My skip boss used the words “I’ll see if the jet is available” today. In so few words have I rarely had such a realization that someone isn’t concerned about the pieces on the board because they are playing an entirely different game.
The context being that a client wants to bring up the EO project sign off up by a month and get all of the execs in a room - on Tuesday. Of course, last minute flights to Toronto apparently run to $1000/seat and if the whole team is going the economics on private travel suddenly start to make sense.
But who knows? After this week I’m not much in the mood for fighting anymore. I’m just waiting for the kids to sleep so I can have my first shower in four days and get some sleep. I’m more than okay having someone telling me where and when to turn up. I feel like I’ve done enough decision making for the month already.
After emergency coding, hotfixes, pipeline runs and investigation - I finished working sometime around 00h30 last night. By the time I’d written some update emails to the exec and gotten the taste of being awake too long out of my teeth, I rolled into bed sometime around 1 to blackout.
At some point I had to keep rolling a toddler off of me that had suddenly appeared and was trying quite hard to bury his skull somewhere in my thorax. And before you know it, 6 AM rolls around and so starts another day of school prep, bus stops, journeys to daycare.
I think the biggest news of the moment is that the project is saved and will be delivered. The engineering work is done. The science is done. What remains is housework, cleaning and documenting everything. Everything that we tracked down became less important or irrelevant giving the timeline. I’m not sure I want to dwell on it today. Today I want to breathe. Today I want to sleep. There will be plenty of time to reflect upon what went wrong.