…really…?

Dudes. I’m just…have you ever had…and then you’re, like…I mean…you know…really?!

SO YESTERDAY, I was in the office – a place I was actually looking forward to being this week because I have an awful lot of favorite food places to hit up one last time, because WHO KNOWS IF MAYBE San Francisco is going to split off from the rest of California and sink into the SEA after I’ve left this job I have an awful lot of people I still need to either hand things to, explain things to, or both.

Because of course, that would come first, NAY, BE THE ONLY CONSIDERATION, REALLY! for me this week.

Gyros? Pffft, who cares…I am there for the team…(and if you need me, send a text or something because…eeeeeeyeah…totally at the gyros walk-up…)

Shortly after lunch, I started to develop a headache, which I attributed to falafel deprivation tension. Or possibly allergies, because my sinuses were acting out, too.

By 2:00, it was becoming all-consuming. I was having a terrible time thinking about anything other than my headache.

About the only thing bothering me more than the headache (which was definitely of the ‘sinus pressure’ variety) was this weird tickling in my throat. Stupid allergies…but I understand honey is some kind of Miracle Cure for allergies, and AS IT JUST SO HAPPENS, baklava has honey in it…(aside: see, this is why I have to keep myself on a short leash most of the time when it comes to Such Things…I could blow throw an astonishing amount of my paycheck on eating out, if I let myself…)

By the time I got home, my throat wasn’t “tickling,” it was “scratching.” Hmmmm…

My alarm went off this morning, and I was starting to think about doing something about that…and then I swallowed.

Apparently, I attempted to swallow a whale in my sleep last night. A whale wearing a sandpaper jacket.

And when I let out this groan of disbelief and anger, I woke up the headache.

Who called his friend, the fever.

Who invited the body ache over.

I mean…really?! REALLY?!

Right now?

This week?!

REALLY?!?!

…ugh…

I ended up working from home today…which was probably a good thing, because every time I start trying to move around I get kind of blech.

If I’d gone in, I probably would have needed to leave early.

Like, before lunch.

Which would be a criminal waste of a rather long commute, because I still have a few eateries on my mental checklist of places I’d like to go one last time before I leave the City by the Bay for an undetermined stretch of time.

Not that I could right now anyway…sore throats and eating don’t exactly play nicely together.

Argh.

I have to say: I do get a lot more done when I work from home.

Even if there isn’t any baklava in the joint.

(Seriously, can you believe this?! I’m going to get a humdinger of a cold/flu thing NOW?! REALLY?!?!)

(But I’ve got news for it: I’m one extremely stubborn little code-jockey over here. I am finishing these last couple things, and I will go into the office tomorrow and Friday, and that’s all there is to it!)

(…but, geez louise…I don’t think I’m going to be feeling like going out to lunch, is the thing…waaaaaah, my life is haaaaaard…!)

Why I will miss these people, #341

OMG...just got back on the corporate wire and what is in my inbox?

A "meeting" on my last day...to be held at Artfibers. (Yarn store, people - a YARN STORE!)

YOU SEE WHY I WEEP TO LEAVE THEM?!?!?!

[weeps]

I don't wanna goooooooooo!!!!!!

(ALSO, where HAVE I been?! When did Artfibers move back to San Francisco, and why didn't they TELL me?!?! [more weeping] alas, the wasted hours...!)

(sent from my HTC)

It’s really VERY simple…

My manager asked me a simple question yesterday: Do you have any documentation on the OTHER stuff you handle?

I swear by my hopes of retirement – my brain locked up in a blind panic. This is such a simple question. What do you actually DO all day? should be something with a simple answer, easily outlined as a one-page document. With a few bullet-points.

But when it comes to what I’ve been doing for lo these many moons…um…well…some of it is like that, but then some of it…isn’t…

Well shoot, I thought gamely, I’m working on one of those things right immediately now, right? I’ll just go ahead and document what I’m doing here as I go! How hard could it be?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

{weeps}

YA KNOW…I don’t generally think of my job as “hard.” I really don’t. I mean, granted, it is hardly “entry level.” It’s complex, and does require a certain level of expertise / finesse.

I ain’t no rookie, and I ain’t no slouch. If I do say so myself, which you will note, I totally do.

(The previous paragraph should be pronounced: “Dear Universe, obviously I need some humbling in my life, so please send me something that I will use to make a really big, juicy, stupid, highly visible rookie-move mistake – and then have somebody else find it for me and announce it through a ‘reply all’ to an email, k-thx.”)

