Falling down

Let me start by reassuring you that I have not had a trans crash or anything like that. This isn't about stumbling in my journey or being sad.

The title is in reference to the Michael Douglas film Falling Down. I had one of those days at work that just made me want to go postal. It was full on and in my mind I could quite happily have dished out some mighty destruction!

Things started badly with a minor fix then causing no end of problem and potentially taking our testing back weeks. It seems that certain people were definitely at home to Mr Cock Up. To make matters worse another problem arose and I was informed at the only way around it would be to wind our database back to the previous version and upgrade it again which would have meant that we lost three months worth of test data and configuration.

Thankfully a few stern words resulted in a modified script and no need to reset our database which was a great relief. The fix to the problem came quickly too. The plan had been to release today but that had now been pushed out to Friday at the earliest due to us lacking confidence in the build process. So that was my morning taken care of.

Switch to the afternoon and my favourite product. We have one issue that still remains unresolved after a week. It's been failed on numerous occasions. Apparently today it was decided that the problem wasn't with the code but that we clearly had a corrupt environment that we were testing in. What the f***! There was a lot of wasted time and effort as a a manager spent hours observing what other people were doing but offering no practical help whatsoever to resolve the issue. Next stage was me getting a new environment built.

Once this was done the problem still remained so it was (to me at least) very clear that this was NOT an environment issue. This didn't change the theory though. I then started getting extra cobblers about other theories on why this wasn't working. Again they were related to the environment but appeared to be wild shots in the dark to deflect from the fact that the devs were just unable to work out was going on and make the scrutiny be on my team rather than them. Tomorrow I will be created yet another environment to try and prove once and for all that its crap code that is the issue!

Very grumpy an pissed off I left the office much later than planned. To cheer myself up we watched Falling Down. It was actually quite therapeutic in a bizarre way and I was left feeling so glad that although I'd had a bad day at least I wasn't driven insane and pushed to the edge like William 'D-Fens' Foster.

I promise not to go in to the office tooled up though, just in case there is another day like today! ;o)




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