This week has been frustrating. I’ve got lots of little projects going on, and all of them are urgent, but none of them were getting anything to me when they said they would. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday all went by without me getting anything to work on, then all of a sudden it all came crashing down on Thursday. All of a sudden, emails start flying by, people start calling me, and I’m trying to keep track of different people, projects, files, urls… I got through a flurry of activity, then get stuck and need to get further information from people, none of whom are reachable.
Today was more of the same, with even more people calling me. I woke up late again (need to fall asleep earlier), and had plans to go to Dim Sum for lunch, so I worked from home for an hour and a half at home before going to work. In that time, I got two phone calls from people whom I’d only met yesterday, came face-to-face with the stupid email bug where fetchmail kept downloading the same 4MB email over and over and over, never getting anything after that and choking the system in the process, and continued to research one of the projects, but couldn’t continue because there was information I needed in an email I couldn’t get. During one of the phone calls, I gave them my cell phone number, because I was about to drive off, and sure enough, I got called in the car.
The person (whom I had never talked to before) expressed concern that the HTML wasn’t working right, or it possibly wasn’t the most recent version. They said the engineer was having problems, I asked “is it Person So-and-So?”, whom I knew worked on that particular website, but it wasn’t. I managed to figure out what the problem was, or at least point them in the right direction right before I drove up and parked in the lot of the restaurant.
As I was standing outside the restaurant I thought I recognized someone as they were driving up. We sort of stared at each other, like we almost recognized who the other was but weren’t sure, but didn’t say anything. Once the rest of the people I was waiting for got there, we sat down, and I looked over at the table next to us, and it was at least half-full of Yahoo! employees that I recognized, including the woman I couldn’t place…
… who was the person whom I mentioned in the phone call not fifteen minutes earlier.