Thursday, May 29, 2008

Almost over

The Month from Hell is nearly complete. Things have lightened up quite a bit, but every once in a while I get hit square on by another poo-flinging monkey. At times I am simply astounded how these people can manage to keep their jobs, but then no one EVER asks for my opinion on them - which is probably best all around.

School is almost out, and I had lunch outside today enjoying the beautiful April day. Too bad that it is almost June and we seem to be about a month behind in the weather, but as much as everyone talks about the weather - nobody ever does anything about it.

Well I'm going to see if the ducks are still out (only one duckling :-( ), and if the female is still chasing the male off every time he gets too close (I can just hear them, "Hey baby, how aobut some sugar?" "GET AWAY FROM ME. LOOK AT WHAT YOU DID!!! THE KID HAS KEPT ME UP ALL NIGHT AND YOU WANT SOME??? QUACK QUACK QUACK!!!!!!"

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Just breathe

Finally. It has been the week from hell. And a pretty crappy month before that. What I find really interesting is that the few other blogs I read seem to be as unable to post anything as I am.

So where do I start. I can't jump into anything pleasant, that would simply be too much all at once.

How about this - the chief monkey got a fricking promotion! Yep, the person who was supposed to be managing the worst cluster-f**k of a project I have ever been on (I say supposed to, because this monkey did nothing of the kind) got a promotion. The one saving grace is that she didn't get a raise with it (I know because last year, when my boss got his promotion, he didn't get a raise. The gorillas only give out raises once a year).

But some good news. The project is done and finally working. Tomorrow will be the last status meeting, with a post-mortem sometime next week. (Boy, do I wish I could give some honest feedback there, but I need my job). Of course this wasn't without a price - the stress and poo-flinging kept increasing exponentially. All the planning and testing with a slight lull, then the actual cutover this past weekend. My bosses boss moved four of us into a conference room for the weekend on Friday - this the development staff. We were there starting at 11 pm on Saturday night, and didn't get out of there until 6:30 am on Sunday. Fun night.

Then of course things started to blow up on Monday. I do like the fact that none of these were coding errors - all configuration. But of course the monkeys couldn't find the things they had set up wrong. Yesterday all the issues were finally resolved, and I even got an atta-boy. Of course that was after being purposefully ignored on the one sent out to half the directors and VP's in the company, that listed the other three people who worked this past weekend, and just lumped me in as "the rest of the team". Stupid and trivial, but especially when my boss's boss said that my vp specifically knew I was there as well, so it meant that I was deliberately left off - I was about to tell them all to take this job and shove it on Monday afternoon, but I kept telling myself I need this job, I need this job, I need this job.

To make things even worse, we had to move our offices (cubicles actually) yesterday, in the middle of trying to fix this stuff.

But the project is over. The move is done. Things are running and stable. I'm taking tomorrow as comp time. And the best part, when I turn my chair around in my new third floor cube, this is what I see (taken with my crappy cell phone with a very dirty lense):