Don't trade your health for the mission.
--a development maxim
You know we don't give out medals for martyrs around here.
--Rusty, our COO
~~~
This project just might kill me:
-My head hurts (my first hangover in weeks, due to two [2] G&Ts, due to project)
-My nerves are shot and I have to restrain myself from snapping at my lovely understanding boss (v. bad career move)
-My social life has been sharply curtailed (working on weekends, crew taking up spare time, see 'hangover').
-I went home sick on Weds. due to a huge infection, spent the better part of the morning in urgent care, and
worked the rest of the afternoon.
Add to that my severe discomfort from the baking heat and the thick smoke from the eleventy-billion wildfires engulfing the state, and poof! Bye-bye to my daily run. So to cap it all off, my recently whittled midsection has gone all soft again. Fucking
hell.
So, quickly, the backstory. I'm heading up a donor management database conversion project at work. Since we're such a tiny young org, up until now we've stored our donor data - contact info, notes, financial information, prospect ratings, etc - on a pastiche of databases and Excel spreadsheets all cobbled together. John Q. Donor might have information about him stored on a half-dozen Excel sheets, in our old database, in QuickBooks, and other places we might know nothing about.
So we bought a new database, made just for not-for-profits, that would store all the data on each donor in one centralized place. Hurrah!
The problem: we had to get our old data into the new system. Which meant all that dirty, misspelled, unformatted, partial, gross data had to get boiled, strained, distilled, pressed, folded, and squeezed into the columns of an Uber-Spreadsheet, perfectly mapped for a lovely quick upload into the new system.
I hope you can get past the thick smearing of sarcasm to get at how a) mind-numbingly boring it is to clean data, and b) how easy it would be for something to go wrong. Hello, human error!
It's been about four months since I've started the project. My boss (quite pragmatically) hired a consultant to help me out, a Type-A five-foot-nothin' whirlwind of gray-haired no-nonsense who has been equally overwhelming and indispensable and humbling. We make a good team. We have gotten a huge amount accomplished over the past four months, and now, we are so close to being done, I can
taste it.
But some shit always happens. At this point the setbacks are not major, and they last about a day or two. But
mon dieu. It's such a psychological battle at this point to maintain focus, to resist apathy, to resist the urge to scream "FUCK IT!!" and to disappear to a bar to begin work on redeveloping my tolerance to hard A. This ain't school no' mo'. So even though every fiber of my being is crying out for this project to be done so I can take next Friday off, that may not happen. I
will get time off. And I'll enjoy that time off
mucho mas mejor when I know that the project is done and that I didn't stint on an inch of it.
And when that happens, my headache will go away, I'll have a fantastic project to put on my resume, my org will be able to run all kinds of super-detailed donor reports, I'll be able to enjoy more time with the BF, start partying again, and entertaining peeps in my new gingerbread cabin in the redwoods.
That will happen when it happens. As for now, back to my afternoon Excel massage.
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