You can't make it up
For the past several months project work has been lining up in front of me like an endless snaking train. It just so happens that I have lucked into having the particular mix of skills needed for every damn project in the near future – meaning that lead times for anything involving me has stretched out into months.
Somebody with a little more power than me finally noticed this situation this week, and decided it was far more important for me to be out on the road teaching people (read: getting my foot in the door of potential future customers) than actually building anything. They also finally noticed that the rest of the developers have been avoiding learning the same stuff I do for quite some time. Guess what – those guys aren’t going to avoid it any longer.
Earlier this week I suddenly found myself notscheduled to build several things over the next few weeks, instead handing off the work to others, which was fun. I scribbled everything out in my Filofax, and wrote in lots of travel plans with “to be confirmed” noted against them instead.
I was quite looking forward to heading out on the road again. It’s not going to happen though, because it turns out everybody wants to run before they can walk. In order to train somebody on something, they kind of need that something before you arrive. Nobody thought of that.
Guess who just got shuffled back into the pack of developers for the next week, to carry on working on what he would have been working on before all the idiocy started?