Nothing improves if no one complains

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No one likes a complainer. Especially someone who acts like no one has it as hard as they do. Some people act like the world is against them and use every opportunity to let you know. But those people are rare and I think that, eventually, they get the idea that they are not endearing themselves to anyone with their constant complaints.

But on the other hand, as I've said frequently:

Nothing improves if no one complains

So, it's a fine line - if you see something wrong, you need to know how to complain but in addition, you need to know how to help. And sometimes, complaining so other people can hear you is useful. Not all the time but sometimes. Like yesterday.

The network administrators for our company made an announcement a few weeks ago that they were going to tighten the rules on the passwords we use to log into our computers and get access to the company network. They said too many people were using simple passwords and we all had to start using longer and more complex passwords. We all forgot about it. Until yesterday.

All of a sudden, the program I use to prepare one of our major applications started to fail. I traced it down to the part where it tries to copy the updated application to the network so everyone can use it. I contacted the administrators and they reminded me about the new rules for passwords. "Well," I said, "this program is only used internally and no one else has access to it but me. Why should that need a new, fancier password?"It turns out the rules were not that flexible. All passwords needed to be upgraded. This meant I had a lot of work to do because this password was embedded in a number of smaller programs that prepared and loaded our application. It took me half the day but I finally did it.

But I couldn't just drop it. I had to make a big production of it and did a little hand waving and story telling to make sure everyone knew how hard I'd worked and how distressed I was! But in the end, it helped. Another engineer was having a similar problem and didn't know what the cause was. One of the fellows sitting near me had heard my tirade and mentioned to the other engineer what I'd been complaining about. The other engineer came to me to ask more about the problem and, sure enough, his problem was the same as mine. He would have been stuck for a longer time if our intermediary hadn't connected my rant with the other engineer's problem.

So sometimes, it's worth getting a little mad and maybe even getting a little too loud about an injustice. Something useful might just come out of it.