Long week

First of all, I want to apologize for flaking on the blog for the past few days. Things have actually been pretty busy at work, so I haven't had the time to put up any updates. I'm actually so tired right now, that I'm not sure I could even give a run through on what's been going on.

Next week I'm in training from M-W 8:30-5 and Th 8:30-12:00. If you remember from one of my emails from a couple of days ago, I was trying to kick an annoying useless person off a project that I was working on. Well, that girl is now taking the next month off, probably on disability. We still think she's faking. I've replaced her on the project, and I'll probably end up PM'ing the project when the current project manager goes on maturnity leave in April. So that's relatively good new for me. As a result, I've had a lot of new work trying to get the project back on path before I go out on training next week. I have been holding "use case" meetings pretty much every day.

Basically, a use case meeting consists of getting a bunch of people in a room, going through a particular task, and document the steps necessary to complete a task. You document all the alternate flows and exceptions to the "happy path." It's good, because as you go through the use cases, you get the whole working team to actually agree on how the system you're developing is supposed to actually work. Not so much the design itself, but what the end product should look like functionally. It helps a lot with building a set of requirements that actually have to do with the system that you're building. But it's pretty painful since most people don't really know what the point is, and a lot of them don't really want to participate. It's also particularly difficult, since team members are distributed globally, so all the meetings are over the telephone and webex.

Yesterday I had to represent the Tools and Automation services group to the UNIX and Storage group during their offsite meeting. It was about 10 of them to three of us, with one of our people teleconferenced in. It went ok, I guess. My manager was out of town, and I'm not really one for evangelizing the group, so it dragged a little. We managed to get out of there about 20 minutes early. Unfortunately, I had to stick around for another meeting, where the CIO showed appreciation for the IT people that worked during the Christmas break on a virus outbreak. They gave us carrot cake and ice cream. I was hoping for a check, but I guess that'll come later.

I found out today that our director got rid of another admin after only about two weeks. I guess admin is the currently PC term for secretary, but it also opens them up to doing all sorts of shit work. Our director wants the admin to be a secretary, project manager, and party planner. I think what she really wants is a valet. I was pretty bummed when the last one (who made it a few months) got canned, because she was actually pretty cute. There aren't a lot of cute girls around the IT department. On the upside, since the director fired the admin, the first Friday of the month Green Shirt day reminder didn't go out, and almost nobody wore one. Maybe the whole Green shirt day thing will finally die.

Ugh, I'm going to shutdown and get the hell out of here. Hope everyone's week has been fun...