I finished the project that's both annoying and reassuring yesterday. The deadline was Monday, but I just plain didn't have the data I needed and that was clear to my supervisors and the guy in charge of the project, so they were all pretty understanding about it. It helped overall that I was doing things by e-mail as much as possible, so it's not just my word that the source took longer than expected.
Now I'll be a bit worried for the next few days about whether someone's going to read me the riot act for how I did a bad job on it. (OK, "read me the riot act" is putting it too strongly. The worst repercussions I've had for doing a bad job around here are getting asked pointed questions that I have to fumble and stammer to answer. Either I'm better at covering my ass than I give myself credit for, or my work isn't as bad as I think, or my supervisors are really lenient and understanding. Or some combination. However, I do tend to worry about this kind of thing, even if it's not entirely rational.)
Why expect negative consequences if people are being understanding about the missed deadline? Because of all the other problems. The other guy took a while to get back to me, but I should have got in touch with him earlier than I did, and I don't have a good excuse for that. I reused a lot of estimates from the previous application. Ideally I shouldn't have, but I only worked with the information I was given. I pressed for more data, but I didn't press hard at all. And who knows what kind of mistakes I might have made that I haven't thought of. Half-assedness in general.
Still, though, I'm glad to have the project in the hands of the guy in charge. Now that I think of it, if I could make a career out of doing those things and get them down to a science, they might actually be preferable to my usual type of work. But as long as these are just a once-every-few-months thing, they'll probably always be an annoying, stressful, impossible-to-get-right hassle.
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