Now it's my turn for some work

Last Friday another 4 people left Toxic. This is a continuation of a stream of people leaving because Toxic lost the last project and the customer is in shut-down mode. Most people voted with their feet as they didn't want to hang around waiting for Toxic to decide where to employ them. Even many of the contractors left early because Toxic is, well toxic.

So that has left me with a team of 0 people and all their work. Ironically the last of my team to leave used to grab all the work for himself and kept himself busy. Unfortunately that gave the project managers the impression that he knew everything to the exclusion of me. Which is why they chose him to stay until the contract is handed over. Pity for them he had other ideas because various things had pissed him off over time. Like their incompetence for example.

Anyway, I am left holding several babies. I was given the first one to work on this week but it is so badly put together it makes my head hurt. It was "cobbled together" by some fool of a contractor who could not code a video never mind a script. His solution goes like this:

start autlogon as admin
calls script2
script2 calls script3
script3 calls a .BAT file
.BAT calls script4
script4 does some magic hardware detection and the gobbles 3 registry files, but, hold on, if it's a certain model it creates a new registry file from the other one it had
.BAT continues....
....and calls some Black Magic that does things without touching the mouse
and deletes the files
and then reboots

Very elegant.

Now for the cherry on top. No-one thought to document the actual design. And the fool who put that ill-fitting jigsaw solution together has been replaced by a lovely chap. The trouble is he has an almost patholigical habit of giving people the wrong files. Bearing in mind there are 5 models of machine, each needing 3 files, and about half a dozen other files, each a possible different version and you begin to want to weep.

So it came to pass that today after finally getting the source files from the customer (as that way I know they are the real ones) I start putting the jigsaw together ready to bolt on this extra bit.
The guy, who I will call V (for version) came by and helped me a bit and then tried to take over. That's when it all went wrong because he brought HIS USB stick with him with HIS copies of the files, that were just a little different.

We tried working together and he kept wanting to run the whole solution only to see it fail as there were files all over the place and references with wrong names etc.

We finally were almost there apart from the mysterious habit of the scripts keep installing the wrong drivers. I narrowed it down to the Black Magic program. Unfortunately it was sealed in an EXE, but undeterred V was adamant that he could edit it. He tried. He failed.

At that point it was too late in the day (about 4:30 and we had to report to Midge (project mangler no 3)).

Midge asked what the score was and I was too exasperated to explain, but mis-reading this as ignorance he appeared to assume I was too stupid to understand his question and hence answer and asked V instead. V duly explained and repeated himself about 6 or 7 times. Maybe 8 because I lost count.

It was decided we go home and come in tomorrow fresh.

I came home, watched Life on Mars and found the problem about near the end, so it took maybe 30 mins. V had somehow got a version of the Black Magic I had never seen before. Even the icon was wrong....

I go to work tomorrow with a large Samurai sword.