Suddenly, it’s easier to plan the next few months

So, Wednesday morning I’m sitting there at work, working. Which is a thing I do when I’m at work.

It’s kind of expected.

So, I’m sitting there coding away like I had good sense, and our departmental manager-types are all in a phone meeting, and they're talking about budgets and resource-management and all kinds of Manager-Type-Stuff; we're in a "hoteling" style layout, which means there are no offices, cubicle walls or even flimsy dividers between our desks.

Every word spoken into any phone on the floor is going to be overheard by every ear within at least a six-desk radius.

So the “budget” and the “resources” and we’re all grabbing our iPod earbuds because the conversation is getting loud, and then suddenly all the managers are grabbing their stuff and dashing for a meeting room. Whew.

Then, about five minutes after they’ve all vanished…my laptop started acting up. Couldn’t run a query. Email kept prompting me for a password it refused to take. Couldn’t access the Sharepoint sites. Couldn’t even look at my own Reporting Services stuff.

My first thought was that I had a network issue. Some kind of weird ‘server is down’ thing; or maybe because I just changed my password…?

…and then I thought, …wait…budget + resources, which is a code word for head-count…?, and I looked at my information in Outlook.

I was a zz.Name. A. Zee-Zee. Dot. Name, people! That generally translates to, “Don’t let the door bang you on the butt on your way out, Terminated One!”

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaat? Seriously?!

Now, I try very hard not to jump to conclusions. It had seemed pretty likely that I would actually have my contract extended, because frankly we’re in the middle of some stuff that it would be very hard for them to get done if I were to walk out the door; they don’t have another me, somebody who can handle the trickier analysis questions, understand what the system is doing and why, and all like that. They have a ton of business analysts, and enough QA testers to fill an entire warehouse, but database analysts?

…I might be the only one on the floor, come to think of it…there’s only one other “pure” data analyst, too, and the poor guy is positively swamped trying to keep up with all the stuff that gets dumped on him…

But still. I’m not a cheap date, either. And if the budget is tightening, well, I’m sure the line item that is the invoice from my agency isn’t exactly under the radar, you know?

When my manager emerged blinking into the daylight, I moseyed over to her desk as casually as I could manage and said, “Ya, uh…my access suddenly got cut off? Sooooooooooo…is that, you know, some kind of…? Or is there something you need to, um, tell me…?”

“Oh!” she said, and blinked a couple times. “Oh. Crap. It’s probably my fault…wait, I thought we had another month…are you just dead, or what?”

“Uh, yeah, completely shut out. Well. I get email, and IM still works, but I can’t get to any of the shares or the servers or anything like that.”

“Crap. I gotta get on this call. You call them, find out what I need to do, and when I get out of this meeting I’ll expedite it.”

“Cool. So, I’m not fired or anything?”

{blink-blink}

“No! I’m extending your contract. Wait. Didn’t I already tell you that?!”

“Heh. No.”

“Crap. Well, I am.”

“Sweet! OK, I’ll call the Access Dudes.”

And I did and a lot of huff and bother later, they told me that “somebody” saw “something” that morning and decided I needed to be shut off immediately. (What it was, nobody could say. And I can’t imagine what it might have been; I’ve worked for MegaBank off and on since 198{achoo!} – I know better than to do just about anything on their wire, thank-you-very-much.)

And then they told me it would take two to three business days to get my disabled access re-enabled.

To which I said, “!!!!!!!!!!?” because We. Only. Have. One. Week. For. Initial. UAT. Testing. And. Test. Plan. Submission. You. JACKASS! (<= I didn’t say that part out loud. That would be how not to get the nice Access Dude to switch your user ID back on. Unfortunately, he was based Elsewhere, or I would have used the single-best method of getting what you want from the Technology Team, which would be baked goods.)

Then my manager got on the horn with the same guy and said “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

And then he said, two hours.

So! I went for a very long walk around the Embarcadero, both to cool off a little bit and to keep myself from being annoying to everybody else. (There is nothing worse than a bored Tama. Seriously. I get really twitchy and talk-y. And if I’m bored when I’ve got a lot to do? Ohmygah. Somebody bring the tranquilizer gun…)

And then I came back and my access was back and I went back to work.

Where I will be until around mid-May. It’s good information to know; it makes planning these next few months so much easier.

Plus, it gets me out of having to put on my Fancy Clothes and going for endless cycles of interviews in search of the Next Big Thing for a while.

Also? Mid-May?

That’s right about the time the first round of produce from the garden starts to come in.

…just sayin’…