Here I am trying to cope with life and not freak out too much.
Oh gosh. I have had worse times at my work than I have this last week, but ... jeez.
The batch of magnets we got in for this ZOMG HUGE project that's been going on for three years turned out to be bad. And we didn't test them until the last minute, more or less. We only tested the batch because we had some samples in from another vendor that were way cheaper and thought 'Oh, these are half the cost of these other ones. Maybe we should test them to see if they're good, and if they are, then in future we'll buy the cheaper ones.' So we test. And the samples are cool. We test against the batch we just bought - $112,000 of magnets we just bought - and the ones we just bought FAIL. Badly. Engineering loses their shit, asking why no one ever did a sample run and tested the magnets we just bought. Well, that would be because our regular magnet vendor ran their prices up FIVE times what they were last year and the general manager said to stop using them at every opportunity. And so when the time came to buy this $112,000 of magnets, I walked over to Engineering, asked long-time, well-seasoned and experienced, in-good-standing Engineer A, "Hey, Engineer B said we ought to switch back to this other magnet company that we used to use and that they were always good on quality. Are they a qualified vendor?" Engineer A said, "Oh yes, they were always good." and I said, "Okay, so there aren't any special tests we need to do, because I've been told by you guys [engineering] that it wasn't possible to easily switch magnet vendors because of all the testing we'd need to do." and engineer A said, "Yes, but not these guys. We used to have all our business with them. They've already passed all the tests." To which I said, "Okie-dokie." and went back to my desk and blithely purchased $112,000 of crap.
(We can return the bad magnets, and we are, but now the supplier is choking and freaking out, and that doesn't do anything about how we still don't have good magnets in hand. Of course we're enacting a whole fix-it plan that I'm skipping over here, but the problem remains.)
The responsibility for buying $112,000 of crap is falling squarely on my shoulders and it's not really anyone's fault but mine. I could point the finger at engineer A, but I have noticed that engineer A has said jack shit about his role in this. I've thought about it and decided to say nothing. Unless and until someone takes me aside - someone who has a right to question my performance, like my boss or the operations manager - and asks me why the fuck I did something so monumentally stupid, I'm not going to say anything. I have nothing in writing; I shouldn't have been asking the freaking engineer who has worked for the company for 27 years and should have instead asked the Quality Manager who has worked there for three months; and I shouldn't have let the crushing pressure to close this project cloud my judgment as to the degree of testing of parts that would be necessary. I never made an intentional judgment of 'we need this really fast, so let's forgo testing' - but I let the pressure rush me and when you're rushed, you don't think things through as much as you should.
Speaking of the schedule ... now about a million dollars of product will not be shipped because we will have to wait to get new magnets (with testing ... though on the slightly positive side, we'll probably be getting the cheaper ones we were testing samples of). That's not sales that are merely deferred into the future, it's *lost*. It's gone. It's like a month's salary that you simply don't get, and are told that you still have all your bills to pay, but without that month's salary. And we find out about this on the eve of showing off the new motors to the customer, so we look like idiots. We assume, since the customer has so much already invested with us, that they'll continue to do business, but that month of sales is LOST. Also, we find out about this so late that now we're having to scramble and figure out how to keep a bunch of people working and busy for the next month, because those resources were allocated to making these motors, which can't be made now until September sometime.
I'm a little shocked that I'm still employed. I really understand how people get wrapped up in their jobs and commit suicide. (No, I have no intention of doing so. I'm just saying I understand it.) I don't think I've ever wanted to be fired as much as in the last week. Just get it over with! is all I can think. I watch my boss, who is a nice guy and has taken flack for me in the past scrambling to do the best he can in this situation and I feel awful for him. Because yeah, this failure of mine has become his failure too, through no fault of his own. I think what the general manager is going to do is let us do the best job we can to clean this up and then decide who to can and who to keep once things are moving smoothly again. If I was him, that's what I'd do. Coming in and firing a bunch of people (or even one person) right now in the middle of this mess would not help, unless he has evidence that someone is progressively making things worse. Which as far as I know, he doesn't. We're all working as hard as we can to recover from this.
