As I remember, we left off where I was told that I would be working 12 hour days plus weekends in order to make an unmakeable deadline on the project from hell.

Just a bit of background. We have an obligation to provide some files to a vendor on a daily basis. This is EXTREMELY important. It has federal fine implications. The system that does this now is horrible. I can't think of enough adjectives to describe how poorly designed and written it is. It literally breaks every single day.

In January, we will be changing vendors and therefore the files we send will change signficantly. So, it was decided that the system from hell was not worth salvaging and I was brought in to rewrite it. However, it was budgeted for 6 months but management diddled around for 4 so I had 2 months to get it done. There are a lot more variables that set this up for failure but I won't go in to everything.

So, January 1 is the real life deadline. Something I could do. However, managment insists that we have this in production September 1 so we can send a test file. Even that might be achievable. However, since this place is so screwed up, we have to hand it over to QA, well, tomorrow, in order for it to have a chance to make it into production by September 1. Yep, it takes that long.

So, back to the matter at hand. My boss finally came to the realization that there was no chance we would make the deadline. So, she had me sit down with her and do a project plan and task list and a bunch of other things that don't help us get anything done. After she put it all in the scheduling software, out popped October 17. An aggressive but doable date.

She took this to her boss who thought the project plan was fantastic. Except for that October 17 date. So he told her to go back and make the end date come out properly. So she added a bunch of programmers we don't have, set them all to working 70 hour weeks, and removed all depedencies in the schedule. VOILA! We can now finish on time.

So after spending an entire day on this she asked "so we are good with this, right". To which I replied "we have no chance of making that deadline". To which she said "but you are fine with this, right?" This went on for several iterations before she declared everyone is onboard.

So she went back to her boss with the schedule. So he took it to his boss who instructed them to have a bunch of other middle manager bosses to have a meeting (with me and Kumar) to figure out how to make it happen. So we all talked through it and unanimously realized we weren't going to make the deadline.

So, being the smart people they are, the middle manager bosses began brainstorming.

Interestingly enough, one of the people in the room (we'll call him Fred) is the guy who originally designed and wrote this crappy system. Apparently, this did not go unnoticed because they promoted him to lead architect in charge of overseeing the design of all system development. Seriously, I can't make this up.

Anyways, Fred says "well we can just make modifications to the current system in order to fulfill our contractual obligations. It should only take 2 weeks". The room was filled with excitement. But since these are managers, they couldn't just go tell the boss this idea. We had to spend several hours on pros and cons and matrices and all sorts of other nonsense.

So, the next day the managers have another powow. But instead of just going in to the bosses office to talk to him, they spent an entire day creating a power point to send to him via email.

Apparently, the boss embraced the solution. And in a wonderful twist of what goes around, he assigned Fred to do the work. So the email was sent outlining a general timeline, including informing Fred of his new assignment. Almost immediately Fred replied to everyone with a lengthy email which basically said "FU, I'm not doing ****'. So my boss found another person, Madu, who had worked on the system many years ago and dumped it on him. Kumar will be helping.

In the meantime, I'm off the hook for everything.