It was the first time in a while he’d arrived at the office this early. Gary found the empty building oddly disquieting. He pushed the feeling aside and thought about sending the email, which brought a smile back to his face again. A few minutes later, Gary passed his secretary’s empty desk and went into his own office. His desk computer came to life, and Gary went straight into his email to type the message to Sean.
From: Gary Mitchell (Communications Products Operations)
To: Sean Leonov (Executive Team)
Subject: ELOPe Project
Time: 6:22am
Body:
Sean, just to give you a heads up, on Friday I’m going to have to pull the production resources for the Email Language Optimization Project. They’re consuming almost 2,000 times the server resources we allocated to them. I’ve given them almost carte blanche when we had excess capacity because I know it’s your special project. However, they’re consuming so many resources that we’ve twice eaten into the reserve server pool. As you know, if we exhaust the reserve server pool, we’d start having distributed AvoMail service outages. The last time that happened we lost a dozen commercial account opportunities we had in the sales pipeline. I’ve spoken to David and Mike about it again and again, but they’ve done nothing to get their resource utilization down. I gave them a final warning and two weeks to do something about it, but they’ve done nothing.
Email finished, Gary sat and gloated for a minute. Then he heaved himself back up, and headed out to find a coffee shop and a newspaper. Naturally, it was too early to do any real work. He’d read the paper and come back in a couple of hours.
Gary sauntered down the hallway whistling.
John Anderson gratefully let his heavy messenger bag slide to the floor. He shrugged out of his wet raincoat, hanging it behind his desk. Dropping heavily into his chair, the pneumatic shock absorber took his weight without complaint. He sighed at the thought of another day in the Procurement department processing purchasing requests. Tentatively peeking at his inbox, he saw more than a hundred new email messages. His shoulders slumped a little, and he reached for his coffee.
This week John had the kids, which meant dropping them off at school before work. Portland’s crazy school system meant that the best public schools were all elective. He and his ex-wife had to choose among a dozen different schools, and they ended up with the Environmental School in Portland’s southeast section. John’s kids loved the school, and so did he. Unfortunately, they lived in Northeast Portland, the school was in the Southeast quadrant, and work was across the river in Northwest Portland. His normal twenty minute commute turned into well more than an hour drive on the days he dropped the kids off, and he was always late getting into the office. By the time he arrived at work, his smartphone had been beeping and buzzing for an hour as emails arrived. He loathed the backlog of email he started his day with. The only consolation was that the kids’ school was right next to a Stumptown Coffee. John sipped at the roasted Ethiopian brew. The dark, bittersweet warmth of the coffee brought a smile to his face.
As the coffee gradually brought his brain into gear, he regained his will to tackle his inbox. He was brought up short by a puzzling email from Gary Mitchell. Sent earlier this morning, the email asked him to divert 5,000 servers. John read the email three times in its brief entirety.
From: Gary Mitchell (Communication Products Division)
To: John Anderson (Procurement)
Subject: ELOPe Project
Time: 6:22am
Body:
Hi John,
Sean Leonev has asked me to help out the ELOPe guys. They need additional servers ASAP, and we’re running out of extra capacity here. Can you accelerate 5,000 standard Avogadro servers out of the normal procurement cycle, and give them to IT for immediate deployment? Please assign asset ownership directly to David Ryan.
John thought briefly about the exception process. Normally when a department wanted new servers, they put in a purchase request. Then parts were purchased, shipping to Avogadro data centers, assembled into the custom servers Avogadro used, and installed onto racks. Next, another group took over and installed the operating system and applications used on the servers. In all, depending on the size and timing of the order, it would take anywhere from six to twelve weeks from the time they were requested before the servers were available for use. The lag was the result of the time necessary to ship the hardware, receive it, install it into racks, install the software, configure it, and then run a burn-in test.
When a department needed additional servers in a rush, then they could request an exception. The exception process would take servers that had already been bought for another group, and were already in the processing pipeline, and divert them to the department that needed them urgently. Then replacement computers would be ordered for the first group, who would have to wait a little longer.
Diversion requests were not the norm, but certainly they weren’t uncommon either. No, the puzzling part was not the request itself, but that Gary would submit such a request in email. Only the official procurement application could be used to order, expedite, or divert servers. Gary should know that.
He put his hand on the phone to call Gary, and then took it away. A call to Gary would eat up at least fifteen minutes. He had learned over time that regardless of what the procurement rules were, whenever John tried to explain them to anyone, they would just argue with him. The higher up in the company they were, then the more they would argue as though their lofty organizational heights carried with it some kind of potential energy that could just roll over the rules. A quick email would save John from getting his ear chewed out.
To: Gary Mitchell (Communication Products Division)
From: John Anderson (Procurement)
Subject: Email Procurement Forms
Gary,
We can’t do a server reallocation exception based on an email. I couldn’t do that for 5 servers, let alone 5,000 servers. Please use the online Procurement tool to submit your request: http://procurement.internal.avogadrocorp.com, or have your admin do it for you. That’s the only process for procurement exceptions we can use. We can easily approve your reallocation exception if you follow the existing process, and provide appropriate justification.
John worked through his backlog of emails as he gradually drained his coffee cup. The hundreds of new messages in his inbox would give the casual observer the impression he had been gone from work for a week, rather than just the late start he had gotten dropping off his kids. He took another sip of coffee, and continued to work through emails. The rest of his day, like every other, would consist of endless cups of coffee and endless emails. Gary’s email might have been a little unusual, but it was quickly forgotten amid the deluge of other issues.
A few hours later, on the other side of the campus from John Anderson, Pete Wong brought his lunch from the cafeteria in Building Six diagonally across to Building Three, pausing briefly on the windowed sky bridge. The sun
