Seventeen Hours

Posted on 2007/10/27 12:55:38 (October 2007).

[Wednesday 24th October]
Today was a somewhat hell-ish day at work. I have a colleague who seems to have some kind of jinx on him whereby whenever he goes on holiday, everything seems to fall apart - and it is almost always my responsibility to fix it. The project I work on now has a direct and immediate impact on revenue - when things go wrong, millions of dollars are at risk. I don't think I've ever worked on anything with such a real time connection to money before, and it makes it extremely stressful sometimes.

When I started off at 9, things were all looking pretty normal, but by lunchtime I had a bit of an ely (as per Douglas Adam's Meaning of Liff - the first, tiniest inkling that something has going terribly wrong), and in the afternoon I was in full fire-fighting mode. This continued right through until 2AM, making this a seventeen hour day.

I did manage to get all the fires put out in the end, but I can't help but have a lingering feeling of annoyance over the whole thing. I really broke my back today to save us from what could have been a total disaster, and the net result seemed to be a small round of half-hearted thankyous, followed by the non-engineering types on the team (the PMs and sales people and so on) whinging about the fact that the customers were unhappy about some delays in getting their data, etc.

cnuts!

Posted by tom at 2007/10/29 13:37:34.

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