Getting a little tired of hearing about the “right” way to protest SCOTUS, and I can’t help but notice that it’s mostly coming from white men who have never experienced the slightest inconvenience from their government. Meanwhile in Sri Lanka, they’re burning that motherfucker down. I think the 5 folks who are poised to strip the civil rights of over half the country can deal with folks telling them they suck.

Also, there was a twitter post asking people to SIGN UP FOR A PROTEST. DO. NOT. DO. THIS. Even if they were just trying to get a headcount, even if they were just trying to figure out if everyone interested was a real person. DO. NOT. DO. THIS. Because, now, they have a list. And the cops know they have a list.

In more mundane shit, I had to go ten rounds with my folks in the Philippines about what I have been tasked with and the total hours available in the month of May… Starting with me saying “I’ll need at least half a day to put together this demo, an hour won’t be enough” being interpreted as “I am going to put together a demo that will last 4 hours.” (Dear god no, I would not subject anyone to a 4 hour demo.) Got that cleared up and then we had to sort out the fact that I have enough work to last me until September right now. This is the HUGE hazard of being tasked by no less than three people and they’re trying to plot things down to the day vs. just looking at how much time is left in the month.

The spreadsheet they have is split among three tabs and has my shit interspersed with my other US partner in crime and it’s a mess, and I just added a tab showing “This is all my shit to do, this is how many hours I have in each month” so they can see my tasking & availability all in one shot. The long and short is “too much tasking and not enough time, please stop assigning things to me right now.”

And even then, after spending the better part of an hour meeting with one of the leads going “You can see, this will not work, right?” She was still, “Well, you can start X today and finish tomorrow, right?” Not when I am getting dragged into client issues left and right, and yesterday was one of those days. Just tell me when things need to be done by and let me take it from there, stop trying to manage it down to what gets done in any given day – especially given that any given day, 5 minutes into testing I find a bug and that task goes out the window while we wait for dev.

I’ve been doing this job for over 2 years now, the fact that I am underwater is not because I can’t do my job, it’s because we’ve been crushed with work. And I’m sure our main team lead is pissed that he overcommitted the team for May and I’m pointing it out. And it’s not just me, all you have to do is look at our tracking system where we have “capacity vs. work” plotted out and it’s all fucking red – I’m not spilling any secrets here.

And of course, the lead I met with yesterday was, “Maybe we need to meet weekly to go over what’s been assigned” – no, another meeting isn’t going to fix this – that is why I’m hoping my “all my shit in a single convenient view” tab will let them see where things are capacity wise without losing yet another hour to a meeting. I’ve been wanting to fix that damn spreadsheet for ages now, I’m glad I took the 10 minutes to add that tab.

Life is very weird. Shit is falling apart and we’re arguing the “right” way to express our displeasure while also making spreadsheet tabs and remembering to get the bins out.

So, time to go make the money to give to mutual aid and take a moment to tell my Senators to get their shit together (I already yelled at them for putting SCOTUS’ comfort over ours) and tell the DNC to get fucked if they ask for money again.

Hang in there.