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deadline dynamics
Friday, July 30 1999
This morning I had a bit of spat with my boss, the Director of Web Development, a guy whom I respect and often go out of my way to please. The only thing that was really satisfying about the conflict was that it happened in front of a bunch of my co-workers in the context of a "Product Resource" meeting. It all started with a discussion between me and the "project leader" of my messaging system team. The project leader for this team just happens to be Karin the overly-involved queen of member support, and she's plenty nice most of the time. But she was trying to nail me down on when I thought I'd be done with my part of the messaging system. But the damn thing is complicated, like a cross between a complex website and a javascript Swiss watch, and the more I work on it the more I realize I need to do. (The same goes for Eric the Web Developer, who has actually done about 90% of the work on this particular project.) Nobody who cares wants to hear that it's going to take days and days, especially since the "deadline" was yesterday or maybe even the day before. Unhappily for Karin, my inability to provide a snappy, pleasantly optimistic date of delivery carried over into the morning Product Resource Meeting. At this point she passed the baton of Grand Inquisitor over to my boss, the Director of Web Development, and he gradually ratcheted his rhetoric from a good-natured appreciation of my joking metaphors (comparing a premature release of the messaging system to an apple falling out of a tree before its time) to the sort of bullying perhaps typical of your run-of-the-mill corporate boss.
But he'd picked a bad day to flex his boss muscle.
For weeks, you see, I've been accumulating rage at the slave-like lifestyle casually expected of me (and the lack of any obvious increase in my compensation). I've had the feeling that I'm drowning in life-destroying demands made by an essentially irrational organization. Lucky for me, as my boss stepped up his attack, I had in my arsenal a most effective weapon: the ugly culture-denying truth, the sort of thing I've been saying for weeks in this journal, the sort of thing everyone in the corporation has been saying at every single lunch break. I said "It's going to take days because it's a complex application that cannot be rushed. You can't build Yahoo in a day. None of these projects are going to be finished on time. [By now there was a detectable anger-induced quality to my increasingly loud voice.] We've known that from the start. Everyone's known that!" The Director of Web Development clung tenaciously to official company dogma, insisting that the projects would be finished on time. Then he turned to my co-workers, demanding, "Somebody back me up on this!" Nobody said anything. What I was saying was the truth. What he was saying was a bunch of indefensible crap.
The day went on. I got along well with my boss as usual, as though nothing bad had happened. I was fairly productive, especially when it came to getting approval of the database model of a system providing statistics to my message board system. An outsider might not be too surprised that Kevin the DBA was fairly easy on my model, since we are social friends. But when it comes to his database, he's strictly business. As he went over my model, he was like a stranger, and I found the whole experience most intimidating, like dealing with a faculty adviser back in my days at Oberlin College. But it was my first database model, and it wasn't too surprising that he came back with suggestions. Overall, though, Kevin admitted to being impressed with my design, especially given how new SQL is to me.
I think my understanding of the "common sense rules" underlying the building and maintaining of relational databases has been helped to a great extent by my months in the wilderness, when I had to figure out how to store complex, retrievable data using the file system object (writing everything to predictably-delimited text files). Only a few months ago I was building systems that were essentially home-made relational databases. With SQL Server, all the structures I once had to build are already there, in much more flexible arrangements. The only downside is the bureaucracy necessary to use them. I don't like having my database models picked over by a tight-ass database administrator, even if we are drinking buddies. I'm too much of a hot-headed rogue programmer.
I silently slipped out of work during the weekly motivational ritual called "Energy." After I got home, Eric the Web Developer told Kim over the phone that five people had "voted" to give me energy. That's got to be some sort of record for someone not even at Energy.
Kim had arranged with the other girls of our courtyard community to go out tonight to a 80s-theme bar in downtown San Diego. It was some sort of "girls' night out," but Kim dislikes that sort of schoolgirlishness and had been going around inviting all her male friends (including my lonely co-workers) as well. Tonight though, after a hard week of massage, Kim didn't really want to go anymore. Jenna the German Girl came over and did her best to make Kim feel guilty about her lethargy, as did Lisa. But no one could motivate her.
After a string of 15 hour work days, I was even more exhausted than Kim, but somehow she got me out of bed and we watched a flick called Friday - an entertaining, somewhat trippy "do the right thing" - themed ghetto flick starring Ice Cube. It came highly recommended from our neighbor Lisa and also our neighbor Jason, the tattooed surfer dude from Malibu. There wasn't a single white actor in the movie.
For some reason I type honour, labour, favour and colour but not neighbour. That last one just looks wrong to my eye.
To whomever it was who warned me about the danger of developing hemorrhoids from excessive time spent on the pot, let me just say that for a time today my asshole was in terrible shape. In the afternoon as a mandatory welcoming gauntlet was organized for a visiting contingent of my company's downlevel "regional co-ordinators," I escaped to the nearby Barnes and Noble and went straight to the john, which, I must add, I found to be somewhat in disarray. I wasn't feeling too bad before I went in, but when I came out I could barely walk. I don't know what was wrong with my anus, but by evening it had completely recovered.
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