The madness keeps going, and going, and going…
513 words.
The weeks leading up to a workshop are some of the most chaotic and panicked times in the life of Gulag 727, and this time is proving to be no exception. In this case, the workshop begins on May 6 in Texas, near The Alamo (how’s that for ironic). All the usual elements for extremely elevated blood pressure levels are in place, only they seem even more magnified than usual: Too many projects to finish at once, inability to decide on final project goals, lowered nicotine levels, excess shipping leftover from the recent major upgrade, disgruntled employees, disgruntled customers, clueless supervisors. It’s all there. Foremost on the list is Julio trying to perform a half dozen completely different project tasks at once, all of which require his undivided attention, while still trying to maintain his private practice. Yeah, this is going to work. Sure.
This morning I continued working on what I thought Julio wanted me to work on, based on interpretations of his chaotic ramblings from yesterday, and came to a point where I was about finished. Julio then comes by after lunch and informs me that several things need to be changed because of new ideas he’s had, and reminds me about the “organic” development process. (That’s Julio-speak for “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, so bear with me.”) I spend the rest of the afternoon making the changes, and resubmitted a document (the infamous “logic pattern”) describing the new way the program will work based on his changes. Tomorrow I expect to find out (in the afternoon, probably, rendering my morning work useless) that Julio has had more ideas and they will have to be shoehorned into the project somehow.
Believe it or not, I actually tried to get Juilo to think about how he wanted this project done early on, and to some extent it worked. The problem is (a phrase Julio himself uses quite often, and is a dead giveaway that he is thinking out loud and stumbling blindly around the problem solving arena), Julio does not remember anything he wants from day to day, certainly not from week to week, and he seems to forget that someone (namely me) is working to implement his wishes. So we end up in situations, usually on a daily basis, where Julio has forgotten how he was going to solve a particular problem, and he then ends up re-solving the problem again in a different way. (Meanwhile, I’ve already implemented his first solution, and when I show it to him, he typically doesn’t like it anymore, usually with an implication that I’m somehow to blame for the bad implementation.) Anyway, it leads a person to think to himself “why the hell should I bother trying to do a good job?” Hence, I just do what Julio tells me; good, bad, or indifferent. I don’t get paid enough to be his software design consultant anyway.
Okay, well that turned into more whining than I intended. Must now go to bed and prepare for another day of juicy Cerebral Locomotion goodness!
Sorry, new comments are disabled on older posts. This helps reduce spam. Active commenting almost always occurs within a day or two of new posts.