A very wise person once said never to post something that you wouldn't want written on a twenty foot high billboard on your front lawn.
I'm going to blatantly ignore this advice for a moment.
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Generally speaking, when I disappear for several days at a time, it's due to work. This week has been busy and stressful, but unfortunately this is not unusual. I got home at around 10:00 tonight, which is also unfortunately not unusual. Even better, I'm already depressed about how much I didn't get done today, which means that tomorrow's pretty much going to suck.
In that spirit, I'm going to post a short manifesto that I wrote in a moment of fury a couple of weeks ago. Names and argot changed for clarity and to protect the guilty.
Current management team issues. In no particular order.
No clear sense of expectations.
It's 5:00 on a production load day. Jim's note said that we load at 11:00. Does it actually mean that we'll load at 11, or is it just by 11? Are we expected to stay until 11? Do you have to check in before you leave? What if your work in done? What if your issue is fixed in staging, but the QA associate is still testing it? What if you have an issue outstanding from a week ago that you have no idea how to fix and no one has said word one to you about it? What if you have an issue outstanding from a week ago that isn't hard and would only take you about two hours to fix, but you just haven't gotten to it and no one has said word one to you about it?
"Absentee" management.
Such as six hour meetings on the days we move to staging. Failure to assign issues until the day of or after the due date. Not reading email on a regular basis.
Unrealistic deadlines and workloads foster a sense that it doesn't matter if you hit your due date.
If you know you can't make it anyway, why not leave at 8, or 6, instead of staying until 10?
Burnout.
No one, no matter how dedicated, can work 50 - 65 hours a week from July to November without serious aftereffects.
No sense of an end in sight.
In that team meeting last month it was a mistake to tell a bunch of burned out people that they need to keep working as hard as they had been (or harder) for the rest of the year.
No sense of anyone at the wheel.
There is a general feeling that management completely lost control of the project roughly four weeks ago, and more importantly that no one has made any attempt to take it back.
Just popping in from the in-law's house to say "Happy Thanksgiving" to any residents of the U.S., "Happy Really Belated Thanksgiving" to any Canadians, and "Very Happy Unbirthday" to everyone else.
Today I downloaded Thunderbird to use for my email. Phill made me try the Firefox browser a couple of weeks ago, but I wasn't impressed until I discovered extensions*. There doesn't seem to be a lot available for Thunderbird in comparison, but I've always hated Outlook Express, so I figured what the heck, it couldn't possibly be worse.
I mean, at times I've been so desperate to access my email without Outlook screwing me up, that I actually used Popcorn as my main email client.
*Incidentally, if you use Firefox, I recommend SpellBound, which is what I'm using to check these posts.
I've been sick for the last couple of days with the plague that's been going around work. Yesterday Phill tried to get me to go to the doctor, quite logically pointing out that a) last time I ignored a cold it lasted (literally) a month, and b) he really didn't want to catch it from me. I hemmed and hawed and dragged my feet, convinced that it was a waste of time and money, that they couldn't help me at all with what was after all just a cold/flu, and that the people at the doctor's office would think that I'm a hypochondriac for even bothering them with something so minor.
Today I went, and was instantly prescribed two pills and a nose spray for my sinus infection.
Don't you hate when they're right? *sigh*
As the name implies, I wouldn't expect great things from this blog. Or great creativity, or even regular updates. However, I will endeavor not to bore you to tears. (Hah! How's that for setting the standards low?)
I am hoping that having a published site that needs to be filled up will encourage me to actually write some fanfiction, or even, god forbid, original stuff, like I've meant to for a few years now.
WARNING! EXPECT:
- run-on and unnecessarily long sentences
- big, odd-sounding words, like "palimpsest" or "megillah"
- lots of ellipse (...), dash (-), and parentheses (( )) abuse
- way too many exclamation points!!!
- the frequent use of "that that" (i.e., "I wanted him to know that that was wrong.")
- and lots of other bad habits I can't think of right now.
