It's been a long time

It's been a long time since I posted last. The few stragglers into this dusty corner of the Internet have no doubt felt it yet another dark and dingy alleyway along with countless others that litter the web like trash on a city street. Fact is I have been extremely busy over the past year. Our company entered into a nearly impossible task that has been all consuming for some time now. A year ago we started with this task, that, after 52 plus 80-100 hour weeks finally is nearing a stage were the now 60 hour weeks seem a breath of fresh air. Truth be told I am onto another impossible task for another client, who at least appear happy that we are there delivering something. The prior death march has been taken over by others in our company to carry on with the good fight as it were.

My new exercise in the job of creating time where there is none, has me doing much of what preoccupied me in the past year. All this however with the lens afforded by the year of starts, and stops, and outright mistakes that we are now forced to live with because it's to late now to change. With that however I can't help but feel optimistic that this new set of hurried developments are better as a whole than the set we pulled out of our backsides on all those sleep deprived weekends spent in the hotels away from home over the past year. This is different, I keep telling myself, the system is better. In many ways it is. The blatant mistakes made on the last mortality parade have been addressed in this new architecture. Yet some mistakes continue, completely unrealistic time frames that seem to become even more so as their original unfathomable deadlines looms on the horizon. "Objects in mirror are closer than they appear", yet I am looking forward not in the mirror. I actually am writing this from a plane out of Chicago, not on a business trip but having taken a whole Friday off an half of the preceding Thursday, that's something that never happened in the other year long forced march. I am struck as I sit here looking at the fact that I have effectively 6 weeks of coding that need to hit testing in a little over a week. I am struck with the guilt of knowing that I just blew 3 days (Saturday and Sunday are prime coding days just like the Monday through Fridays of a normal work week). The fact that next week brings an all to familiar hotel room on the road, with it's marginal Internet connection, crappy tv, blacked out local sports and all, I have come to realize that nothing has changed, and nothing ever will.


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