As I mentioned in Tuesday’s post, work has been staggeringly busy. I haven’t even had time to think about my organization project this past week since every single day has been over eleven hours of constant effort and focus. Well, not every day. I had one short day, since my friends where getting married and I wouldn’t miss that for anything, but that was the day that turned my “one long day to make up for one short day” plan for this week into my “every day is a long day since there’s so much that needs doing now, if not sooner” reality. Turns out something we thought wasn’t working for one specific reason actually wasn’t working for an unknown reason, which we know because I proved that the specific reason wasn’t actually at fault. Turns out the assumptions I’ve based my last three months of work on were incorrect, actually. Turns out everything we’ve been doing to “fix” the problem actually only hid it. And, as it turns out, the problem is likely more wide-spread than we thought it was but an incidental quirk of the hardware involved might have hidden it in most cases. As of yet, we still don’t know for certain what the cause is. I have some strong suspicions and a theory I’ve been able to back up a bit, but there are still problems with that theory that I haven’t figured out yet. I will continue to work on this problem all day, every day (well, I don’t expect to come in on the weekends, so hopefully only every work day) until we’ve figured it out and then, finally, we can lay this thing to rest.

Or not. It’s difficult to know since we’re also at a point in our project cycles where the solution might be to fix the existing hardware or the solution might be to develop entirely new hardware since we’re headed in that direction anyway. Complicating all that is the unfortunate fact that we just aren’t certain what hardware is at fault, so it could still wind up being a series of issues rather than the new specific thing I think is the problem after the past twelve hours of work. We just don’t know anything for sure other than that the one thing we thought was wrong actually isn’t the problem, that the secondary thing we thought might be making it worse isn’t contributing, and that this is all incredibly difficult work to do in our lab setting because of the way our lab is configured. This is why I’ve basically been given access to whatever and whoever I need to get this figured out enough that the engineers can solve it.

It’s a weird position to be in, if I’m being honest. I’m suddenly in the mix of things. Constantly the center of attention. Instead of needing to make space for my coworkers to do their stuff (which, up to this week, has been a higher priority than anything I’ve been working on), I am now expected to ask them politely to get out of my way or hand over whatever resource I need. It is a strange thing, to know I have been given permission to ask for anything and not wanting to put anyone out so I do my best to avoid asking for literally anything. I’ve gotten over my hesitancy to ask for things I need, thankfully, but I’m still struggling to actually delegate things that need to be done that I, personally, do not need to do. After all, it’s not like anyone is working on anything low priority right now. Mine just got established as the highest priority, so I’m supposed to pull people away from their four-alarm fires to work on my five-alarm fire.

I can get away with not delegating as much as I maybe should since I am riding herd on this project. I have to at least stay on top of everything that’s happening since literally no one but me understands the full scope of everything we’re working with and I need to be able to maintain that clarity of vision and complete understanding. I’ve drawn it out and explained it all half a dozen times (I’m even keeping my notes on a publicly visible whiteboard so people can check on my progress or look at the data I’m collecting), but I’m still the only person on the team who really has the full scope of this in their head.

Hopefully, once I’ve cracked this particular nut, I’ll get all kinds of awards and commendations for figuring out the true problem, finding the actual cause of five years of pain and anguish on my team, and then providing the linchpin data required for the appropriate engineers to develop a solution. It would really be nice to have my work rewarded or recognized in some way, even if it wasn’t particularly genius so much as stubborn and thorough. I bet most of the other testers would have figured this out as well, given enough time (and maybe in even less time than I did). I was just the one working on the problem and so I was the one who figured it out. My ability to keep all of this stuff untangle and sensible in my head has definitely helped, though, and I’m learning that most of my team can’t really do this like I can. Most people need to keep the pictures they draw to remember them.

Still, after so many exhausting days, I can feel myself starting to wear down. My body is aching as I write out this post and I can tell that it is going to be a struggle to get up and moving in the morning. A morning that will be disturbed by a training thing I have to attend at one of our other locations. Hopefully I can get into the office early enough to delegate a few tasks so that progress on this problem doesn’t just screech to a halt for the hour and a half to two hours that I’m gone [I got in early enough but I couldn’t find anyone, so nothing got done until I’d returned]. That said, I also hope they don’t solve this problem without me, since that would really sting. I’d feel really frustrated about that, if it happened again… Though, I guess it didn’t really happen the first time, did it? I thought my coworkers had figured out the problem I’d been working on for a few weeks, but I guess it turns out that they didn’t. The managed to coincidentally fix the actual problem while trying to solve a different problem that wasn’t an issue. I’d still rather avoid that frustration, though. I’m not exactly at my most emotionally resilient right now, thanks to all the mental and physical exhaustion.