Monday, October 22, 2012

Work, Cloud Cuckoo Land, and The Cloud Atlas



It was a long day at the office, with some pretty serious stress peaks in the early morning. The thing that sent my levels climbing was being pulled into a schedule meeting.  In an project, managing a schedule is a full time job. To that end, we have a master scheduler.

The problem with our current project is...he is not very good. In my current role, on this project, I do not have schedule control responsibilities (though, I have been pulled in a couple of times to write part of the schedule, but that is another stress point). Because our scheduler is not very good, he has to have everyone present in the meeting, for when he runs into things about the schedule he doesn't understand - which is all the time. Prior to departing for vacation my boss had provided schedule updates and estimates for the two meetings I got called into today.

So, basically, all I did was say "as was provided". A pretty much pointless waste of two hours.  The rest of the day though, I plowed through writing a new set of requirements.  Here is the challenge that I ran into - I have a portion of the project that is current in the test cycle - and yet, at the end of last week they added what translated to 150+ new line items for the requirements document.  Too crazy.

I would give you a nice entry about my personal life but I didn't have one today.  I worked about eleven hours, came home, ate a simple dinner, took a short nap, then got up and watched the presidential debate, while answering the occasional email on my corporate Blackberry. I do have one bit of feedback - I think presidential candidates should be wired with Tasers and when they fail to answer the question asked, they should be shocked.  In about three minutes both of the candidates would have been laying on the floor, twitching. A pure evening in Cloud Cuckoo Land. Fortunately, I plan on recapturing some good hours this evening by reading "The Cloud Atlas", which I started on Sunday and I am already enjoying.

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