No code, no process, no problem

Today was another meeting. Another meeting about a project I have no information about. The situation from last week is unchanged, no access, no code, no information, no problem.

This week a panel is assembled to talk about their grievances, their wants, their desires, and their disdain of the current product. I created documents describing the project as I understand it, and they are promptly ignored. They will not be tied down by documentation or the need to file out paperwork, this is strictly an off the cuff demand list. As they go through the demands I point out that they assume that I know their process, and I don’t. The demands continue. They begin talking about ANOTHER database that I’m supposed to be building, of which I had no knowledge of. After hitting me with that and Boss giving no support, they finally relent and talk about their process.

The process is largely nonsensical, which is no surprise. The one I struggled to get my mind around was how the preliminary report would magically turn into the first supplemental report. Especially since I will be force locking down the preliminary report and according to their definition the supplemental report is brand new…I accept this and decide just to carry over the preliminary to the supplemental despite the fact it makes no sense. I also quickly come to realize that this will be a very email intensive project, which is a problem.

See the network is awful. No that’s not a good way to describe it…Apocalyptically bad, so rancid that it melts your face off, terrible beyond all measure. It’s the kind of network that Hell would have, as the devil locks you into a code sweatshop where you are forced to debug Fortran written in pig-latin, as bloated tick like managers critique every keystroke. I could shout the 1s and 0s faster over a phone line, and in some places they still use old school modems so I might have to. In addition they have stripped away all the tools I could use to send via email like wevdav. My option is to dance the dance of the dead with exchange and then pray they don’t touch the exchange server…a futile prayer.

Most of the actual talking in the meeting is about deleting fields in the DB and removing data tables and pruning old data. This blows my mind, as they want to be able to archive the data but still use it actively, in effect creating two separate databases running alongside each other but complexly separate but covering the same business operation…or as I like to call it database hell. I plead with them to not force to take such an action and I earn a temporary reprieve. They still wish for me to go in and play Jenga with the tables…removing fields that are foreign keys…did I mention the code is outrageously out of date, not commented, and not in a language I know? I have one week to solve the puzzle or call it quits for this nightmare game.

I have a meeting again next week and another the week after. I’m glad it happened today, all I could think of after the meeting is having a tall cold glass of vodka and staring at my wall till the darkness overtakes me…