Pensieri di un lunatico minore

Being a team player…

... or why you shouldn’t believe anything you’re told sometimes.

In the ongoing saga of the world’s worst-managed project—an epic clusterf_ck—we pick up where we left off: me at home in Arlington.

I received an instant message on our internal system Tuesday mid-morning from my “project manager”, a label that is insulting to anyone with a clue, saying, in his passive-agressive style “So I guess you’re not coming down today.” My response was simple: “Per previous arrangements, I will be working from VA this week”. Nothing else.

Then, later that day, around 6:30pm I receive a call from my actual manager, saying that they had identified an “expert” resource to work on a system that I’d been fighting with¹ for weeks. That person was supposed to be flying in this morning, I’m assured. Suspicions were aroused when my request for a resume and contact information were met with a resounding silence. Regardless, I booked tickets on the 7:30am flight out of National and arrived here prior to 9am with the absolute assurance of 3 different managers that this “expert” would be here.

It’s now 3pm, and nobody knows where this person is, nor when he will arrive, if he’s coming, or anything else about the details of the schedule. To make matters even more maddening, he lives in suburban MD, perhaps 30 minutes from my house.

Once again, I’ve been duped.

¹ A system, I might add, which I was told would take 3 months to get up and running, and which I got up in 2 1/2 weeks. I never saw it before.