I took the time to read the personal blogs of Jake and Dave. Oh my goodness, what a fricken whinge-fest. If this is how they want us to write blogs then read on. Its great to know that you are tired as hell for taking on too many responsibilities and maintaining the illusion that you are living life to its fullest because you are too busy to do stuff all the time. Yeah that excuse approach worked well for me throughout my time at Monash Caulfield. Just look at my dismal grades because of it. Everywhere I look, not just at these blogs but in my personal and professional life, everyone is working more hours than they should. Taken a labour day holiday recently? What happened to 8 hours of work, 8 hours of rest, and 8 hours of play. (That adds up to 24 quite nicely.) People are getting pushed by their managers to do all this overtime, and regardless of whether it is remunerated or not, their personal lives, relationships, health (yes it is unhealthy if you don’t get enough sleep) and their own existence takes a dive. I’ve done it for too long, (I even go by the monkier, neversleepz, on many internet message boards because of it), and woke up one day to realise that 4 hours of sleep a night isn’t living, its slavery. I feel as outspoken as a vegetarian saying anything about it though. I wonder how you stop a junkie employee, thinking that their drug work is the most fruitful thing in their lives?
Next whinge, I also couldn’t believe the nerve of Jake to blog that “2 teams with the same client didn’t think of sharing data”. Since I worked with members of the other team last semester, I did approach them a couple of weeks ago with the idea. All I got back was ‘we already asked, the client wants the systems to be separateā¦. I don’t think we have stuff in common anyway’. Granted some members in my team were of the persuasion that it was additional risk, but after Jake and Dave made the point that data could be shared, and I drew on the board that we shared a common point of collecting customer contact data that we could develop together, we agreed that this is something that should be persisted. If only we could we could get hold of the client and run it past themā¦
Whinge 3: The manager of the clients organisation, the only paid employee, finally emailed Andy and myself with regards to the current host of their CRM, their only online presence, being the host for our project(s). She began a week and a half of annual leave on Friday, but advised in an email to us Thursday night, that she was super busy (this is true, she wears a few different hats…, again see opening rant), and would contact the host on Friday (her day off, how nice), and let us know. I’m just about to walk into our Monday morning meeting, only to report that our client must be well and truly on her holiday and we are still in the dark about were to put our host. What we do know, is that the client contact for the other team working for the same organisation, has no jurisdiction on this kind of thing, they only deal with their program. The organisation is still young and they don’t have much integration yet. I see Jake and Dave’s point about the marrying of the data, but the organisation itself isn’t very married to each other. Its great that these IT projects can facilitate this, but it’s a shame we haven’t been able to get a warning light out to them to say, ‘hey, your next business problem is that one hand doesn’t talk to the other, you are going to need to pull stuff in and work more closely if you want this organisation to run effectively.’ They probably already do know this, I hope they see the opportunity in these teams to help achieve this.
Whinge 4: I was stood-up on Wednesday and Thursday with regard to going over our database design. I was to meet with another team member over MSN, but haven’t heard from them. Yes, errors a plenty on both our behalves (like no phonecall to ask where the other one was), so this wont be a long whinge. It does mean we will have more collaboration today which will cut in to our time today and my time to find a dentist (see next whinge)
Whinge 5: Saturday afternoon felt like my wisdom tooth was pushing into the tooth next to it. Due to my bad habits of no breakfast, and being best mates with the vending machine at work, I think I exacerbated a long standing problem. A few teeth away from said wisdom tooth was what looks like a couple of cavities. Dentist, Dr Danny Lam, as rude as he was when I saw him a couple of years ago, may get my business after-all because I don’t know if I’ll have the time to travel any other locality and lookup a new dentist (refer to opening rant, again)
How’s that? Do I sound like enough of a baby boomer for ya? Feel a bit low, eh? Now go and read Conversations with God, and find out that this negative ranting does nobody any good.
Or don’t, but heed my advice: Never underestimate the power of positive thinking.