Hey, everybody!
So, I just got done working a 44-hour work week in 4 days. I convinced my boss that I was caught up enough to not need to work tomorrow, but he was a little reluctant about it. That is how things are going at work.
It’s not smart to write about work, really, since it’s proven again and again across the internet to be an effective way to get fired. So suffice it to say that it’s been very busy lately.
Actually, no, let’s do it this way.
I got assigned a project and when they asked when I thought I could have it done, gave the date of 7/19. It’s a huge and complicated project and was going to take me a LOT of work. I think I got assigned the task on 6/20 or so.
The following Monday (6/24), my deadline was moved up to that Friday (6/28). I worked frantically to try to get everything accomplished in that week. I failed to get it all done on time, but it turned out that it was a soft-deadline and the hard-deadline was actually going to be the following Wednesday (7/3).
I missed that deadline, too, despite working long hours, but the deadline got moved out to the Wednesday following the long weekend (7/10). I took the weekend and tried to relax a little after working at a frantic pace for several days trying to accomplish this huge project.
We got back from the long weekend and I worked 12 hour days Monday and Tuesday in an attempt to get the work done. At 5:30 on Monday, a huge amount of my data changed, resulting in a complete do-over of that entire half of the data. Data that, remember now, I’d been working on pretty solidly for nearly 80 hours already. It was unfortunate.
So I spent Tuesday doing final wrap-up on the half of the data that was nearly solid and redoing all the work on the other half in a mad dash to get it all done by the end of the day for an important meeting in the morning.
Unsurprisingly by now, I failed to get it done. But I got pretty close. My boss told me to print off the data that I could, call it a draft, and he’d address it in his meeting.
The meeting got cancelled.
By the end of the day yesterday, I think I finally had the data in a good spot, but the person who needs to review it (the one who re-set my work by getting me new data late Monday) is out of the office until next Monday.
So today, I worked frantically to get caught up on all the things I’ve been neglecting to work on because I’ve been focused on this other thing.
On Monday, I should be able to have a final review of the data. I expect there will be changes and I’ll have to put in a couple more hours of work on this. If I’m very, very lucky, it’ll be done by Tuesday, 7/16. Which is only 3 days earlier than the date that I said I expected I’d be able to get it done, way back at the beginning.
Now, I’m not sure, with all of this frantic work, that I’d have been able to meet my original date. But it’s still amusing. And frustrating.
But I know a lot more about the program that I’m using to work on the project, and a lot more about the data that I’ve been working with for the last several days, and those can’t be bad things. I just need to figure out how to work faster. And how to get accurate information from my data-suppliers earlier on in the task.
Anyway, that’s work. It’s probably very boring to read about.
This is getting too long here to write about home stuff now, but I’ll try to get back tomorrow or the day after and write some more. I’ll see if I can’t round up some photos by then, too. 🙂