Frantic and Rushing

It’s broken. Again.

I tested this before I deployed it. I know I did. But here I am, 8pm on a Thursday, staring at error logs while everyone else is packing up.

This is Jason’s fault.

Three weeks ago, Jason convinced the team we should just swap out the project file for the new version of the code. “It’ll take a day,” he said. “I’ve done something similar before, it’s easy.”

I argued against it. I said we should take the time to understand why the old system worked first. Map everything out, then upgrade it to the new version. Yes, it would take more time, but at least we’d understand it better.

But Andrew, our team lead, liked Jason’s timeline better.

So here I am. Staying late to fix something I didn’t even agree with. Of course “just swapping out the project file” didn’t work. And Jason left hours ago. And Andrew is expecting a progress update tomorrow. I mean, who does he think he is, making me stay late and he’s not even here to he…

Oh wait, what’s that?

Seems like there was a setting that was missed in the migration. I’ll just turn that “50” into “5.0”

Well, fuck me.

It works.

The next morning, Jason messaged me: “hey, sorry had to leave early, how’d you go with the migration?”

I told him about the fix and the weird setting that caused it.

He replied: “man, sorry about all the trouble. I really did think it would have been easier. These things always have some weird edge cases.”

And now I feel like shit.

Because Jason was just trying to help. He wasn’t thinking about credit or blame. He just wanted the thing to work, and he thought his way was the fastest path there.

I was mad because no one listened to me. Because someone else’s direction became my responsibility. Because I felt on the hook for it.

Maybe I jumped the gun here. Maybe it wasn’t so bad in the end.