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Well, work finally did it--they blocked access to LiveJournal, among many other sites (Amazon is among them, which makes no sense, and NetFlix isn't, which also boggles).
But that has nothing to do with the urge to kill. It merely explains why I'm making this, a work-related post, on a Saturday. :) (The cut-off of non-work sites has been expected and anticipated, so is frustrating and annoying, but not urge-to-kill-producing.)
No, this post is about my current project. And specifically, the woman (we'll call her "Roz" (those of you who've seen 9 to 5 have the appropriate picture in your head, right now)) who is the project lead.
I was tagged to come to a meeting about this project a couple of weeks ago. There were about 8 people in the meeting, and it was the first time I'd met Roz. I'd seen her around, of course. She works four doors down from me, but we're in different departments, so we'd never formally met. Immediately, I noticed that every time Roz opened her mouth to talk, everyone in the room rolled their eyes or smiled indulgently or sighed silently. I wondered why.
In the second meeting, it was the same thing. I was, however, beginning to get a clue. Roz is...panic-driven. She is one of those types for whom every little thing is a world-ending disaster. She is also one of those types that has to have everything planned out to the molecular level. And--this is the kicker--she needs and sort of demands constant feedback-style reassurance.
Dear. Mother. Of. God.
She blusters into my office about 5 times per day and starts out with "I just wanted to get you up to speed with where I am..." and then proceeds to talk rapidly with her back turned to me as she draws illegibly on our white board while my officemate and I exchange eye-rolls. Everything is a disaster. Then, she'll ask me about where I am, and I'll show her, and she's very impressed with my progress. Then, she'll say, "Do you think we're making progress?" And this is where I'm supposed to reassure her that we are. This is every time she shows up in our office. Carl (my officemate) is about tired of it. He has, in fact, started to just leave whenever he sees her coming down the hall. Roz has her own office. And we have email. And phones. And, Monday, I'm getting the company-approved IM software installed on my machine by some drone from IT (because I'm too stupid to install software by myself). Does/will any of that stop her? I sincerely doubt it.
We're the only two people on the team (I did not know this going in--I thought at least 3 of the other people from those first two meetings were going to be in with us). The deadline is some time in November, so we have to have it to QA some time in October.
The project requires us to learn C# 2.0, ASP.NET 2.0, and MySQL. The MySQL tools are...not stable. I'll just state that for the record. I've been having this problem with it that's causing me difficulties in learning it because every time I type a minus sign (hyphen) (-) in the query editor, it hangs the program, which then pegs the CPU at 100% until I kill it. So I can't use negative numbers or subtraction. Oy. Roz, of course, panics when I tell her this, and comes down to my office and starts making bizarre pronouncements. "It's a syntax error," she confidently states. Um...if the program freaks every time I type a hyphen, that is not a syntax error. I could see the panic in her eyes Friday when I showed her it didn't matter where I typed the hyphen or under what circumstances. Her hands were practically shaking. I reassured her that I would figure it out and that I needed to go. I've left early (by a half-hour or so: nothing major) every day this week because I just can't take it.
She came down one day this week and asked to see where I was at, and I showed her that I had it basically done, and was working on the CSS stylesheets to get the colors and such like we wanted them. She panicked and basically said that I shouldn't be working on that kind of stuff, and should be doing content, not style. I nodded, smiled, and continued working on what I was working on. Later in the week, she calls me down to her office after she's spent most of a day integrating my stuff with hers. She has changed colors and alignments and all kinds of things, basically rendering everything I did useless. And I keep having to tell her that we should be more worried about how the code works than how it looks. And she doesn't seem to realize I'm feeding her own words back to her. It'll take me a few hours to fix it when I get it all back from her. I also had to stop her from doing work that we put off until Phase II of the project.
She also grossly overestimates how hard everything has been, to date. I was given...6 days to do the Master Page and Navigation. It took me all of 5 hours. And that included the aforementioned CSS Stylesheets. The rest of that time was spent reading C# 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 and MySQL manuals. I have 11 days to do "logging" (HIPAA requires us to log every time a user access any PHI). But that will require me to have access to the databases and the ability to create stored procedures, which she is not giving me because she seems to think that because I don't know MySQL, I don't understand that I shouldn't just cavalierly drop databases or insert columns or something. I'll get access to everything next week after we have all the code in some non-VSS source-code repository I don't have access to because she has to upgrade the thing to the next version for some unknown reason, and another programmer won't let her do it until he's there to supervise. Meanwhile, I twiddle my thumbs and kill MySQL every time I forget and type a hyphen.
I'm eventually going to take a very large hammer and stave in her skull. Watch and see. You'll see it on the news. ATLANTA MAN GOES BERSERK, KILLS COWORKER. No jury will convict, though. My officemate can testify that she's enough to make the Pope say "Fuck!" Hell, even my boss has to rein her in during every meeting. She'll start to go off on some molecule-management freak-out and he'll say, "Roz! Let's concentrate on security right now, and we can worry about that, later." Or whatever. They'll thank me for doing them a favor. They will. Trust me.
But that has nothing to do with the urge to kill. It merely explains why I'm making this, a work-related post, on a Saturday. :) (The cut-off of non-work sites has been expected and anticipated, so is frustrating and annoying, but not urge-to-kill-producing.)
No, this post is about my current project. And specifically, the woman (we'll call her "Roz" (those of you who've seen 9 to 5 have the appropriate picture in your head, right now)) who is the project lead.
