Obnoxious Bitch

Monday, July 05, 2004

“There will be consequences…”

Not sure exactly what they’ll be, but I’ll face them as the adult I am, since they’re the fruits of my fuck-up.

And boy, I fucked up HARD.  Not only did I make a ridiculously stupid mistake, but I violated a policy and the mistake took down our biggest site for the better part of a night and day.  For lack of a slash (you’d think I’d have learned that lesson by now).

A combination of things contributed to my fuck-up: Way too much work to do, wanting to finish something that had been requested almost a month earlier, copying and pasting code someone else wrote without going over it with a fine tooth comb, and the final, fatal mistake was staging the updated file without making sure it worked… on a Friday at 5PM no less, which is a violation of our policy.  Worse yet, the changes I made weren’t even critical to the site; total low-priority updates to SEO text.  I’m pretty sure I looked at the page after staging the changes, but even if I did, there’s a good chance the file I looked at was still a working, but CACHED, version.  In truth, there’s no excuse for my violating the no-staging-after-2-on-Fridays policy, other than that I stupidly took for granted that these three lines of code (a simple NOSCRIPT entry that feeds the SE spiders) were likely to be just as valid as the other code I’d just put on 10 other pages.  Except this code wasn’t right; the tag wasn’t closed and it caused nothing but a blank page to be served.  Shoot me now.

So my manager called me in on Friday to tell me about the situation, asked me how it happened and whether or not there was anything else I had to say that might somehow exonerate me or place blame somewhere other than on me.  However, since I’m the friggin’ moron who staged the file, I had nothing to say for myself other than, “I screwed the pooch.  It’s totally my fault, I’m sorry and I’ll take my lumps.” Since facing a firing squad isn’t an option, and I don’t think the infraction is so bad that I’ll lose my job, whatever punishment awaits me can’t be anything so bad I won’t be able to live through it, learn from my mistake and move on.

However, between my fucking up and being told I fucked up, we had a company Town Hall meeting; and I stood up and voiced my concerns about there having been so many new hires in the departments that bring work IN, while there were none in those that put work OUT.  Several people from the rank-and-file came by after the meeting and lauded me for having the guts to stand up and say something that desperately needed to be said.  However, I don’t think the higher-ups appreciated either the comments I made, the question I posed or the way any of it came out.  I probably should just have sat in my seat and cried (which was the only other option - and unacceptable - and therefore the reason I chose to speak out instead).  I can only hope that the consequences for my grievous error in judgment in staging a broken file aren’t ratcheted up as result of my voicing my opinion in a public forum.  Especially a forum that’s mostly meant as a pep rally, despite management’s encouragement to send in suggestions or bring up issues that need addressing.  They ask for it, but they really don’t want to hear it.  Dem’s da breaks in Corporate America.

Morale is at an all-time low, and no matter how hard I try to just do as much work as I can and not let getting behind upset me, the fact is that it DOES.  It doesn’t matter that there’s more work to be done than one person can possibly do; if that work has been tasked to me, I do my damnedest to do it right and do it quickly, and hopefully at the end of each day there’s nothing left undone.  When that’s not the case, I take it as a personal failure and beat myself up over not being up to the challenge.  Due to a large project that required reassigning two people from my group (of THREE) that usually help out, my workload has increased significantly and is now to the point that I simply cannot finish everything unless I stay late every night - which I’m not willing to do.  A night or two here and there is one thing, but I refuse to fall into the mindset that I live to work.  I don’t.  I work to LIVE, and as much as I’d like to leave every night with a cleared plate, I’m not going to sacrifice time with my family to achieve that goal.  Unfortunately, my resolve to have a life outside work doesn’t overcome my sense of failure when I don’t reach the unrealistic goals I’ve set for myself.

The flogging will continue until morale improves!