A bad day

Ugh. Today was rough.

I got into work and found two things to work on that had come in yesterday while I was out, because it was my RDO. They weren't actually late or high-pressure, but it's still not fun to get in first thing in the morning and still have stuff piled up because most other people were in the office yesterday and I wasn't. And even if they weren't huge problems, they both happened to be annoying in their own ways.

First there was the latest draft of the blackmail project's document. The RDM asked me to merge it with the main document, a version control issue. (That's never fun by itself.) Because he asked me to merge them, I assumed there had been changes made in the main document while the reviewer had been working, so there would be edits that had to be preserved in both of them. So I opened both documents side by side and went through them page by page and copy-pasted the reviewer's changes into the main document. However, I should have started by checking whether I needed to in the first place, because the only changes were the reviewer's. I could have just archived or deleted the old version and saved the new one with its name. So that was frustrating.

The other thing waiting for me was the economic analysis on the doomed project. The economist is a much better writer than some SMEs, but it's still daunting and depressing how much work I'll have to do with it. I had thought I was done with basic formatting and this kind of word choice work, but oops, no, here's another 50 pages of it.

And H. had an idea to help the doomed project along: for me to make a spreadsheet summarizing the remaining issues and assigning them to specific people who can actually do something about it. My attitude is that nothing can help the project (hence "doomed"), so regardless of outcome I'm leery of this just because it's unexpected work for me. But I can't ignore the assignment, and we should do something to look like we're trying to keep things moving, and I admit that this might actually help. So I started designing the spreadsheet.

In the process, I kept the "redesigning the axle" problem fully in mind and I was very careful about what we wanted and how to do it. I've run it by H. and the lawyer more than once. I wanted to do something I didn't know how to do, so I wound up using the help guide and asking two people before I found an approach I liked. I made most of the spreadsheet write-protected so there would be no ambiguity about exactly what we wanted. In previous spreadsheets we had multiple columns that were blank in most columns, which made them harder to read, so I'm putting everything relevant into one column and laboriously typing in explanations of what's going on. This spreadsheet covers all the bases. It is foolproof, or as close as anything can be in Microsoft Office. This spreadsheet is a fucking magnum opus.

And I guess I may ultimately take pride in my work today if it winds up making a difference, but that's unlikely, and it's still a lot of back-and-forth and dealing with knotty problems at the moment, and now that I've finished designing the spreadsheet I can look forward to filling it in. Again, not fun.