Paying for the time away / BWE *

In which our Hero gets to step back a little and let them appreciate how smooth I make things go

So this past week, I’ve been “away from my desk” as the expression goes, participating in a software training course. And it’s been… interesting. Three projects are converging on done. One went live. One hit a speed bump and I’ll pick it up tomorrow. And one went completely off the rails.

The information we’d planned the project with turned out to be incorrect. The system that we’d been working with, turns out not to work the way we thought it did. The new discoveries make a lot more sense, so we feel like we’ve gotten out of the twilight zone a little. But we also were supposed to launch in a week, and that’s really not going to happen.

The part that’s entertaining, mostly because I wasn’t there for the initial panic, was that just before I left, we’d identified that the date was going to slip. And this week, the programmers came back with some information and so the manager announced that “There will be a one week delay.” And then my counterpart with the client told my manager, “Actually, I don’t think you’re going to see this till September.” Which is a delay of, what, 8-12 weeks depending on which version of the schedule you’re looking at.

It’s a mess. They’re trying to test against the test system, which is something I specifically refused to do. Because the test system is a copy of the real system, but a few months older. So now every single issue that comes up is not only an exercise in “Oh, is it a problem with our code” but also “is it a problem because the data is stale?” (And we’ve already found several of the later that we wasted time on because we thought it was the former) I’m sure the manager is annoyed. I got pulled right when the crisis hit, all this bad news landed and he’s going to look bad for jumping the gun on announcing the new date. And if that hasn’t pissed him off, what should do the trick is that I’m going to tell our guys not to waste time on the discrepancy reports even though the manager is focused there.

I’m sorry but if time is really an issue, then I’m not wasting it testing how good a copy was made by the technical group that we already have a great deal of reason to distrust. Better to assume the copy is bad and wait till we can test on the good system. And if the manager insists, then I’m dropping tools because I’ve got other things to do.

The training is for the “new project” and on the one hand I really want to be on it because it’s an opportunity to learn some new software and business functionality, but on the other hand, it’s going to long and boring, and very possibly get cancelled or materially changed before the year is done. Or it could be the ticket to ongoing employment for years.

To that end, I went on this week of training. Two courses whose upside I can summarize with the statement, “well at least I got to drive to work.” I don’t like corporate training, it’s ineffectual to begin with, and the mix of attendees include deep technical people and deep auto-rectal prestidigitators (which is the people with their thumbs up their ass, just so nobody misses out on the disdain). And that means that the course is *slow* to start with, and very quickly proved to be the wrong material to justify my interrupting my other work.

Hell, the first module on Monday was supposed to be an overview of some kind but instead they taught one of the software modules. And the FIRST words out of the instructor were “So how does your company do [module process]” And the answer was “We don’t do that here, that’s done out of the parent company.” Which means that this entire module is a waste of time. Interesting for idle curiousity, but not required for the mission. And I’m big on curiousity except that this time, I’m a contractor. Paying for my class is an option, but the client didn’t opt.

So not only am I being pulled out of the productive work that I have to do, but I’m paying cashy-money for the privilege.

To put it gently, I’m a little pissed about it. And then at the end of the week when we did a feedback session, I was baffled that people were calling out that part of the program as being particularly useful. No, you fucking twink, it wasn’t useful, it was just the piece that touches near your job so it was understandable to you. It was useless, it was a waste of everybody’s time and money.

And I don’t know if it’ll piss off the client more to say I’m not doing any more of these training sessions so instead I’m going to ask if we can get a table of contents for the course, so a little more than just the paragraph blurb.

I feel like getting a new phone just to get the bad taste out of my mouth. Screw it, I have mints. (Dallandrah loves me!!)

Mmmmm cinnamon

*EDIT*

With some small horror, I’ve discovered, after googling a note, that “twink” has picked up meanings in the time since I picked up the word in school. Back in the old days, between nettrek players (hi, geek, remember?) twinks were the newbie players who had no idea what they were doing, so would charge the enemy lines and then in retreat tended to draw enemy ships towards the lead players and then die before they could helpfully absorb photon torpedoes. Basically they were worse than useless, they were effectively more useful to the other side.