Not my manager then
I technically belong to the guy who hired me last May, and still do until this reorg is officially announced. Why should I have told someone who wasn't my manager I was taking a day off, let alone ask for permission, when I received it from my official manager in the beginning of November? He also stated that he would let her know through the weekly managerial staff meeting, when things like this are covered - but he forgot. You don't want to go around asking your boss if he remembered to do something - might make him feel like you're putting him on the spot. Finally, I ran the day off past the team lead/contractor guy in late October, because he was the guy giving me my assignments, and he saw no problem with the scheduling.
Now, things are getting worse. Received an assignment late Wednesday evening; meeting was scheduled at 4:30, but didn't start until 6 - her other meetings ran late. I had to stick around later than desired. It's due in production Friday morning. Involves an area of the system I hadn't been into yet, so I go to the team lead/contractor guy saying "Here are my thoughts on this, your opinion?" since he's the author of the program. He replies "This would require a major change in the program, at least 2 days of rewriting. Then, I'd need at least a week to thoroughly test it". I point out the due date (roughly 36 hours) and he says "There's a down and dirty way to go around it, but it involves another team making changes to their database and we'll need her approval on it. but we'd make the deadline easily". Go back to her office - she left for the night. So I send an email detailing our proposal and go home.
This morning she's in meetings, so I do another follow-up email. Ditto for after lunchtime. I send another email and begin to worry. At 2:30 I send another email; no response. I check with the main guy on the other team to see if it really is an easy database change and can he do it before Friday morning. He says, "It would take around 30 minutes, but I could do it for you if she approves it". (He's like me: officially reports to a boss but has been working on her team for the past few months). So after that I head over to her office to discover she's gone home for the day; doctor's appointment. Now I'm getting the feeling I'll be the taffy in the taffy pull on this one.
If she doesn't approve the other team's database changes first thing tomorrow morning, there's no way it will be in production by Friday. In this instance, her "hands off" could bite me.
