Maybe I'm just spoiled - my new calling in PTSTC

Maybe I'm just spoiled by all of the technology that I see and use around me, I work in the technology field after all. Words like RSS, social networking, blogs, email, text messaging, and others are a part of the daily vocabulary where I am each day. And when I get home at night, I get the time to catch up on all of the blogs, feeds, social network site activity, etc. (after the kids are asleep of course).

So, now that my older daughter is beginning pre-k and we have gotten a taste of how her new school works and especially the private minibus system chosen to bring her to and from school each day, I am painfully aware of how spoiled I am with the technology I have at my fingertips.

What DO they have? Two phone lines ( I give them credit for having more than one). No voicemail, no message system to let you know if your child's bus is delayed or has forgotten you entirely (like what happened to us a few times this week). They put you on hold forever and you're stuck there waiting to see when your kid will get picked up, held completely hostage to the phone attendant lady.

What DON'T they have? No website, no email, no efficient communication system. It's hard to even find them on Yellowpages.com or Google Local, sometimes I wonder if they even exist.

What's my perfect dream scenario? The bus company sends me an email the night before reminding me that my daughter's bus pickup will be the following morning at 8:45 am. This is good to do, especially in the first week when things are hectic and the route is getting figured out. This probably won't be necessary every day of the schoolyear, maybe just reminders when the bus service isn't running, etc. Then, the morning of the pickup, I would like a text message sent to my phone to alert me if the bus is behind schedule. I would like to know approximate location, which kid is getting picked up, and how many more need to get picked up before they come for mine. I would like to be able to go to a website and see a live map with the bus on it, and each pickup pinned and the order that the bus will go to them (and it would be extra nice to have the pin label show the name of the family, so that I can call that home to introduce myself and my daughter and help start a bus-riders playgroup).

This is really not so much to ask, right? If I wasn't rushing off to get my younger daughter to daycare and then myself to work, I probably wouldn't mind sitting around dealing with all of the uncertainty of it. But, since I am... then I do. Maybe this is a new career calling - Private Transportation Service Technology Consulting (PTSTC).

Ultimately I will probably cancel the bus service and use the good 'ol MTA and the Coney Island bound F train to get my daughter to school, atleast then I will have more control over when we come and go and it will be nice to see her classmates and teachers each morning. Then I won't have to feel so much in the dark ages when working with these bus people, and guilty about demanding so much more of them.

Quick Decisions, in a Software Release and on the Staten Island Expressway

Caution: If you have a weak stomach and don’t like reading about baby puke and quick project decisions, you might not want to continue reading.

So, I guess my 18 month old daughter doesn’t like my driving. Since we don’t own a car and just rent a few times a year, her body probably isn’t prepared for the shock of it all. Regardless of how and why it happened, she had an unfortunate up-chuck while we were just slowing down in a huge mass of weekend traffic on our way back through Staten Island this past Sunday night. It was quite the event too… anyone who’s seen Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” can picture a similar scene. So, we’re stuck in the car with a wailing puke-stained baby and a 3 year old who keeps yelling, “stop crying, you make me sad!”

What to do? Do we try to pull over on the lack of a shoulder lane and try to change her into clean clothes? Do we pull off at an exit and see if we can find somewhere to stop and clean her up? Do we just try to keep driving and see how quickly we can get back to Brooklyn (granted, this is New York traffic on a Sunday night in June, seems like everyone left the city for the weekend and they’re all coming back now).

As I was weighing my options, I was reminded of similar situations that I’m in when I am managing software releases for my company. (Ok, so maybe I really didn’t drift off to such thoughts while in such a stressful predicament in the car, but it sounds funny so I’ll tell the story this way).

Our last large new feature launch was in the beginning of May, and we do regular bug releases and small feature launches. Inevitably things will go wrong, regardless of the amount of testing we do while on our QA and staging sites, there’s always something we find when we put the new work live. This can cause varying levels of panic, especially when it’s late at night and our project team wants to go home, or its early morning and we’re trying to finish up before our clients come into the office and want to start using their websites. When these things happen, we have a few different options –

1. Put a programmer on it ASAP and see if this new issue can be resolved and tested quickly and hope that no new related problems are created by the changes.

2. Roll-back the entire release and try again the next day, after spending time working on the new issue and resolving on the test sites.

3. Leave the issue on the live site, make the client aware of the issue and work on getting the fix thoroughly tested and live within the next couple of days.

It all depends on the severity of the issue, but what I can always count on is a project team looking to me to make the decision. I don’t always like making quick decisions, but I know it’s my job in these situations and I know my team is looking to me to make the call. It’s almost funny how much they count on me, on different occasions the programmers or the QA team and even the more senior members of the staff have shied away from making crucial decisions when it comes to software releases and potential impact on our clients. It’s as if nobody wants to be responsible if the decision made sends us into the deep dark sea, they’d prefer I be responsible and as the manager go down with my sinking ship. So far so good…we haven’t sunk yet. I wouldn’t call myself caption of the year, but we’ve been floating along somehow. This part of the job can keep things exciting, and terrifying at the same time.

So, what did we do with the sad sick baby in the car? We kept on driving, opened the windows up all the way to keep the smell from making me sick myself, and gave her a bottle of water. The bottle actually made her very happy, and within maybe 20 minutes she was calm and maybe even forgot that she was covered with slop. We figured since it was already late and she was tired, better to try to just get her home than risk getting stuck in an even worse crowd of traffic. We eventually got out of Staten Island and were able to get home to Brooklyn to get everyone hosed down. I was glad my husband and I (yes, he helped in the decision making, too) had decided not to stop because once I had started to clean the crime scene I found that it was a lot worse than her clothes, even in clean clothes she would have been sitting in a stink and gotten dirty all over again. Today she’s clean and happy and hopefully has forgotten the whole thing.

And can I even try to remember the show-stopping bug that plagued my project team the last time we did a release? Barely…