"The waiting is the hardest part"

After a few false starts, I'm dressed and ready to go in to work (wearing the shirt in the icon, but with bags under my eyes). It doesn't look they're ready to go quite yet, but for some reason the fact I've had to get up and check my email every hour for the last three has kind of killed my ability to sleep. So I'm giving up and going in to hang out with everyone and have some of the food they'll have lying about as I have discovered that I am hungry. The sun IS starting to rise and the birdies are chirping outside, it is the height of doom and the start of the day of hell. Check back in after I arrive.

And what to my wondering eyes did appear

I swear to God I just saw the entire technical staff of my company out taking a collective smoke break. This does not inspire me with a great deal of confidence in the current state of affairs.

This said, I am making myself a cup of tea (the curative for all ills) and am also making a special cup of chai for the woman who's running the release for the test team.

The A Team of Nothingness

Nothing, nothing, nothing is happening, though we're getting closer to the possibility of something happening. My boss is here and his boss, the Big Big Daddy of QA. They'll be serving us breakfast at 8, though I've already had myself a very nice bowl of congee. I hope we get something to do before then.

So, for the rest of you: where can you buy theater tickets from touts? I'm very eager to get two tickets to Friday, July 7th or Saturday, July 8th's Life of Galileo - does anyone know where we could get them on the resale market? I've also discovered that Rock and Roll is available at its new home, the Duke of York's Theater, where it will be playing the last weekend I'm there. The write-up it got in the New York Times made it look very exciting. Anyone want to go?

Still bored

That's it, we've got five, we're playing some Hearts.

And I'm getting hungry.

And the president of one of our divisions came in and I hit him up for more employees.

At last!

I've had breakfast, and just in time, for we are RTT (in my case, ready to test!). W00T!

And ... we're off. Or not.

So basically we got in our new car and started up the engine and the wheels fell off and the engine fell on the ground. And our CEO is here and I want to go yell at him and ask why we're chronically understaffed. I am of course basically wearing jammies so I'm looking very authoritative.

Oh, the irony. We are all so bitter.

Right, so the CTO is here, too. And I just suggested that we have him take over one of our positions. And we all laughed. It's a very funny situation.

We were going to do a pool on when we'd actually get the site up, but we got distracted by breakfast. It's really a shame, I like the idea of getting some pleasure out of all of this.

Our CEO brought his kids in. I asked him if it was the backup shift for B team. I told him I had empty heads that hadn't been backfilled for the last six months and I'd take whatever I could get. He said the 2 year old was a great UI tester. I also told him that EVERYONE in my group was already in and there were no backups to be called. This seemed to trouble him.

Ah, off he goes. It's really a shame as I could have used an extra hand to run automation. Maybe the CTO can take on the B shift quarterback position - dev or test, I'll take anything.

Ten chocolate covered creampuffs down the hatch

I'm feeling dehydrated. We've signed off on what we need to start the site running again. I had to tell the PM for the project we've been working on for 8 months that we weren't able to run a single test and that we're signing off anyway. It's kind of embarassing but he understands that the money toliet is flushing and we have to make it stop. (Me big test manager, me make big decisions, pass on bad news.) We found a workaround to be able to do more testing later, hopefully to discover there are no bugs once this bug is fixed. Gah.

On to the next cluster to test. Too bad I didn't actually bet on 11:30 as it looks to be very close to actual unshunt time.

I'm tired of nagging

I've spent the last hour trying to convince people to GO HOME. Fresh or fried, that's the question of the moment; which are you? I've been trying to get the team down to one person max ("You! Put your computer back in your office! You! Call your husband to come pick you up! You! Tell the fresh person how to finish your tests and LEAVE!"), and I've been pushing the B team test QB (who works for me) to take over from the A team woman, who I've been telling to dial down her areas of responsibility so she can head out. This is me, being a boss, trying to get things done and trying to take care of people when they have worked too hard.

And of course, that leaves the question of me, how am I doing and when am I going home. It's time. The CEO and CTO and Big Prez Dude and Mr. Boss's Boss are all gone, and no one is worried about me and how I'm doing. I've got everything ready to leave, but I wanted to do one last post after I put my computer back in its docking station, so here I am. Who's going to tell me now that I've been up for too long?

It's a beautiful day outside and I feel kind of sorry to have missed so much of it, but, well, there's a summer worth of beautiful days still to come and I'll do my best to catch up while I'm at Golden Gardens tonight. Be advised all of these posts will be going friends-only in a day or so, after I've had some sleep.