poppewicker.com

That project has been on-going, and just when I think it's finished something else pops up or they request another change. I've likened it, at work at least, to trying to land an airplane on an aircraft carrier that is weaving from side to side and changing speed almost continuously. Assuming, of course, that an aircraft carrier was as responsive as, say, a black Ford Mustang. These nice folks have a deadline that we're trying to meet, and as they make changes, they still can't seem to grasp that their deadline is in two more workdays and we aren't going to make the changes until after the first release.

Oh well. They sent me another e-mail this morning requesting a change to the status reports that I'm generating from the application. They've requested this change twice already, and we've told them we'll do it after the deadline twice. But they've asked for it again, a third time.

Along with this repeated request, they've informed me that some of the data about [CENSORED] and so on is incorrect and that I'll need to change it. Now all of this data comes from our "Enterprise Database System", which provides this data to all of our applications and tools, so it's pretty funny for them to ask me to go in and just make changes to that because they said so, especially since I'm a web developer and not a DBA or some other database wonk. The other funny part about it is that I've been building this app on our development server, and running against development data.

Now we've got three separate environments set up for our apps. One is the production environment, which serves up all of our apps to the public at large. It’s stable and nothing short of an act of war should ever change that. We’ve also got a QA environment that we use exclusively for testing the apps before they go live. The testing, of course, is part of what ensures that production stays up and running. And then there’s development, or just dev for short.

Now we use dev for building all of our apps or any changes we make to them. That way, while we’re trying things out and the whole server crashes when we accidentally run some code that runs an infinite loop, all the customers aren’t affected, just the developers. Now the cool thing about dev is that we can do silly stuff there, as well, because no one ever sees it. A password like “blowme” or a street address like "19.99 Retail Lane" aren’t out of the question, nor are typical entries such as the following:

First Name: Julio
Last Name: Iglesias
E-mail: julio@iglesias.com
[CENSORED]: Cooper Institue for Wayward Spiders

Consequently, when the guy e-mails me to let me know that the status report I’m working on right now, which I kindly provided him a copy of, has incorrect data, I get a good laugh. When he provides me a list of the actual data that we should be using, the stuff that’s going to be coming from the Enterprise Database, it gets even better. Let’s see, you mean there isn’t a [CENSORED] named “John’s school for indigent penguins”? When did they close?

I sent his e-mail to my project analyst and asked her if she’d like to handle it or if I should reply myself. She sent me back a one line response:

I’ll handle it, they think they are the smartest on the earth.