I’M JUST A GIRL

…..so don’t let me have any rights!

So I went to the office on Tuesday as I normally do. This time I actually had my one-on-one with my boss. We have a leave each other alone sort of relationship, I try really hard not to bother him with petty things and copy him on anything that might blow up. But today we are doing our new mid-year review which is a short conversation. I am told I am a high meets and that the new management criteria for doing exceeds is that you have to go out of your way to do other things not assigned to you without being asked. Whoa that sounds like a can of worms. Great, I guess I don’t care reviews generally turn out to be a bogus crap pile anyway. But here is where things go south he tells me I can’t get my promotion to Senior Database Engineer because there is a perception that I am resistant to do work and that I am defensive. Hmmm. There are no examples of this issue presented to me, no mention of how to actually change this. The information given was “well on that project ABC, they are just nuts and it’s okay. We don’t need to worry about them”. If we don’t push back on them they’d make a big mess. We discuss how the architect would tell me “NO WE ARE NOT DOING THAT” and then be gone 2 days. I would spend those 2 days saying “No, I am sorry we can’t”. Then she’d return to change her mind making me look like an ass. Oh the boss LOLd and said that has happened to him. Great! He mentions that even someone on my team thought that I was reluctant.  Ah…. the bells went off in my head. I asked what has gone wrong with written communications, I mean we used to write letters and memos on paper and no one got so upset or read so much into it but email is a different story. Everyone reads their own emotions into the text regardless of how it is presented. But best of all he doesn’t see this “issue”. I told him that I just don’t understand how I could come across like that because I am not angry and I don’t have any animosity about anything going on. He just shrugs his shoulder and says “he doesn’t get it either”.

I have only worked on 1 thing with someone on my team. They are a “DBA”. This person suggested that there are too many joins in my SP (highly normalized database) and that I should use user defined functions instead. This person changed 1 #temptable in an SP to a table variable and acted like it would change the world. The problem here is that the server where all this sits has issues. There are tons of things going on and our production team has been monitoring and working on solutions for a couple months now. So YES I do have an issue, I don’t like someone telling the customer that this temp table change and index rebuild is going to fix their time outs. I don’t feel that this is a long term solution. I also know looking at these large tables that don’t have maintenance plans and are sitting with stats out of date and fragmentation in the 80% range isn’t helping anything at all. I have real concerns being the responsible party pushing that rebuild into prod without knowing how long it will take and its impact on that, let’s call it sick machine. I worked with the PROD team to run a test on a reporting server that has transactional replication. This would let me know how long to expect this to run and when to set the window to avoid any issues. Once my team member found out about this he went over my head and the PROD DBA’s head to the bosses and got this test cancelled and had the item shoved into production. I decided that I just couldn’t spend the time or clock cycles to care about this, the good news was I wasn’t responsible for the deployment and if the rebuild took too long and they killed it I wouldn’t be charged with the failure and rollback. *As a side note that doesn’t pertain to this story they didn’t run this during the suggested window and it took over 6 hours. We are also still seeing occasional issues with the SP being slow. It appears to grab a bad plan handle or no plan handle – once recompiled it goes back to normal. Yes my “DBA” has suggested we recompile every time it runs, all 6k a day.

So yesterday was Wednesday and I was feeling sad. Sad that I am a girl. Sad that none of this was my code that was being defended. Sad that I at the end of the day don’t give a shit about anything but data integrity and the health of my systems. And sad that because of that I am being seen as “reluctant” and “defensive”. But then the sadness gets worse because I realize that 2 of the guys on my team are the same way one of them more vocal and they don’t have this issue. HELL they coach me and help me when I ask about stupid things going on, they tell me to say NO. I am sad because being a girl means I don’t have the same rights as the guys. I have never gotten mad, raised my voice, thrown a fit, I don’t go running to tell someone every time my feelings are hurt or every time someone disrespects me, I don’t run to HR when the room full of LMM are rude and dismiss me because I am a woman but because I use caution and common sense I am being made out to be a bad guy.

My Wednesday goes on to include a WIT meeting where a discussion about a current blog post makes me feel ….what’s the word I am looking for…. WOUND UP! Maybe I am being over sensitive because I feel like I have been put in the “you’re a girl STFU” box. So I will say that the cave man in this story has stated that they don’t want women speakers at their user group because they want technical content. Now if you know me my personal spoken reaction would come out not fit for an R Rating. But inside I am hurt, I know that someone said this to a friend of mine and I am sad that this type of behavior still goes on today. Maybe it is okay in a culture, time and place that I don’t understand but it isn’t okay here. The silver lining is that a few outspoken men have written about it and how appalled they are by this behavior. I am guessing that more men speaking out on the subject will make it more unacceptable to behave in this manner. But in the end my feelings nose dive because someone suggest that SWAG be purchased in PINK.  Where I respond with really? I mean that clashes with everything I own.

PINK, so funny that earlier in the day I read an old article about how to keep a man, mind you we are talking in the 50’s. One item is to own pink panties. My online response was I DON’T WANT ANYTHING PINK EVAR! Why do women fight for rights and demand to be treated like equals and then turn around and grab the typical stereotype that we are trying to crush? WHY? Why is it that someone would suggest that WIT swag should be pink? Why am I so irritated by all this?

Now that it is Thursday my last working day of this week I sit here and reflect and figure out what all this means. Well the last NomCom interview of the BoD applicants was last night so that is a relief. I have most things ready for our company coming this weekend. I am really still sad that I don’t know how to fix this perception at work and I don’t really know if I care. Maybe it’s time to find a new work environment where my gender isn’t an issue. There really are no women in higher positions at my company and there really aren’t any IT leaders that are women. IMO that says a lot. Maybe it’s time to get more involved in community items that actively promote WIT. Maybe I just need to take a nap and pretend the middle of this week didn’t happen, you know what the internet says? Pictures or it didn’t happen.