The last couple of weeks probably need to go down in history as the most stressful of my professional career - and probably give a reason for so few postings to this online journal over that time period.
At the end of the week before last we had a call at the office from the client who owns the web development project I’ve been working on, asking if we could go over to run through the changes they wanted. We left at 2pm on Friday, and got back at 6pm with 5 pages of written changes. Due to the client wanting to get the changes done quickly, and my workload already being absolutely full for the next two weeks, we agreed that I would work on it in my own time.
Over the weekend, (and following my participation in a stag night), the web server that I would have been working on was down, and there was nothing at all I could do about it. Following that, after marathon sessions at work working on a completely different project, I spent the entire evening of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday working on the website changes, and didn’t finish them. Then on Thursday and Friday I had two days commuting to a different client and getting back late. After filling in my various time sheets, I worked nearly 60 hours that week…
This week I have been playing with fire once again - on Monday I found myself loaded with 4 projects simultaneously, and without much I could do to resolve the situation. Following various meetings with managers and such like, I got lots of pats on the back, but no solutions to anything whatsoever. I still have the same workload as before, only the clients are now aware that their projects are skidding in an alarming fashion.
Aside from all the mentalness at work, I haven’t had the chance to go running for over a week now. To say I’m a bit pissed off that work has overtaken my private life is the understatement of the century.
Some fun stuff that happened this last weekend was my cousin visiting from America. She went to visit Paris for a few days first, but then arrived on the train into Waterloo station on Sunday afternoon - we went to meet her and she stayed over for a few days - eventually flying out on Wednesday morning. Of course because the resourcing is so ridiculous at work at the moment, I failed miserably to get any time off at all to spend with her.
The actual events of last monday are actually quite amusing (if not bloody annoying). On Monday morning I contact my manager to ask about the possibility of getting Tuesday off. Initially I was given the day off. Then as Monday wore on, things continued to act in a pear shaped manner at client site, so first half of my day off was taken away from me, then another client called pushing for their project to be completed sooner rather than later - and I lost the rest of my day off.
In the end I saw my cousin (who I have not seen for three years) for one afternoon, and late on two evenings… how crap is that?
The “pear shaped” stuff that’s been going on at client site involves production scanners and scanning software. Let this be a warning to everybody in the world who reads this - Kofax Ascent verion 6 is a pile of junk, and the Fujitsu 4097 series scanners with VRS are the most fragile, flaky pieces of junk to get working in the known world.
There… I’ve had enough of a rant now. I’ll get on with my work… well, after I’ve also told you about the Playstation 2 game I bought a couple of weeks ago and have not had the chance to play since. It’s called “Formula One 2004”, and is absolutely fantastic fun. It has a career mode in it - I think I am the first driver ever to be warned with getting fired from Minardi