One ‘o these days, I’m gonna blow my top

Yesterday it finally happened. I was ready to snap, pop, blow, whatever your term of choice is. I’d gotten my last straw, I was ready to break out into ‘Take this Job and Shove it’ all of that. And it wasn’t started by anything more than a customer e-mail, not even sent or addressed to me, but I was copied on it. (I really hate that. Getting a message in your Inbox that starts out Dear someoneelse,…) It was sent to our federal webmaster complaining of the lack of work done on their site. Far be it from me to tell anyone how to handle their e-mails, but it seems that if you’re sending an e-mail complaining about someone’s work, you either send it directly to them or you don’t include them in the distribution list at all!

I can not dispute the customer’s concerns or frustration, a lot of our customers used to have dedicated developers for their tasks and now they all have to deal with their tasks falling into a big queue with only a few tasks gaining priority to jump to the head of that queue. Customers are informed when developers leave, but what I’ve been told we’re not allowed to say is that those positions aren’t being replaced. And from the recent tone of e-mails, it’s pretty clear that no one else is telling our customers that we aren’t hiring anyone into those empty slots either. We’ve lost 4 developers in about as many months, we have 4 f/t and 1 p/t web devs, 3 of the full timers sort of dedicated to their clients, our cf admin, and our team lead who has development experience, but seems to get nabbed to do more managerial stuff than development — which is fine when we’re fully staffed, but we could use the extra coding right now.

From reading a friend and co-worker’s posts (titled “Morale in the Toilet”) I can see that it’s not just bad in my part of the office, so I wonder when it’s going to give? As for me, I’ve reached critical mass and yesterday was going to be my meltdown. There is too much work, not enough people to do it and not enough understanding that things are just going to take longer than they have been and unfortunately there’s very little we can do about it as we don’t have the option of overtime, comp time, or working from home.

Thankfully, I was able to get hold of Justin who needed a drink even more than I did, and we set out in search of Mexican for dinner, primarily for the margaritas than the food. We drove past Lauriol Plaza but it was packed as usual, so we headed over to La Frontera Cantina instead, nabbing the little two seater table in the window. Normally the food here is adequate, but last night it was really good, so they’ve made some improvements since I was last there. I had Pechuga Rellena a really yummy spinach stuffed chicken breast with shrimp, topped with mushrooms in a marsala sauce. It’s definitely the best meal I’ve ever had there. And we each needed the company and conversation more than anything, I think.

I was still grumpy today as I had to send off an e-mail trying to explain our situation and assure the customer that I’d be able to devote time to their site. But the following post lunch IM exchange gave me a smile:

me: How’s it going?
jw: Going good, actually.
   Just got back from lunch.
   had a nice turkey sandwich on olive loaf and some pepper chips.
   And a nice tall bottle of ice-cold cock.
   OMG.. coke.
me: Sounds nice. Did you finally make… (stopped mid-typing, I just read what he sent & was giggling my ass off)
jw: LOL jesus. lol
me: Yeah, right.

It’s the little things. 🙂