I should be working

Correction. I should be frantically working!

I have one big project set to be implemented on Friday (a week ahead of schedule, no less), and I'm deep in the throes of testing to make sure that what the programmer has produced and what I think he should have produced match. I have a love/hate relationship with testing. Part of me takes sick pleasure in bending, stretching and otherwise ripping apart data in order to make sure it is correct. Another part of me loathes the tedium of running the same queries over the same data looking for the same problem over and over again.

So here I sit 1.5 days from go/no go. Instead of poring over query results and micro-examining the 36 reports we will be producing, I am writing on my sadly neglected blog. I even skipped a Toastmasters meeting thinking I would spend my lunch hour being mildly productive. All I can think is that this is the 5th time in 2 years we have modified this system and I am sick to death of looking at it. In an odd way, I am jealous of the programmer who has been assigned this project with me. This is his first time dealing with this system, so everything is fresh and new to him. Unfortunately, since this IS his first time dealing with this system, I get to deal with the same mistakes the previous programmer made and learned from that this programmer is now making and learning from.

Ah well, at least I'm getting to unofficially train a programmer up the way I like, LOL. In six weeks, when our lovely board of directors makes yet another change to this system (that I am NOT about to tell my programmer about whle he's still wrestling with these changes), my programmer will be familiar with both the system's idiosyncracies as well as mine. Meanwhile, I really do need to dig around in my data. It's kind of important that all this stuff be right since it does affect the income of oh about 600 individuals. I've noticed that people get very cranky when they don't get paid what they are expecting.

M.W.