New Direction, part one

Congratulations to M.C. (nee M.R.) and W.C. on their marriage! Woo!

***

Two incidents caused me to wholly give up on L.M. The first occurred on Tuesday, during an internal team meeting. It turned out that there was a proposal (read: demand) for a new system within the project, which meant, at its heart, that the software development life cycle would spin anew, and we would start at the beginning of the painful birthing process. It happened all of a sudden, but I was kind of shocked and surprised when it finally came to light. This meant that, for once, I could actually do something which I wanted to, requirements documentation.

Yes, gathering requirements and synthesizing easy to digest requirements for the development team is rather boring from an objective viewpoint, but from a subjective viewpoint, I think it might be kind of exciting. "Might be," because I have yet to experience the process. The nature of translating what is essentially business-speak to technical-speak excites me. I'm translating, I'm interpreting, and in a very vague, yet very firm manner, I'm teaching, that which I always wanted to. Oh, baby. Baby, baby, baby.

Our esteemed program manager told us she would be going to the client site on Friday to gather requirements. This excited me. Finally, a chance to be utilized in the manner in which I thought I would be. Then, someone turned to the lead developer and told him he should go along with her. Not a single person looked at me, and the meeting continued on. I just sat there, a little dumbfounded, a little hurt, a little stunned. That activity was part of my job description. This is what they hired me for, and now, with the perfect opportunity staring them right in the face, they didn't even give me a thought.

Not that I minded, because E.B.'s last day was Friday, and I would've missed his farewell lunch. Still, if given the chance, I would've gone to the client site and talked requirements. Would it have sucked to not be able to send him off properly? Sure. Still, I'm there to work. And there I was, slouching through yet another user manual. The fourth? The fifth? Don't really care much anymore, I had a chance to do something different, and was denied. Could I have spoken up? Sure, but it should have never gotten to that level of frustration.

If this were the only incident that week, maybe it wouldn't have stung so much. But, as always, we had our esteemed Thursday meetings, wherein I act as note taker. Not that I'm knocking the act of note taking in general. Notes are important, and someone's got to do it. Still, given the continual improper utilization of myself as a technical writer, plus the fact that this was sprung on me like a steel trap, well.

It is nice to have a wide breadth of knowledge about the inner workings of my project, no doubt. What would be even nicer is if I were writing documentation for any other aspect of it, which I was not. Thus, all that knowledge was more or less going to waste. I'd learned what I needed to know for the user manuals from a combination of trial-and-error and the extant documentation. There was nothing in those meetings for me, save the two minutes at the end when we would discuss the current status of the user manual drafts. At the end of the meeting. These meetings busted so much of my time, it was ridiculous. That, and they either strayed off topic for forty minutes at a time, or argued the same point for forty minutes at a time.

At around 1000 that morning, roughly forty-five minutes after we started, I couldn't take the empty words, the mindless threats, the general idiocy of the meeting. Stood up, walked to the door, opened it, stepped out, and closed it again. I think I instant messaged some people, then walked to E.B.'s office to try and calm down. He later told me that he thought I was going to cry when I stepped into his office. For fifteen minutes, I stayed in E.B.'s office, or risked going back in and yelling obscenities at the client.

The best part was returning to the meeting, and finding out they were discussing the same exact topic that they were fifteen minutes ago. What a waste of my time, as well as everyone else's. Now, not only were they taking me away from their work they wanted done, they were also killing my joy. Jackassery of the highest order. In traditional passive-aggressive fashion, I just sat there and mentally doodled, taking notes down almost in a haphazard fashion. It turned out when I reviewed them that, as usual, I'd caught most of the relevant points. We could've had these meetings in an hour, hour and a half tops, not all day.