Grumpy Old Man Having a Moan

 

This post is just going to be me moaning, so feel free to stop reading now and go about your day. ๐Ÿ™‚

I am a regular guy, with a regular job. I don’t wake up every morning wondering how I can selflessly serve the Oracle community. It isn’t my mission to make sure you never have to think when you do your job. It is not my job to respond to your questions in a timescale that fits in with some SLA you seem to have arbitrarily assigned to the interaction. I don’t review every product, book, whitepaper, article, blog post, tweet that is produced. My mission in life is not to sell your product.

Some days I feel totally exasperated by all of this community stuff. I know some people think this is my job, but it’s not. I know some people think the website is done by a team of people, but it’s not. It’s just me using my *spare time* to learn new stuff, and I happen to put the notes I take during that process on the internet so others can read them. That’s it.

I like interacting with people. It’s nice that what *I have to do to learn new stuff* ends up being useful to other people. I really appreciate it when people contact me with corrections, as it helps me and therefore other readers. What is really hard to deal with is the constant, unreasonable demands from people who don’t seem to understand I am not here solely to serve them.

From a community perspective, the content I produce has more value than the rest of the stuff I do, so anything that pulls me away from that is a problem.

I am one person with a couple of hours a day to dedicate to this stuff. I’ve just got to protect that time a little better. If that means I am not as *available*, so be it.

Grumpy rant over, for now… ๐Ÿ™‚

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I have been waiting to post this for a while because I don’t want to offend anyone who might think it is about them. Literally every time I’ve thought it would be “safe” to post it, someone has jumped in with some amazing request that has made me delay the post again. ๐Ÿ™‚

PPS. I understand it is a nice problem to have and I know I’m not the only person in the communityย withย this issue. ๐Ÿ™‚

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

8 thoughts on “Grumpy Old Man Having a Moan”

  1. Hi Tim,

    Indeed you are right — you are not working as our consultant and you don’t get paid for that.

    But we appreciate your efforts and really grateful for that, so I woukd like to thank you for being such a devoted person to Oracle DBA community.

    PS. I was on oracle-base website while received lnkdin notification.

  2. Same thing…

    Some People : “Can you add this bit of functionality” or “Make it work against this database” or “Open source it”.

    Me “No, Sorry I don’t have time”.

    Some People : “Well that’s not very helpful. I’ll use another tool”

    Me “Ok”

    I’m sure no one means any offence…. particularly in your case. Everyone appreciates your brilliant work.

    Dom

  3. Dom: Or people asking, “How does OFS work with NFS?” They really get on my nerves. ๐Ÿ™‚

    Cheers

    Tim…

  4. Master !
    That’s a kind of virus those lazy learners send to you.
    Would you like to say/use, “WannaCry RandomQuestions” for such questions.

  5. And you have just offended somebody: yourself. I your thoughts circle around “Grumpy Old Man” stop that now! You are our “Online Yoda”! ๐Ÿ˜‰

  6. Thank you for all your hard work. For all those helpful examples, code and clarifications.

    And all those ‘we tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas’ kind of people…. Just ignore them. And do your stuff.

    Few days ago I read on reddit that you can lie down for people to walk on you and they will still complain that you’re not flat enough.

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