The messUp
“I am a contradictory mess but I see it as my prerogative to change my mood like the weather.”— Shirley Manson
Eva used to take care of the technical issues arising in the office. The small firm which provided software services overseas was established in the city center on the first floor of the building. The office space was small, aesthetically designed and pleasant place for working. The owner of the company was Mike who managed the small number of employees working over there.
Eva was usually busy in her job of routine office maintenance tasks, but none sufficient to challenge her abilities. She was feeling like her career had come to a standstill. Mike also felt that she was able to achieve much more than merely handling routine stuff.
Jass worked as accountant with primary job of taking care of financial matters and maintaining reports. One day she came to Mike telling that she was finding it hard to manage all her files in her desktop. Because of a recent hard disk crash, she had lost some of her reports as well.
On the other hand, office data was growing with time. The fear of loosing the valuable data kept him thinking about the possible solutions. He also knew that even for the smallest tasks, Eva had to move to the desktops of the individual users which was not an elegant approach at all.
As if that all was not enough, the software developers Zico, Saana and Blac also had to copy their data to and fro among their desktops for taking backups and helping each other. Sometimes their files would get overwritten and lost in juggling of the files among the desktops.
This was Friday morning while he sat sipping his usual cup of black coffee at 11’O clock. He decided to leverage his own experience with Linux servers to manage the office infrastructure and tasks centrally. This was going pending for so long because of his own busyness with business management cycle. The point was, if not him, then who would be the one.
Can Eva manage servers? Will she agree to learning about Linux system administration? Will she come out of her comfort zone? Such were the questions running in his mind one after another.
The idea of managing office data centrally with Linux servers filled him with so much ecstasy that he could not sleep for whole week-end. It felt like he had found his old love: Linux. Spending week-end was seemingly hard for him.
Monday morning filled with new energy he reached office earlier than usual. First thing he did was calling Eva to his office. As soon as Eva entered his cabin, he shot his question, “Are you ready to Break Your Comfort Zone?”. She seemed puzzled at such a question. “What happened? Which comfort zone?”, was her reply.
Then Mike told her about his plan of implementing Linux servers and that she would execute his plan. She said, “Will I be able to work on Linux? I heard these servers are very difficult to manage.”. To which Mike replied, “Do you know what Theodore Roosevelt said?”. He said, “With self-discipline almost anything is possible”. “Okay, come back after lunch. I’ll introduce you to The World of Linux.”, he said. She agreed in surprise and disbelief.
“Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”—Francis of Assisi