19:26 Saturday, November 11 2004

so much for peace of mind

Yesterday turned out to be a pretty crappy day. Engineering was racing like mad to finish a service pack, and it just wasn't coming together. It was approaching 3pm, and there were still a number of bugs, and after a brief meeting we decided to aim for Monday. So i'm driving home, and I get a call on my cell where a larger group of people then attempt to coerce me to agree to ship the service pack for one of the three platforms, since QA thinks its done. I'm told, in so many words, that it needs to go out that day, and they're giving me a chance to either go along with them or be over-ruled. So i cave, because i didn't really have much of a choice anyway. So I wait for the final announcement in email to let me know that the SP is ready to push out to customers, and it just doesn't happen.
In parallel with this, I got a haircut after work yesterday. I think it turned out fairly well. I was incredibly exhausted last night, and ended up going to bed at about 9pm. I slept fairly well last night, and when i got up this morning I found a series of emails, starting at 11PM friday night, talking about how they've run into another problem with the supposed 'one good platform', but they think that it won't matter much, since this problem is highly unlikely to impact any customers. So again, i'm backed against the wall, and made to be the bad guy. I express my concern over rushing out a SP before its truly done, especially on a saturday when its highly unlikely that any customers will download or apply it until Monday. But i cave anyway, because i'm not really being given any choices. Around 9AM the announcement comes that the SP is ready, but I had several distractions, and didn't get around to writing up the customer facing announcement until around 11AM. I'm just about done writing the email when my cell rings, and i'm told that they've run into a major problem with applying the SP on the company's internal server, and that they need to attempt to determine whether the problem is due to a new bug, or some other issue, and get back to me. So here I am on saturday night, and i've not heard a thing. Its just ridiculous how many times they've wanted to rush this thing out, and how many times new problems have cropped up. I don't understand why i'm the only one who sees that its in no one's best interest to rush this out, especially over a weekend. I fully understand that this was promised to customers, but that in of itself was a huge mistake.