Inestimable
Oftentimes at work, when big projects come up that require my involvement, some stupid little dreamer will make a valiant but ultimately useless attempt to plan out its completion with a project management tool. Eventually they ask me for a timeframe for completion of my part of the work. I really want to just laugh at them when they do this. I understand that they need that information, and that I do need to come up with something, but despite my putting forth my best efforts to give them an accurate schedule, I know without fail that the schedule is going to be blown to bits.
The reason is simply because I have too many responsibilities for too many mission-critical things that never fail to come in at the last minute. 99% of these responsibilities are directly to clients, so unless I want to be directly responsible for us losing money, I need to drop everything and complete them. In the last year or so I’ve migrated—more like been pulled like a magnet—into a 50% support role for the customer service department, so now I act as technical advisor (and executor) for client problems. You can’t predict when a client is going to have a problem. And when they do, there’s no telling what it will be.
So when I was asked when I could complete a complete rewrite of our directory template last week, I said that it could be done by the 11th. Of course, I added my usual disclaimer stating that the whole thing was subject to change due to other things coming up. And I was not disappointed: This morning two issues came up, one of which is huge, and will have me not only spending the entire rest of the afternoon working on it, but quite possibly taking work home to do tonight as well.
Of course, whatever I manage to finish today/tonight is just a preliminary draft of a finished product, so I’ll need to spend yet more time over the next few days—in haphazard and unpredictable pockets—responding to client feedback on what should be changed, added, removed, added again, removed again, and so on. I got a start on the Big Project this morning, and nearly ripped my scalp completely free of hair when I got into it and realized how many different bases I was going to have to cover. In the end, it’s probably going to wind up being yet another half-finished, half-assed project from our brilliant product development department, which never gets enough time or resources to do anything because we’re all doing sixteen other jobs at the same time.
Ironically, though, it was the project manager herself—who is also suffering the ill effects of that deadly combination of both Way Too Much To Do and Not Enough Time To Do It—who said to me today that she’s really stopped giving a shit about these chaotic problems beyond her control. She’s resigned herself to the fact that the management of the infamous directory department—who are in control of the Big Project—are hopeless lunatics with no perception of reality who cannot be reasoned with. When you attempt to address said management and explain that you need help to prioritize the tasks they have given you because there are too many due dates and not enough time, their only response is that “everything needs to get done.” Basically they oversold the queue and now they don’t care. If it ever got to the point where we couldn’t finish their assigned work even if we slaved 24/7, I wonder what they would say? Everything needs to get done. But not everything can get done. What do we do? I’m certain that these managers’ heads would explode if they were given this strong a dose of reality. It’s like Zeno’s frickin’ Paradox.
Okay, I’ve groused enough about this. It’s 2:00, so my lunch hour is over and it’s time to get working on those ad pages (the crisis situation that came up this morning). We don’t have all the information we need, though, and the pages are overdue—all because the client’s entire management staff spent the last week in Jacksonville for the Super Bowl and they all dropped the ball, didn’t tie up their loose ends and didn’t do their jobs. Now we’re behind the print deadline, and they want us to create an order form before we create the page, but that’s not possible because how do we know what listings to put on the order form if we haven’t done the ad page yet? Another Zeno’s Paradox!
Okay, okay, I’m going. I’m going already. Sheesh. Hopefully I’ll be back later to post something a little more constructive. I recently got into a new PC game the likes of which I never thought I would ever play, but now I am playing it, and it’s not bad, actually. But more on that later; time’s a-wasting.
Edit: No, it is not Barbie Horse Adventures!
Categorized as Rants