I’m having one of those weeks when I feel like anything productive or positive I’ve done in recent memory is completely moot.

Two issues have come up that are being completely overblown. One involves communication process. One is technical.

Regarding the first one, I forgot to switch an oncall pager to my teammate before leaving town for the weekend. The pager forwards to my phone. I happened to walk into a swimming pool with my phone in my pocket. That last detail, in itself, has really, really sucked for me personally in the past week. As for work, I missed an important call, never having gotten a good enough internet connection to get the right phone number to switch the pager to or letting coworkers know my predicament. I spent half my mini-vacation worried sick about how to reach people.

This week, rather than chalk it all up to me having done something stupid, it has been proposed that entire processes be overhauled. There was nothing wrong with the processes. I walked into a pool with my cell phone.

As for the second issue, a few times a year, I take it quite personally that some conclusion I’ve come to is questioned and torn apart, or my analysis is completely ignored in the first place. This is happening again, and again it is a demoralizing feeling to have worked with this same stupid product for 13 years and not have management trust me when I come to a conclusion. Let’s ask the vendor to make triply sure, even though I know our environment ten times better than the vendor, and the vendor only knows the product slightly better than I do.

Alas, I meant to do rapid blogging…

I really have been trying to like my job lately…it’s so difficult, though, when you are constantly reminded just how indifferent the-powers-that-be are to fact that they actually have a valuable resource if they bothered to look. Of course, that’s a double-edged sword. People realize that a guy working on the app has 13 years of experience, and they may ask, “Why does our app suck so much then?” The short answer from me would be that I haven’t been able to convince TBTB to do anythng useful with the app. I’m constantly working on b*s items that barely matter because approval is needed for any significant.