PHB asks question, ignores answer

A PHB (FSVO, I have not yet found out which particular pointy it
was) decided to close out one of our offices in London. It
contained three production servers for which I am responsible, two
of which were in the DMZ, which also contained some client-facing
systems owned by business units, notably an ftp server used to
bypass our paranoid and attachment-limited mail filters, a rather
important part of providing production support for people whose
databases exceed 12MB zipped. In other words, everybody.

The process went like this:

Down through the communications chain: Can we turn these off at the
start of June?
Up through the chain: No. We can do it at the end of June, by which
time the users will have been migrated to other systems which we can
build using new IP addresses which will be added week 3 or week 4 of
June, during scheduled firewall rework (something to do with BGP,
don't ask me).
Down: OK, then.

[days pass]

Down through the chain: We really want to do this early in June, can
we do that?
Up: No. We do not have spare DMZ IP addresses at the main office,
are waiting for firewall rework before the next /32 can be attached
in the DMZ, and are migrating the users off in the third and fourth
weeks of June anyway. End of June, as originally agreed [months
back] is still on.
Down: OK, end of the month it is.

[days pass]

Down: Are we still OK to shut down this office at the beginning of
June?
Up: No, we never were, as noted before there are production systems
which we can't relocate due to availability of addresses. By the end
of the month it will be academic anyway.

[days pass]

You know what happens next, don't you?

On Wednesday, while I am on a week-long training course, I receive
an email on my Blackberry: it has been decided that the office will
be closed on Friday 13 June, and the servers moved to the other
London office.

So of course the ops team and main office techs are deputed to
harvest IPs, make emergency firewall changes and move production
servers with no testing, no communications, PTR records not in place
despite being told they were done and the DNS changes not
propagated. Way to go. And guess who gets the crap when dozens of
people ignore the rushed emails and find their URLs don't work? Not
the PHB, you can bet your life on that. Once again we get to look
like idiots by being forced into doing something according to a
timescale we rejected as impractical.

Why the *** do they bother asking if they are simply going to
ignore everything they are told and do what they wanted anyway?
Wankers.

On the plus side, the course was good: CLARiiON SAN management and
data protection. Fibre, mmmmmm.

Guy
--
But ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof:
I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh;
[Proverbs 1:25]
.