I was out taking a walk around the block a week ago Friday and turning the past day’s activities at work involving “The Client Who Shall Remain Nameless” (hereafter simply “TCWSRN”) and I was feeling uneasy. We were supposed to be running a series of jobs that were supposed to fix a data corruption issue caused when one of our India guys overlooked some code that, well, shouldn’t have been overlooked. The data corruption issue had set our main project back a week – instead of having everything (and I do mean everything) fixed and the project finally closed down by the second week of May, we were now looking at a mid-May timeframe at a minimum. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that, in their haste to make things right, the India guys were not accounting for a whole bunch of data that was still going to need fixing. I came in from my walk and fired off an e-mail expressing my concerns. My guy wrote back almost immediately assuring me they had identified and were fixing all of the corrupted data; he even sent me an example of one of the accounts being corrected to prove it.

On Wednesday, one of the users at “TCWSRN” called me up and told me she found a whole bunch of stuff that appeared to still be corrupted. I asked my India guys to recheck their logic, and sure enough, what had made me so uneasy during my Friday night walk turned out to be correct. Even worse, the original issue ended up revealing an even bigger issue involving the 3rd party software vendor our project is involved with, and they found a major issue with their own software. So another week goes into the books and all hopes of the project being completed by mid-May are blown clear out of the water. We’re now six months – six months! – into this project, everyone is pissed at each other and tired of working long days on a project where the goalposts seem to be moving further away with each passing day.

It would be nice in this kind of environment to simply get away and go hit balls at the range, but I’m afraid I did something really bad to my back during my range session a week ago. The muscle relaxants, hot baths, and Tylenols haven’t made much of a difference; today it was back to spasming whenever I tried to bend over for anything. So on Monday I’m going to call my primary quack for an appointment and see what he thinks – perhaps a MRI is in order. I was hoping to start back at the gym this past week but my back won’t let me do anything except stand up, walk around, and sit down. And the same holds true for golf – right now I can’t even bend over to putt, let alone swing a club.

So that’s basically it: a never-ending, mega-stressful work project that won’t relent even for a day, and a back that won’t let me do anything but gingerly take a walk around the neighborhood. Last night I dreamed I was laid off and standing on a balcony overlooking Santa Fe shrouded in snow and fog – the second time I’d had such a dream. I woke up wishing I could go back there, but there were four straight hours of meetings ahead of me that included a shouting match with my boss. It’s not much of an existence right now, but it won’t last forever: it’s hard to “TCWSRN” putting up with this situation for another month. Either things will be fixed by the end of May, or we’ll all be tossed out, fired, or both. Maybe by then I’ll know what’s wrong with my back, and perhaps by then it might even start feeling better.

But one thing’s for sure: until one or the other changes, in one way or another, it’s life on hold.