Max's Miscellaneous Musings

The situation in Victoria is awful. I donated $10 to the red cross appeal yesterday, and felt guilty about not giving more. How do people recover from losing everything? Will $10 really make a difference.. etc. Still, every little bit helps, I guess. It's difficult for me to even imagine hundreds of deaths from fire. A small, tiny part of me wonders why the hell these people didn't leave their homes as fast as they could, rather than hang around to be burnt to death. But another small, tiny part of me empathises. Leave and certainly lose everything, or stay and fight the fire and maybe save your home? My understanding is that the fire moved very quickly.. there were people who left it too late to leave, who tried to escape in their cars and ended up dying a hundred metres from their homes, trapped in their cars. Awful.

On a happier (?) topic, I haven't done a lick of exercise since the weekend, and even that was forced. I'm in a couldn't-be-bothered funk, one of my (thankfully) infrequent self-destructive, self-derailing moods. I'm hoping I snap out of it soon. My bike is sitting downstairs crying from loneliness, and all I can say to it is that I'll ride it tomorrow. Then tomorrow comes round, and I tell it "tomorrow", and so on. I'll probably go down there on the weekend to find it's slashed its own tyres in a pathetic bid for attention.

The last few weeks have been pretty busy at work. This week sees the commencement of the deployment phase of a project that was offloaded to me last year. I remember being pretty annoyed at the time, at being handed a half-baked project while the project manager went on leave. I was given the impression that I was just keeping things rolling until he came back (six weeks later). So I, foolishly, did not double-check his work. I just assumed it was all under control and I just needed to keep the wheels turning. I was wrong. Many of the decisions made RE model selection were just plain wrong. He allowed people from other business units to make decisions about our business unit - without even knowing how we do business! W. T. F.

The whole thing was very badly scoped, some very uninformed decisions were made (emphasis: not by me) and now our business is paying the price in the form of very unhappy victims of the bad decisions. So I've spent a lot of time on the phone dealing with unhappy people complaining about what this project has done. Yippee. I've made my opinions clear on the way the project was scoped and it's been agreed that part 2 of the project will be done very differently. I want to believe that this is true, but I think that the awful truth is that nothing will change, we'll do exactly what was decided originally, the business will be disgusted with the outcome, and I (being, conveniently for the PM, the public face of this project) will be blamed. The worst part of this is that I fully believe I will be made the PM for this project once this first phase is completed. I really wanted to hand it back to the PM when he returned from leave, but he basically said he wanted me to keep running it.. BAH.

Not much else to say about it except that I hope today is better than yesterday. The rollout officially starts today, thankfully only a couple sites are involved. I'll be glad when this thing is all over.