Oooooh, watch it drain.
Trails on the plush corporate carpeting, dripping from my fingers in clumps; the exuberance that I returned from indian food lunch and double diamond beer, my delight at the dahl and at the conversation with the new guy on the team - is draining and the traces left on the floor are invisible.
On the drive here this morning I formulated my plan, I decided to play by the rules on Sleepless Friday, decided to bolster my new haircut and write some pretty front end so that next time someone comes to look at my demo and Peter's, I've got somethign more to show than a button that says "bite me" and lines of obscure algorithmic code, while Peter's ASP meanderings make the managers oooh and aaah.
I didn't think it'd only take me half the morning.
Admittedly, I set out to write code that would work in Netscape 6, and instead it's only functional in IE 4 and Netscape 4, but it *does* work, and it *is* kinda pretty, now I just hafta figure out why the Netscape 6 sidebar doesn't use "document" as part of the DOM tree.
Pretty shades of blue - who woulda thunk it, eh? ;)
So I bound out to lunch, and greekboy Steve (who reminds me eerily of greekboy Steve at Discreet from attitude to life story) who's new to our team is working on the low end BLOB data management stuff that was my idea oh so many months ago.
Talking to him about where the design has gone since then started off as terribly exciting.
And then Fabrice joined the Fray.
I'm going to start calling him Leon, real soon.
Fabrice, who hates me and my linux values, who introduces me as the expert in anything useless and worth under $50, who intentionally doesn't communicate with Peter and I... Has been completely disregarding the original design that was decided on meetings and meetings ago.
The meetings with the charming american fellows (can you imagine me uttering such a sentence?) where Fabrice said nary a word (his english is too poor), and apparently retained nary a word as well, judging by today's heartbreaking discoveries.
He's avoiding the url and vcard standards we'd designed, he's giving his programmers random and unclear tasks and not telling them about the important considerations -- apparently Fabrice buys into the old concept of "you never have time to do it right, but you always have time to do it twice".
And he's completely neglected to include the design and specs we'd written up.
Granted, Fabrice's project is a static, hardcoded, C application version of what Patrice, Peter and I are working out a demo of in Java and plugin scripts - but neither his coders, nor I, can figure out what the fuck he thinks he's doing.
For fuck's sake - Patrice HAS ALREADY WRITTEN an API that writes to and from the card - why didn't he instruct Steve to at least ask Patrice about his algorithms?!?
And Fabrice must thoroughly despise the opensource world cuz the way he's designing (if you can call it designing) - every single module of theirs will not only be utterly uncompatible with Linux and UTTERLY UN-PORTABLE! - but it'll never work in Netscape either. Not even on winblows.
Unless Mozilla gets off their asses and gets Netscape 6 into better shape, but even then...
So my exuberance is lying in a puddle 'neath my chair, and the fact that I ended up against a brick wall trying to get Fabrice to give me a copy of his specs - with Peter on vacation and Philippe in Singapore, it took all the doublespeak I could muster to explain
"I'm not trying to threaten you, you incompetent fuckhead, really I'm just trying to see how in-tune we are between our sidebar version of the API and your off-the-shelf application..."
Then I looked at his diagrams, and as politely as I could (with my stomach urging me to hurl korma all over the walls the entire time) asked him why he thought "including the pattern-matching engine in the personal details database was a good idea" and proceeded to cringe when all the answers I got were "cuz your way doesn't sound any better and I like it like this".
I've got a notepad with out conversation on it, waiting for Peter to come back so I can ask him what to do.
It's not my problem really, not directly, but if I didn't care, then why am I working here?
I'm not a drone, like you - Fabrice.
First I'm going to find out if I'm wrong about this or if you're really as bad a project leader as I think, and then we're going to go back to those weekly meetings, not so that everyone can get help from each other, but so that someone can keep an eye on you.
Because NOBODY walks into a room while I'm having a conversation with a programmer, and tells me "this doesn't concern you".
Especially not if you find me threatening because I'm competent.