This is the last week at work before leaving for holiday. One of my freelancers went on holiday Monday, I told him to take Thursday and Friday of, he had been working a lot and could perhaps do with some time away before holiday with the kids and everything.
My other freelancer is working hard to finish her tasks by Friday, when she will leave, also for holiday and then a new gig. So it will be some time before I see her again, but she has impressed me with her work so I am hoping that I will have opportunity to work with her again.
I am attempting to close as many tasks/projects as possible, among other things a nightmare project, which has taken way too long.
So today I went and talked to the project manager and the technical resource about the status of the nightmare project. I worked late last night and kept struggling with bad test data. So I finished my stuff and sent these people some indicators of the problems.
It then struck me that they wanted to put the application into production when I am on holiday. Well this is no problem, actually I could put it in production today, but I have a single dependency of the back-end web service I am using has not been put in production since the deployment guys are on holiday. The online team take care of this ourselves, we do not need a separate team.
Me and the technical project manager went to talk to the responsible for the deployments and she stated that since there "tomcat" people where both on holiday this week, they where not able to put stuff into production until next week.
I then stated that we where not here next week, due to holidays. So the one technical resource in the team is away and so are the three consultants (my people and me).
The she responded "All of the consultants also? - isn't that bad planning?"
I did not say anything.
I laughed a bit to myself afterwards, she is the one with he two "tomcat" people on holiday and lacking capabilities to deploy anything.
Apparently some resources are more resources than others so consultants should just stick around to deploy web apps, when everybody else is on holiday - and that is for a project which has been delayed several times and our window of involvement has long gone, so I have to spend evenings to finish this.
The funny thing is that she could apparently not hear it herself.
I hate when people are regarded as resources, we are all human beings and yes consultants need holidays too.
