Dichotomy...

Being responsible kind of sucks. Especially when other people you work with suck most heinously. *cough* Fred *cough cough* See, not only did I basically completely take over his job of making the Maintenance Training Guides for 688 APB03 TI02, 688 APB04 TI04, and Seawolf (which is what we're using for the DDT stuff next week, which is why I'm going, since, after all, I wrote the training manual), but he's had 6+ months to put together an embedded training guide to teach sailors how to use our system. To put it bluntly, his trainer (which is basically rudimentary HTML) is the worst thing I've ever seen. Now, it's not entirely his fault. He was hampered by having to make it work with an archaic program that runs the trainer. But since our system doesn't interface with that program anyway, there's no real point. Also, he used an old version of our system specs. Which is technically all we've got released because we're currently updating our most recent version for release. But Fred uses our system all the time so he should have been able to at least catch glarign errors and correct them or at least ask us what the right way was. No no no. Not Fred. He just cut and pasted random stuff out of our old spec and some of what he put in barely made any sense. Like I said, it was flat out awful. I really think if Latham had had a chance to look at it, he woudl have actualyl destroyed Fred's lifeforce right there in front of me. Fortunately, Dave and I discussed it and cam eup with a plan. I suggested we just make the whole thing in simple HTML and throw in some pictures and make it way more user friendly. Having had a little experience with HTML, I was volunteered to do it. It's due next Friday, but Latham said he'd give me 2 weeks to do it since I'm trying to do what Fred had 6 months to do. But since I'm leaving for Groton on Sunday, I have to get at least all teh layout and pictures doen befor eI leave. So I did it at home tonight. And I gotta say, I kick ass. If I really push it, I can probably have the whole thing done by the end foteh week. 6 months? Fuck you Fred. I just did your job in 48 hours. At least since I've realized you're worthless now, I just let you fuck up just enough for Latham (Fred's boss) to see it, and then step in do his job for him. As long as I don't get over-extended and let my own work suffer as a result, I can handle most of Fred's job on top of my own, and that's a sure-fire promotion next year. Especially if Latham talks to Moon (which happens nearly every day). On the other hand, taking on all this work means I'm setting myself up to get crushed with work down the road, but whatever. If I can do 80% of Fred's job on top of my own job (which I'm almost doing already), then GD can fire Fred and give me 50% of his salary and we'll call it even (the other 30% is me not having to deal with him anymore) and then split out the remaining 20% of his duties to other people who need more work to do.

Posted by Rev. Adam on Wednesday, March 30, 2005 at 11:35 PM | Permalink