March 03, 2004
Things To Come
Finally, a relaxing evening spent at home. Daughter was off playing with the church orchestra. Wife was playing games on the computer and I was watching the Dallas Stars playing with their food. I love it when they dominate a game like they did tonight. I also love it when I have no work to bring home from the office. Alas, this is about to change.
As Bob Dylan once sang, “The times they are a changin’,” and they’re changing in a big way at work. We’re changing the underlying technology behind our application to something a bit more modern, and all that I can see ahead of me this year is a lot of pain. Implementations of this magnitude are generally planned and mapped for at least a year, and then a pilot system is implemented using a small subset of data. Of course, the business wants this thing installed and running before the year is over, and the software vendor hasn’t even delivered a working system. Beta releases of software are bad enough, but alpha releases are just disasters waiting to happen. “Hey Rocky, want to see me pull a rabbit out of my hat?” will be our project manager’s slogan! We even have a Russian woman in the department – perhaps I can get her to say “Moose and Squirrel” a couple of times. She looks nothing like Natasha Fatale of Rocky and Bullwinkle fame, but her accent is dead on.
The last time I walked into one of these projects I nearly lost my wife because I was away all of the time. Technology may prove to be a blessing this time around – a lot of the overtime can be done from the comfort of my home office, and I’ve got all the necessary tools to get the job done right here. And the folks on my team are very creative, even when working with stone knives and bearskins. We’ll survive, and we’ll deliver a working product. Sigh… It looks like it will be an interesting summer…
