Poor Guy

I'm feeling bad for the boss. Not my female NATO boss, or my direct US boss, my one step up on either direction boss. He's been put in a bad spot with the guy before him promising to roll out windows XP to the base (yes, THAT Windows XP), that guy leaving even though he didn't do anything to actually make it happen. Now it's supposed to go out. New boss put me on the team because I like to work.

The unfortunate caveat to the "I like to work" is that I like to work quickly and pretty well need an umbrella to protect me from the scores of people that I'm likely to piss off while I charge forward destroying all that oppose me. Well...his team has no coordination or desire to actually "work". Boss pulled me off the the coordination since I'm not a help desk guy and it shouldn't be my job. Help desk doesn't want any advise or to actually work even though I've rolled out NT, 2K, and XP at previous assignments. Fighting tooth and nail for baby steps before being told to shut up and play along. After being told that I'm not really supposed to be working, working fast, it doesn't really matter, the people don't want to do it or work....my motivation tanked. I was doing OK until being told that I'm just an excuse to say that he's pulling extra resources and any ideas that I have are crap because if they were good then his techs would have already thought of them

So basically I spent the past couple days trying to think of a way to help the cause but not directly be a part of it. I came up with the plan to prep all of the bench stock (currently w\ 2k) so we're not replacing newly imaged machines with machines w\ the old image while also opening up the possibility that we can just physically change out computers should the wonderful help desk decide to be a part of things. All of this is in the scope of my current position while supporting his current plan. It pretty well came out like his techs suck and he sucks for allowing them to suck and I got kicked off the team. It's for the best really but it was kind of ugly really.

The big kicker is that he asked the "what am I supposed to do as the manager?" question. The obvious answer was "your job, your people aren't working and you know that"....which was really the only answer that I could come up with. I've been trying to figure out a better answer though. A plan of execution. Unfortunately there really isn't a stick. The people are horrible workers...but there's nothing that he can really do to MAKE them better. It's a quandary.