In a better place today…

Today started off with a division meeting that has already been recounted in a few other blog posts, so I won’t bemoan it too much. It was the same drivel that we have heard before from a different third party company that the management appears to trust over their own employees.

The only thing I can really say about their plans is that they are ambitious and need to take place above the troop level. But that’s OK, we’ll let them do their thing.

I have to reflect similar sentiment to … I’m really grateful to have coworkers that I also consider good friends. It is nice to be able to have an environment where the pretense can be dropped and office stuff discussed directly for what it is.

As for the negativity issue… I agree that the situation is negative and unfavorable, however the last week or so I’ve been letting it get the best of me. While today’s division meeting was more of the same, I didn’t get the overwhelming sense of frustration and dread that I got last week when dealing with my process partners.

I felt like I was able to offer some measure of constructive feedback to give to the team that is leading the charge with this third party place, and it always helps my frustration level when I am able to formulate my concerns in such a way that they can be used to affect the situation.

As many of you know, Thursday is my annual PDP. I’m somewhat keyed up to argue my point for a 2 rating, however I’m hoping it won’t come to that. I know that Sharon sometimes tends to sandbag ratings a little bit to make it seem like she’s doing you a favor and she has been telling me 3A all year so far. My secret hope is that I just walk in there and she decides to give me a 2.

I asked her back in November what it would take to get a 2, and she said that if I got one more big project out of the way between then and now we could talk about it. My leading argument there will consist of the Regression Testing project. That application that we built to run scripts for CWI has been an incredible undertaking and we’ve been able to get an end-to-end test for every message that CWI can accept. I think that’s a big enough project, considering this feat was basically impossible to have in a repeatable state before January.

*whew*. That was a mouthful. We’ll boil that down to “I’m holding out hope for a good rating on Thursday.” The End. 🙂