My trip to the doctor yesterday did yield the information that I have fluid in my left ear. Although she said it didn’t look infected, she gave me antibiotics to thin it & make it drain. I wouldn’t normally take them unless I was feeling really crap but I’m uncomfortable enough to feel the need this time.
I got into the office this morning, popped round to see my boss. “Today’s your last day.” says he. “Is it?” says I.
He said he thought he’d done what he had to do for HR (I don’t entirely believe him). He obviously hadn’t.
Tomorrow is now going to be the day he ‘officially’ informs me of my redundancy and I will then exit 8 days later. So my last official day at the monolith will be 9th March.
Fortunately I don’t think he’s silly enough to expect me to be in the office much between now & then.
I’m completely lost for words to describe my feelings about this. I’m not annoyed, but I’m not exactly thrilled by it either. I won’t be relieved until I have the date on paper.
Truth really is stranger than fiction.
Thank you to Dr Bean for another lovely weekend at your little piece of paradise. It was just as beautiful as I remembered it and those paddocks are in perfect shape for dogs and kids to charge around. Your neighbour and his cows are to be congratulated. The dogs are, indeed, still tired. Em would jump at the chance of walk if I offered it, but that would be true if she was at death’s door. The fact that she can’t sit still without her eyes closing is a better indication of her state. Indi is much the same.
I have to apologise to all for piking and going to bed at the first opportunity on Saturday night. The combination of only one ear working and my tinnitus make it difficult to understand people when things get noisy (and you’re all pretty noisy) and the effort involved in making sense of what people are saying makes my head hurt. The silence of the Icon’s room with a sleeping Foozle was way too seductive.
I’ve abandoned all pretence of working today and have SMSed in sick. I’m going to the doctor in an hour or so to get a certificate to back that up. Even if there was stuff to do, I couldn’t have faced the office today. Once the mail has arrived, and my redundancy letter has not been delivered, I’ll be drafting an email to my boss and the GM, requesting confirmation of my finish date and/or tasks required to be completed before I go. I’m not sure that that will get any action or speed things up, but it’s the only thing I can do and it will make me feel better because of that.
While I’m at the doctor’s I’m going to ask her to have a look at my left ear. It feels ‘wrong’ and I’m pretty sure my tinnitus is generally louder at the moment than it usually is. I’m hoping there’s fluid in the ear - which should make no difference since the nerve is supposedly dead - but it would explain the way my ear feels and stop me imagining a new tumour.
Fluid in the ear shouldn’t affect my tinnitus, since the nerve is dead and supposedly no signal is travelling through to my brain from there. Then again, background noise shouldn’t affect my tinnitus, but it does and my surgeon said the same is true for many people in my situation. It’s one of the many unknowns about having tinnitus. Because it’s really about how the brain interprets what it receives, rather than being a purely physical phenomenon, all sorts of things about the way it behaves are not readily explainable.
I haven’t gone into the office today. I’m working from home - although I’ve been playing Solitaire for the last hour or so after being gobsmacked by my ability to very effectively stuff up the defect spreadsheet. I haven’t contacted my boss to tell him that I’m not coming into the office. This is very naughty of me, but I’m all out of caring at the moment. My mobile hasn’t rung to it’s a safe assumption that no one’s noticed I’m not there.
Mark has just got our new ADSL connection up & running and it screams along. Luverly!!
There was a requirement that was supposed to have been tested & wasn’t. Guess who’s just spent the last day digging back through documents that pre-date my involvement on the project to try to find out what other requirements haven’t been tested?
Something appears to have happened in late 2004 - a whole heap of requirements appear in one document and then not in later versions. And there are other requirements which magically appear that I can’t find in earlier documents. Of course, almost everyone who was on the project then is no longer with the company, so there’s nobody who really knows what happened.
