Special Ops Engineering: Short-handed

It's Monday again, and we're fresh off our two-hour conference call with Sales & Service. Sales is pushing very hard for us all to defy the odds and complete all of their orders by noon tomorrow, and Service is pushing very hard for no one to get sent to Canada (or Van Nuys, in my case) for the Thursday before a holiday weekend. We have very different agendas at the end of Q2. Sales wants their numbers to come in high, and Service wants to survive to see the dawn of Q3.

I am exhausted and not at all ready to conquer the final days of June with poise and grace. But I should -- dangerous word, that -- finish my revenue recognition requirements in time to make our numbers look good. I've finished Frankenrobot -- the upgrade that required an upgrade and special permission from the Mother Ship, guided only by a photograph and some cryptic configuration files (from an incompatible software version, of course) -- and I'm on to It Should Be Simple. Nothing I do is simple anymore...

On this morning's call, I got to hear about the next big hateful thing to theoretically arrive on my professional to-do list. For you IT professionals out there, it amounts to a dying computer with an irretrievable absolutely critical software platform on the HDD that cannot be recreated elsewhere, that obviously hasn't been backed up (ever). Nevermind that an install backup would be utterly useless, as the platform has diverged from its installed form over nearly five years of use. Add to this a production environment and an end-user with a faulty grasp of the English language, a little robotics, and a four hour drive each way. Hurrah! Also the guy who wrote the software package lives 1/3 of the way around the world, but that hardly seems like an inconvenience to me... until he refuses to get on a plane, which he ultimately will.

And for the crowning jewel of our Monday call... our team has seven positions. Two of those people are at training, one is out on sick leave all week, and one is leaving soon for shinier toys, more blinking LEDs, and a more reasonable cost of living... Whee. That means we have three people with their head fully in the end-of-half game. Go Team!

Don't worry... I won't be snapping and building Skynet any time soon. But I am really looking forward to a long weekend. Rather than making a laundry list of things to-do with our three days off, I think I'm going to spend some time looking up tasty marinades so we can grill an assortment of summery foods and relax on our mostly-organized patio, and enjoy so well-earned time off. M's traveling all week, so his long weekend will start very late Thursday evening and we're both back up and at 'em on Monday, trying to catch up with the critical failures that always happen over a holiday weekend.