Am I the only one?

Yes, this is what this blog has become. A place for me to vent my anger and frustration from work. I don't know if this is healthy but I do not care. I need to get it out of my system and this is where I can do it without causing much complications. Well, hopefully!

Its been about a month today since the project started. One month and about a quarter of the project later, a writer asks me a question the answer to which I have repeated over and over again for the last one month. And this writer comes up with this question now. I am irritated but I am not supposed to show my anger and frustration at work. I am supposed to explain and that is what I did. Its like this joke/comment we had in college "पुरे रामायण सुन ने के बाद पूछता है की राम कौन है." I can very well relate this to the incident today. I kept cool.

Installing a device vs Installing a driver. I wrote about 3 mails to a writer explaining that there is no real difference in installing a driver and installing a device if the driver is for the same device. What you basically are doing is nothing but installing the device when you are installing the driver for it. I was cool again. Exchanged 3 sweet and polite mails with the writer. Yes, I did add a couple of smilies in each mail.

A writer takes off for a vacation without bothering to inform me. I send him a mail and he replies saying that he is on a vacation with his family and will be back in office only next week. Excuse me? Whatever happened to informing your manager about this vacation. Well, this happened last Monday. The writer was to be in office today. I wait for a mail from the writer but when I did not see any till about 11am, I sent a mail asking about the status. An hour later, I see a reply. A one liner "I'm finishing it now and then was planning on sending it to a peer to review before forwarding to you." Ok.. Its 6:40pm now. I haven't seen a mail on whether this document is in peer review. I had another mail out to this writer at about 2:30pm. I asked the writer to let me know when done so that I could assign more work. No reply. What do I do? I have escalated this issue earlier too. My boss says we need to talk about this writer with the person who hired this person. And this "hirer" is out on a vacation.

We are late on this project. Very late. We are about 2 weeks behind schedule. The clients needed an updated schedule by end of today. I work on my long weekend to get a new schedule ready. I get it approved from my boss. However, we both agree it would be a good idea to discuss this with out Account manager. The account manager does not make it to the early morning call we have to discuss the updated schedule. Since, I am the one here, I was asked to forward this to the account manager and get inputs and then send out the schedule to the client. I sent the schedule to the account manager at about 9:30am. 2 mail reminders and a zillion attempts to catch the person online later, the account manager responds at 6pm with suggestions to the schedule. I, then, update the schedule and then send it out to the client and its 6:45pm. My day started at 8 in the morning with a call and I am not sure if I am ready to call it a day as yet. Oh yeah, this story doesn't end here. The person from the client side who asked for this updated schedule by EOD today is OOO till tomorrow morning. So all this hurry and efforts for nothing. The clients are not going to look at this till tomorrow morning.

I spent half the day today explaining comments from the technical reviewer to a writer. It was crazy. Firstly, this writer goes adding content and questions which aren't really helping in making the content any better. Then, the writer needs me to explain every single comment I ask her to reject.

I have come to this conclusion that some people are on this team are only here to follow instructions. They need spoon feeding. It reminds me of this mask thats put over horse's eyes to make sure they see only straight and walk on the right path. This team is similar to a horse with this mask. They walk on the path that has been set but do not think with an open mind. The project requires that the writers have open minds and come up with ideas to present the content in a better way. There are many correct paths for this horse but the trick is to take the path that is most beneficial to all. And this is not easy.

Ok. Am feeling better now. That's it for now.