A Truly Awful Week

Last week was a bad one. In fact, last week made other bad weeks look good by comparison. Indeed, it was so bad that I wasn't even able to find time for a one-line throwaway post about how bad the week was!

Now, I'm going to have to be careful here, because the badness was connected with work, and there are limits to what should be said about work in a public place. So, with that in mind, here goes.

The project that I'm on has been having some problems. So, the week before last we had a meeting and discussed the situation, and what should be done. One of the outcomes of this was that I should send what I was working on to the customer's expert and have him look it over, to see if he could advise. So, I duly did. Additionally, our project manager was in France that week, and had asked me to send out the weekly status report on Friday. I, of course, forgot until just after I had left the office on Friday, whereupon I spent twenty minutes looking for a convenient place to turn the car around, only to decide that I didn't have time because the BT engineer was coming (or not, as the case actually was).

Anyway, I decided to send the report first thing on Monday, especially since I had to be in early again. And, since the week is cyclic, there's no real difference between sending it last thing on Friday and first thing on Monday.

So, I got up early on Monday, and headed to the office, busily composing the report in my head as I went. I sat down at my PC, opened email, and was hit by the bombshell.

The customer's expert had looked over my work, declared the whole thing utterly useless, and written a scathing report on it, in which he declared, essentially, that I was utterly useless and incompetent. Not the best thing to be hit with on a Monday morning.

At this point, the company went into a damage control mode, and we had meetings and discussions about what went wrong, what was to be done, and so on and so forth. I was told several times that this wasn't about them assigning blame (which I didn't find terribly reassuring).

So, it was hectic. And this week's going to be hectic as well. And the week after. And every week until I can finally get this thing fixed and out of the door.

But the worst thing about it all is not the email itself - it's the dreadful feeling that, just maybe, he's right. Although many of the issues he raised were fairly trivial, there was one major screw up on my part, something I should have known better than to do. (Actually, there was a second, but that one was based on a peice of information I just didn't have, so I'm letting myself off the hook on that one.) But something has gone badly wrong with the project since July, and the blame, if there is to be any, must fall to me. After all, I'm the guy who should have had it working by now.

(Perhaps the funniest thing is that I made a relatively huge amount of progress last week. Were it not for Monday, that would have been the greatest week since I started there.)

There was more badness in the week. My band lost their pipe major just after the Cowal Games, which has left a degree of confusion. And the BT engineer came, and failed to help on Friday, so I still have no broadband. However, these problems fade to insignificance before the hell that was my job last week. I may blog about such things once the project is over. If I survive that long. I find I desperately need a holiday, but there's no possibility of getting the time off until the current project and, in fact, the next one is finished. The way things are going, Christmas is starting to look doubtful.