Time will bring to light whatever is hidden

When you try to cover-up a stinky thing, it is bound to sip through the cracks and reach somebody else’s nose sooner that you think. It happened today in our team. No, nobody emitted a reeking break wind (that’s just gross!).

It was a great mishap in our UAT (for user’s testing) environment. For the uninitiated in terms of IT things: when we develop systems, we have this environment for the users to test so that they can tell if the new system wasn’t that good enough or it needs more change before it could actually be used publicly. This environment should be owned by the operator and the development team shouldn’t have in anyway any access on it.

Somehow by freak of nature, some people working on one UAT environment noticed that all the authorities where changed – that it’s no longer owned by the operator and that the development team, pretty much, could do anything they want on it. So one on my boss tried to figure out what happened; there’s just five of us who knew about it – as we are working on it. She asked us to find a way to copy over the set-up from another UAT environment to this problematic one without the knowledge of the bigger boss. So, you see, she tried to hush it up – I could tell from the meetings we were having far from the big boss’s cubicle.

However, we can’t proceed right away to rectify the problem as users are pumping data to this environment – they’re one group of people you wouldn’t want to mess with. So we waited for the right time, and at the same time identifying which is the best UAT environment we could copy from.

Then the dreadful email came today, which opened the can of worms. There’s another group in our team that will bring up changes to that environment and finally hit the error. As usual, they would investigate and finally the project leader of this group sent an email to everyone in our team, including the big boss (of course), asking what happened to this freakin’ environment.

Oh, I’m pretty sure all hell will break loose. Good thing is that I became a part of this after the fact; meaning we were the ones who first noticed the problem. So I’m part of that group wondering what happened. I haven’t heard any high voices coming from the big boss’s cubicle yet; maybe she still hasn’t read the email, or she’s still digesting it and tries to get over the shock.