So, I’ve mentioned that I’m in a transitional period at work, right? It’s been messing with my mind a little bit because the responsible part of me wants to carry on, business as usual. The pragmatic part of me has been actively trying to get the new team to take care of all day-to-day things. Makes sense, right? Well, this push and pull has been at the forefront of my mind for what’s felt like an eternity. Every person that I’ve talked to about my situation has told me that I have to listen more to the pragmatic voice. After all, the new team needs to get used to the workloads that we used to handle. Now, it seems like I’ve gotten good at pawning off tasks to them. Like I mentioned in my last post, the client has pretty much kept me out of the loop. That’s a good thing. The only thing is, there’s a side effect to all of this. See, the resulting detachment has left me feeling like my skills are rusting. I’m not as confident as I used to be that I have a good grasp on the project as a whole. It’s probably all just in my head, but I can be forgiven for feeling like I have no idea what’s going on anymore.
These days, when I’m asked to investigate something, I do a cursory check for the obvious suspects, and once I have an overview I send it back with an explanation, and a statement of what needs to be changed or investigated. If the task needs more in-depth investigation, I leave it for the new team. On Friday night, on my way out, I got a request to investigate a problem that a customer was having with his personal account. I passed it to a colleague if only because I was already out the door when I received the request. I thought that would be the last I would hear of it. The following Tuesday, I was asked to have another look at the problem. It seems that no one could find anything wrong with the code and left it to user error. The only thing was, the problem could be reproduced by a customer service person using that user’s account. It was quite odd. I thought that perhaps the customer service person screwed up, but when someone I trusted was able to recreate the problem I was stumped. I pulled up the entry in the database and stared at it for a few minutes. That’s when it suddenly came to me. There was a field in the record that should have been filled in with something, which it wasn’t. Well, God, I was downright pleased with myself. I filled it in as expected and everything started working. It was amazing! At the time, I wasn’t concerning myself with the cause of why the record wasn’t correct, but I was at least comfortable that the one user could finally sign in. Honestly, it tells me that after all this time I still have the skills for this team. I’ve been around the code long enough that I can spot this kind of thing. Though, knowing all that it also kind of makes me sad that it’s all coming to an end fairly quickly, right?
*aigh*
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