The manager-level folks are jumping around like scalded cats because we know what this means, business-wise. The people who work for me were saying things on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday about how manager X or manager Y was acting weird, or not doing a good job, or freaking out, and I told them, 'Listen, there's good reasons for that. The shit is hitting the fan and yes, the managers are all freaking out. Be happy that you're not involved. You guys are all doing a good job. There's nothing for you to worry about. But there is metric crap-tons of things going on the managers need to freak out about.'
The stress of my job is eating me alive. I've had my resume out for several months looking for somewhere else. And I've had a few interviews, but nothing has gone anywhere yet, partly because the economy sucks so hard right now.
At least I still have Peter and Sylar to keep me distracted from pointless dwelling on real life crap. Speaking of which, here's my plans for the measly two days I have to recover from the last week, before I have to climb back into the workplace:
Mundane
Manage the kids [done]
Laundry [done]
Make bread [done]
Water whatever the F I like - the routine of going out and moving the water hose every five to ten minutes 24 times in over 100 degree heat just ... really doesn't seem like something I'm up for this weekend. I hope the trees survive, because there's still no rain the forecast. [done]
Clean up the garden a bit. Most everything in it is done fruiting, so now it's just weed abatement and watering the sunflowers around the edges until it cools down enough to put in a fall crop, if I want to have one and can do something about the dang rats.
Sex - I am *so* looking forward to someone holding me. God I want that desperately. The sex can go fuck itself. I just want a hug - a nice hour-long hug with a lot of kissing and touching. That would be heavenly. [done]
D&D [done]
Pay bills [done]
Sleep as much as I can, because I need it [done]
Fandom/Writing
Watch Heroes Lizards, comment on it. [postponed to Monday]
Finish and post that Shattered Salvation chapter I've been chipping away at all week [done]
Revise and post Break Time, incorporating beta edits [done]
Continue working on MBU
Heroes_faves Crossover Challenge entry [done]
On the off chance that I have inspiration, get started writing big boom entry. But really, I can feel that my brain is a bit sabotaged at the moment.
The batch of magnets we got in for this ZOMG HUGE project that's been going on for three years turned out to be bad. And we didn't test them until the last minute, more or less. We only tested the batch because we had some samples in from another vendor that were way cheaper and thought 'Oh, these are half the cost of these other ones. Maybe we should test them to see if they're good, and if they are, then in future we'll buy the cheaper ones.' So we test. And the samples are cool. We test against the batch we just bought - $112,000 of magnets we just bought - and the ones we just bought FAIL. Badly. Engineering loses their shit, asking why no one ever did a sample run and tested the magnets we just bought. Well, that would be because our regular magnet vendor ran their prices up FIVE times what they were last year and the general manager said to stop using them at every opportunity. And so when the time came to buy this $112,000 of magnets, I walked over to Engineering, asked long-time, well-seasoned and experienced, in-good-standing Engineer A, "Hey, Engineer B said we ought to switch back to this other magnet company that we used to use and that they were always good on quality. Are they a qualified vendor?" Engineer A said, "Oh yes, they were always good." and I said, "Okay, so there aren't any special tests we need to do, because I've been told by you guys [engineering] that it wasn't possible to easily switch magnet vendors because of all the testing we'd need to do." and engineer A said, "Yes, but not these guys. We used to have all our business with them. They've already passed all the tests." To which I said, "Okie-dokie." and went back to my desk and blithely purchased $112,000 of crap.
(We can return the bad magnets, and we are, but now the supplier is choking and freaking out, and that doesn't do anything about how we still don't have good magnets in hand. Of course we're enacting a whole fix-it plan that I'm skipping over here, but the problem remains.)
