Last year around this time i was part of the ESA product team in cogni. I was working in the timesheet module and remembered today the most screwing incident that happened in timesheet and thought of writing it here

In IT time is money and all the clients are billed with respect to the amount of time entered by employees in a timesheet. The sheet is approved by the manager for project hours and by HR for vacation hours before submitting to the client for final billing.

Some how that day there was a major bug (email me if you wanna know what it was ) in the system.All timesheets were getting automatically approved .

To fix the bug we had to delete all the entered timesheet and then automate the resubmission process. My task was to take care of automation of resubmission process and i remember my routine was something like this.

Thurday 12:30 pm : Total panic in meeting room , people in hyperactive state (obv coz timesheets getting auto approved).

Thursday 1:40 pm : I am told i have to write the auto submission process (the way i want to) and in as much time as i want , but it should be ready by 6:30 pm (common dialog in IT industry)

Thursday 6:45 pm : I am done with writing the patch, and then they review my code and say i need 2 rewrite it to make it run more efficiently  (they ( cant take names  here ) say it was taking too much time to run))

Thursday 7:30 pm : Morale down , totally irritated coz nobody gave proper instructions before starting the work and they expect me to redo. I start the redo process from scratch.

Thursday 11:20 pm : dinner of  1 sandwich and glass of juice and back to work

Friday 1:20 am : totally exhausted but loads of work remaining.

Friday 4:30 am : I need some help from DBA who are in US when i call them , they say its time for them 2 leave office as its their end of day (onsite people aren’t supposed to work overtime )

Friday 5:30 am : I leave for home , on the way 5 dogs chase me , thankfully my bikes faster than them

Friday 9:00 am : back in office , resume the work

Friday 6:00 pm : codes reviewed and passed. After the big shots made me do all the changes , there was again hardly any change / improvement in the performance. (but u cant ever say no to bigshot egos ).

Friday 7:30 pm : the code is run, will continue running till morning

Saturday 12:45 am : go out with a dedicated colleague who;s giving me moral support and we have dinner of eggs bread and juice.

Saturday 5:00 am : Codes still running, me and my colleague playing cricket with managers two stress balls (they always need 2 (one is not enuf ))

Saturday 7:30 am : I leave office, my task is accomplished.

Monday 11:30 am : I have to give a detailed explanation why i am late in office, at 10:45 am and not by 10:00 am.

Lesson learned: “In the corporate there arent any friends. People will use you to the maximum and will be with you till the time they need something from you. “

…. screw or get screwed .