This is what I hate about inheriting other people’s work. I don’t have the history on this project, yet I am expected to answer for things that happened before I was involved. I inherited a detailed test plan which had already been used once and it was agreed that it would be suitable to use again - so what wasn’t tested this time around, wasn’t tested the first time around either and no one queried it then. And I resent doing stuff a trained monkey could just so they can find someone to point the finger at. The thing’s live for heaven’s sake. Regardless of what was or wasn’t tested, it’s all out there and stuff is going to come up that no one thought of - that’s what happens when things go out into the public domain. You have thousands of testers who are going to think of & do things that you would never have expected.
My boss is still in Sydney. I emailed him this morning & asked him to ring HR. We’ll see what happens next.
The HR woman called me back. She needs to hear from my boss, as it’s up to him to advise the date on which I’m to finish and that triggers her to do her thing.
I told her that my boss had said that he was waiting to hear back from HR. She asked me to get him to call her.
I’ll talk to him when he’s back from Sydney. No point in emailing him while he’s there. He’s just as likely to ignore it - it’s his most commonly used method of email management.
(sigh) Who would have thought it would be so difficult to get them to get rid of me?
The site went live overnight. Obviously I’m not going to name it and I won’t link directly to it, but you can see what some people are saying about it here (scroll about 3/4 down the page to avoid the geek nonsense).
So what’s left for me to do? Work through the remaining open severity 3 bugs to see what can be closed off (a lot of them are content related). The sev 2s got closed or downgraded prior to the switch being flicked. Update the ‘final’ version of the test summary report to reflect the number of bugs that were actually left at the end. Bundle up the screen shots of the sev 3s into one zip file and put it with the defect list. Organise to get the sev 3s into the fault system so that they get tracked to resolution. All in all, probably no more than a day or two’s work.
I still don’t have confirmation of when I’m finishing. My boss is in Sydney this week for the big unveil, so it’s pointless chasing him until he’s back in Melbourne. The HR woman hasn’t called me back. I’m thinking, if I don’t hear anything before, I’ll be drafting an email on Friday morning and escalating.
I still have 7 severity 2 defects outstanding.
The site goes live overnight and there’s another drop of software coming this afternoon/evening - which, for the uninitiated, is sheer madness.
I’m going to have to stay here to test the fixes in the new release because the connection at home is too slow to do it. God knows what time I’ll get out of here - I’ll have to check what time the carpark closes.
I have to run a meeting at 5pm in which I will have to explain the above to a heap of network/operations type people who will be very unhappy about it.
The HR person I rang yesterday rang me back to say he’s not the person I should be speaking to. He gave me the name of the right HR person and I left a message for her this morning. She hasn’t rung back.
Maybe I will just stop turning up after the 28th…
I’ve reached the frustrating part of testing where I can’t close any more bugs & I have 8 high severity ones still outstanding. I should be able to close 2 or 3 of them tomorrow, but have no real hope of closing the others. I’ve gone over the list so many times now I feel like I can’t see them any more. The good bit is that the ones that are left don’t happen all the time, or may not affect too many users - I think…
On the finish date front, I rang HR today. I got directed to someone I’ve never heard of and left a message for him. My boss isn’t in today, so I’ll hassle him again tomorrow if I haven’t heard back from the HR person. A colleague suggested that I should just stop turning up after the 28th and see if anything happens. That would be OK if they just kept on paying me, but with my luck someone would notice. We are approaching the point at which stern words may have to be said.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted any knitting content. It’s been a while since I finished any knitted items. I’ve had a bit of a period of starting and not finishing things.
The pattern came from the Creative Knitting 2004 annual and I bought the yarn from The Woolshack about 12 months ago (I think the colours I’ve used are Dusky & Blackcurrant), but I only started knitting it about a month ago.
I’m pretty pleased with the way it’s turned out. I knitted the body in the round and ended up knitting the sleeves in the round from the top down when I found that the original versions wouldn’t fit in the armhole. It took 3 attempts to get them right, but they’re now perfect. I’ve decided that I’m going to knit stuff in the round whenever I can, so that I don’t have to do seams - I hate sewing things I’ve knitted together. The only seams on this jumper are at the shoulder and I could have done them by grafting the way you do sock toes if I’d thought of it soon enough.
Now I’m debating whether to persevere with a green cotton singlet top for myself or just move onto some socks…
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