Overload

So on Thursday, I found out that we're laying some people off in my office. Three, to be precise. (Well, one of them isn't technically laid off; he's on "furlough," which is to say, he's on leave without pay until the contract we're counting on to keep him paid actually comes through, which should be in about a month. It's up to him if he wants to look for work elsewhere.)

Anyway, one of the people who's being laid off is our Configuration Management manager. CM is a support position, like QA. It's a gross oversimplification, but if you're not in the industry, then the summary is that QA makes sure that what we create is built correctly and error-free, while CM makes sure that what we deliver is identified and controlled, so that if two people out in the wide world have, say, Widget v1.04, then their copies of Widget v1.04 are identical. There's a lot more to it than that (including internal, pre-delivery code control, for instance), but that's the upshot. Keep in mind that we deliver, on average, 40-50 versioned items every month, some of them on as little as four hours' notice, so this isn't trivial.

Anyone feel like guessing who they've decided can cover the CM manager's duties once she's gone?

Why, yes, that's right! Me!

Oy.

Okay, anyone who's been reading me for any length of time will have gotten the sense that being QA manager doesn't exactly fill my days. I'd give it between 60 and 75% of my time, depending on what's going on in any given week. And CM isn't really a full-time thing, either -- maybe 70-80%. (The reason we've had the two full-time positions all along is because of that four-hours' notice thing -- we need both positions on-staff and present at all times.)

Anyway, even though both positions have some spare time built in, they still add up to quite a bit more than 100%. I'm not sure how I'm going to handle that; the usual answer would be "delegate more" -- but I'm going to have a staff of a whopping 2.5 people, and the 2 have already indicated that they're really not interested in expanding their current roles, and while the half (part-time) is interested in working on the management side of things, she's... part-time, which makes it difficult to assign potentially time-sensitive tasks to her.

Urg. I'll figure it out eventually, I'm sure, but I'm sort of looking at having to do a certain amount of unpaid overtime for the rest of the year.

And to make it all that much shinier, I was pondering all this Friday morning while I was taking the kids to school, and I got Alex dropped off, and on the way back to Penny's school, I rather suddenly started hearing a loud whap-whap-whap noise coming from my right-front tire well. I pulled over, praying that a stray branch had gotten stuck in the wheel, but no such luck.

The good news is that it wasn't a flat tire, but it wasn't that far from one: the rubber had started to peel off the tire. I had a strip about a quarter-inch wide peeling off the edge. It was holding air for the moment, though, so I whap-whap-whaped on down the road and got Penny to school (people walking on the side of the road turned around to stare when I was still a block away), then limped it on home and called Triple-A to send a tow-truck to put the spare on for me.

Normally, I'd relish the excuse and opportunity to skip out of work for a day, but I have a lot of stuff to learn and only about two weeks to learn it. I'd been hoping to get started on that.

whee...