Big Money

I arrived at work today to find out the update I'd had released last night (which I'd been working on for 3 months) had half a dozen bugs. One of the underwriters stopped my on my way in the door to let me know. "Ok, let me clock in, I'll be right back." I made it half way to my desk before I realized I didn't have my laptop with me. *sigh* I'd brought it home so I could fix any bugs remotely in the morning. I got up early double checked with my contact in Albany, but of course the SF users wouldn't inform him, since they can just go straight to me. Now it's 10 AM, I could have solved this 2 hours ago and not killed productivity for the whole department, plus I have to drive back home to get my machine. I made record time and clocked in by 10:30, and knocked out the bugs one by one - half of which weren't even bugs, just misinterpretations of new features by the users. Damn, looking back on it I missed my chance to use favorite refrain of developers everywhere - "working as intended!"

I killed my whole day fixing bugs and hand holding users through the new, more automated UW system. Rough work as, well, everything that went wrong was my fault. Sort of depressing, having your mistakes laid out before you. Around 5 o'clock, I had a surprise annual review sprung on me. Surprise because we don't do annual reports in our company anymore. Apparently, we still do, just not on paper and they have no official effect. This one did. I got a raise.

A big-ish one. Not as large as the last, but seeing as instead of my expected cost of living increase (3.8%) I got more than four times that (about 16%), it certainly caught my attention.

So, big news I guess. Brightened my day. I'd been a bit worried since the other guy on my team got fired with no warning in February, and I wasn't really doing the job they brought me out for - still basically a software developer, maybe that and a project manager. Guess I've been doing alright.