John was not having a good day. Today was the day most of the workers at his company had voted to unionize. He had fought this tooth and nail and still it had happened. They hadn’t needed to avoid unionizing altogether, simply to hold off for another six months or a year. John needed the data center migrations to all be completed so he could carry out his plan.
His company hadn’t hired too many new people lately. In part it was due to fear they would have to pay people more once the union came in. The other reason was nobody would take the shit wages they were offering, probably because they thought the union would be taking over and they wanted to start out at better wages.
They had been shorthanded the last month. John was working fourteen-hour days himself and forcing his employees to work even longer. It wasn’t like it was back-breaking work — mostly just staying awake and monitoring the job schedulers. Sometimes they had to mount media for backups to run, then remove the media and label it for shipping. Backups could take hours. The systems were never off-line. There was a disk-to-disk backup which happened in a matter of minutes. It was the backing up of the backup to removable media that took forever. Removable media was needed so it could be taken to off-site storage.
His team had bungled only a few of the media cycle rules. It was much easier when they were shipping things to Iron Mountain, but now that the off-site backup storage was here in India, it was a debacle. The company they were using (and he assumed they owned part of) had incompetent help. Basically, John believed they were the people he had turned away. To understand the true level of that insult, you had to know just how low the requirements were to get in here.
If the people working at the remote site managed to get the correct backup media returned to John’s people, it often took forever to get to it or it arrived damaged. The backup site was about a two-hour drive away. Correction, the backup site was about two hours away if anything like American highways or interstates had actually linked the two places. The chuck-hole-lined mud ruts and the lack of suspension in the transport truck played hell with the backup media. Some of the cases arrived completely ruined. It looked like they had simply been tied to the back of the truck and dragged all the way.
John had complained to his boss several times about this problem with the backup storage. His boss tried to look into it, but was always told “they’re working on it.”
The problem reared its ugly head publicly when one of the locations needed to restore a document from a backup. Nearly three hours after the request, the backup media it should have been on arrived and was unusable. They had to go back and get the prior day’s backup. This time John’s boss took the car of one of the upper management types and brought the media in it. The car didn’t look so good when he got back with it, but the media worked and they were able to satisfy the request before it was morning in America. The only benefit from the entire ordeal was that someone above John’s boss was now looking into getting better transportation for the off-site storage company. He probably wouldn’t have been so interested if his car hadn’t developed a very large oil puddle under it after John’s boss got back. John estimated the puddle was about five quarts in size. One of those chuck holes must have ripped loose the oil pan.
John went to a window and could hear the chanters out in the street through the glass, all chanting for better wages, better treatment, and a strike. Just lovely, he thought. A strike will have them locking this place down like a fortress.
When his work day finally ended, John went home to see how his new trainee was doing. This trainee hadn’t picked it all up as fast as the first one, but had learned enough to be out on his own soon. Someone had given him some money and he had taken a job with a different company here in Bangalore. He had enough money that he could rent his own place in this complex and would be moving out tomorrow.
They chatted awhile. John answered a few questions, then checked his own email. It really was his own email he checked this time. Over one-third of the cells he normally handled email for were now being handled by his first trainee. This new trainee had a much more capable machine and had taken over half of John’s remaining cells. John asked his current trainee when the new trainee would arrive. He was stunned to hear that this trainee would be training two others soon. They would be given the remaining cells John handled and sent to other locations.
So, I’m being phased out, thought John. He guessed it didn’t matter. He would be too high-profile now that there were surveillance cameras all over the data center. He was going to have to hide once his plan went into play.
It was in the middle of this train of thought when John opened up an email from a cell he used to handle. It was actually for him. Once he deciphered the message he found out they wanted information about the off-site storage company. John didn’t understand why, but made a note to pull down the files from work. The bulk of the information was on the company intranet. The place wasn’t of much value as a target. It employed at most thirty people and was only of need if someone had to restore a system or a file.
John was too tired to make sense of it now. He logged out and went to bed.
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