9 months of my life PART 2

There were many aspects of the project that I was very detached from. Like billing. Frequently while I was setting up for the next set of upgrades I would be approached with billing questions. I simply was not involved in billing decisions and while I had made my "advice" known I know no one cared what I said it was the smile and nod parade as they went past my desk on the way to the meeting I was not invited to. Later this became OK with me, as unfortunate as it may be, I learned to accept the Japanese way. Meetings are so superiors can tell inferiors what to do. Formally. Very little real "working things out happen there", mostly it was you do this and you do that. As a constant student of people, and knowledge of my own persona abilities and handicaps, I learned ways around this. I would catch managers in the hall and chat to them politely about the situation and try to get their opinions on what then wanted and needed done. Then after understanding the problem, I would either offer a host of solutions or step back and try to find a solution, only to return later to the same person with a sorted solution in the hallway or over lunch or in the smoking area ... even though I do not smoke, to get what the engineering side wanted, and what make the business side needed happen. This was not easy, actually for me it was the most stressful part of the migration. Finding the person who was influencing XYZ decisions we did not agree with and getting them to do things our way. The engineering way, or getting the business perspective and try to influence things from the other end. This did not always go well. I want to remind everyone reading this that I neither had the authority to make any decisions and had very little say in the actual outcome, I did what I could to make the outcome, something that made sense for me and the guys I worked with, and the rest of my company not just for today but for the long run. That is when I had the meeting. In this meeting I was systematically over joyed and driven to almost insanity within moments of each other. I had spent more than 90 + hours preparing migration scripts, diagrams, and documents to display how we would move users personal web and mail data from old single storage systems to our new clustered multi-terabyte system. All to be shot down in with a question. "Erin-san when can you migrate the data?" One manager asked in his most polite voice. I was on I launched into my speech and started to layout dates as me and the 3 or 4 other people negotiated and I sat smiling and proud, but after about 1 minute I knew something was wrong, after 2 minutes I knew I was misinformed, by the 3rd minute I was starting to get angry because there was a joke and I was not in on it. Finally some one told me we would not move the users old mail data and instead provide alternate urls to check the old mail. In addition to that all my talking to managers and other people was a waste cause some had sent a snail mail to customers to tell them there web data would be migrated by x date, in 2 weeks. I had spent 2 weeks rsyncing testing and comparing, writing scripts and getting the network set to make all this happen. Now it was mostly all for nothing, because I missed a email or was not cc'ed or something. Either way the choice was made to go around me and that was a little more than heart breaking. I was another shit gaijin engineer who would only be called on when, some one else broke something or they just did not know. Japan, no matter what, if you are not Japanese, you will never actually be accepted. I had 2 choices. Say I could not do it, in which case, best case was that some else would do it, poorly. Or I would suck it up and run the scripts that me and others had developed to move the data, and get angry later. I chose the second. What makes any company money is delivering on what customers expect whether it is the RIGHT or WRONG thing to do in the Engineering sense. This is possibly the most important lesson that I learned thought out this whole process. Some of my fellow engineers still do not get this. We are here to serve data to customers. REMEMBER that always. I delivered the web data and as I remember there was some problems but as always I worked through them. Web data migrated, it was time to move to mail and mail services.