life as I know it

Okay, so it's been almost two weeks? I keep thinking I'm posting here, but no, just to market_roulette.

So I like being busy. This is--I don't know what this is.



Our testing periods have started officially overlapping and I can't explain the horror of this in words, but it's like we're not only constantly behind, we're being bitched at for it; for reference, our testing periods used to be four to five weeks with a week to two weeks for planning and writing tests and two weeks interspersed to do emergency releases and workarounds for the system. Basically, they happened every two months and now we're writing the test for the next testing period while testing for the current testing period and getting our assignments for the testing period after that to start immediately.

We're not just running behind; we're like, forever behind. We can't catch up. We're still testing while the next build is introduced and we haven't even run regression yet, and prodfix is already up and running. I jsut finished scripting for the next build and there's another one coming and we keep getting these--the tests are long. I mean, like, two to three hours end to end and changing user ids and stopping to verify with the database and we each have ten of these and I've had to run each one from two to five times and half of them aren't even passed yet. And the stupidest shit goes wrong in testing. User error, or new functionality no one told us about error, or surprise!system change error. Or the user ids have a problem we didn't know about until they don't work.

Ouch

Smushed finger in car door. Had to open to release. Not broken. Just--there. And irritating.

Other News

I have a Keurig coffee maker. I just want to cuddle it forever.

I think that's it? God, I'm just so ridiculously tired it's unreal. I want one of my hobbies back, just one of them, so something is goddamn balanced in my life. And I feel like I've driven all my friends away by being a total lack of motivation and joy-sucker of lifelessness or something.

(note: I know this is not true; I promise, I get this is utter frustration with the world making me react really off reality by a considerable margin. I don't get how I can know intellectually that right now I'm seeing everything skewed badly and still be unable to do anything with that knowledge other than know it and hate it. What's the point of self-awareness when it's kind of useless?)

Good Things (besides Keurig)

So my new boss took over in July. She's tech and a programmer, and this is administrative, and it felt a little rocky at first. However, the idea applicant for the job is someone who is a programmer, familiar with the system (ie, worked in it, on it, and through it) and with our unit, as well as administrative, and I'd take the loss of admin if it meant she understood completely what we were doing.

She really does. And she really argues for us. In a meeting we had a couple of montsh ago, we were brought up to speed on a change in teh system, a big one. They had no documentation, no clearances, nothing to explain what it would do, and we were a week from testing and the code hadn't been locked and tehy were adhocing. She completely routed them on the documentation thing when they acted like they didn't have any (for their own programs?) and teh clearances and it was--good. She's also becoming a better administrator, but the fact she logs into work every Saturday from home when we dont' have official workdays just in case someone works a Saturday from home so she can be on call is kind of amazing. She can also run tests and knows our tests and knows when to compromise.

She's hard on us, but not in a negative way, which is hard to explain but it ridiculously comforting. She's really good now, and I'm wondering in a year what she'll be like if she doesn't burn out. We're doing impossible things because of her; we couldn't have done what we're doing now otherwise, not and survived it, not and get this much done.

So that's my good thing.

Going to read now before bed and contemplate retests tomorrow.