The responsibility for buying $112,000 of crap is falling squarely on my shoulders and it's not really anyone's fault but mine. I could point the finger at engineer A, but I have noticed that engineer A has said jack shit about his role in this. I've thought about it and decided to say nothing. Unless and until someone takes me aside - someone who has a right to question my performance, like my boss or the operations manager - and asks me why the fuck I did something so monumentally stupid, I'm not going to say anything. I have nothing in writing; I shouldn't have been asking the freaking engineer who has worked for the company for 27 years and should have instead asked the Quality Manager who has worked there for three months; and I shouldn't have let the crushing pressure to close this project cloud my judgment as to the degree of testing of parts that would be necessary. I never made an intentional judgment of 'we need this really fast, so let's forgo testing' - but I let the pressure rush me and when you're rushed, you don't think things through as much as you should.
Speaking of the schedule ... now about a million dollars of product will not be shipped because we will have to wait to get new magnets (with testing ... though on the slightly positive side, we'll probably be getting the cheaper ones we were testing samples of). That's not sales that are merely deferred into the future, it's *lost*. It's gone. It's like a month's salary that you simply don't get, and are told that you still have all your bills to pay, but without that month's salary. And we find out about this on the eve of showing off the new motors to the customer, so we look like idiots. We assume, since the customer has so much already invested with us, that they'll continue to do business, but that month of sales is LOST. Also, we find out about this so late that now we're having to scramble and figure out how to keep a bunch of people working and busy for the next month, because those resources were allocated to making these motors, which can't be made now until September sometime.
I'm a little shocked that I'm still employed. I really understand how people get wrapped up in their jobs and commit suicide. (No, I have no intention of doing so. I'm just saying I understand it.) I don't think I've ever wanted to be fired as much as in the last week. Just get it over with! is all I can think. I watch my boss, who is a nice guy and has taken flack for me in the past scrambling to do the best he can in this situation and I feel awful for him. Because yeah, this failure of mine has become his failure too, through no fault of his own. I think what the general manager is going to do is let us do the best job we can to clean this up and then decide who to can and who to keep once things are moving smoothly again. If I was him, that's what I'd do. Coming in and firing a bunch of people (or even one person) right now in the middle of this mess would not help, unless he has evidence that someone is progressively making things worse. Which as far as I know, he doesn't. We're all working as hard as we can to recover from this.
The manager-level folks are jumping around like scalded cats because we know what this means, business-wise. The people who work for me were saying things on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday about how manager X or manager Y was acting weird, or not doing a good job, or freaking out, and I told them, 'Listen, there's good reasons for that. The shit is hitting the fan and yes, the managers are all freaking out. Be happy that you're not involved. You guys are all doing a good job. There's nothing for you to worry about. But there is metric crap-tons of things going on the managers need to freak out about.'
The stress of my job is eating me alive. I've had my resume out for several months looking for somewhere else. And I've had a few interviews, but nothing has gone anywhere yet, partly because the economy sucks so hard right now.
At least I still have Peter and Sylar to keep me distracted from pointless dwelling on real life crap. Speaking of which, here's my plans for the measly two days I have to recover from the last week, before I have to climb back into the workplace:
Mundane
Manage the kids [done]
Laundry [done]
Make bread [done]
Water whatever the F I like - the routine of going out and moving the water hose every five to ten minutes 24 times in over 100 degree heat just ... really doesn't seem like something I'm up for this weekend. I hope the trees survive, because there's still no rain the forecast. [done]
Clean up the garden a bit. Most everything in it is done fruiting, so now it's just weed abatement and watering the sunflowers around the edges until it cools down enough to put in a fall crop, if I want to have one and can do something about the dang rats.
Sex - I am *so* looking forward to someone holding me. God I want that desperately. The sex can go fuck itself. I just want a hug - a nice hour-long hug with a lot of kissing and touching. That would be heavenly. [done]
D&D [done]
Pay bills [done]
Sleep as much as I can, because I need it [done]
Fandom/Writing
Watch Heroes Lizards, comment on it. [postponed to Monday]
Finish and post that Shattered Salvation chapter I've been chipping away at all week [done]
Revise and post Break Time, incorporating beta edits [done]
Continue working on MBU
Heroes_faves Crossover Challenge entry [done]
On the off chance that I have inspiration, get started writing big boom entry. But really, I can feel that my brain is a bit sabotaged at the moment.