Our development manager called a meeting with all the development staff today. We went over the 20 page schedule. Apparently the developers have not been paying close enough attention to the schedule. I discovered that I was assigned some tasks that were supposed to start last week. That was news to me. It was also news to my team lead. Something was not right with this setup.The meeting ended when we had to run to attend another meeting. The next meeting was short and sweet. We analyzed some changes. Determined which ones would impact which parts of our program. Did some shop talk. Then we bolted. I thought I might have been in the clear. But I had no such luck. The prior meeting reconvened. Some developers tried to get out of the meeting. They got the word that they had to attend. Some other developers were conveniently out of the office and avoided the pain. This meeting never seemed to end. I started getting some flashbacks of meeting hell from prior projects which were doomed. I hope this is not a premonition of disaster to come.
The only relief from this day full of meetings was a series of e-mails from one developer who was working remotely. He decided to go work on another team, having determined that he finished all his tasks. His team lead informed him that he needed to assist with other members of his team. That launched him into a massive email carbon copied to everybody that addressed the state of productivity on the project. I printed out a copy of this email to bring to my lengthy meeting. A couple people asked that I secretly pass my printout to them so they could read the email as we went over the schedule for what seemed forever. I got some more humor when I got home. That is because I checked my email and found more coming from the lone developer working remotely.
