The theme of my workday so far has been one of frustrations. The core of my original workday was managing the release of two site updates to production in the early afternoon. Before any site is released, we have to jump through hoops of a process of paperwork submittal and approval by a change request board. Welcome to life in the government. Today, for the first time in my nearly 5 years working at this position, a request to release was denied. The reason being becasue the CIO decided to put a blackout on all releases for the next 10 days, which apparently nobody knew the scope of this blackout until the weekly approval meetings were held. And from what I can glean, this blackout is, as a co-worker stated, "like hitting a gnat with a sledgehammer."
Prior to that, I was asked to do some last minute estimations to one of our applications to really beef up the level of security both in data storage and in access. This was for a group that needed to use this application on October 5th. Now keep in mind that in our little world of CMMI, there is no such thing as a 5-minute fix, so the mere fact that they were willing to forego a lot of our QA processes to get this done in time spoke volumes about it's importance. My initial estimates put it at about 48 hours of just coding and unit testing, but we pared it down to 32 hours. In this timeframe however is my birthday (on Monday) and a weekend trip starting tomorrow that my wife has had planned for a while now (where to, I still have no idea), so when all was said and done, not only was I going to be scraping the bare minimum for time to get it done, I was looking at pulling a double-shift on my birthday in addition to working late the night we return for this trip (making the overall prospects for relaxation less). So we go through all of this, get our schedules seemingly lined up.... and then find out that the group requesting this never got permission from the Office of General Counsel to go ahead with it in the first place.
Ready.... FIRE!!!... Aim...
Jan 4, 2010 at 12:41 AM great post and i can really relate. talk about work related stress. and don't get me started wity my own, personal frustrations. even a cold beer and a glorious sunset cannot warm my bones nowadays. a good message or back rub is good though