Work.. And more of it.

Just got home from work at around 1:30 AM, and have to be back for a 9:00 AM monthly strategic planning meeting. I'm sort of hoping the meeting was cancelled since I haven't seen any of the usual reminder e-mails. But I figure I better show up just in case. Then another meeting at two, and another at 4:15. And none of these three are directly related to the product we're supposed to be launching.

So why was I at work so late tonight? I'm working on a collaborative development project with several other people, one of whom is at another branch of our company several hundred miles away. (This is my first experience using CVS, and I now don't know how I got this far without it.)

Right now I am little less enthused about the whole collaboration thing, though. About a week ago, we decided that we were going to lock in the database schema. So I went ahead and migrated a bunch of our old data so that we'd have something to test with (and eventually launch.)

Next thing I know, the other guy is making more changes to the schema. That's ok -- they're good changes, and they tack on to the end of what I've already done. Not a huge deal.

This afternoon, he e-mailed me again. Only this time he had totally reworked the structure of major chunks of the database, changing datatypes, altering field names, and generally wreaking havoc. So at about 6:00 PM I basically had to start from scratch and do another complete data migration to get it into the new, supposedly locked down for real, schema.

Once again, most of his changes are very good, and they will improve the product in the long run. But at the same time, I feel like I just wasted 8 hours of my life redoing work I'd already finished! And this sucker's got to launch in just over a week. Yikes - I feel some all-nighters coming on!

Layne points out that all-nighters are a "telltale sign of sucky planning and mismanagement." Or they could just be a sign of two many projects and not enough staff. Which, come to think of it, would fall under the heading of "sucky planning and mismanagement."

Oh, and the phantom Mary Kay truck basher hasn't returned my call. Maybe her two-year-old is screening her messages for her.