Professionals or NOT?

Are there really any professionals left out there?
I've had a leak in my bathroom ceiling. The company I've been dealing with have tried the smaller cheaper fixes (which I agreed to), why replace the roof if you don't have to. We thought the leak was fixed and except for repainting the bathroom ceiling, they had the ceiling patched and the work was done.
Well, the rain over the weekend has proved that the leak is somewhere under the first layer of roofing tiles. I called the company on Saturday. The second time, the called me back and I was told they probably wouldn't be able to get out and put a tarp on my roof right away.
Well, the rain slowed down but I didn't hear anything from them on Monday so Tuesday morning I called them back and around 11 I received a call from them stating they've been working 24/7 because of the rain on Friday and they didn't know when they would be able to get out and do anything. He suggested I call a roofer. I wonder how he expects me to find a roofer to come out if they are so busy they don't have time to come and put a tarp on the roof.
So I called a couple of people yesterday who, as expected did not call me back.
I will need to try and make calles today while I'm at work. Not only will I have to have at least part of the roof re-done, the work to patch the ceiling has to be re-done. When I know the leak is fixed, I'm and going the have the ceilings in the house painted.
I think I'm getting jerked around because: it's not a big job compared to some of the others they have and I'm female and they figure I don't know what I'm talking about. I do know, they will not get my business any more and I will not recommend them to anyone. I can't believe all the work they have scheduled is from current customers.

And to make matters just a little more exciting, that little excitment yesterday killed the relaxed attitude that I had since I had take a couple of vacation days. I go back to work today, all worked up, having to try to squeeze in phone calls between dealing with people who are suppose to know what they are doing and don't.

I can't get away from it. I already know that there is going to be a meeting about why "we" need to support something since the area we feed the information to doesn't want to support it. It is an uppermanagement directive that we support it. What seems to be the problem here? This other area has a lot to do and is short staffed from my understanding but that isn't my problem, they should just hire more off shore programmers - that seems to be the way of the company. This is also one of those wonderful systems that at some point in the near future we are going to have to take over and support.

Isn't life just wonderful. You can do everything you are suppose and still get slapped in the face because other people are idiots and not competent to do their job.

I for one can't wait to get out of the rat race.

How to Put 48 Pounds of ...

How do you put 48 pounds of shit ... sorry, I mean how do you put 48 hours of work into a 40 hour work week?

That is the question that we were basically asked by the director of our area this week. What they really mean is - if you can't take on more work and do it right, we will just have to outsource the work.

We were told on Thursday that as the Production Support area we will be taking on a number of other systems starting around the end of the year. I'm not sure of the exact number of systems or the current number of employees which support those systems. Let us just say that whatever the number of systems are, there are 20 people supporting those systems today. When the all famous "we" take on those systems, we may get 5 of those employees who support those systems today. The systems will be documented either before they come over or shortly after. Doing this documentation, called Knowledge Acqusition (sp) Process is very time consuming and you really can't work on anything else while involved in the documentation process.

Once the system has been documented, the production support area owns it. We take over the on-call, handle any fixes, keep all software at the current level and so on and so on.

Anyway, our task for the next week is to come up with something that we do that possibly we no longer need to do, that could save at least a day a month if not more.
Some of the task may be able to go to the customer area to be done and they will take them on once they are done screaming about having to do the extra work. Maybe we do something because it's always been done that way but no one ever uses it.

The way I see things in aother year or 2, we will not have jobs because we are not born in India. To many jobs are being outsourced to the India work force. I don't blame the little guy. They are just trying to make a buck like we are it is the corporate world that is after the almighty dollar. Hiring workers from India saves companies a lot of money and that makes the bottom line looks better.

So - I just want to know how we figure out what items we drop out of our everydays task so we can cram more shit (read work) into our work day.