A recent story from H. has made me feel better about her job. I'm still worried about her mental health, because she's still in charge of the doomed project and it's still a mess, but the WMBD boss just saw an e-mail trail of a fuck-up that quite clearly wasn't her fault, so I'm pretty sure he knows she's not the main problem.
A round of review on the doomed project ended last week. We got even less helpful feedback than usual. We asked about eight people to approve the rule as is, or give us specific edits to be made in certain places by a definite date. By that date, we had heard from only two people, and one of them just gave us a long, rambling e-mail about the department's stance towards many issues, but even the team's lawyer couldn't tell if it had specific edits for our rule. That's all we got on time.
After the deadline, H. sent out an e-mail to all the people who hadn't answered. She complained to me about a certain reply. One guy was baffled. He said he thought he wasn't supposed to be doing something now, just waiting for other people to finish their part. He cited an e-mail from the WMBD boss on a certain date as his source for that. H. asked for details nervously, in case the WMBD boss had indeed gone behind her back and said that this guy didn't need to worry about it. But no, the baffled guy's source was simply the e-mail asking everyone for input itself. I've reread it, and I don't see a thing there that looks like saying anyone should hold off on anything. It seems he just didn't read it well.
What else could H. have done to avoid that problem? Should she really not use words of more than three syllables?
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