I have been working from home for the last two weeks and I have had a hard time adjusting. My workspace here is tiny (I'm in our old laundry room which was freed up when we moved the laundry stuff upstairs). I am not used to the distractions (different distractions from work). Finally, my interactions with my co-workers are now very different. I can't just walk over to someone's desk to ask them a question or offer help myself. It's taking a lot of effort to get anything done because I'm spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to work.
I had said earlier this year that I hadn't written in my blog for such a long time because of two things. I talked about one - my mother-in-law was slowly dying of dementia and other complications of a fall. But I never got around to talk about the other reason. That reason was (and continues to be) work related.
I am the sole person working on our company's largest software product. The reason is that this product is old (first started around 2002) and is slated to be replaced some time. But customers still use it (a lot!) and there is no replacement yet. But it was decided that I could handle this all myself because we have a number of new projects that need people working on them and since this is old software in "maintenance mode" (notice the parentheses), there is not much to do on it.
But there is a lot to do and it takes a lot of extra time that I don't list in my every two weeks time sheet. Why would I do that? Well, I didn't at first. I took every opportunity I could to let the world know how hard I was working and how I could use some help. But that got no results. Everyone was just too busy to help (except for some specific problems) and the company wasn't interested in hiring new people to work on an old, mature product If they were going to hire new people, they should work on newer projects that were the future for the company.
So, here I am. I put out two releases of the software in 2019 and I was working on releasing a third before the end of 2019. But then the hardware it was to support wasn't going to be ready. So, I waited around through the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays expecting any day to be told it was time to release. This went on through the New Year, too. And then through February. Finally, in March, 2020,I was told we had to release - RIGHT AWAY. And we did. On St. Patrick's Day, we released the latest version - with me (and most of the Engineering department) working from home. But despite how daunting that was, it did get released and I could finally relax, get back to my blog and other things I'd been neglecting. I was glad.
But then - it was decided we need to release another version right away to get something out quickly. So, I'm rushing to get this one item completed so we can do a quick release soon.
So, that was the second reason for my writing so little in 2019 and it's still a reason 2020 is starting out so slowly. Maybe I will write a bit about how we are coping with the virus outbreak and the Stay-at-Home directives we are all dealing with. Other people are doing such good writing about this that I won't be adding much. But I can tell about how this is affecting me and my family better than anyone else.
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