I am continuing as a consultant with my current gig to the end of the year and as it looks right now I will probably continue for some months in the new year.
Anyway, I received a mail from a technician, a regular employee the other day, just 5 minutes before leaving.
I have been giving to assignments, implementing web GUIs to some technical backends, so I went over the two received specification commented on them and sent the revised editions to the respective authors one of the specifications had a lot of issues, so I suggested a meeting and luckily the guy (another consultant) showed up at my desk and we got the most critical issues out of the way pretty fast and I was able to continue.
The other guy however sent me a mail, inquiring what I was I was doing with his service. In my comments to his specification I had only requested the renaming of a single parameter, a long shot if the service was already put to use, but in order to strive for uniformity between the technical backends and at least for out side I tried.
I left work somewhat annoyed by his tone and attitude, this was a good thing.
When I later same afternoon wrote back to the guy that I had been employed to do implementation of the web part utilizing the API outlined by him in his specification I was much calmer and I did not write anything I would later regret.
Same night I received an even longer response...
He dismissed my suggested change, which I understand, but then he started to explain to me the problem with the features I was expected to use as if it was me who had requested this quick and dirty implementation.
I am in a completely different department and I know nothing of the inner workings encapsulated by the web service API's we use.
So I started writing a VERY long mail explaining the guy, my situation and the task at hand - then I thought of it, I would only escalate the problem and the guy's irritation with the requirements to his work, which was something imposed by people in his own department - so I just wrote a thank you for his response and that I would address the issues he mentioned with my project manager.
The situation is that we are timewise under such constraints that we can only succeed if we use the quick and dirty solution - but that is not for me to communicate to this guy.
So I backed of and thought of back when I had to write an apology to a complete development department after having roasted them for committing non-compiling code into the SCM of the project, I was in charge of the build process at that time, I was stressed, I was tired, I did not agree with the project manager on how to approach things and I was younger.
So eventhough this guy attitude bothered me, I know from experience that is probably has to do with anything else but my email.
