Quietly Banging Away… Trying to Stay Hidden
Today was a day like a lot of the recent days have been: quiet... almost too quiet in the group. I think it has a lot to do with the "incident" as I've come to call it, and while I'm probably only partially right, my recent excursions at the end of the day and even the middle of the day, along with the number of closed-door meetings I've had with senior partners, probably make it pretty easy to put two and two together to see what's going on. It's not ideal by any means, but that issue is out there, what I've done in response is out there too, and we just have to deal with it.
I'm not really happy about the situation, but I'm not going to sit here and continue to deal with the kind of management issues I've had to deal with when there's a viable alternative out there. That's just silly. I'm not sure what's going to come of this, but it's going to change things, that's for sure.
So in the meantime, I'm doing my best to just do a bang-up job of getting new things done and old things fixed up. Heads-down coding. I get the obvious benefit that it's clear I'm still working for the good of the organization, while gaining the added benefit of staying in my little corner of the pod and not getting involved in too many conversations.
One thing I did get a little involved in was after I came in and caught up on my email, I vented a bit to my teammates about the things that transpired in my absence (on Friday). Basically, two things that I really, really wished hadn't happened:
- I got called about memory additions to some machines - Why? they can do this. I'm not needed. I don't need to be called, emailed, texted just to be told they are adding memory to some boxes. It was my day off - which, it seems is simply something that doesn't exist for me in this place. I just needed to be home to help out Liza, and I got electronic "buckshot". Enough already.
- Steve, a co-worker, pointed out jQuery to Ralph - this was the equivalent of giving Guy Fawkes C4 and remote-controlled detonators. It's going to run into a flurry of little, cosmetic, GUI changes to the web pages when we'd already looked at it, and decided that for the first round of this web system, it wasn't worth the effort. Clearly, we left Steve off the email list. My mistake.
Don't get me wrong, a JavaScript library like jQuery is nice, but there are a lot of libraries - some more focused on the UI components, some more all-encompassing like jQuery. Rather than just pick one, I wanted to have a really good idea about where we were headed with this web site and then look at what we needed help with for the second cut of the pages. Yeah, it's a lot of work, but not having put together a complete AJAX web app before, I had no idea what we needed, and didn't want to pick wrong.
So I had to say "Please don't do that. There's a reason we haven't, and now the monster is loose." Sure, it didn't do a bit of good, but I had to say it so that I can at least out a little bit of a lid on the situation. We have so many things that just don't work, or need to get working, that messing with pretty pop-ups and fades just doesn't really rise to the top of the TODO list.
Don't think it made any difference, but I had to voice my concerns on these issues because of all that's been building up in this cemetery of a pod - post-incident. It's just a big, long sigh...