I'm Calm Now
But I wasn't as recently as 3:45pm today.You might notice that today is Friday.
My company has a big product release set for next Friday. You'll notice that day is the day after Thanksgiving which has basically become an official US holiday called Shopping/Hangover/Digestion day.
Us chickens here in the writer coop have been suspicious of the release date for obvious reasons. No one works on that day. Not us, not our customers.
Well, they wouldn't give us any information on the date, telling us that we're sticking to it, for real this time. See, this product was supposed to go out sometime last year I think, and has been pushed back, pushed back, and pushed back again and again.
We're going through a lot of effort to plan everything out based on this date. With everyone off on Thursday and Friday, we need to have everything checked in by Tuesday night for assembly on Wednesday.
I was planning on putting in 10+ hours this weekend to make sure it's all frosting rosebuds.
I get a voice mail around 3:30pm today saying that we need to send out our stuff on Monday, can I have it ready? Ok, change of plan. Big work involved. I call my new, inexperienced, over-his-head manager and ask about this.
Change of plan again, we're sending the stuff out tonight!
My wonderful new manager seems suprised that everything is not done 6 days ahead of schedule! No matter, we'll just give the customer-in-question unfinished material. That's real top-notch customer relations right there. (I forgot to add that our wonderful new manager knew about this early release for weeks and never told us, even in our weekly meeting which was just THIS MORNING!)
I say OK, not having much other choice.
My biggest concern is the complex installation documentation, of which I am responsible. I ask about the OS the customer is using to make sure what I am giving them is kosher.
His answer, UNIX.
This would be no problem if for the last 3 months everyone, including him, have been telling me this release is Windows only. Therefore I have ZERO UNIX material written.
Nothing.
I even asked him this very question last week, he said he'd "follow up" and I didn't get an answer. I wrongly assumed everything was ok, not expecting him to completely forget about my question.
My fantastic new manager sees fit to pin this on me. Despite the fact that I've been given consistantly incorrect information and was never informed in any fashion that plans had changed, even though I have asked.
This is a disaster. A total disaster. A customer is paying upwards of 6 figures for this software it doesn't have instructions?!?!
They agree that we can get by with delivering this document Wednesday. That gives me about 4.5 days to complete all my regular work, plus about 2 weeks worth of UNIX work.
Complicating this is that I don't currently have access to a UNIX machine.
I'll be flying blind, working game-developer-type hours for the next 5 days.
That's if I don't follow my instincts and walk out of here right now and never come back.
What pisses me off is that this is going to be pinned on me. We have all new managers in development, and I've met none of them. They don't know if I'm a good worker or a bad worker. From my new manager's tone, he sees this as my fault somehow and I'm sure that's how it will be portrayed company-wide.
If anyone needs a dedicated, experienced, technically saavy, VB schooled tech writer with experience with SQL, ASP, WebSphere 4.x, WebSphere 5.x, WebLogic 7 and 8, Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, HTML, Javascript, and over 5 years experience in the software field, ...drop me a line. tnmke at yahoo dot com
I'm officially looking for other work.
<< Home