Let's not do that again

Or, WTF (as in "where") have I been the last month?

Just over three or so weeks ago, I was contacted about a Drupal project. I was asked about my availability over the upcoming weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. My work schedule wasn't full (my project schedule is always full), being near to launching the most recent site I was working on, so I offered 25 hours a week for the next three weeks, ending, of course, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

Before I started working on the project (a straight forward Drupal install, with a few extra modules and a theme added onto it), before I even went to the client's location, I started sensing a bit of urgency in client.

Mike had worked with this client before, and had let me know his schedule was full. If I said yes to the project, I was on my own: I'd have access to Doyle, but not any of his hours.

Red flag, number one.

The client was building a community website for a client of theirs. When I arrived at their (my client's) offices, the sense of urgency was even more apparent. When I looked at the site specification and documentation, I started to understand why.

The original specifications were dated August 2005. The site was launching at a conference the week after Thanksgiving. There was no site to launch.

No site. No working code. No built functionality.

Worse, the specifications weren't complete: all the pages and functionality weren't defined. The CSS hadn't been done for the pages, there was not HTML to put into the theme. The workflow was also missing. And, some of the functionality was still in flux.

Doyle and I had to build a site from nothing to rocking in three weeks, and, after a week, we still didn't know what we were building.

Eventually, the specification started to solidify for parts of the site. We began building out the site, with small demos to the client, discussing over the phone. Doyle and I worked in parallel with his getting some site functionality, my getting the rest.

We soon started to realize the biggest problem with the job was feature creep. I felt a bit caught in the middle. I had agreed to install a Drupal site and fix the theme; my client was promising altered workflow and features to their client. If my client can't produce for their client, they look bad; it reflects up to me and I look bad. But, the work promised to my client's clients was going to take a lot more work than I had anticipated.

What to do?

Mike encouraged me to push back on the various parts of the project. He talked to the client (Mike having a better, long term working relationship with the client than I), mentioning the feature creep. From the client's perspective, there was no feature creep - all of these features were in the Drupal modules, those that I had agreed to install. They didn't realize the workflow and features they mocked up actually didn't exist in Drupal, and that many would need to be created.

Three weeks, 60 hours from Thanksgiving through the Sunday after Thanksgiving, 3 missed parties, 5 nights of missed ultimate, 4 stressed lunches, a dozen dinners left early, five friends blown off, two clients potentially lost, one potential client lost, and three weeks of butt-numbing work later, the site launched on the Monday after Thankgiving.

Just in time for me to get on a plane and fly out to Colorado to scramble with projects for another client. Good lord, how I hate heading to meetings, projects, appointments unprepared. Hate it.

I think I recovered with that client. At least I hope I did. I'm not sure any more. With four weeks of seriously hard work, and desperately missing Kris, I have to say I haven't worked this hard in a long, long, long time. My hips show it, too. I can't sit any longer. It hurts to sit. What has this world come to when sitting down hurts?

So, yeah, am I a little wiser after this? Maybe a little bit. I know how hard I can work. I know that Kris gets annoyed when his four days of vacation are spent by himself because his wife is off sitting in a corner wiggling her fingers in front of a computer for 15 hour days. I know that I really can't stand practically losing a dozen friends because I can't head out for the Thursday night drink-fest, or meet up with them for communal dinner, or throw with them, or go see a movie with them. I know that this site works only if I put time into it, and working too long each day means there's really nothing to put into it, which sucks (hey, sat on my ass for 15 hours today! got lots done for someone else (again!)). I know that I should run away from a client who, when told the functionality hasn't been added to the site yet, says, "Sure it has, look at this." pointing to a static, mock-up web page that's supposed to do fourteen things after I'm done with it - a page I had never seen before.

And I know that when the person I think works too hard is telling me, "You work too hard," it's time to stop, close the laptop, and go play ultimate.

So, enough of that. Let's not do that again, okay?