brotherpeacemaker

I missed my deadline by a week. In the twenty plus years I’ve been working on databases applications I have never missed a deadline. Well, almost never. If I’m given a clear set of specifications it’s a piece of cake.  But usually, normally, the client is constantly making adjustments and modifications that expand the scope of the project.  I can’t be held responsible for a missed moving target. Technically, the specifications for my latest project kept getting updated and I remained confident that I could hit this target. But one of the fundamental requirements, that the data get pulled out of the database correctly, didn’t work. My deadline was a Monday and I didn’t get it working properly until the following Monday. I missed my deadline by a week.

Normally it would be no big deal. People miss deadlines. But I am a black contractor and for some reason my work place mistakes are somehow magnified.

Early in my career I was working on a project for one of the big oil companies. I was working on a relatively minor database application when I ran an update in the production environment before it was ready. The data was corrupted and we had to pull information from the backup copy. We were out of commission for all of about fifteen minutes. It happened before. People were constantly tinkering with the production data and making corrections on a regular basis. We were working on a Digital Equipment Corporation VAX machine using VAX BASIC as a programming language. Everything was developed in house. The database contained sales information for various big diesel contracts. I made a copy of the production data in the test environment but made the mistake of working in production. The production machine ran in parallel with a backup and we simply copied the backup to production.

I worked with a team of about a dozen programmers. We were an even mixture of consultants and employees.  We all had our areas of expertise and worked to help each other out. My primary area of concern was accounts payables and receivables. But I was helping someone else with some inventory programs.

The day after my mistake was made, I walked into the office and discovered my access rights to all production databases were revoked. I didn’t even have access to the accounts payables and receivables. I had to get my project manager to manage the data transfers. This wouldn’t bother me so much except for the fact that people who have done far more damage to the production database and its corresponding applications were never curtailed. And I would have understood if I didn’t have any working experience with my client at the time. But I had a solid record of successes and finding problems within the data that saved the company millions of dollars. One of the things that I was most proud of was the fact that I had discovered a huge problem with the company’s tax calculation software that caused it not to work properly. We were headed for an audit and didn’t know it until I discovered the error. The company had been using the incorrect procedure for months. It was developed prior to me starting.

But my record of success was thrown out the window at my first mistake. I realized then that the yardstick used to measure my effectiveness for the company is somewhat more severe than the yardstick of my colleagues. And this isn’t the only experience. At another company I was given a bad review because of a misunderstanding. Even though the misunderstanding was ironed out relatively quickly it was a bad mark on my record and it became the only thing that mattered at year end. At another company my manager manufactured things to put on my record. I was on record wearing jeans in the office when I had taken the day off to attend a funeral. My mistakes are somehow the only things that appear in my career.

So now that I missed this deadline I’m sure my manager and my clients will be looking at my work a lot more closely with a much more cynical eye.

The department that I was trying to develop the report for contacted my manager’s manager when the data didn’t come out correctly. My manager’s manager contacted my manager and a couple other people in the department.  I wasn’t included in the email distribution list. The next morning my manager sent me an email saying that a coworker with a couple of years experience in the company will be assisting me in the development of the extract procedure. The coworker and I sat down for about forty five minutes trying to hammer out the problem. Believe it or not there is no documentation about the structure of the database that we are using. The database comes from a vendor who is not obligated to provide any detail about its inner workings. We make educated guesses as to where the data we need can be found and its relation to other tables in the database.

It took less than an hour to come up with a theory as to what the extract needed. The coworker could see that I was somewhat nervous about the data problem. She assured me it’s no big deal. But she has no idea what my experience has been like. When we figured out what the extract needed I had to update the SQL to get the correct data. Unfortunately, we hadn’t accounted for multiple corresponding records when there should have been a single record returned. I had to figure out how to obtain the correct single record. I worked late on Friday and a little over the weekend. I pulled the data extract into a small Microsoft Access database to verify the data. Out of ninety thousand records about a hundred failed. But the failed records were outside the scope of the extract. I had the extract perfectly.

This morning I had an email from my manager in my in box. My manager wanted an update of the project. His email was sent last night just a few minutes from midnight. I really do feel bad about not hitting my target. But after being here almost four months this is the first missed deadline out of about a dozen projects. That it isn’t important though. I really messed up this time. Nothing else matters.