What a crazy week

Well, it's been a bit of a crazy week around here. Sometimes work just sucks, you know?


It began on Monday, when one of our company managers rang and asked me (again) to go to China. Normally I would jump at a chance like that - company sponsored travel to somewhere I haven't been before is always a nice perk. But I'd been trying to avoid this job, because of the chaos that seems to be happening over there at the moment. I'd been asked before to look at some of this project work, and had decided I really didn't want to get involved. They're at a point in the project where they are presenting the results to our customer, and basically it doesn't work. Or so I've heard. So - results? One unhappy customer, some very stressed project staff, no time to sort it out. And that's when they ask me to go there - just in time to present it to the customer again without any real information or preparation. How fair is that? I wanted to stay as far away from this sort of mess as possible.

If they'd actually asked me a couple of months ago, when I could have made a difference by getting in early and working on it, then it would all have been ok. I could have prepared, maybe even helped them avoid some problems. Who knows? But its all a bit late now... anyway...

So I'm off to China on Wednesday. I guess I am excited about it - I do love travelling when I get the chance. I rushed into Brisbane on Thursday and applied for the visa. Fortunately they can do it overnight, instead of the normal four working days. I picked it back up on Friday morning. There were fairly long queues each day, which I wasn't expecting. Apparently China is quite the destination at the moment. But they were fast, and pretty efficient. Only complaint - they wouldn't accept my company AMEX card as payment. Just a minor pain, when it comes to reporting the expenses for the trip.

On top of all that excitement, I've been rushing around putting the finishing touches on my current project, trying to do some troubleshooting for a site in New Zealand and dealing with another strange request from a local customer. They always want to do things that are just not part of the standard system. Which is fine, because we get to charge them lots of money for making it work the way they want. Its just the timing that sucks.

So I'll be away for a few weeks. Good fun :)