But for folks who don’t have that “I just sorta ‘get’ how these things work” under their belts…sure, it starts off easy. First check this. If it isn’t that, then look at this. Those are your two Easy Button answers…and they will be the case anywhere from 20 to 80% of the time, depending on the question and the system.

The rest of the time, well, then what you do is {star-burst of seemingly schizophrenic troubleshooting}

Whenever I’m called upon to attempt to do this kind of explanation of What I Do Around Here Anyway to somebody who is, say, a business analyst or manager, I am uncomfortably aware that they are either starting to panic because they feel completely lost…or that they are looking at me suspiciously, like they are just sure I’m intentionally trying to make this all sound very complicated and hard so that they will feel stupid, to give me some kind of intellectual leg up on them or something.

Which makes me cranky, because to me…this isn’t hard. Dude. We haven’t even gotten to the hard stuff yet! Just pay attention! {claps hands} Focus, people, FOCUS! Here we go again, one-two-three AND…you put de lime in de coconut…

But, when I’m not being frustrated by my own inability to explain things well, I have to admit…there’s a reason not everybody flocks to this particular niche occupation.

I really don’t think it’s hard, exactly…but it is extreeeeeeeemly detail-oriented, and the sheer volume of details to keep track of can be a little staggering at first.

Plus there’s the slight wrinkle that it isn’t necessarily as linear as most people think it is.

I mean, you probably think of “computer stuff” as being linear, right? A simple progression of steps happening in a certain order, A => B => C => D.

A database system both is, and is not, actually like that. Sure, processes will fire in a certain order. This calls that, that calls this. One, then two, then three. Code executes from top to bottom most of the time. You read it just like you would a book – start at the top left, and work your way down to the bottom right.

But the whole system is more like…a fancy Swiss watch. Dozens, hundreds, even thousands if you’re in a really-big one, of tiny little gears, spinning and whirling at different rates, regulating each other into a cohesive whole…and each tab of every gear its own name and purpose, fits into one and only one slot correctly…each tab is likewise the walls of another slot, meaning that another tab will be slipping into place as it passes to get its push from it…

…touch, push, part, touch, push, part…all day and night, the systems are coming together, exchanging pushes and pulls…we take in from you and you and you…compile, process, transform…give back this and that and this…now you all compile, process, transform…and our tab comes along again to fit neatly into that slot at precisely 12:00:00 0.38 each morning…

That’s the part that is always hard for me to explain to folks who aren’t database analysts; that’s where I start to flounder when trying to document how to do what-all I do; that’s where I start to sound like somebody who is just trying to confuse the @*^&@ out of people.

How do I do what I do? Well, it’s very simple, really…when I see this, I start looking over here in Gear 1. Gear 1 touches gears 2 through 36, each of which in turn touch a different set of 36 gears…one of those tabs is my culprit…

And when I figure out which gear the gum got into, I have to figure out how to tease it outta there…without bending the gears, this is the important bit!, do NOT bend the gears while you’re tinkering around in there…!!!!

I love it. It’s fascinating. It’s like doing logic puzzles all day. My job is full of things that fall into the “ten hours to find, ten minutes to fix” category – but that thrill of victory at the end of It All is more than worth it.

To me.

But as I sat there today, with an almost blank Word document mocking me as I tried to document what I was doing right that moment, trying to track down why we had selected the patently WRONG account as the “primary” account for a customer relationship…I had to admit…for most people…? This would be confusing, and complex, and crazy, and about as much fun as digging your eyeballs out with a grapefruit spoon.

And also, there’s simply no way I can document this process for somebody else.

All I can really tell them to set them on their way is this magnificently unhelpful gem: Learn your system. Know every gear. Know every tab, and every slot, by name…and time of day…and other-gears-touched. Know what’s “right,” and what’s “weird,” and what’s “wrong.” Understand where it’s going, with all this whirling and whirring…understand what happens when Tab 32 on Gear 7 misses its appointment with Tab 5 of Gear 9.

Once you’ve done that, my son…it will all become very, very simple indeed…except for the parts that aren’t, but won’t you feel like the clever one when you figure it out anyway…?!

Money Monday: March 26, 2012

This is probably going to be the shortest of these posts ever. This is the last week of this contract, and I’m probably going to be AWOL yet again all this week. There’s just way too much to do, and I’m way too agitated / tired / cranky / etc. to write much.

I’ve spent a lot of time pondering What’s Next over these last several weeks…but to be honest? I’ve been trying not to do that.

