All work and no play

It's been such a tiresome week at work. Firstly it was supposed to be my work-life balance day on Monday but I had to go into work as there were two implementations going live this week and there were still approvals to get. For one of them it was the first time that both Srila and I had done this sort of change so it was a voyage of discovery. Srila is one of my offshore team in Mumbai and it's a challenge working with her and the team as our cultures and languages differ considerably and it's hard to communicate by phone and e-mail without getting together physically in the office.

Srila had worked so hard on the change though and I was really pleased by Tuesday morning to be chatting to her on the phone and saying that it was all going smoothly. Famous last words (!) as the next thing I knew, the penultimate approver had denied the change!! Incomplete information on the change record! - aarrrggghh!! I nearly walked out. I was so angry and fed up. It's hard to explain to people who don't know the process but let's just say it's long-winded and time consuming to raise change records and get them through the process to get the change into production. And falling at the last hurdle for a really stupid reason is not funny. Especially when you have a client who is expecting the change to go live the next day. And when you have come into work on a day you aren't really supposed to in order to get it done. Sigh.

Then on Thursday evening, my second change went into production but was backed out as it failed the live proving test! On Friday morning I had a conversation with a guy who had done much of the work for this change and he told me it had failed as there was a manual last step which hadn't been done. This was the first time EVER I'd heard about this step so of course it wasn't in the implementation plan. Angry again? Oh yes! Why hadn't this guy mentioned it to me beforehand? Not only did he not mention it to me but he completely denied that he knew this change was going live on Thursday. It was blatant lies as he has been working with us on this for a while and is on all the e-mails planning the change. It's the first time ever I've been lied to at work and I was stunned at the gall of this guy to just deny everything and I can't understand why he did it - he must have wanted us to fail with this change. He does work on a different team for a different company and in a different location so all I can think is there's some strange ulterior motive going on. Double sigh.

And then Friday was the last day for Darren at our place - he's one of those who has found another job as we are due to move up to Canary Wharf by the end of the year. It was a sad one Darren leaving as he was one of the central characters at work, always with a smile on his face and a joke on his tongue, organiser of many of our socials. It's a bit scary really, how many more are going to leave before the end of the summer? And should I start looking myself? Questions, questions!