Gone pear-shaped

My assessment of the doomed project as soon as I got back from that vacation may have been overly optimistic. (Part of the problem, by the way, is that several other people also had vacations or other periods outside the office overlapping with my own. So I had to piece together what was going on from third parties and e-mail.)

Remember everything I've said about version control problems, and team members who don't know what the active version of the document is? For about a week recently, I myself wasn't sure. It changed while I was away, which I hadn't expected. Something like that coming out of the blue on my first day back was annoying and tiring and worrying but by the end of the day I had determined that the change had been handled well and was done by someone I find reliable, so, you know, I'd just go with it.

But as people returned to the office one by one, no one else could tell me why it had been changed. (If I really needed to know I could probably find out, but at this point I think it would be counter-productive. I've narrowed it down to two suspects. One of them has been a life-saver for me and has done great work overall so even if he is responsible for this one mistake I wouldn't want to alienate him. The other guy has caused and/or had so many problems that laying one more at his feet would be a drop in the bucket. So all in all, it seems like pointing fingers would be a negative-sum game.)

A meeting last week made it clear that what had become the working document couldn't remain it. However, it couldn't be changed to something more reasonable right away. However, I wasn't sure when it would be possible. Also, naming conventions are restrictive: the name I would most like to use for the "correct" working document is the same as something we already have, or very similar to it. In the end, what I wound up doing was creating a new file with a weird name that I don't intend to be the working document for long and just not telling most people about it. I told the smart, reliable people who need to be in it all this and planned to tell everyone else once we had settled on a more long-term "correct" one.

Of course, unfortunately, more people need to be in it than the smart, reliable people who I think need to be in it. Or at least, more people think they need to be in it. I created it yesterday and I've already had to tell two more people about it than I intended. Argh. This is an insane mess.