I love my guys

I've worked in some environments where you always checked your back for knives every night before going home.  The kind of place where everyone is either striving to get that next promotion or to keep their heads above water and not get laid off, and they're not above crawling over the bodies of their co-workers to do it.

Luckily, I've fallen in with a wonderful group of people who support each other and work together on everything.  No-one is worried about getting promoted enough to try to sabotage anyone else, and we've all worked together long enough that we know each others' strengths and weaknesses.

We have a way of acknowledging our unintentional mess-ups that makes them into light-hearted learning experiences.

We call it "The Order of the Golden Lobster".

Basically, when you mess up really bad through a simple mistake, you acknowledge the error and work with the rest of the group to correct it.  Afterwards, a small parade is held through the office, where the Golden Lobster is taken from its last recipient and you receive it.

Your boss gets gets the "Little Black Raincloud" trophy, which symbolizes the amount of crap that may rain down on them from above.

It's a good way to acknowledge our human failings without making it personal.

This afternoon, I was working on two servers.  While doing something to one of them, I was distracted by a phone call.  Afterward, I turned back to my xterms and put the reboot command into the wrong window.  I then went on with my business and waited for the server to come back up.

A moment later one of my coworkers asked why the main configuration management server was down.

Imagine my surprise when I realized that the xterm to the configuration manager was gone, but the window to the other server was up.

So I have the Lobster.  Haven't had it in a couple of years.  I won't have it long, I hope.  We're doing a lot of storage work over the next few months, and that is ripe for opportunities to become crustaceanified.