Rising to the Doom

[firstfrost]

So, due to various people being lame or miscommunicating, and some denial on my part, I ended up getting poked by the producer for Patience yesterday afternoon: the program designer had punted or vanished or fallen in a hole and wasn't answering email, so could I do the program? For Thursday? Of course "for Thursday" really means "for Tuesday" because Copytech wants two days turnaround (unless they're hosed and want three, which could be a problem). So now the program is done and to Copytech, and I've taught myself to use InDesign (which is, I have to kind of admit, a better tool for graphic layout than LaTeX is, much as I love LaTeX). But now "program designer" will haunt me until the end of my days, as my attempt to foist the task off on someone else this time was a catastrophic failure.

Comments

[kelkyag]

If you really don't want to say no to a last minute request (or fend off an early one firmly enough that they don't come back to bother you later), you could try mentoring an alternate program designer so that 1) someone else is trained and 2) you have warning if flakiness is impending.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

They did get chanaleh to do programs before, and hers was much prettier than mine was, as she is artistic and skilled, whereas I am skilled. :)

But I would be very bad at the mentoring thing. I multi-task well, but delegate exceedingly poorly. (I find it interesting to compare chenoameg's efficiencies to mine, as she doesn't have as many timelines as me, but delegates very well. So I might be faster at small projects, but she'd be running a vast empire of minions long after I exploded.)