I’m sure that my posts recently have indicated my stress level…high.  Today I got an email on the way to work and the subject said “another XXX issue”.  All I’ve been doing for the last month, as I try to prepare for my trip, is resolve existing “issues”.  I’m not having much luck wrapping up a couple of them, so this message was a kick in the stomach.  I couldn’t open the attachment while I was driving.

The first thing I did when I got into the office was open it.  It was a photograph showing an error message.  Let’s just say that it looked like a software engineer put in a “funny” (not) message and forgot to remove it when we deployed the software.  If you don’t work in software engineering, you might not know that occasionally while testing the team will put in funny messages.  But, they MUST remove them before deployment.  As the program manager, I don’t support this since I know there is always a chance one could get forgotten.

I doubted that my team would have done something like this, but there I was staring at it on my screen.  I almost broke in to tears.  I didn’t need one more “issue” to deal with.

Just about that time a co-worked walked by and chuckled.  To my deepest relief, it was a joke.  Someone had mocked up the message and it was getting pass along in email.

Needless to say, I was the brunt of many more jokes today.  Once the sting wore off, I realized I still have it…my humor.