Oddball Update

From the word go, this day has seemed determined to test my patience.

This morning we were awakened by the ungodly sound of some sort of strange sawing, thumping, hammering combination that seemed to be coming from all around us. In fact, it’s coming from our neighbors. We live in an attached townhome, but until now, the 6-inch poured concrete wall between our units has prevented us from hearing anything our neighbors have done. This morning, though, they appear to be engaged in some kind of whole-house renovation. There’s constant hammering to be heard in every room of our home, and a pick-up truck with a mobile workshop in a trailer is in their driveway, from which continuous grinding, circular-sawing or something is going on. According to the lettering on the trailer, they may be installing hardwood floors.

Meanwhile, my previous employer has started to really tax my patience, now that I’ve taken this side job with them. They want to get their huge new web portal (one large enough to be run by its own company) built and online with 90% of the proposed content by October 15th. Not only am I designing it from the ground up, but they have one engineer who’s going to write the entire content management engine from scratch. What blows me away is that these folks have been in the business of developing websites for longer than I have, and yet the CEO — who has always had a penchant for unrealistic deadlines — still just doesn’t get it. Either that, or — and this is the more likely — he deliberately sets deadlines that are beyond insane as a way of ensuring that everyone works at a manic pace for the entire duration of the project, which is a pretty shitty way to treat people in my estimation.

If that wasn’t bad enough, last weekend I spent approximately 14 hours developing a prototype of the site homepage, only to have them come back to me on Monday and say that they had decided to change the focus from a primarily fact-driven base of information (drug information, medical research, etc.), to a community-driven resource (forums, comments, etc). This, of course, completely shifts the weight of the various content and renders the homepage prototype useless.

We also danced a merry little jig concerning the site colors. Originally, I proposed blue. “Well, Competitor A uses blue, so let’s use green,” they told me. So I did the design using a combination of ocean green and tan/off-white. After putting in all those hours, they told me that they had only just now decided to do research into some other womens’ websites, like the Rachael Ray Show and the aforementioned Competitor A, and were sending me a palette of colors they want me to use. What was one of the primary colors? Blue. The rest were all ugly bright greens, oranges and pinks. Wow…are we designing a website for caregivers, or a fast food company? None of these colors go together, and when I spent a few moments applying some of them to my first prototype as a test, my eyes nearly started to bleed. I looked at those womens’ websites myself, and saw a much better use of color than my client’s “palette” suggested, so I think I’ll just take some creative license in the name of keeping it from looking like hell.

Overall, though, I was pissed. I felt like I’d just run a marathon all weekend, and now this was like being told I ran the whole thing in the wrong direction. So I took the whole crew, including the CEO, to task by email. I reminded them that, as I told them during the kickoff meeting, I’m only able to give them my time on weekends, and that during the month of October I will be on the road and unable to contribute. I told them that I could not guarantee the design’s completion by the original estimates, because now I see that they are still trying to figure out what this site is all about, even while I’m in the process of designing it. I flat-out told them that this was not an economical use of my time and they would be better suited with an in-house, full time graphic developer if this was how they were going to play it, but that I would be glad to continue developing the site — so long as they understood my limitations, my schedule and the fact that I cannot be responsible if their flagellating causes us to miss deadlines. Alternatively, I expressly offered them the opportunity to bring in their own additional resources or shop the project to someone else if those conditions weren’t good enough.

Oh no, they responded, we absolutely want you on the project. Shortly thereafter, while responding to some of my questions about the prototype revisions, they told me that they’re trying like crazy to get the site launched by November, that they “understand my time constraints” but the sooner I can address things, the better. Okay, yeah — that’s like saying “I understand you can only afford beer, but we need you to buy us champagne.” Result? They’re getting what I can reasonably give, per my expressly-detailed constraints, whether that’s good enough or not.

So on top of the noisy neighbors and the clueless clients, the website I’m working on at my day job is taking nearly two minutes to pull up every page because the server is overtaxed. Trying to do my work, therefore, is like trying to run a marathon in a lead suit. That’s all kinds of fun. At least this is only a temporary situation, though — it’s gotten so bad that my bosses have realized they need to build better servers, and since they consider me the resident expert on computer hardware, they conferenced me into a meeting yesterday to help pick out all the components for the new rigs. We got everything ordered on the spot. I expect to see a huge performance improvement in the next couple of weeks or so, when these things come online.

The rest of the world doesn’t seem to be having a very good day, either — the majority of the headlines today are of the doom-and-gloom variety. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is resigning, partially over pressure related to Japan’s ongoing support of the U.S. in the war on terror. Putin has dissolved the Russian government. Oil is about to hit a record $80 a barrel. The U.S. dollar has hit a record low against the Euro. Our housing market collapse has all but pushed our national economy into recession. A huge earthquake has rocked Indonesia. A North Carolina school banned the American flag so as not to “upset” anyone. And that’s about all I know, because at that point I had to shut down the news links to keep from crawling into a hole and singing nursery rhymes to stop the pain.

And our Internet service has been really piss-poor lately, repeatedly going out for as much as several minutes at a time. It used to do this — although not as severely — about a year ago, and then it quit for a while. Sigh…that’s Comcast for you. You’re at their mercy.

Oh, we had fun last night, though. First, we set up the Garmin GPS in Apple’s car and ran a test — she needed to go to the Social Security office to update her status now that she’s a citizen, so just for fun, we decided to plug in the office location and have the Garmin direct us there, just to see how it would work. It did so effortlessly and even creatively helped us avoid a U-turn, using a little-known street that actually turned out to be pretty handy. Apple was really geeked about it — in fact, she’s on her way to the Social Security office right now, this time for real.

And then of course there was the Xbox 360, which was like a giant pressure relief valve for me after nearly a month of absence. It was great to be able to pop in BioShock and spend a couple of hours immersed in something fun. PC games are great and all, but it’s much more comfortable for me to stretch out on the big leather couch and watch the action on a 57″ screen. That was definitely a good time. The only problem with last night’s gaming session was that it reminded me that my TV’s geometry is off; about an inch of the picture is cut off on the right edge of the screen. It’s always been that way, but in BioShock it’s a big problem because a lot of information is presented over there. So I’m gonna have to get into the TV’s service menu and adjust the image width and horizontal position, I think. At least such a thing is possible! (You flat-screen folks need not worry about such rot. Those of us with projection sets have a lot more things that can go wrong.)

Anyway, I feel better for having written this — and in the last half hour or so, the noise from next door seems to have stopped. Now I’d better get back to work — time to hit refresh, and see if that slowpoke server will respond before lunch time.

Categorized as Rants