My brain is overloaded with all the work-related chatter going on inside it; all the shoulda-woulda-coulda crap that insists on playing through no matter how often I shout, “NO TIME! TOO LATE! QUIT IT, THERE’S NOTHING I CAN DO ABOUT THAT NOW!”

It keeps me up at night, which leads to exhaustion (go figure), which leads to crankiness and more brain-chatter.

This is not a good time to attempt to make balanced, reasonable decisions about what I want to do once this contract is over; history has shown me, again and again, that decisions I make when I’m emotionally or physically off-balance – and I’m a bit of both right now, frankly – tend to be bad ones.

Not to digress, but I feel like I need to say this: I’m not being abused by anybody but myself on this deal. Nobody is being “mean” to me, or anything like that. What has got me so worked up isn’t my situation, but that of the people I’m leaving behind – who are damned good people that I like an awful lot. I don’t like what I’m seeing ahead for them, which is taking a whole lot of blame for a whole lot of stuff that they are not being equipped to defend themselves against.

And that’s got me irritable and upset, because it hits my ‘that ain’t fair’ button.

ANYWAY…I’ve been spending a lot more time playing video games than looking at spreadsheets or doing feasibility studies. Which I feel is a much better use of my time than coming up with “great” ideas that start off like, First, we buy a really big used motor home…

The one thing I’m pretty sure of is, I won’t want to stay home for long, if at all. We still have way too much that we want to get done, the husband’s pay is still a good 15% below what it was five years ago and there’s a lot more coming out off the top – the health insurance premiums alone are almost triple what they were five years ago. Combined with the cost of Everything Else going nowhere but up, retirement funds that are deflated like flat tires, woefully inadequate college funds for the Denizens and still being upside-down on the Den – which essentially hamstrings us when opportunities that would require relocation come up – we’d just really like to keep the double-income power-lifting going for a while yet.

But for right immediately now…I’m not going to worry about it. I’m going to get this last week done, and get as much put to bed as I possibly can before I go.

And then I’m going to take a week off from Everything.

And then, I should be ready to actually get moving on something…something that doesn’t involve motor homes and a live-off-the-land lifestyle.

(…which has seemed a lot more tempting than you’d think lately…except I still haven’t come up with a good solution for the Yarn Stash Storage Issue yet…hmmmmm…)

In the midst of Chaos

I met with some friends for lunch yesterday; as seems to be somehow required for me lately, what should have been a very, very simple, normal, usual-and-customary break in the middle of a working day turned into some kind of 27,000-page epic odyssey, in which our heroes had to battle twelve-headed monsters, spear-throwing natives, a couple gods and a sea monster.

Because there must always be a sea monster.

I had two different people at work trying to spackle meetings over other meetings. I had one person freaking out because I wasn’t in this meeting while another one was telling me to stop, um, doing my job. And then another person told that person to go climb a pole because if I didn’t do it, it wouldn’t get done, period. (Meanwhile, I’m telling both of them to go climb a pole because neither of them was the boss of me or what I did or didn’t do, work-wise.)

And this person is having a panic attack because she needs me to do her job for her or it won’t get done. And another person is waiting for me to approve his work so that he can move on to the next step. And this guy is sitting there staring at me, waiting for me to…wait…well, actually, I can’t remember what it was he wanted, but, somehow, it was waiting on me.

AND THEN, I get a weird call that would neither connect, nor disconnect. AND THEN another one from Eldest, who had snuck outside to make the call from her (illegal during school hours) cell phone to tell me she was being sent home sick. Hilarity ensues, because we can’t get hold of Vanessa the Great and both the husband and I are in the city, soooo, nobody can come get her…so for the first time ever, a Denizen walked home sick from school alone.

Yeah. I was fine with it. Uh-huh. Noooooo problem. (Except that I was screaming and clawing up the walls the whole time.)

About the only thing in my life yesterday that wasn’t being all high-maintenance were my friends, who were even gracious enough to pretend I wasn’t fiddling around with my phone at lunch like some kind of class-impaired twit.

That afternoon, as Thing 327 was going up in flames, my phone practically vibrating itself off the car seat while I was driving back to the Den from the second pharmacy (…yeah…that kinda day yesterday, naturally the first pharmacy was out of TheraFlu…), I found myself wondering how it was that I had managed to grow less wise in my adult years than I was as a kid.

See, when I was a kid, I was a classic underachiever. I frustrated my parents no end with my stubborn refusal to excel at stuff; they knew I had the wherewithal, but they couldn’t ever seem to get anything higher than a C average out of me.

