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2003-04-18 - 12:44 p.m.

Leave it to my co-workers to find a way to break a hard and fast release process for application changes. For the last week I have had a high priority code enhancement bouncing around between me, testers and the file release manager. I made some changes, ran my code, found it to be in working order, sent it on. The testers found it broken and sent it back. I sent the issue to the release manager, asking him to make sure he had put all relevant files on test, he swore he did. Round and round we went with this routine, me totally unable to produce the bug from test on development and convinced this was a database or server issue but, as always, the burden falls to me to figure out what is broken, even if it isn't my code.

I played detective for a while and finally discovered that there was a discrepancy between the field and table names in the development database and the test database. I forwarded this issue on to the infamous DBA Legion of Doom. Their response: "Oh yeah we dropped this field".

First of all if you are going to drop a field the first place you might try dropping it is on the development side. Gives me an environment that matches the others and gives me a heads up that my SQL has to change to work around the missing field. Second of all, never bothering to change development and only changing test (who knows what is going on on production) means my coding environment is never going to match what the testers and end users have -- that's just not acceptable. Third, this field being dropped actually had nothing to do with this enhancement I was working on, it just happened to get noticed, that field being dropped should have had its own change request. It all makes me wonder how much else the DBA Legion of Doom makes changes that break my code that I'll never hear about until some user finds it.

Of course there was no apology, no admission of guilt or wrong-doing from any one for this debacle and I am sure there will be no consequences for anyone. Everyone is just free to fuck up whatever they want to fuck up.

There's also a screaming baby in my office today. People bring their kids here every day. Some of them appear to be old enough to go to school so I don't know what they are doing here. Maybe they are sick. Ew! Like we want their creepy germs around here, keep them at home. This baby has been screaming off and on all day, I've kinda been tuning it out and listening to spinner. Its idiot parents ought to be embarrassed about doing this to their co-workers but I think we've established that everyone in Officeville is completely shameless.

The only good news in Officeville (other than that I am still planning to leave because I hate everyone here) is that I've been taken off of Psycho's project, she no longer calls, IMs or emails me. Oh happy day!

I'm the only developer on the new project I've been given which pretty much rules. I've also discovered that is way too easy to impress the people who requested the project so this should be a real cake walk. I just now have to get my finances in order and turn in my resignation.

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