The line is feeling much better now...

There's just one thing I don't like about deadlines. They tend to recover at the last minute.

The nice thing about deadlines, in theory, is that no matter what happens before they arrive - no matter how stressful things get - you know that (again, in theory) it will be all over five minutes later.

Did I mention that this is just in theory, and that things almost never work out that way?

So it's probably foolish of me to hurry to finish my work in time for the first deadline, knowing that it's going to get moved. (Sometimes many times.) Nevertheless, I keep doing it. Just in case.

I didn't get a full workload for this release at first, because I was new and they figured it might take me longer to finish things. When this turned out not to be true, I was given more work, but I seem to have the Touch of Death - if you assign a new feature to me, there's about a 40% chance it will get canceled. Sweet!

So I finished my own work with no problem, and then I took on some other work, and I rushed and hurried. For a moment there, it looked like they were going to move the deadline because of one bug-ridden feature, but there was a big meeting, and all the concerned parties decided to cancel that feature rather than delay the release.

I was thrilled with this decision. The end was in sight! Because we had started with such a backlog (due to previous understaffing and neglect), we weren't expected to finish every last thing; so as long as we'd covered all the important stuff, we would be okay. Whatever we couldn't finish now, we could finish in the downtime between releases.

But there was one customer who really wanted that one feature. And they have lots of money. So now all the other customers are going to have to wait an extra seven weeks for the release so this one customer can get what it wants. This was decided on the very day of our deadline.

We - my group, that is - decided to push our own deadline back just 12 business days, since our own work was almost done. But we're also getting tied up with a lot of training and other long meetings that we had specifically scheduled for AFTER the release; the meetings and training can't wait any longer, so we're constantly interrupting our work to attend these things.

What scares us is that we all know about feature creep. Some genius is going to say (just after we finish and compile our help files), "Hey - we've got seven whole weeks. Let's throw in a couple more features!"

My latest effort is in technical review right now, so I need to sit around and wait for it to come back before I can continue. There's nothing like doing nothing when you have a ton of stuff to do.

Useful Spanish of the day
pasado mañana
day after tomorrow... as in "I have another lunchless five-hour meeting the day after tomorrow"
vs.
pasada mañana
yesterday morning