And, true confessions: it was actually on purpose. Just like they thought.

I remember learning, very early on, that the reward one got for being spectacular at pretty much anything was…more, and harder, work.

And more frequent scoldings for not continuing to excel, no matter how much harder work was dumped on you.

This is not hard math to do, folks. I believe it was second grade when I realized that being patted on the head and given a cold slice of pizza during an awkward luncheon with the principal (because what kid doesn’t live for that, am I right?!) was the benefit, but mountains of additional homework and my parents constantly circling around me demanding to know in what reality I thought an A- was acceptable, I MEAN, REALLY, YOU ARE CAPABLE OF SO MUCH BETTER…eeeeeyeah.

Keep it.

So I didn’t really try. I’d sit around waiting for the bell to ring, and whenever I was in danger of going too far the other way – where lay things like detention and summer school – I would pull off some “miraculous” save (read: I would actually answer more things correctly on the tests and/or turn in a few pages of homework here and there) and get myself back to the ultra-average place that was so comfortable.

When did I forget this crucial information?! Why do I not spend more time just sitting there with some blank, idiotic expression on my face, so that people go, “Ya know, on second thought, let’s have so-and-so take that, shall we…?”

I should so totally start taking longer to do stuff. And while I’m at it, do less stuff.

That would solve everything, don’t you think?!

Today, I finally got the main account loading process – the Really Big Ugly part of the last thing I’m working on so frantically – to actually work.

Against the, um, like, 2% sample of data that was actually successfully loaded into the new testing environment…so, I know it works functionally, but whether or not it will continue to work well when we’re back up to 100% data, whether it will be faster or slower, all that kind of stuff…no idea, really.

Only theories, probably and maybe, should and ought to and I’d expects.

Eh, well. Nothing I can do about it – their delays aren’t anything I could have done a thing about, really.

In a lot of ways, we’re just lucky we finally got enough together for me to get these initial passes working again.

I wonder what I’ll be doing next.

I’m kind of looking forward to finding out.

And also to getting a little more sleep.

Yeah.

That…will be awfully nice…

Stick a fork in me…

…cause I am done.

With the backlog of bills, that is.

…that’s right, my life? Never ending rollercoaster of excitement, wooooooo!

I spent over nine hours today – nine! – catching up with the backlog of crap that required a signature, a read-and-understand, a bellowing up and down the stairs about planned course of action, scanning, filing, shredding or otherwise dealing with.

But on the bright side, it was a wretched day outside. Cold, rainy, windy, dark, blech.

Which made it easier to be cooped up inside doing the Dreaded Paperwork stuff, even though my garden is SO not ready for spring.

Except that I kept stopping to stare out the window in amazement as weather kept happening. I MEAN, REALLY…does it not know this is California? Aren’t we supposed to be, like, a sunny-blue-day vacation wish-you-were-here postcard all the time?!

…geez…

In unrelated news, I am so damned tired of Drama. Now with more Drama. PLUS, AS AN ADDED BONUS? Drama.

Seriously. Enough, now.

I think one of the not-exactly-downsides of being a person who ordinarily resists stress pretty well is, once it does get to me…man, I am not equipped to deal with it particularly well.

It got to me about two weeks ago. On Tuesday. When it was like, all the leaving that has been going on – coworkers to new jobs, or being laid off, our own Vanessa the Great finding another job, and why am I still here, again?!, combined with the “sudden” realization by Everybody that I was not going to be there that much longer OHMYGAH, if you ever had a question, about anything, be it how to do “that thing” in SQL, or how this application does that or that application does this, or how come this other thing isn’t blue while that other thing is orange…NOW IS THE TIME!

…I suddenly became verrrrrrrry popular, and a job that was already normally fairly go-go-go became GO-GO-GO…but now with more official meetings and less actually working.

Which, when combined with “my” developer leaving for another job and the subsequent need for me to train up a new developer…made for some interesting “time management” issues for me.

SPEAKING OF…ohmygah, you guys…get this. I got home Thursday night and started to basically go straight to bed. Which is kind of what I’ve been doing for the last Forever and a Half (hence the enormous pile of bills and other Official Things that I spent – I kid you not – nearly nine hours dealing with today, oy vey!), but then I said to myself, tiredly…

“Dude…you’d better at least open your email and clear out the server, before they lock you down.”

I try to keep up on my phone when I’m meeting myself coming and going. I try to deal with it while I’m loitering around on the train platforms, you know, at least delete out the spam and Extremely! Exciting! Offers! for 0.008% off if I buy between 10:00 and 10:08 a.m. on a Saturday and like that.

