Code Name: Nasi Lemak

Nasi Lemak Wisdom, swiped from williamnyk on Flickr.

The project that I had been working on since August last year finally went live on the 12th of October after one postponement. Truth be told, the scope was too big and the timeline too rushed to produce a good end result. And it was muddled by internal squabbles between teams, unclear requirements from users (exacerbated by indifferent business analysts on our end), some sloppy development work on our end, bad feng shui, gung ho upper management, poor dissemination and coordination by the project management office and difficulty working with a 'black box' type of technical framework. Till the final week before D-day, we were still in the dark about many things. Wasn't even sure if the production environment was ready. Anyway, they finally told us to check the parameters on Friday night and by then I wasn't even sure if Saturday was actually with live production data or just a test run. Went to the data centre on Friday afternoon and guess what? Both the front-end and the back-end wasn't up. For some reason, JDBC couldn't work on the AIX server and on the IBM iSeries. The whole thing dragged till 3:45am. Horrible troubleshooting. The security was too tight and we had no expertise on what particularly to look for. Basically our fat ass couldn't get through the door and the security team would rather open the door a bit at a time rather than open it wide then close back. Great that we managed to bring the system up on time because there was checkpoint at 4:30 am. At that time, there was a huge meeting to thresh out the issues of the previous night and decide whether to proceed or not. At the ungodly hour, I was already like a zombie. Lucky there were three rounds of eats to keep me awake-- pizza, nasi lemak and sandwiches. Surprising that one's tummy grumbles at odd hours when you're not asleep.

By 7:00 am, lots of business users were streaming in. A carnival-like atmosphere ensued. Transactions started to come in and it was chaos. The money couldn't get through. Things were timing out front, left and centre. We found some problems on our end and we found some problems on the other end. The whole floor milled till about 9:30 am where all the key users had another meeting to decide whether or not go through with it. Once again, we were given the green light. Breakfast was served but there wasn't enough food. When I got to the buffet line, I had to scrape the noodles from the bottom. :(. And while I was filling my cup with coffee, my plate fell splat on the floor! Argh! More activity went on till noon. My chance to go home. SK was nice enough to wait for me and pick me up. My car spent more than 24 hours at the Bukit Jalil Stadium car park. Luckily the tyres were still intact when I got there. Got home, showered and jumped into my bed. Was so tired and my back was stiff from all the standing and rushing around. Set my alarm for four hours sleep as I needed go in again. However, I didn't hear the alarm and only woke up at 6:30 pm! Thank goodness that my colleague and boss covered for me. Just ate hokkien mee at a neighbourhood shop. At about 9:00 pm, KH came over to see how I was doing. Damn sweet of him to do so. So I brought him out to to eat tong sui nearby. Unfortunately, it wasn't up to par and we needed to leave cause they were closing shop. Had to hop to the nearby bubble tea shop instead. Although it was just an hour, I felt refreshed after seeing him. At 11:00 am, I slept and my alarm was set for 4:00 am ... The torture continues...

P.S.: In case you're wondering about the title, my project manager commented that he never ate so much nasi lemak during a project implementation in his life.