What is NOT mine...
Ah, "responsibility", what a nice word huh? Is since I was 18 that I am asking myself what the fuck does it means, especially when everybody has a difference interpretation of the word depending on the circumstances.
The vocabulary is kinda prophetic in this sense: "word pronounced with .. grave tone, especially when, in a specific group of people there is the intent of rescind the responsibility of the single persons from the responsibility of the group as a whole". Also known as "ass-covering".
And is there a better way to "rescind" the responsibility than employ somebody else? So you can simply point the finger in a different direction.
The problem is when, for accidental reason, somebody ends up holding the bucket and can't toss it to anyone else.
And after this irresponsible introduction, we are back talking about $companyX, of which I told about some times ago. Besides the complexity in their system, those peoples had decided, in a futile attempt at paying as little as possible, instead of managing their own firewall, to have somebody else own and manage it.
The result of all this was that to have any type of change applied to the firewall rules we had to send a request in triplicate copy to the firewall owner/maintainer and to UL of $companyX that was supposed to greenlight the request.
Being that UL was reading the mail once a week and the firewall maintainer wasn't very efficient in performing changes on the system, every change, even the most simple of them, toke days to be performed.
Now, since their ($companyX I mean) system was a MESSAGE system, in many cases the various customers expected answers in a timely fashio and they were, most of the time, dissapointed.
All this had been reported many times to both UL and DB (and to whoever was close enough), but in many cases, the concept of "responsibility" was being flapped around.
Then, one nice day, one of their customers decided to move their IT infrastructure to the cloud (what a surprise) and as such they needed to change a lot of IPs.
I turned the thing to the firewall admins and forgot about, but things are never easy.
Because, to save even more money, the customer above decided to first move the infra and then request the new IPs, when the old infra, with the old IPs, was already no longer functional. So they ended up unable to access the system.
And at this point, for some reason (Karma, probably), the guy that was supposed to do the changes in the firewall, was unavailable.
After one week (yep, ONE WEEK) and a very, very high number of curses, mails and the like sent right and left and center, involving, Boss, Boss' boss, Boss' boss' boss and so on and so forth, we finally manged to get the ip changed. And then, obviously, DB shows up asking what the fuck.
Like he doesn't know.
DB - So, what is going on with those peoples? Is 2 days I'm receiving tons of complaints.
Me - It happens that they asks for changes to the firewall, we send the request to the maintainer and they dont execute them.
DB - And why not?
Me - Why don't you ask them?
DB - I though you've already asked
Me - No, because the firewall isn't ours and we do not manage it, we have no contract so no base to ask for explanation.
DB - But we now have $companyX that complaints...
Me - If $companyX complaints they should direct the complaints to whoever is managing the firewall, that isn't ours.
DB - But we signed the contract that we have responsibility for the system...
Me - Whoever signed the contract probably didn't read it before.
DB - But what can we do?
Me - Nothing.
DB - What?
Me - Listen, that firewall isn't ours. If it was, then we could do something, but since IT IS NOT, we can only pass the ball to somebody else.
Because stuff that isn't mine, isn't mine.
Davide
06/05/2021 12:58
