Causes of manic laughter (and possibly breakdowns)

“Your admin assistant will know”.

This pretty much sums up the problem with orkplace, all the bits which were there pre-merger are “big corp” and have structures and lots of people employed in lots of jobs giving lots of capacity and people who are there just to be assistants to other people.

Enter this bit of the org, we were an aquisition, purchased for the software we write and were a small startup, these structures don’t exist but the assumption is that they do.  It is assumed that there are teams dedicated to all sorts of things, people on hand to leap on issues 24×7 and so on.

The latest fun involves some testing which has been dumped on my team and which last time sucked up weeks worth of effort for an entire section.  This time round we have been talking about it, $BOSS has been informed what the realistic timescales are and lo and behold… rather than the six weeks it will take we’ve committed to the customer that it’ll be three weeks with one person out for the entire period and during the summer holiday months….  Of course there will then come the pressure for weekend working and excessive overtime on that part of the team, so I’m starting the fight back now.

There are times when I think upper manglement are determined to either break staff so we’re short again or piss them off to the point they leave taking experience with them.