Charlton Heston Is Not Karl Malden

Now that everyone knows that important bit of information, we can proceed with this post to my ill-tended blog.

Work has been kicking my butt lately. Timelines were short on projects I'm on to begin with. But we had to shorten things due to delays on project requisites. So I shaved about two and a half weeks off the project timeline by doing things in parallel that should be done in serial. Things were going swimmingly for a while, until the news came down: second or third week of November was not OK, all my projects MUST be done by October 31st. Right, I think. Sure. And I'll make a baby in a month by finding nine women...

Then I find out the directive came down from about as on-high as it could (agnostically speaking, of course). Turns out this came from the worldwide CIO...the single highest technology leader there is...at direction from the board. The board one of the largest and oldest companies in existence.

So. Now I'm trying to find ways to shave two and half MORE weeks off the timelines, doing even more things in parallel, and hope that it happens on time and successfully with a minimum of mistakes (did I mention I've been making mistakes since I've started massively parallelizing the project work?). The sick thing is, for my division, which employs somewhere around 1800 IT staff, I am the one critical to making this deadline happen. One person. Oh sure, there is some stuff I can hand off in a one-month-baby effort. But for the most part, it's all me. I have to do the hard work of delivering 18 terabytes of data to a city four hours away.

No pressure. I just have to deliver on multiple projects, to a single deadline of 31 OCT, with NO room for error at this point since the timeline has been cut to the bone. It's like walking a quarter-inch tightrope that has been greased with lard, stretched over the Grand Canyon (and for a laugh, some sick bastard has put punji sticks on the canyon floor).

Hope I make it. If I don't talk to any of you for a while, the above is why.