FUBAR

I'm wondering how much worse things will get here before they get better.

My project sponsor was fired on Sunday. His back up was fired the Thursday before. There was no explanation of why this happened, and I found out from other people in the company, not because I was informed before hand.

Wednesday I was back in the office after being gone for two weeks. The problem child H now has the project moved under his department. He is so gleeful about this that it almost makes me sick when I talk to him. Luckily I managed to maintain a good relationship with him so the splatter hasn't hit me directly. But still. Everyone in the company who liked my project sponsor keeps asking me what happened. As if I know. I'm avoiding politics here as much as possible but people keep trying to engage me in a speculation game of what happened. At this point, I trust no one and refuse to say anything. That's in turn creating a sense of paranoia that I know something and so people have been asking me if they are going to lose their jobs. They don't believe me when I say I don't know. That's causing them to do things like stand behind my chair while I'm trying to work, speaking in Arabic, saying my name and the name of my project sponsor. If you're going to talk about me, and not in English, do it in your office.

To make matters more interesting, I'm getting criticized for things that are just insane. I was yelled at yesterday for not putting the names of my customer on the to: list of an email in the order of their importance (COO first, etc.). I was like are you god damn kidding me? A sales guy claimed to H that I was having secret meetings with other sales people behind his back (which, while also not true, is completely improbable as I haven't been in the office to have any meetings). H suggested I sit with the sales guy and talk to him to make him feel better.

So, even though I have a ton of work to do, I sat in the sales guy's office for an hour yesterday and tried to discuss his concerns with the project. It turns out, he has none. He made up his concerns to force me to talk to him. I sat there while he tried to grill me about my love life (short conversation, that one) and then he tried to force me to agree to go to dinner with him. I hate this kind of stuff. I don't want to hang out or talk to anyone here anymore. I just want to get done and go home.

H is also throwing all these road blocks in my way to continue moving the project forward. Meanwhile, since Wednesday, I've had to waste hours of my life I'll never get back briefing the new project sponsors on what we have done and what we have left to do. That's right, sponsors. Since Wednesday 3 people have taken over and then resigned as the project sponsor. I'm hoping the guy I talked to on Thursday will stick at least for a week so I can get some work done. The latest project sponsor is younger than me and has no experience in this stuff. He claimed the project was behind schedule even though we are two weeks ahead of schedule and have delivered more stuff than was required. I've been driving my team to make sure that everything is high quality so the customer can't nit pick up to death about spelling errors or whatever. The team is taking it pretty well considering everyone at the customer site is saying "why work so hard, the project is just going to be shut down".

And then yesterday, after working an hour of overtime to deliver some bullshit report to H, he smiled and said to me "Thanks, but this report doesn't matter, because as soon as you leave we're replacing your software tool with another tool. What do you think about that?" I know he was baiting me because there were some important decision makers in the room. So I said "Assuming you've done a trade off analysis that shows that tool will work for you, you need to make decisions based on the best engineering approach to your current problem. I also assume you've analyzed the cost of changing tools along with the required training. By the way, that tool isn't even on the Gartner quadrant. I assume you've checked with the vendor to make sure you'll be able to get tech support if something goes wrong, since it's not a well established company and may be lacking resources." Asshole. I smiled back at him. One of the decision makers asked if H had checked into any of the issues I had just brought up as I walked out of the room.

Only 5 weeks left. If I survive this project and get it delivered on time, with customer approval, I can do anything.