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Re: developer status again



On Fri, Oct 30, 1998 at 11:53:13AM +0000, James Troup wrote:
> Bo Branten <bosse@ing.umu.se> writes:
> 
> > Ossama Othman wrote:
> > 
> > > Sorry to bother the devel list with this but it's been close to
> > > two months since I applied for developer status but still haven't
> > > gotten any word.  I recently e-mailed new-maintainer@debian.org
> > > but received no reply.
> > 
> > I think think is unacebtable!
> 
> Bully for you.  For my pointless complaint of the day: I think that
> genocide is unacceptable.

I must admit....I know that when you have your package done and want to
upload, a few weeks can seem like an eternity waiting for that aproval to
be a maintainer....but...

I would recommend anyone who si complaining, spend some time working
in "Customer Service" for a while. Thats what I have done fo rthe past year.

A few incidents come to mind....

I was on the main campus of the hospital where I work for 2 weeks when I was
new here ("The Trial by fire"). I went around with another guy. They
often have more than 50 "problem calls" at once for their group to do.

Figuring each one can take from anywhere of 10 minites to 4 hours to fix, 
the queue can get backed up. We went to one user and one
of the first things she said to us was 
"Your 24-hour turn around time is pathetic"
She is damned lucky we got to her within 24-hours, things were so backed up
that others were waiting longer than that!

The point is she has no idea how many "calls" we had to answer that day. No
idea who else has a problme (lets face it, when the emergency room calls
in about a problem they kind of have to get priority over her, and her
precious grant)

or... for a while any work orders which would require new wiring for the PC
were taking a LONG time (the new compnay who was to do it failed 
asbestos training). So whenever I went out to see people they would
be irate that it was taking so long.
Im not in charge of hireing, I am just the field service tech. I
have no power to do anything. 

The point is that ocasionally things get backed up. Noone outside of
the people who do the new-maintainer aprovals have any idea what they
are up to and ho wmuch work they have to do (for those and
whatever other work they have)

It seems when doing this sort of work, everyone thinks they are the most
important person, and have no idea who else is waiting longer than they are!

I don't mean to accuse anyone...it really is understandable and seems to be
a natural human reaction. We don't like to wait for things. However
working on the other end of that stick for a while, I see allot of people 
do it (and I do it myself sometimes)

I think the PHB from Dilbert got it right "Well when comming up with this
time schedual I just figured that any task which I don't understand must 
be easy to do: 
Develop a corperate worldwide information infrastructure - time 1 week
..."

I guess in short, life goes on :) you don't have plans to join and then 
immediatly leave the project? so a few weeks really isn't too bad
hell...ive been waiting nearly 2 months trying to get my bank to
finnaly send me an ATM card...

Believe me, id rather wait 2 months to be aproved as a maintainer than 
have no ATM card for 2 months (Direct Deposit..so
my paycheck goes directly into my account, and th eback closes
before I get out of work!)

-Steve
-- 
/* -- Stephen Carpenter <sjc@delphi.com> --- <sjc@debian.org>------------ */
Drug Fact:
Nearly 2.5% of the worlds population smoke marijuana

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