Deadline? What is that?

Sometimes, I could just strangle certain people. I'm not the best with deadlines...In high school and college, I would often wait until the last minute on projects and papers. My excuse was that I found that if I was given an extended period of time to work on something like that, I always felt like there was plenty of time to work on it. "I'll get to it later. Why bother now, I have six weeks to work on this 20 page paper. No biggie." I always ended up waiting until there was a week (or less) left and then I'd whip something up, even if it meant staying up all night the night before it was due.

Whatever. I got it done. ON TIME.

And I'm still a bit like that. When it comes to work, I kinda slack for a while and then when I see a deadline coming up, then I plow through like crazy. But I always get my shit done on time.

Unless I'm waiting for someone else.

And then I'm fucked.

Like tonight! I have a release that's scheduled to go out today. We (as in I) set this date over three weeks ago. We set a cut off date for last Thursday. This means that the programmers should complete all of their changes by that date. It allows JB and me just under a week to test all of the fixes that have been applied to make sure that everything is working correctly, as well as go through a set of standard tests - just making sure the stardard transactions go through as expected. This extra week also allows for any overlap, just in case the programmers can't get their code in right on time. Or to fix any errors that JB and I hit in our testing.

We have one programmer who is on the non-core team with JB and me. He is a great programmer. Very smart and quick to jump on random bugs when we send them out. HOWEVER, when it comes to new features, he doesn't do a very good juob of testing his own shit. Which always ends with JB and I waiting until the very last minute to get all of his crap tested. And because he doesn't do much testing on his own, there's usually a lot of bugs. And he just doesn't seem to grasp the concept of the deadline. Not only did he not have his stuff all done by last Thursday - he didn't have it all done until this morning at 9am!!! It takes almost two hours for the code to compile. And then I start testing it. And SURPRISE! There's bugs all over it.

Since JB has class tonight, I'm the lucky girl who gets to stay late and wait for everything to finish. I just love working until 7 or later, driving home for an hour and then coming back at 7am (WE FINALLY GOT APPROVED FOR THE REFI! WE"RE CLOSING TOMORROW AFTERNOON!!!!).

I just feel like every time we have a release going out, I end up taking it up the ass. And I feel like I'm just supposed to smile and say thank you. It just sucks.

On the plus side, I won't have to take vacay for the two hours that I was at the doctor yesterday. Yippee!

Thank you for listening/reading my rant/bitch session.

The End. :-)