The Tribe Has Spoken

I'll take 'Voting Idiots Off the Island, Alex, for $200."

So last night I get a call from the tech lead on the Doomed (yes, that's doomed with a capital D) project:

TL: I know it's 8:30 and you just got home, but what time are you going to be in tomorrow?
Me: Um...dunno, usual time I guess. 8:30 ish.
TL: That's not going to work - we have this meeting with the customer and have to leave for it by 10:30 and will need some statistics before we go.
Me: But the statistics aren't ready yet.
TL: Yeah...so can you come in and get them ready for us before we have to leave?
Me:
TL: What's the earliest you could get there?
Me: Ummm...
TL: Maybe 6?
Me: 6? Uh..I'd have to call my carpool. (Side note: carpool all work at office and are on project.)
TL: Oh good, I left a message on their home and cell phones too - we'll need them to help push out these statistics.
Me: I'll see what I can do.
TL: Great, so we'll see you at 6ish.
Me: Probably closer to 6:30.

So...I called the carpool. Boy were they unhappy. Arrangements made to pick me up at 5 freaking 15 a.m. But, we console ourselves, at least we'll get to leave at 2:30 and maybe miss all of the Memorial Day traffic.

We work our tails off to get the stats we need, but can't quite finish one table because we've discovered it's based on a faulty premise, so while we had been doing a fairly simple SQL inner join to get the counts...turns out that's missing roughly 60% of the results we really need. Thus, that's not done, and we redo it, leaving the previous data blank (since it was wrong because of the faulty premise.) Well, the PM is in love with this chart and comes and says, "I can just copy all the numbers from the old chart into these blank spaces, right?" We yell, plead, explain and beg him not to because they're wrong. What does he do? Copies the numbers.

So they go to the customer site...guess which chart the customer PM really is in love with? Yes, that's right, the one with all the wrong data in it. But there's some confusion about why some of the numbers are so low. So what does he do? He opens his mouth...and out come words that relegate him quickly into the "Too stupid to be sharing my air" category...

"Oh, that's no problem. We'll get you an updated chart by COB."

So they come back at 1:30 and drop this little bombshell.

PM: I told them you'd have an updated chart to them by COB.
Me: Um. I'm leaving in an hour.
PM: Well, it can't be that hard to update these numbers, right?
Me: Actually, yes. That's why they weren't in the chart we gave you.
PM: Well, I promised the customer we'd get it to them.
Me: But I'm leaving in an hour.
PM: But you have to get this done first.

Long story short -- it was 9:30 on the nose when we walked out of the office.

If this was a rare occurrence, I don't think I'd mind quite so much. But my shortest day this week was 9.5 hours. My longest was 18, the rest were right around 15. And what am I told when I mention this?

"Well, if you'd share the work and be a team player, it wouldn't happen."

Great! I'd love to share the work...who'd you have in mind for me to offload this onto? The guy I had to bail out while you were at your meeting because he had taken 3 days to write a 50 line program and still couldn't get it working even though he supposedly has 15 years of experience? I'll get right on that.

I'm so glad it's a long weekend. I think if I had to go to work on Monday someone would have to die.