I was tagged to come to a meeting about this project a couple of weeks ago. There were about 8 people in the meeting, and it was the first time I'd met Roz. I'd seen her around, of course. She works four doors down from me, but we're in different departments, so we'd never formally met. Immediately, I noticed that every time Roz opened her mouth to talk, everyone in the room rolled their eyes or smiled indulgently or sighed silently. I wondered why.
In the second meeting, it was the same thing. I was, however, beginning to get a clue. Roz is...panic-driven. She is one of those types for whom every little thing is a world-ending disaster. She is also one of those types that has to have everything planned out to the molecular level. And--this is the kicker--she needs and sort of demands constant feedback-style reassurance.
Dear. Mother. Of. God.
She blusters into my office about 5 times per day and starts out with "I just wanted to get you up to speed with where I am..." and then proceeds to talk rapidly with her back turned to me as she draws illegibly on our white board while my officemate and I exchange eye-rolls. Everything is a disaster. Then, she'll ask me about where I am, and I'll show her, and she's very impressed with my progress. Then, she'll say, "Do you think we're making progress?" And this is where I'm supposed to reassure her that we are. This is every time she shows up in our office. Carl (my officemate) is about tired of it. He has, in fact, started to just leave whenever he sees her coming down the hall. Roz has her own office. And we have email. And phones. And, Monday, I'm getting the company-approved IM software installed on my machine by some drone from IT (because I'm too stupid to install software by myself). Does/will any of that stop her? I sincerely doubt it.
We're the only two people on the team (I did not know this going in--I thought at least 3 of the other people from those first two meetings were going to be in with us). The deadline is some time in November, so we have to have it to QA some time in October.
The project requires us to learn C# 2.0, ASP.NET 2.0, and MySQL. The MySQL tools are...not stable. I'll just state that for the record. I've been having this problem with it that's causing me difficulties in learning it because every time I type a minus sign (hyphen) (-) in the query editor, it hangs the program, which then pegs the CPU at 100% until I kill it. So I can't use negative numbers or subtraction. Oy. Roz, of course, panics when I tell her this, and comes down to my office and starts making bizarre pronouncements. "It's a syntax error," she confidently states. Um...if the program freaks every time I type a hyphen, that is not a syntax error. I could see the panic in her eyes Friday when I showed her it didn't matter where I typed the hyphen or under what circumstances. Her hands were practically shaking. I reassured her that I would figure it out and that I needed to go. I've left early (by a half-hour or so: nothing major) every day this week because I just can't take it.
She came down one day this week and asked to see where I was at, and I showed her that I had it basically done, and was working on the CSS stylesheets to get the colors and such like we wanted them. She panicked and basically said that I shouldn't be working on that kind of stuff, and should be doing content, not style. I nodded, smiled, and continued working on what I was working on. Later in the week, she calls me down to her office after she's spent most of a day integrating my stuff with hers. She has changed colors and alignments and all kinds of things, basically rendering everything I did useless. And I keep having to tell her that we should be more worried about how the code works than how it looks. And she doesn't seem to realize I'm feeding her own words back to her. It'll take me a few hours to fix it when I get it all back from her. I also had to stop her from doing work that we put off until Phase II of the project.
She also grossly overestimates how hard everything has been, to date. I was given...6 days to do the Master Page and Navigation. It took me all of 5 hours. And that included the aforementioned CSS Stylesheets. The rest of that time was spent reading C# 2.0 and ASP.NET 2.0 and MySQL manuals. I have 11 days to do "logging" (HIPAA requires us to log every time a user access any PHI). But that will require me to have access to the databases and the ability to create stored procedures, which she is not giving me because she seems to think that because I don't know MySQL, I don't understand that I shouldn't just cavalierly drop databases or insert columns or something. I'll get access to everything next week after we have all the code in some non-VSS source-code repository I don't have access to because she has to upgrade the thing to the next version for some unknown reason, and another programmer won't let her do it until he's there to supervise. Meanwhile, I twiddle my thumbs and kill MySQL every time I forget and type a hyphen.
I'm eventually going to take a very large hammer and stave in her skull. Watch and see. You'll see it on the news. ATLANTA MAN GOES BERSERK, KILLS COWORKER. No jury will convict, though. My officemate can testify that she's enough to make the Pope say "Fuck!" Hell, even my boss has to rein her in during every meeting. She'll start to go off on some molecule-management freak-out and he'll say, "Roz! Let's concentrate on security right now, and we can worry about that, later." Or whatever. They'll thank me for doing them a favor. They will. Trust me.
no subject
no subject
MySQL?
Kaa, I don't know what kind of work you're doing (ASP.NET and ...MySQL? Not some Microsoft-packaged database solution?), but it might not hurt to look at different tools.
For instance, I've found Navicat (http://www.navicat.com/) to be a fairly stable platform for messing with MySQL. It's GUI-based, works with MySQL up through version 5, and has a Windows version (something tells me that's important). There may be other tools out there that are free and work well enough, but if the three you need are fast and good, you might want to give it a look. Or a demo download, as the case may be.
This is not a paid endorsement; if anything, I've paid them; I have the Mac OS version on my laptop. So this could be cognitive dissonance. Meh.
Re: MySQL?
Yes, Windows is quite important. We are a Microsoft shop through and through, although I think there are some Linux machines hiding in various places.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll give it a try, assuming they haven't taken away my ability to download software and install it on my own machine (that's in the plan, at some point).