But I’d gotten way behind. WAY behind. And there was something wrong with my automatic sync that I hadn’t figured out, and, well, just, you know.

I needed to put in the massive effort to turn on the computer and open my email client.

PING! PING! PING! PING! HI! HI! HI! HI! REMINDER! REMINDER! HEY, YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE? YOU KNOW WHAT? YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE? OVERDUE! PING! PING!

I had about eleventy mazillion reminders pop up for appointments on Friday, Saturday, [pause over Sunday], Monday AND Tuesday.

For a split second I was all, whaa? because for heaven’s sake, in what reality would I have put whackity-majillion appointments all packed together over three…

…days…

…aw, @^*&@...

YA KNOW how I was getting all sniffy about others not being particularly aware of how a calendar works? And was all like, shoulda been doing this six weeks ago, morons! and other haughty and superior sorts of stuff?

…ya know that old saying about how whenever you’re pointing a finger at somebody else, there are three fingers pointing back at yourself…?

Yeah. I sort of forgot I had planned time off Friday, Monday and Tuesday.

{head-desk}

When am I going to learn – the instant I start feeling superior about anything? Put a pillow under my arse, because I’m about to fall on it…geesh…

I was tired and irritable at that exact moment, so my first thought was, well…there you are then. It’s been on the team calendar for a Sunth of Mondays. It’s been called out in our weekly meetings, over and over again. Sure, yeah, I “always” send out a reminder email a week before, and then the day before, but you know – hey.

I’m sick of them, and they’re sick of me. And I’m tired. And not working tomorrow (read: talking to any of them, about anything)? Is sounding real good right about now…

But, after I’d gotten my 2.5 hours of actual sleep (and 1.5 hours of lying awake wishing I could get to sleep) (insomnia thanks to excessive brain activity that likes to respond to me trying to go to bed by going “whirrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRR!” instead of “zzzzzzzzz,” and yeah, it sucks) (stupid brain!) and was feeling a little less childish, I spent some time in the morning shuffling things around until I’d gotten anything that wouldn’t involve standing another human being up pushed off until early April.

So I’m taking partial time off. By which I mean, I’m working as usual, only with a few very long breaks midday so I can meet with people here and there for exciting things like spinal adjustments, crown installing (tooth not jeweled headwear, unfortunately) and to discuss their database needs.

And to have lunch with some friends. Which is a very important part of any given time not-exactly-off.

I only have two weeks left, and a lot to do…for people I’ve grown to care about rather a lot. I still feel as though I’m leaving a newborn on a bus depot bench and walking away, leaving this project as it currently stands…there’s just still so much that should get done, that probably won’t get done after I’ve gone.

There just isn’t anybody to do it…and it would take too long for anybody to train up into it.

…sigh…

Well…it’ll be OK, one way or another. The worst that can possibly happen still doesn’t result in any actual, physical death.

Or dismemberment.

So, onward. We’ll do the best we can with what time we have left, and after that, well…I’ll just have to trust that those I’m leaving behind can figure things out.

I’m pretty sure they can…and I won’t be, you know, moving…so the new developer can totally find me if he has any questions.

(Hi, honey. You will so owe me a whack of yard work if you take too much advantage of that.)

(Yet another fringe benefit of the two of us working together: Losing one of us doesn’t actually mean losing that one.)

(Heh. He’s so totally going to be driving me nuts with the ‘quick question’ thing for about two months after I’ve technically left, I can practically guarantee it…)

(OH, and? Vanessa the Great didn’t end up leaving us. Her new job fell through after a great many near-misses and miscommunications. Yay! Um, I mean, and I’m terribly sorry about that, dear me, tsk-tsk, simply dreadful, nobody regrets more than I do…)

(p.s. yay!)

(p.p.s. I am a bad, bad person…)

I’m not REALLY dead

All appearances to the contrary aside, I haven’t died. Yet. But I have started getting pretty worked up about things that ordinarily I would just shrug about, so it is actually possible that the End Times are upon us and we should all either repent, or go out and get really drunk.

Or possibly, if there’s time, we could do both. But not in that order. Because then, we’d probably have to repeat the repenting step and, well, there’s almost definitely not enough time for that.

I am now officially in the “fish or cut bait” trap. And I think everybody is irritated with me for not doing the OTHER thing more diligently / better / whatever. And I…am becoming…ahem…slightly short tempered…about it.

