It's a first

Well, we made the deadline on that stage of the doomed project, barring four isolated issues. On one, I went to a presentation yesterday about how ridiculously complicated the issue is, and the team member responsible for the issue has said he can "take [his] lumps" for not having it resolved yet, so that seems fair enough to me. Two more are legal issues and I'm pretty sure that the legal department is allowed however much time they need for things like this. Finally there's one more issue that was assigned to me, but when I tried to solve it I found I needed help from someone who wasn't around at the time.

Technically it's my fault and responsibility, but you know, I'll take the blame for that ONE problem if it means I can spread a little of it onto him, probably the most unhelpful team member. That's partly just general frustration with the project, since the last part of the assignment before the deadline was mostly mine. And it's probably unfair to rate his helpfulness or lack thereof against a few people who have had less total involvement with the project, but to the extent that they were involved they seemed even more useless than the unhelpful guy.

But now that I've got fairness out of the way, getting useful contributions out of the unhelpful guy has been like pulling my own teeth. He's frequently absent from the office on short notice. Taking vacations during summer is understandable, of course, but this week he took two days off, and he didn't let the team know about it until just half an hour in advance, and even that was only because of a reminder that went out to the team that people still had things to resolve. And that's another thing: he breezily offers to take care of lots and lots of stuff, and doesn't. I wound up talking to him on his cell phone while he was in the airport on the deadline day. There are a lot more things he had taken care of in some sense, or thought he had, but it wasn't taken care of in any way that matters. Which brings up yet another problem: this guy is the biggest cause of version control problems, and was unashamed of it as far as I can tell. I mean, sure, in the grand scheme of things, screwing up version control is a minor problem, but one guy apologized for it and it wasn't the unhelpful guy even though he did it much more.

Well, we're over with that phase of things. Now for the next part, which should be easier. For me. For a little while. Probably.