The Working Girl Blog #30: Working late, or Learning to sleep in my office chair To see all of Bobbie's "Working Girl" blogs, click on this link: http://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/book/19261/working-girl-blogs

Well, here I am. One AM and still in the office. Me and the guys have been working late at the office for a couple of days now, rushing some of our deliverables which we thought we had about two or three more weeks before they come due.

Anyway, I told the team about my needing to leave the country for a while. I was up-front with them, and said I had to leave for about three to four weeks next month to work on a project overseas, and the boss might assign a temporary replacement for me. I knew it was tricky, as some of them might resent it (my leaving the team, or me going overseas), so I played it cool and just told it plainly - the company was going to put up another call center unit in the Far East, and I was to help draw up and finalize the operational procedures, and, in order to save on costs, they were trying to use current staff. They had tapped me for this and were also recruiting for ten additional people to act as senior or mentoring call agents (which was open to all personnel who wanted to apply).

Anyway, the upshot of it was that someone will be taking over for me at around June. Taking a cue from Stephen Covey's gambit of throwing down a challenge, I put this to the team and suggested we do double-time and see if we can make that unnecessary.

I dangled the prospect of overtime pay, performance bonuses, AND a little consolation prize of a weekend stay at a resort (pre-approved by my boss, of course, and only at a local resort, otherwise the incentives budget would have been wiped out).

This galvanized everyone, and the test team leads started drawing up a super-aggressive test schedule, and my team started handing out writing assignments. I had to go into, ahem, some spirited "negotiations" with them, grounding our intentions in what is do-able, and we came out with a plan that everyone signed on to.

And after two consecutive days of starting our workday early and working late into the night, we reaped benefits. Yesterday, we finished running all of the primary test scripts and we finished ALL of our testing. Today, we finished up all the functional fixes (leaving most of the cosmetic or layout-related ones for later), and did the stress testing, and my team finished the first drafts of all the user guides and system documents. That means what's left would be documenting the tests, performing the user acceptance testing with the client and final edits of the manuals. Piece of cake.

Late this afternoon, I asked Sammi to put me in touch with the client and I told them about the possibility of starting UAT as early as next week, which made them happy, and we talked about the arrangements for it.

Well, we're mostly done, and just winding down, gettin' ready to go home, and I'm logged on to the chatroom, not saying anything - just lurking, and winding down myself.

The two days have really taken its toll, and it's a bit refreshing to see my coworkers in a different light. Most are sprawled around the office in various stages of pooped, but we got it done. Sammi is taking a catnap on the boss's couch, one of the girls curled up underneath the desk apparently asleep, one of the team leads was leaning against the wall with a vending machine cup of coffee, and I kept getting up to walk around, chatting with anyone who seemed to have nothing to do. I was nursing a little stress-induced headache so I made do with chatting with them. (I had fallen asleep in my office chair several times - guess I'm starting to get used to sleeping in it.)

I think girls handle stress a bit better than guys since they find it easier to commiserate with each other, or dissipate the stress by talking gossip while working and, in that way, get the energy and motivation to continue on. Guys would rather internalize, and go quiet as they worked, becoming more and more focused on finishing the task at hand. After several snappish answers, I decided to leave most of the guys alone and just hang with the girls.

The guys seemed to finish a lot more of the work, most finishing their assigned tasks earlier than the girls. The ones who finished early I shooed away home so they could get some rest, thanking them for their hard work. In a way, I can identify with that - wanting to finish something, to put "paid" to something, and get a feeling of personal accomplishment that way. But nowadays, I seem to prefer having a feeling of belonging to something, or belonging to a group instead of personal achievement (though not completely, of course). In that way, I guess I can identify with the things that people do to cement them together in groups - putting another ahead of one's self, of doing communal things. I guess that sort of feeds into the half-truth that women like to gossip - knowing stuff about each other is another way of being closer, or telling someone how you feel, what you think - it's all part of it.

Guess that's stereotyping again, but to be totally truthful, I guess my attitudes didn't radically change all that much, only in minor ways, and not in any fundamental way. I have to wonder (as I have wondered numerous times before) if I was, fundamentally, a girl in my attitudes, or was it that men and women, in their basics, are actually the same. I'd like to think the latter, actually, because there is a bit of an attraction to the idea that everyone is basically just like everyone else. 'Coz if that's so, then there really is no barrier for people to get along.

Anyways, time to go home. I'm sleeping in tomorrow, so no jogging.

Nite nite, everyone!

   

To see ALL of Bobbie's blogposts, click this link: http://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/blog/bobbie-c
To see Bobbie's stories in BCTS, click this link: http://bigclosetr.us/topshelf/book/14775/roberta-j-cabot