I’d love to make everybody happy. But…I can’t. I just can’t. There are not enough hours in the day or enough days between Now and Then for me to do that. A lot of these conversations should have started taking place in January, to be brutally honest about it. But of course, they didn’t, because back then the fact that I was ‘rolling off’ at the end of March wasn’t “in your face” news.

Everybody, including myself by the way, would rumble and sputter about it from time to time. Oh ya-ya-ya, uh-huh, we need to start thinking VERY SERIOUSLY INDEED about that…!

…and then we would be “absolutely hammered” by this-n-that-n-the-other (unlike every other business day, of course) and “swamped” and “overwhelmed” so that we then neglected to “action” the “learnings” enough to “reach out” to “anybody” “about” “anything” “really” “wait” “what’s” “with” “all” “the” “quotes?!”

Help, I have fallen into too many business meetings, I can’t action my learnings of English anymore…! (<= alas, this is almost like a ‘real’ sort of sentence that could be used in some of these meetings…and yes, sometimes, I want to reach across the table and slap somebody for saying they want to ‘action’ a ‘learning’ when what they mean is, ‘do it more betterer, like we should-oughta have done it from the git-go.’ I MEAN, REALLY, PEOPLE…let’s use proper American grammar, IF you please!) (this digression is otherwise entitled, How Tama amuses herself in meetings so that she is not paying a LICK of attention to whatever-all is being said, and is thus later surprised to learn that she was supposed to action something but didn’t even hear that learning because she was too busy coming up alternative phrases for ‘action the learnings.’)

Heh. Corporate America, baby. Gotta love her!

ACTUALLY, you know what’s weird? The other day I was stomping around the house in a bit of a temper because blah blah blah and they were all yak yak yak and I was all LOOK, IT’S SIMPLE, IT’S JUST blah blah blah and they were all {blank stare} and then…

…wait…

And I looked at my tech-husband, who was sitting there waiting for me to shut up listening intently to my every faaaascinating word, and I said…

“…ohmygah…”

He started chuckling.

“Shut up,” I snapped at him.

He started laughing.

“DUDE, SERIOUSLY, this is not funny…”

He proceeded on to howling and slapping his knee.

“ARGH!!!!!!!!”

I very much fear…I have migrated over the line. I can no longer seem to find that middle ground, where I can give Business the information they need without making their heads explode, and translate for Tech what on earth that weirdo was on about, with his ‘actioning’ and ‘learnings’ and ‘reaching out.’ He isn’t going to, like, HUG me or anything, right…? No, dude, don’t be scared…he’s just a project manager, they talk like that…

Instead I’m stuck in this place where my high level stuff is too high level, so they’re demanding more detail. But then my detail is too detailed and they’re just…looking at me…like, I don’t get it. Or worse, they want to argue with me about all these nitty-gritty details, like arguing is going to, um, solve something.

Bonus points if their “simple” solution to a perceived problem or omission would involve umpity-majillion man-hours to implement. Work to be done by…{glances around at empty floor}…hmmmm…

And then? I get frustrated with them. Which has got to be the number one symptom of having gone a step too far.

LOOK. We both know you can’t understand this. How about if you stick with actioning the learnings in meetings, and I’ll just get my MacGyver on over here, hmmmm…? (<= yet another symptom of having crossed over: arrogance, tinged with smugness)

Of course, it’s also a symptom of just being tired. I’ve been go-go-go for five weeks straight. I have gotten very little sleep since mid-February because I have had so many things dumped on me as non-optional.

I have been working my arse off.

And then, it has suddenly been discovered – and this may come as a great surprise – that I’m leaving, in, like a couple weeks.

I KNOW. It’s not like this was, you know, on the calendar for months or anything…{eye-roll}

Soooooo, suddenly I’m just incredibly popular. I’ve got tech howling for me to finish…well, almost every open QC item. I’ve got business whining about not understanding how they are going to action the learnings and that they need more documentation and so forth and so on. I’ve got partners desperately trying to get one last mystery solved. I’ve got users asking if I can pretty please figure out just one real quick issue they’ve got. I’ve got QA hounding me to analyze their test plans, to confirm that they’re doing the right testing.

Which is one of those “Tama can’t win this one” propositions, really. If I meddle, I will end up having to write all the tests. If I don’t meddle, we will probably end up with “eh” testing because the poor tester has no idea what he’s doing – he’s new to the application, too, and it’s always been a black box for everybody.

@^*&@.

Well – life in the fast lane, huh?

And only a little over two weeks left to go before the next rest stop…Lord, but am I ready for it…