So one thing that I didn’t get to mention much last week was work. Monday the 21st was a snow day and Friday the 25th was some federal holiday or other (I think it has something to do with wine-infused cheese spreads?) so I basically had three working days to try to nudge my project a little further along, via poking and prodding the people who actually have the access rights to make things happen. In my grand vision of how things should play out, the online application I’m responsible for migrating would essentially shut down at midnight between Tuesday and Wednesday, and that had already been set in motion before the Blizzard of Aught-Nine came to town.
Thus when my supervisor called an all-hands-on-deck meeting on Tuesday morning as we all came back from digging ourselves out of the snow, there was no small amount of grave dread in my heart. I knew very well the line I had been walking for the previous few weeks: nothing was going to get done and no decisions were going to get made by anyone other than me, because everyone else had other things to worry about and the transition deadline was too far away. So I rolled the dice and made the decisions I thought were best and hoped that would be enough. Now that the deadline was imminent and on everyone’s radar, I was fully expecting an onslaught of criticism at the all-hands meeting, which I would mentally deflect by remaining secure in my knowledge that anyone can raise inconvenient objections at the last minute, but which I wouldn’t dream of deflecting out loud across the table because, really, what’s the point. (The single business skill I have sharpened the most in the past nearly three years of government contracting is the ability to take a verbal whupping, fall on the sword, and generally shift the focus from what’s already done and unchangeable to earnest promises that it won’t happen again.) The shutdown was happening because it was too late to stop it, and if I ended up finishing the transition while dodging jabs from the angry mob's pitchforks, so be it.
Much to my pleasant surprise, though, the all-hands was neither intended as an opportunity to put me up against the wall facing the firing squad, nor did it devolve into that. It simply informed everyone I hadn’t already looped in that the shutdown was happening and a “downtime protocol” had been developed and would go into play for the period between shutdown and getting everything up and running at the new host. Not only did I not have to calmly and quietly explain to outraged affected parties that it was impossible to cancel or reschedule the shutdown (which I had been bracing myself for) but I didn’t need to defend the decisions in any way. Everyone basically accepted the plan, which probably says more about their feelings as worn-down teeth in the gears of the big gray machine than about the brilliance of the plan in and of itself. I’ll take it.
Even more surprisingly, after the meeting, the various parties I had spent weeks hounding into giving me some kind of indication that they were receiving my plan outlines all piped up (via e-mail, of course) and let me know everything was good to go. I had outlined a best-case scenario as well as a worse-case version (not worst-case, of course; it is some kind of blindingly fractal impossibility to even attempt to envision a worst-case scenario with anything involving computer system upgrades or anything involving government agencies. THIS HAS BOTH.) and by Thursday afternoon things were proceeding according to the best-case timeline. The midnight shutdown happened without a hitch, the data copying started at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday morning, the drive of data was shipped Wednesday afternoon and arrived on Thursday, and I moved it along to the drive-sanitizing step of the process before I left on Thursday. I may actually see the entire transition process finished by Wednesday or so, which would be several days ahead of schedule and would be outstanding. I may not, of course, because it ain’t over etc. But so far things look promising.
On top of all that last week the director of the agency declared the rest of the year to be business casual attire, which means on this particular Monday morning I am rocking the khakis and denim shirt look and that makes me reasonably comfortable and thus unreasonably happy. Almost done with the big annoying project, lucky to have a job at all, blah blah blah, the thing that brightens my outlook about work right now is that my collar is neither noosed nor even fully buttoned.
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