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Wednesday was supposed to be a momentous day at work. It was the scheduled go-live day for a huge project, one that's been in the works so long that only one person originally involved in its conception was still around. And rumor is she was holding on just to see if it ever did actually launch. The big project, misbegotten for very long, is one of the two misbegotten projects for which I was hired.
Then about 9 am the ... I'm not sure her title, but she's the person on the floor with the actual office with a door and everything ... called everyone to please gather around, this is important. She wanted to explain what she knew and apologize for how we were finding out about it.
The department for which I'm a contractor is one that supports what are called the ``Quality of Life'' agencies for the state of Michigan. Three of these are environmental or agricultural, and the fourth is ... veterans affairs, lumped in because the old department wasn't managing it well and the Quality of Life agencies had administrative capacity. As a result of some departmental musical chairs following a different department's reorganization, veterans affairs is being moved back to its old supervising agency. This effective --- well, for regular-employee payrolls it's effective this coming Monday. But every manager's schedule just became one of figuring out who's sticking where they are, and who's being transferred over to the other agency. This has to be done by the start of October.
As of now, of course, nobody has plans in place. Six weeks is lightning-fast by any standards for an organization this big, and the decision to even make the move isn't yet a week old. There was supposed to be an announcement given to employees Tuesday night, that somehow misfired, and thus our office-bearer's apology Wednesday morning.
Obviously I'm worried. The only times I've ever lost a job was in the aftermath of new management coming in or being shuttled to a new department. On the other hand, government-related reorganizations are a different beast; people who've been through this before with this agency have said it's routine for someone to be transferred to new departments and transferred back without ever even changing their desk. One of my coworkers has been extremely worried about this, and we even got in a bit of a Teams chat today where he talked about the location of the building we'd be moved to, if we're moved, and how it's only a couple blocks away but just far enough that there's nothing around it. The current building, close as it is to the Capitol, is also near the good downtown restaurants. Also The Peanut Shop that I've finally started visiting again, a signal of how I was just starting to feel financially secure.
Still, at the moment, nobody expects there to be any layoffs since, after all, this isn't about changing workloads; it's just about what boxes connect where on the organization chart, and especially in the days of hybrid workplaces it doesn't much matter where your laptop is. But the projects I've been on have all been veterans affairs, so it feels likely that I should be moved over.
And yet, Wednesday afternoon, my boss got very concerned about when my identity badge expires --- the end of September, which I assume is also the end of the fiscal year --- and started on the process to get a new one issued that won't be expiring soon. Like, he warned me they might be ready for me that day. (They weren't.)
The client, by the way, was thrilled beyond words with the project deployment. Bugs were found, of course, and we've been doing a lot of patches since then. Thursday afternoon the business analyst found a big thing was suddenly not working, and got a chat going with me, other programmer, and our grand-boss trying to figure out how long this could be addressed. I was able to spot the problem, diagnose and post a fix within five minutes (in clearing up inconsistent variable names --- like, user_id versus userid versus uid --- a couple on this page were missed), earning a lot of awestruck looks from my grand-boss. So maybe I can make it through this all right after all.
Here's something a touch less momentous: pictures from Cedar Point on our Memorial Day drop-in trip, where we didn't figure to stick around that long but did anyway.
Corkscrew, one of the park's oldest coasters, performing its rare feat of following up two loops with crackling open subspace and disappearing into a wormhole.
This is an abnormally long line for Gemini. Probably should open a couple switchbacks or something.
Got a picture of the map and the events schedule for the Frontier Festival. Note there's activities for the Young Uns, which we did not participate in, as we are not young, merely uns.
Graffiti on the fence outside the Mine Ride roller coaster.
They've been adding Old Western props around the Mine Ride, part of strengthening the whole theme of the area. I don't know what the arrow is for other than to explain how to apply this axe.
One disused Mine Ride car is set up as decoration, outside the ride, coming out of a mine entrance that clearly used to be the ride's main entrance. As of this year, it also sprays smoke out, after an explosion noise, now and then. This event made us poke our heads and cameras in to discover that in back there's ... purple garbage bag drapes? I don't know either, not really.
Trivia: In early 1930 architects Albert and Moritz Kahn took on a two-year contract with Amtorg, the Soviet Union's trade representative in New York City, to be the consulting architect for all industrial construction in the Soviet Union. Their group would design buildings and teach architects, engineers, and construction specialists. At the time the Soviet Union had one blueprint machine in all Moscow. Source: Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World, Joshua B Freeman.
Currently Reading: The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery Of The World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine, Benjamin Wallace.
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Date: 2023-08-19 05:32 pm (UTC)