One of my projects at work involves periodic deliveries. It makes for kind of a sluggish-sluggish-INSANE-sluggish kind of rhythm, but that's OK. It has always been a troubled project. Last year the guy who was in charge of the deliveries basically had a nervous breakdown and I was put in charge of them, after having been his backup for a year. He had been all prickly about it and didn't like to have me sitting with him while he worked on them, so there were some parts of the process I never learned. When I tried to run the scripts he had written (in a more-or-less obsolete language, made necessary by the fact that we're forced to deliver things in an out-of-date format because somebody made a crappy procurement decision, don't get me started), they didn't work. Because of the nervous breakdown, I wasn't allowed (officially) to ask him questions, although as we were more-or-less friendly I bent that rule a bit. My own ability to debug things was limited (as I've made a point of not acquiring skills in the more-or-less obsolete language). So I worked a lot of late, late nights trying to put everything together, a process that wasn't helped by the second-guessing and sneering from know-it-alls around the office, none of whom were interested in taking on the job themselves.

In came the new hire, a guy the boss loved (there is some blatant ethnic and gender favoritism at work here, oh joy) who was supposed to replace our webmaster but soon wormed his way into my project. He started sending everybody long (and often erroneous) lists of everything I was doing wrong, under the guise of helping with the quality-control effort. I spent a bunch of extra time just responding to this shithead's messages. Once I was reasonably certain the project was ready to go, and having heard gossip that the higher-ups intended Shithead to take over all along, I told my boss I wasn't interested in leading it any more and handed it over to Shithead, who supposedly did a bunch of coding (in the obsolete language) and got it running smoothly (or so he proclaimed loudly and at length in staff meetings).

So now it's crunch time again, and things are a lot easier for me now that I'm not responsible for the finished product. Shithead, on the other hand, seemed to be having some trouble late last week. This morning I found this email from the boss in my inbox:

[Shithead] worked until 10:15 p.m. Friday to fix the [same] problem [I had, which he had supposedly written a fix for], probably due to [the same issue I ran into and warned him about before I handed the project over]. No error messages to go by. [I don't know why not. I always got error messages, or maybe he just didn't know where to look.]

[The process] finished at 11:23 p.m. Friday.

I am trying SO hard to resist the urge not to send out an "I told you so" email to the entire office. So hard.

[Edited after lunch to add:] My first reaction was that sending an email would be in poor taste, but after talking to a colleague I decided I couldn't afford not to send something out. Apparently this guy has been sending a ton of emails to the way-higher-ups about other people and their work, trying to blame them for his own failings. I haven't been getting these, and none of them have blamed me specifically (that anyone knows), which is why I didn't realize until just now just how sleazy this guy is. It's hard for me to believe that the higher-ups are taking him seriously, but I don't think I want to take my chances. So I sent an email out to everybody saying, essentially, "I'm surprised that this is a surprise; I told [Shithead] when I handed the project over to him that he needed to watch for [issues]. Specifically, on page 66 of the revised documentation I sent out on March 31st (email attached), I wrote [blah, blah, blah]." So there. I might have overdone it, but better that than to be screwed any further by Shithead.

Tags: work
Current Mood: evil