Stages of surprise

1. Fear

• "What? I've never done this before! Can this guy tell me to do anything? Is this even in my job description? It is? He can? Fuck! What if I screw up? Why's he asking me about my schedule for the next two weeks - is it going to take that long?"

2. Hope

•  "You know, I spend a lot of time complaining about this job, I should be glad to have something new and challenging to do. It might be a bit tough, but I'll survive. I might learn something. This is for a presentation, and bad speakers annoy me, so I can make this a good presentation for once. I'll show them all how to do it! It will be elegant in its simplicity."

3. Disappointment

• "He sent me a Word document already organized into six slides and just wants me to copy and paste the text into PowerPoint. I asked about reorganizing it to make it a little bit more readable, or putting time and thought into it in general, but he told me not to. Nice to know there was nothing to worry about, but what did they need me for?"

Obstruction

I'm starting to think they're actually trying to delay the doomed project.

The latest review of the doomed project by TMBBs was asinine even by the usual half-assed standard of this place. It's fairly normal that a document might get reviewed more than once by the same level of management even if it shouldn't be needed, but this time two TMBB out of four had a lot to say, not just "oh yeah, one more thing," but "I need this and this and this and this or I'll make you start over from scratch."

That's bad enough. One of them, thank heavens for small favors, at least made his late unnecessary edits in a convenient format and limited himself to that. The other didn't. This TMBB used a format that's inconvenient for me for about a quarter of his edits. It's a really minor difference, but it's still annoying because (a) it's unnecessary, and (b) one such edit is minor, but a hundred add up to a fair amount of work.

Even that, though, would be par for the course on this project, but finally we get to the real problem: a lot of his edits were so pointless that I honestly think he's trying to keep us from publishing this.

In the economic analysis, where we said that this rule offers the option of many industry consensus standards, he said, "Sounds good but is probably a stretch." I wasn't even sure what part he was objecting to, but all I could think of was the use of the word "many." The thing is, when I read his comment I counted documents in the folder of consensus standards, and found 80 there. Some of them have probably been removed from the rule, and I'm sure many aren't relevant to this discussion, but even so, even if only a quarter of the consensus standards are relevant here, that's still 20 documents, almost every one as dry and vague as this. Does this TMBB think it's unfair to describe 20 different options as "many documents"? If he checked everyone one and found that even fewer than 20 were relevant, how many would he call "many?" Hah, trick questions, he doesn't know or care how many there actually are, he just had a feeling that the statement looked like it promised something good, and we can't have that.

Elsewhere, we said that the rule will ensure the existence of a certain fail-safe, and he said, "No, it doesn't. The primary def'n of 'ensure' is 'to secure or guarantee'. While our requirements are intended to provide a reasonable degree of system reliability via component redundancy, they cannot and will not 'ensure [the fail-safe]...'"

Here's the reply I actually wrote: "I'm OK with using 'ensure.' It appears in the [Congressional mandate] and about as dozen times throughout this document, and I think it's commonly used by other teams. I guess we could change this phrase to something like 'This is intended to ensure,' but I don't think we need to, and if we choose to, we should do so throughout the document, except where it directly quotes the [mandate]. Thoughts?"

Now, by the standards of blogging or conversation, that's perfectly civil, sure. But I think in an office, in writing, where the target can see it, especially from someone way down the totem pole to a TMBB, that's as undiplomatic as I have ever got, almost as rude as I can imagine without using synonyms for "penis." I just couldn't take it, and I'm not too worried about repercussions, because objecting to "ensure" really is that pointless.

Either this guy is trying to help us publish the rule and he thinks that parsing the meanings of "many" and "ensure" are really, really important to it, or he's trying to stop us from publishing the rule by any means possible, and at this point the latter seems more likely.

Apologies

That was a long time to go without posting. I aim for twice a week, but that's two weeks between the timestamps of the previous two posts. Oops. It's partly because work is slow these days - the only recent event worth mentioning was the doomed project meeting that was the subject of the last post - but also for personal reasons. Even so, I might not have mentioned the slow posting, if not for the fact that it's likely to continue. Several reasons.

• My personal life has been busy lately. For the past month or two, I've had several big things to deal with, and that's likely to continue for at least another month. It's not bad, except in the sense that change and big expenses are stressful, but it takes time and mental energy that I'd rather put into things like this.
• My home computer died this past Saturday. This doesn't have anything to do with the two-week gap, but who knows how long it'll take me to fix. I know what the problem is, but I've already checked the local Best Buy and they didn't have the part I needed on the shelf. Off to Amazon, waiting on the mail to arrive, hoping it's the right one...
• I've begun turning this into a book. Sort of, slowly, maybe... And that's at the mercy of my computer problems as well, of course. But if I find it as easy to continue as I did to start, I may put more time into offline writing and less into this.