Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain

The chorus of last-minute whiners at work is starting to get louder than my stomach-rumbling, and that's usually bad. For the whiners.

I write software for a big Federal government agency. Specifically, I write a large, busy internal website that carries all of our agency's policy and procedure information to over 70,000 employees all over the world. Doesn't sound like a big deal, but before I built this system in 1998, we were sending this crap out on CD-ROM and even on paper, and it took an average of about two months to get it out there. In that two months, employees would be making wrong decisions based on the now-outdated policy, we'd get sued, we'd lose, it cost us (and therefore you, if you're in the United States) a lot of money.

My system took that two month lead-time and turned it into hours or minutes. The site got over 16 million hits last month. And the whole thing basically... just... works. Every day.

That track record should buy me a little credibility, right? Not with some of the whiners, who are somehow sure that I won't be able to get a new update to the site done in time and therefore they must call endless dumbass meetings and conference calls not to help ME, but to reassure their whining selves.

I've taken to just not attending such meetings. There'll be time to talk after the new site gets launched. I am sitting in on a conference call in about 15 minutes, though, but if even one of the whiners suggests delays the rollout of the new system "because we're not sure it's ready," I am going to simply ignore them. Lalalalalalala, I can't hear you, Fred! What's that you're saying, Georgia? Let's go ahead? Sure thing!

I can do that. I am the wizard. I never fail. I have never failed, and I don't intend to start. What the whiners don't realize is that this seems "difficult" or "complex" to them because they don't understand it and in general, haven't bothered to try. They also lack a learning capacity that for most normal people would say, "well, he's done what he said he was gonna do all those other times, he'll probably do it again." Nope, the sky is perpetually falling for some of these people and they seem incapable of not panicking.

They also don't realize that I have a very strong sense of personal pride. Shit, they don't pay me enough to take it this seriously, so it must be something intangible, and that intangible is my personal and professional pride. I'm gonna do this because I SAID I would. It's that simple.

Off to go listen to the whining and get grumpy for the rest of the afternoon.