Today I found some e-mails asking me about the status of a particular trouble ticket from our customer. It was strange that somebody was asking me. Our bug tracker showed the ticket was assigned to another developer. Then it hit me. I was asked to join a trouble ticket conference call with the customer. Let me tell you about that debacle.The customer had a list of outstanding trouble tickets. They started with the first ticket and asked the attendees what the specific problem was. This question was followed by silence. I thought this was a total waste of time. So I jumped in, quickly scanned that problem details, and explained the bug in normal English. I then proceeded to do the same for every other trouble ticket on the list.
Now that I spoke up about the myriad of trouble tickets, it seems that I have been associated with the tickets. We have a team of about 7 developers. All of us are working trouble tickets. However I was the only guy that stood up and spoke at the meeting. So now I get the benefit of being a point of contact for some of these that still have not been resolved.
To speak up at the meeting is the responsibility of the team lead. I am not the team lead. The team lead was actually pretty quiet during the meeting. This has happened a long time ago in the past. My reward for stepping up was becoming the team lead. It took a while to shed that responsibility. I don’t want it. Perhaps it is time to remain quiet during any more meetings I get invited to. Otherwise I will just have more work to do, along with more responsibilities. I am not looking for that. There is no financial benefit to it.
