It's easy to get caught up in yourself. After all, there's no one you spend more time with. But, once in a while, stop to consider how your actions are affecting those around you -- at work, at home, with friends, wherever. And I'm not talking about the obvious here (if I kick you in the shin really hard, you'll have to go to the doctor-type obvious). No, I'm talking about the more subtle interactions. Because you'd be amazed how easily one small mistake on your part can ruin another person's day entirely.
Last night, we had a goal in mind. One of my team members was going to handle some hardware installation, then I was going to take over and do some of the software-side. This is client-affecting, so our work has to be done in the middle of the night. He was supposed to start around 8:30 PM, then call me when he was done. I figured his part would be about 3-4 hours of work, between everything that had to be done and adding in a gap for the inevitable "Something went wrong" phase, and I wanted to leave myself at least 3 hours to finish up, with a drop-dead time of 6 AM. This leaves plenty of time to work with, and we had a reasonably speedy retreat plan, in case something we didn't expect came up or we couldn't finish in time.
So, I prepared myself for the late night ahead. Left a little early, grabbed a coffee on the way home, switched into something a little more comfortable than my stuffy work clothes, and set in for the wait. I gave him a call around 9:30 to see how things were going, only to find he'd got side-tracked and hadn't even left yet. That was fine, there was still plenty of time to work with. I finished up my evening's browsing (yay, Flickr!) and fired up the xbox for some nice distraction. After a few more hours (around 1), I gave him another call. He'd run into an issue with something or the other, but he'd worked through that and was ready to really get rolling. By this time, I figured we wouldn't have enough time for him to finish his part and for me to finish my part. So, I told him to do his part and execute our rollback plan, and to call me if he ran into anything else. He finished that up a little before 4 this morning. This means we did accomplish something, but not everything we'd hoped for.
So, what was the mistake? Well, the first mistake was in getting side-tracked. This cost us a good hour and a half or so, which would have been the difference between finishing his part and finishing my part. The second was in not calling me to let me know he'd run into a problem. This one doesn't affect the times any (he'd still have to work around the issue, whether he'd called me or not), but it does mean that I could have known staying up longer was a likely pointless activity, only to be repeated the next night. Maybe I should have called again around 11 or 12, but I was trusting him at least until my "expected time" was up.
But, that's fine, right? Just a part of the job? Well, yes, that's why I'm not angry, and why I'm writing a blog nearly no one will read as opposed to bringing it up in front of the office. I know it made him feel awful, because he hates to fail, living in constant fear that he isn't good enough (if he could get over that, he'd soar), and that's without knowing how it affected me. I have been sacrificing sleep for the past month and a half already, plus I have challenged myself to limit my coffee trips this year. So, I've burned sleep and wasted a coffee run.
But, as I said, he feels bad enough already, telling him this won't actually help anything. Neither will telling the rest of the office. But I want to vent, and this seems like a good lesson to learn -- every once in a while, look at how your actions affect those around you. See if there's anything you could have done different, then use that understanding to guide your actions in the future. I just hope I can live up to these words I've written.
Subscribe