8 days and counting

Is it really December 21?? Seriously? But yesterday was October I swear… and the day before that was May. Is Christmas really 4 days away? I haven’t wrapped a single present. I didn’t put up my tree, or any of my wreaths… I didn’t set out the nutcrackers or my winter teddy bears… I haven’t even played any of my Christmas CDs. A year without Christmas.

It’s kind of a depressing thought. It seemed like a really great idea at the time, but right now I’m really missing the fact that it just doesn’t feel like Christmas. And, considering this is my favorite time of year, that’s really sad. On the other hand, I really think it will feel like Christmas when we go to my parents’ house, and I actually think our wedding will feel like Christmas (without being too Christmas-y). And to be honest, if I have to give up Christmas for one year in order to have an absolutely gorgeous, romantic, winter wedding and marry the perfect man then, well, I think I can handle that. He’s more than worth it.

I’m more calm today. Not quite as much flipping out (but there was still some in there). Instead I was focusing on my job selections for next rotation (March-September). Rotation options just came out this week, and we have to decide by the end of the second weekend in January – which happens to be when I’m getting back from the honeymoon. So I’ve had to speed up the process and put it into overdrive. To add to that stress, Jeff and I are essentially fighting over one particular role. On the one hand, I’m what Rob would call “top dog” of the program right now – I won last rotation’s outstanding performance award, so I should have a pretty high say in what I do. On the other hand, Jeff “took one for the team” and went to one of our remote sites, so our managers in some unwritten sense owe him one. Usually this all works out somehow… but this time the top dog and the took one for the team want the same rotation. So who wins?

I don’t know. Therefore the war is on!! I met with my potential assignment leader today to express interest, get to know each other, and talk about what I’d be doing. When I get back from the honeymoon (technically when I’m still on vacation) I’ve got another meeting with my manager and pseudo-manager to talk about where I want to go next and tell them WHY I want to go there. Basically my game plan is talk to everyone who has a stake in this thing and convince them that this is the right rotation for me and my career. And then I cross my fingers.

I’m a little bummed out with work right now. We’ve been testing for about 4 weeks now and it’s just taking way longer than it should have. Our consultants came to us with scripts that just didn’t fit our requirements in some cases and quite frankly didn’t work in others. Had to sit through a lot of debugging – time wasted for us. Now we’ve finally gotten the customized functionality finished and working pretty well, but there are still some significant usability issues opened. And then today, to top it off, we had a user helping us test, and the dumb thing completely flaked out. I can’t get into too many details here, but just know it was frustrating to me. I wanted to have this thing good to go before I leave.

I mostly blame our consultants. Let me give you a couple examples. We get into testing the application, and notice it’s not behaving how we expect it. We write up the issue and send it to the consultants, who inform us it’s a product limitation – nothing they can do. This is interesting, because ON PAGE 18 of our requirements document – which we wrote with the consultants AND discussed in great detail on multiple occassions face to face with our consultants – was that exact requirement. Now, my question is, why did they wait until we’d already put the product in place to tell us that requirement was going to be completely ignored? In addition, the other consultant we had was just a certifiable idiot. I can’t tell you how many times he would say something completely incorrect and I would call him out on it. And I would be right in the end. Oh he’d argue – he’d act shocked that I would suggest he didn’t know what he was talking about – but he didn’t. He was an idiot and I very much enjoyed destroying him.

Chris thinks this is not how you should treat people you work with. Usually I would agree completely. I absolutely believe in respecting one another and trying to get along to do the job as well as possible. But there are certain situations in which we’re paying these people a lot of money to know what they’re talking about and do their job well. If said people are screwing up, if said people are saying and doing things that are outright wrong, and even I am aware of this, then we have a problem. When two people from the same company representing the same product are saying two different things to me… we have a problem. In this case I think I have every right to let them know I’m not happy, to let them know that they need to get their act together and fix what they’ve done. This may not be the style of everyone, but that’s how I handle it. I’m not going to be a bitch about something stupid (some high-powered execs can be real dicks about things that don’t matter), but I will nail your ass for fucking up multiple times on my dollar. Yes, everyone makes mistakes. But when you’re a consultant and you don’t even know your own product as well as your clients – we’ve got problems.

Annnd yet another entry turns into a rant. God I’m good.

Anyway, I have got to get some sleep. Last day of work tomorrow until after the honeymoon. And we’ve got a TON to do before we leave!!

Thanks for being here for me, OD.

(indecision)