I managed to get a very nasty cold/flu recently, and, to make matters worse, both dear one and I got sick at the same time. Normally there is one of us to maintain a stable house and keep the little dudes from getting too destructive, but that was not to be on this day. Luckily my parentals took both little dude and little madame for us, so we managed to spend the day sleeping (in between blowing noses and coughing). It was only in the evening when they came home that I needed to make dinners and do the bath-read-bed thing that the strain set in. Did I mention that Little Dude had the cold first, so is a little prone to whinging right now?.... Not the most fun when your own tolerance levels have dropped slightly below those of the average white supremacist. Anyway, I returned to the place of pay the following day. You can imagine what state I was in..

Now, to set the scene here, I am a programmer by trade. My last few positions have been either as a team leader or project manager, but even then I have managed to juggle the administrative part of the role with some coding, just to keep myself sane (and, yes, I did say that coding keeps me sane..... Go figure!). So I crawl in to work and start looking through me emails, as this seems the most innocuous thing I can do. The first thing I come across is an email about our latest round of "goal setting". Once again I have to look at a list of the shit I have to do this year with a bunch of incredibly lame measurables. Then, in six months time, I can sit down with my boss and say "Yeah, I did this", and he can say "Yeah, you did". We can smile at each other and then walk away. This is surly a very important part of my role, wouldn't you think? Oh yes, there is also a pay review attached to this, but, as there is no money around anyway (is this familiar to anyone), it doesn't really matter how well I did. Oh, and I need to do the same stupid goal setting exercise for my team, even though I haven't got a clue what they are going to be doing (heaven forbid I would have a say in that).

So, I'm now feeling a tad shitty. Which brings me to my next email. It is a review of a requirements document for a piece of software that already exists (useful, don't you think?). My boss has decided that he should get paid by the word, and for this exercise want's to be paid a lot. Lots and lots of stupid changes and additions to a fundamentally useless document. Oh, yeas, I can see the point in this.

So it would appear that the only thing I shall be doing for a while is filling out pointless forms and editing useless documents. Lucky we don't have a product to support!

Actually, I think management have come to the realization that the only way bugs get into the system is when programmers add or change code, so they are doing their utmost to reduce the bug count by making us do everything but coding. I really love being a programmer, but I have no trouble understanding why people give up in disgust and move into other fields. When the people pulling the strings are spending more time pulling themselves than the strings, and when they don't have a clue what the products actually do, you know things are getting a little dark...