What a waste....

...of a weekend.

I had to work on Saturday, we had a production release. If you don't work in IT, then just look at it like it is a day of torture....

Back in the day, when we had a production release, all QA and Developer staff would drag their tired sorry asses into work at 6am and our systems would be up and ready for us to test our changes early enough to have a stable environment before our call center reps were in the office to process work (I work in Insurance IT and we have call center reps that answer calls)...like I said this was "back in the day".

Over the past few years the staff still drags themselves in at 6am, only to have our systems not available until 7 or 8 and then of course the vultures stand over the QA staff looking for system stability.

In the past several months we have been moving our releases to Saturdays. Primarily because our systems have become so complex that the risk associated with releasing on a busy weekday is too high. This method SUCKS!

I was in the office by 5am (est) Saturday, our systems were supposed to be available at 5am so my offshore (India-3:30pm) staff could begin testing.......the systems are not up. 6am my onsite staff arrives in the office still no eta......7am eta 9am......9am still not up........9:40 Systems up Systems up!!!! Oh wait, system errors for every app! 10:30am they think they know the issue and will have it ready in 15 minutes......11:30 they still think they know the issue and again say 15 mins........12:30 we still have no systems to test (mind you it is now 11pm in India)...........1:22pm (midnight in India) the systems are FINALLY up for us to test...........4:45pm (2:15am India) my last Indian staff leaves the office...............5:50pm myself and my last onsite staff leave the office. We have issues in the production environment which will require some staff to work again Sunday.....

Sunday morning 7am onsite staff is ready to test.....ooops maybe someone should have told us the systems are not up until 8am on Sundays. It is now 8:37am and I have people working again today and I am calling in for status update meetings every 2 hours.....I had to call one of my staff this morning and ask her to go into the office and when I did she cried, totally broke down on me. Myself and my staff are so burnt out...

I have slept a total of (if I am lucky) 6 hours over the past two nights. I am cranky, irritable, and sore. I can't stop crying and all I want to do is curl up and close off the rest of the world.

Have I ever mentioned how much I dislike my job these days?

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On another topic, I received a phone call from one of my MIL friends last night around 9pm. One of their friends sons (22 years old) was stabbed to death outside a night club early Saturday morning. He was certainly a troubled kid, always in trouble and a heavy drinker...but sad that he is now dead. Not sure what this will do to his mother. My MIL is like a surrogate mother to her, so hopefully she will be able to help her through it.