Well then...
Yet again I find myself at a customer site trying to hide from the customer just how un-prepared we are to actually get their £250k piece of equipment working. How has this happened? It's a remarkably convoluted situation, but it is primarily due to the absurdity of having just one sensibly qualified and competent Enginer for all of the fault-finding, modification, development, process control and programming work required by a three-ish million pound-per-year turnover company. There is, after all, only one of me, and there is only so thinly I can be spread. Consequently, the particular piece of kit on this customer's site, which is a major develpment over our normal systems, was never properly developed, tested, fault-finded (found?) and made ready in the factory before it was shipped, so the customer expects to have a bit of kit that simply requires commissioning, but in actual fact, it needs finishing.
So here I am, in a hotel room, still writing code at 23:00hrs, when I should be asleep. Or even better should have finished the commission two weeks ago and be at home.
