What is this thing called “Projects”?
So, the heat is on. The time you have prepared for is here. Now it all’s gotta be done. But you can’t, because… reasons… The server guys got food poisoning on that vendor thingie. The loadbalancer girl stumbled on a VIP and broke her hip. Ouch! The project manager overdosed on Visio and is in rehab somewhere.
However, you are still here. Wich is bad, because now you get questions about stuff you haven’t heard of, never logged into, and has nothing to do with what you are hired for. And you never got those Visios that sent the project manager into oblivion either.
But. You know this phase. You know that you are just a tiny cog in a pretty elaborate machinery. You have seen worse. That guy who torched himself with kerosine in the cafeteria a few months back was just a mid-level project manager in your office who got ordered to implement ITIL.
You know all the current kerfuffle could have been avoided. But it never is. Project was too big. It outgrew the organization. It turned into an entity of it own, always evading, always moving into the shadows the second before you would have grasped it as a whole.
The project now is an enterprise of its own - It hires and sacks people just as random as a real enterprise does. It books event venues, then never book any people. For some unknown reason, the project seems to have endless resources. And these resources are thrown out at completely random. Always putting people in the wrong places, adding resources to the teams that doesn’t need it, starving the teams in need of more meatbags. I mean brains!
Epilogue
In an earlier life, I played music. While on tour in west africa (Ghana, Togo), I got to meet some really amazing people, and see the most amazing approaches to life in practice.
In a society where nothing what we take for 100% granted works, people are smiling, happy, cheerful. How is that? Knowing what you can change, and what you can not really helps.
If you have a problem, and you can solve it - Why worry?
If you have a problem, and you can’t solve it - Why worry when it is impossible to solve?
“The bus never came by. But I bet it will be here tomorrow!”
And that about sums it up.
Many things will come and go, some will fail, some will work. You can only do your own work as good as you can, not answer for what everybody else do. Use your time. Because your time will end.
People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice. - Charles Bukowski
You are a cog in a huge machinery.
Be a happy cog.
