I Stayed

Today at work we nearly had four big projects that all had to be live by COB, before the long weekend (Close Of Business - do you Yanks use the term as well?). It turns out one didn't actually have to be live today, in fact it doesn't have to be live until November 1, and it was quite embarassing that I was the one who had misread the terms and conditions and made a big overarching schedule and got it wrong. But now most of that project is done, anyway, and we can take some time doing testing and refinement.

Still we had three big projects that all had to be live by the end of the day. Everyone has been in a flap about them for weeks, but no one would cooperate - the clients would take days to answer emails, and one only sent a purchase order for half of the quote; the other suppliers gave us things three days late with only a few hours to process; yet other suppliers started getting their own bossy ideas about how things should be done, or gave us briefs that made no sense whatsoever and then changed them anyway right at the end. It was constant, all week, and I was just thinking the thought that all our clients seemed to have brain damage when I realised my mistake about October 1/November 1 and realised I must have brain damage as well.

But the worst thing was that none of my colleagues took any ownership of these projects at all. They all went vague, and lazy, and spent all day talking on the phone or IM'ing or laughing with each other, and nothing was getting done. I delegated a couple of things to someone else to manage, and the ball was just thoroughly dropped. Maybe he thought I just wanted him to do the initial briefs and I would follow everything else up with the clients. Maybe he never heard back from the designer that the task was done. Maybe he didn't realise what the deadline was. But just at the time he was supposed to be sending an email to the client and getting signoff, he was faffing around setting up a new desk and putting his new bike together. (New bike, you are thinking? We do lots of work for a company that sells Italian bicyles, and they pay us in "contra". So everyone who wants a new bike can get one, on the boss.) I was outraged at this colleague, but didn't say anything to him, I just found out from the designer myself the work was done, and contacted the client myself to get approval, and even did all the HTML changes MYSELF, using notepad and completely hacking around our version control system. But they're done, and live.

At many points during the day I felt like just walking out of there. I kept announcing that I felt like just walking out of there. When they pulled one of the cables out of one of our most important servers, just to see what would happen and to change a setting for the people at the new desks, they timed that little activity to be just exactly when the other supplier was supposed to be busy putting content in to the site that had to be live within a half hour. She had to go make a cup of tea instead. I yelled at them in exasperation, "Why are you doing this right NOW?" I threatened to just get up and walk out of there.

One designer left at 5 - he always leaves at 5, since he gets in at precisely 8 sharp every day, and also he's going away for two weeks to get married. One programmer left at 6, later than usual because he'd stayed to chat with the boss about the cable thing they were doing. One designer was there pretty late but she was working on a project separate from what I was working on. What I was working on, only the senior developer and I stayed. He kept working and testing and publishing and looking into my error messages and coming up with clever solutions, and kept his sense of humor, and when the boss came in a flap and asked him to do something else altogether he just calmly said, "Yep," and kept on doing five things at once and making sure they were all right.

We were the only two, plus the boss, who you'd expect to care if things got done or not. We were the only two that stayed to make sure the job was done properly and the deadlines were met and the customers would not have bad experiences. We were there until 7:30, on the Friday night of a long weekend. I really didn't want to be there at all, starting from about 11 o'clock in the morning, I could see what kind of day it was going to be. And I've already resigned! I'm only going to work there for three more weeks. I have nothing at stake any more, I could be slacking off, I could even start telling off the clients who've been making my life miserable for two years. (Actually it's never a good idea to do that, you never know which bridge you're going to have to turn and run back across one day.) But I did none of these things, I instead took personal responsibility that all the things got done, properly and on time.

Personal responsibility. I just accepted it. I was the only one who was going to make sure it all got done, and communicated to everyone who needed to know. I wasn't panicky, I didn't stress the designers out (I made them proud that they had gone the extra mile and finished the impossible task in time - two of them strutted over to my desk with chests out, to tell me!). I took command, I managed, I stayed back until 7:30, I checked everything, I made sure everything was live that needed to be live. Why do some people take personal responsibility, and others do not?

I suppose it makes me employable. I think it would make me a good mother, if it came to that. But it does make me frustrated with other people. And it makes me very tired!