When our company's air-con failed on possibly the hottest week for the summer I knew it was gonna be a tough week.
Working to an already impossibly tight deadline, I learn that even more features have crept in. So much for being a products company not pressured into release schedules by end customers! At least this latest contract is worth some decent money.
Next thing to go bad, my tropical fish start dieing due to excessive heat and know matter what I tried, 3 days pass and all 24 fish are dead. Sigh...
Boom... Broadband fails... Fucking NTL:home muppets. They run possibly the worst call centre in the UK if not the world. So called planned over night maintenance turns into 48 hours of complete loss of service. No web, no mail, no hosting (apologizes to all hostees), no Halo 2.
Bang. Band new freeview set-top box goes bang after 2 days. God what else?
Friday comes and we need to do a major build and release of our software. A deep sinking feeling in my stomach. I've done too many Friday builds to know how this was going to end. Badly.
Any how, seeing as all my development work for this release was complete (on time) it fell to me to do the build and test the install. The code freeze was scheduled for 12.
4pm. Start the build!
Bang... Here we go... Start debugging...
One by one the dev team leaves for a nice relaxing weekend...
9pm. Myself and one remaining developer (both shareholders funnily) call it quits. And leave writing off any chance to create a release before Monday.
Lessons learnt:
- book Fridays off.
- leave at 5:30 on Fridays no matter what.
- plan DDos on NTL:home
- never buy cheap electrical goods
- finish coding at last possible moment, so someone else tests/builds
- check water quality in fish tank daily on hot days
Now where did I put that third bottle of red wine?