She looked very apologetic when we arrived.
"Sorry," she said. "I need some new printer drivers, and I've been told not to do anything until they're installed."
"Oh, no problem!" my boss gushed. "We can do that for you!" Always going above and beyond, anything that would get us out of that dingy, dim, cubicle wasteland faster.
"No," she smiled sadly, dropping her eyes. "You can't. It's locked by admin access."
"Oh. Uh, alright. No problem, we'll swing back by when things are fixed up."
"When will you be back in town?"
"Back in t-- how long is it going to take before you can work again?"
"Probably a week or two?" she replied softly. With a cautious look around she confided, "It's a WFJ problem."
I had no idea what a "WFJ" problem was, and my boss didn't either, so we just looked at each other for a long moment.
"Ah. Well, let us know when your machine is available again."
We continued wandering around, trying to get information out of people that all shared a beaten, broken look, frequently stymied by simple IT issues. "It's time to change my password," or "My hard drive has bad sectors," or "I don't have a network cable." Each time, when we probed, it was described as a WFJ problem.
Finally, my boss had to ask somebody "What's a WFJ problem?"
"Waiting for Jane"
Jane was the head of IT in this department. She looked like exactly the kind of woman that would end up working in IT, or maybe Birkenau. Thin, direct, and very, very extremely intense. We finally met her in her office, a corner office with the most amazing, tenuously balanced piles of paper and books covering every horizontal surface: both desks, the credenza, and most of the floor.
Our initial meeting was brief; she whirled us out the door on her way to "take care of some things", and we were whisked along behind her, dodging a flurry of loose papers and casual swearing that would have made Andrew Dice Clay sit down and shut up.
She kept up a constant stream of chatter-- it never paused, only directed itself differently; sometimes at us, sometimes at passersby, sometimes at random objects.
We'd had a chance, before meeting Jane, to chat with some of the other IT staff. There were many; her department alone made up nearly a quarter of the entire state department's headcount.
In speaking with them, the reason for WFJ problems quickly became apparent: every computer, every server, every mainframe account was locked down, and could only be opened or operated on... by Jane.
No programmer could open his own ports, no DBA could index his own database, no mainframe admin could create his own accounts. Literally every operation had to be unlocked and personally managed by Jane herself.
If Jane were ever to be hit by a bus, they might as well just throw their entire computing infrastructure away.
It's not as if she were particularly stable, either. We tagged along as she was doing some basic tech support on one of the PCs, and, being Windows 95, the install was being slow and ornery.
"Come on," she cooed, gently stroking the side of the box. "Come on, work for me, baby. You can do it. DO IT YOU FILTH. DO IT. DO THE THING RIGHT NOW!" Her voice spiked to a shriek as she began hurling insults and imprecations at the uncaring machine. Boss and I took two involuntary steps back, but the people around us were as unaffected as the box she was verbally shredding.
This was clearly not an unusual event.
This one's getting long, so I'll table the remainder of our adventures in government software for another time.