Meeting hell

Jesus, what is wrong with these people?

I send an email asking a simple question that should only need a one word answer, and he wants a half-hour meeting instead? I don't CARE how his application typically uses (or 'leverages' in his peculiar gibberish) Development & Quality Assurance environments, it's not my concern: I'm only paid to deal with Production environment, and wasting half an hour of my life listening to him expound on how marvellously clever his application is to be able to test things in a development enviroment before they are deployed to production** is not going to enhance my management of his database, or my ability to do my job.

And, in fact, seeing he accidentally stumbles out the answer I was looking for, near the end of his invitation - i.e. that they are going to handle data loading through application-specific interfaces, and I don't need to be involved in the data loading at all - I don't need to talk to him at all, it's just another friggin' database after all.

OK, end of rant - now to play nice with the client (or in this case, the dickhead the client is paying to install his application), write a polite reply & let him waste my time: it's paid for anyway, so how much can it matter. I wouldn't go off pop about this, except this is the fifth instance of this behavior in the last week, from various self-important software developers: and even that might be tolerable, except my new boss has introduced semi-daily morning meetings to review our status.

I say semi-daily because they are only scheduled for Monday, Wednesday and Friday: apparently if something goes wrong with our systems on a Tuesday or a Thursday he doesn't need to know. However, because they involve all the company's teams working on this contract - something over 40 people in all - simply getting everyone present or dialled in to the meeting, and giving the OK, is taking nearly half an hour - and god forbid if there should actually be problems to discuss.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

On an entirely different subject, we went back to look at the Humpty Dumpty house yesterday, with estate agent and builder in tow. Just as well, as a closer examination revealed many many more faults and problems than I had spotted on first inspection (although I think I can fairly claim to be a bit rattled & less than attentive then, for obvious reasons).

The plumbing would appear to need to be entirely replaced, along with almost all the downstairs walls and beams, and some of the joists where moisture has gotten in, on top of the deck & rear room needing to be entirely ripped down & redone, and on and on. What Rob (yes we had Bob the Builder :) said was, if you're paying more than $60-$70k, you're paying too much.

So, so much for that. We'll start looking more closely at some finished places that just need redecorating, now.