Uncertainty

I meet with my (cool) manager tomorrow @ 9 AM to discuss the review she wrote about me. I received a favorable review - considered "excellent" - so I'm feeling good about how I'm doing in my work. I've had to deal with a lot of things outside of my comfort zone and as long as I'm persistent in trying to master them, I think I'm okay. Sometimes, I start a sentence and I really don't know where I'm going until I reach a conclusion. Then I think to myself, "Wow. That does make sense."

Things like that remind me of an English professor in college who didn't think I could speak. I was consistently dinged for not getting involved in the class discussions. In my "letter of recommendation," he mentioned that. He talked about how he had spoken to me about it and it was something I was going to work on, to speak more. Reading that letter now, I really question why I ever sought one from this specific professor. Great guy and all, but he thought he knew me. He didn't. I used to spend a lot of time trying to live up to his expectations and to my cooperating student teaching teacher.

This is ancient history - Fall 1991, Spring 1992 - but it bears mentioning because I am so much further now than where either of those two thought I could ever be. I have achieved so much in my career already, it's a tremendously awesome thing. I mean, without those two doubting what I was capable of achieving, who would I have to prove wrong in my life? I think we are given people in our lives that are there to question you, to doubt you, and to make you think you don't know what you're doing. Those doubts, those insecurities, they are so much more powerful to me than people that say "you can do it!" or "Way to go!" No, the ones that say, "You cannot." are my favorite. Those two were in my life for a reason.

Fast forward to 11/14/08 and I can't help but smile at the coincidence of it all. On what would have been my grandma's 100th birthday, that's when I talk to my (cool) manager about my accomplishments over the last year and my goals for the coming year.

And, to be clear, the coming year is going to be chaos. I am already, roughly, 10 weeks behind in my work. Based upon what is in my Inbox, I have 6 weeks of work. I did some trolling in our call report system and found 160 hours (or 4 weeks) of work that I need to do. Plus I have my own projects that I want to complete like changing my HTML files from a table layout to tableless. This is something I have worked on for over a year. I have ~390 files to change in my end-user RoboHelp project and 991 in my internal RoboHelp project.

On top of all of that, I talked to the lead programmer guy yesterday. We are rewriting systems in a new language and I've been asking for the UI so I can at least start to build shells for my Help topics. He said to talk to him Friday (tomorrow) as he hopes the UI is close to frozen. There are 9 systems and there's a pending due date of reaching QA (my dept) by 12/31/08. There is so much work to be done! As of right now, I'm going to open their project in Visual Studio and identify the form IDs and then create a corresponding HTML file. There are NO specs, NO requirements, and NO functioning programming. This is going by the UI and trying to figure out what is happening. I hope to begin working on it by Monday but I may not be able to do so unless I can get some of my other 10 weeks worth of projects tapered down. But, as I mentioned, there's a looming 12/31/08 date. I have 1.5 months to write doc for 9 rewritten systems. I should count how many times the word "challenge" is used in my meeting tomorrow!

I do have a sense of pride regarding the work I did this week. I solved my MOTW issue. I changed 220 links to call a .htm file whose sole purpose is to display an embedded PDF file so that IE 7 displaying RoboHelp's WebHelp on a local PC works as expected. I think the other solution - posting my help files on our server and requiring our users to have an Internet connection to access online Help is in the future. That or using the relatively new Adobe AIR format, which basically zips up the WebHelp files and creates a single .exe file. I think that would be awesome as it could, potentially, be updated through the Internet through automatic update checking. There's some things that I need to be more comfortable with - how to call it from an app, whether I like the "Mini-TOC" feature, and whether the Index works correctly when two or more topics are assigned to the same keyword - but it does have potential.

There is a lot of uncertainty in the world with the economic situation and the way people are freaking out and withdrawing from their 401(k) plans - not me - according to NPR. I hope everything works out okay. I'm starting to believe that flying to the Grand Canyon is not in the cards for 2009.