Is a hot poker up your bum a 'creative solution'?

or "Would it help if I mimed how to install an OS without a console in my cube?" or "They will never fire me as it would be far too kind."

We rejoin the continuing saga today with the PHBs who managed to get bonuses because they made sure we all filled out our timesheets regularly and cut important things like console gateways from the budget. Today I received an email from the aforementioned bigcheese wondering why the tickets I have on these two systems were allowed to exceed the SLA. WHAT?! I think that popping noise was the dramatic increase in blood pressure making the vein in my forehead throb.

One of the systems had a guy there with enough clue to get a backup of the system on a clean external tape with ufsdump and install the basic system to the point where I could do the rest. The other system, however, is still in progress as I can't teach a monkey to sing like Pavrotti, really. The PHB is concerned about his bonus though and we wouldn't want him to miss his bonuses because he won't buy essential equipment like console gateways for remote sites now would we? He suggested that as a senior admin I should be creative with my solutions to get this job done...and I quote...

"Competence, we are not all as verse with Solaris as you are but all have our own level of expertise and value to the team and organization. If you feel there is a team member who needs some guidance and/or training it is your responsibility as a more senior level engineer in Solaris/UNIX to help them along or communicate to me, so we can define training/education appropriately. But do not be surprised if you see such need for another team member, when I assign you as their mentor.

As for physical hardware to complete the tasks, a dedicated terminal/console box would definitely be nice and we will possibly have one in the future, but again as a senior level engineer I expect for you to be creative at getting tasks done, and/or working with the resource available. If you can not figure out a substitute for the console box let me know, cause I possibly know of a temporary resolution that has worked on other UNIX based systems and have communicated such to monkeyboy."

My response was that monkeyboy can't tell the difference between serial and parallel cables or ports so this isn't a 'training' issue, at least not for me it isn't and we don't have 2 years to wait for him to get a clue. Furthermore, the console gateway isn't a nice option, it is an essential piece of equipment. Monkeyboy was creative with the parallel cable which clearly didn't work so this isn't a matter of creativity it is A MATTER OF GIVING ME A CONSOLE GATEWAY, FUCKTARD. What part of "Essential" wasn't clear?

I set the WPHB onto Monkeyboy on Friday while I was out of town hoping that he could help in getting something workable together but today I was told that all of the Bay Area Fry's are currently out of serial cables as are all the CompUSAs. Bollocks. He probably just doesn't know what he's looking for. *sigh*

It was a long week today and I just can't wait until tomorrow.