no-name post

Started off with one of the senior client-liason guys on my major account calling. I now know that it has been absolutely pointless sending a weekly report on the upgrade project every Sunday, because obviously, not one of the outsource-at-the- client team has read the bloody thing. So client tells them that client expects other product upgraded 3 times by Jan, even with 3 month change freeze over the holiday period. Outsource team wakes up. At last. Other product has been waiting on my upgrade for at least two months, which has been detailed every week in my report.
They call meeting with me and other tech-team leader for this afternoon. We tell them this again. They panic. How are they going to explain this to client. Solution is that they plan a meeting for next week with client very-senior-management for next week, and tell me that I need to come along and tell said VSM what the hold-up is (waiting on applications vendor staff to fix applications....) - presumably so VSM knows that it's not them holding things up. Good news; meeting with client doesn't scare me. Bad news; if client asks, I will tell him that this has been known for months and nothing has been done by managers to get it resolved. Very bad news; as of next week, it will also be costing client very large sums to run old version of other-product, and client is going to hit the roof. Oh well....I have documentation to support me, and it's been a long time since I've seen someone hung, drawn and quartered by this client, who has a particularly astute nature, a very ascerbic tongue and a huge dislike of being kept in the dark. Something to look forward to, even if I will have to find more officey clothes to wear for the meeting.

This anonymous way of not specifying client, my company, products involved or any other identifying details makes things very complicated, doesn't it.

That wasted most of the afternoon. Saw t-doc in the morning, who is regretting not taking her father up on his offer to pay for them to elope. She reckons that wedding planning and organising is way too stressful - having seen my sister's version, I agree with her. Highly unlikely, but if I ever find anyone stupid enough to marry me, I suspect I'll ask him if we can do the very very intimate foreign country version - just the two of us and the minimum legal requirements. Extra-highly unlikely, seeing as I am way too scared of my mother to try that!

Being tense about not seeing her and p-doc (possibly) for patches of the next month is enough to make me feel like Borderline is at least partly a match. Not that I want it to be, but there are still too many of the criteria that apply sometimes. The self-destructive behaviour, cutting and suicide, and this one...the fear of abandonment or perceived abandonment. Even though I know it's not, and that weeks and fortnights pass quickly with baby birds and standby and digging up the garden, it scares me that I still feel so tense about the possibility. Especially seeing as I don't actually even know whether p-doc will be MIA at the same time at all, and wouldn't consider asking him either. So stupid, given that he knows so much about me, but there are still subjects that I won't either raise or discuss.

Ah hell...let me try sleep, so that when Ops phone again they'll get me in full deep sleep mode. I am terrified about being on standby at the moment as well. Not only that I'll be too dopey to respond properly, but also because I haven't supported most of the clients or their software for 3 years now, and don't remember enough about either part to be comfortable. One client is a new one that I have never supported, which is even worse. And I've had too much of a break to trust my instincts anymore. I used to know that in spite of everything, I was a really hot DBA. Which was some consolation for stuffing up the rest of my life. Now, only the latter bit applies...