Headthump

I swear, the gods are conspiring to try to keep me from going on this writing retreat, or at least to make sure it's not productive.

I had a proposal technical edit dumped in my lap on Monday. I find it very hard to switch back and forth between writing and editing modes.

Then I had to get involved in a discussion about another document that we're due to deliver on Friday. If I'm out Friday afternoon, and the manager for that project is out Friday afternoon, then we really need to do the document review on Thursday. Which means that the document specialist doing the editing and cleanup of the document needs it by Tuesday morning at the latest. By 2:00 yesterday, she still didn't have it.

Things started looking up: the proposal manager agreed that I'd done pretty much all I could do on the proposal, so I knocked that off my plate. And the manager for the project with the document agreed to extend its due date to next Tuesday (which, given the holiday Monday, is technically only a one-day extension, but it gives the docs person all day Friday to work on it, since we'll be able to do the review on Tuesday).

With no deliveries Friday, now, I began to think about taking the whole day off, instead of just half.

Then I got a software delivery dumped in my lap. The software isn't finished yet, but we've got a contractual/political thing going on, and whatever we've got has to be delivered by the end of the month.

Fine. Software delivery is a lot of paperwork, but it's not hard. I told the manager (this is a different manager from the other two, mind you) that I'd handle it, but I wanted to get it all prepped to go by end of the day Thursday, because I was trying to take Friday off. He agreed that was fine -- they're not making any changes to the unfinished software this week, so baselining it early wouldn't matter.

I muttered and grumbled, then shrugged it off -- hey, it's chargeable work, which is scarily rare in my office right now. I started prepping paperwork and documents, and got as far as I could without having the software checkin notice or the version description document draft to edit.

This morning, before I'd even finished turning on my lights, the phone rang. There's an issue with the previous release of the software that affects what they checked in last night, so I have to hold off on baseline until they sort out the redundant files and check it back in. And there's some questions with the version description document, too, so I might as well hold off on working that, as well.

And I realized that since this is a major version release for this software, I have to do a set of configuration audits on it before it goes out. Which is another eight pages of paperwork, dammit. At least it gives me something to do while I'm waiting for the other issues to be straightened out.

And by the time all this editing and processing and administrivia bureaucratic nonsense is done, how hard is it going to be to yank my brain back to anything like a creative mode?

Grr.