Ling Chi II

or Death By a Thousand Cuts. I wrote about it before.

Today was one of the worst days I've had at this job.

I got home last night knowing I had to run and test a new line of business in our test environment. This was a fairly small subset so it should run fairly fast, two or three hours. Around 1:30 AM, it completed. I did my quick sanity checks and realized that it just wasn't working right.

Crap, I forgot to load our new rates. That has to be it.

So I reran the rates and then reran our process.

It's now 3:00 AM. I run my sanity check and it's exactly the same as the last one.

I quickly realize that some of the rates hadn't been updated like I assumed they had. This test was null and void. I went to sleep...mad.

I woke up around 8:15 with my son telling me something about Transformers. What? Oh, OK, I'm in his bed. I take him to school and get to work around 9:15.

I'm cranky because the other developer didn't do his part, but probably more mad at myself for not making sure they completed their piece.

I throw a piece of candy. Better.

Of course my colleague isn't in today, so I have to make sure the DBAs deploy this to our test environment.

Finally I get the process working and it finishes around noon. I send out a note to the business and QA letting them know that they can begin.

I get a call from the business around 2:30, it's not working the way they expected. One of our rates overlaps another causing invalid results to return.

Thanks for telling us that sooner. The day before deployment and were getting new requirements. Awesome!

I walk over to my boss' desk with my badge in hand, ready to quit, kind of, to tell him the news. He talks me off the ledge.

We then head over to their building to discuss and indeed it's something they didn't realize. OK, fair enough. Had they seemed to appreciate me/us a little bit more over the past eight months I probably wouldn't have been so mad. It was just one more thing though.

My boss decides how this will be remedied. I argue (gently) that this is not an application issue but a data issue. He agrees. We'll just put one job on hold and make the necessary changes to the [driving] data.

Two IT VPs, one business VP and the CIO need to sign off on two change requests, one for the driving data and one for the application.

We're slated to deploy tomorrow pending UAT signoff, though that shouldn't be a problem.

Ten to twenty percent of my time is spent writing code, the rest is paperwork. I believed I had mastered the administrative stuff only to get this requirement change at the last minute.

One more thing...just one more thing.

Ling Chi indeed.