you either do or do not. Sometimes we get set up to fail no matter what we do. Just look at the Sunday Dilbert strip for this week. The PHB tells Dilbert to upgrade all servers by Tuesday, Dilbert says he needs at least a month to do the upgrades, so the PHB summons Kronos for Time Management who knocks out the PHB and then says that he will wake up and think that Dilbert is a weasle and the PHB will ask for status reports. Sometimes you just cannot win because your superiors have no clue what it takes to get the f*cking job done. They want it done in days, not months. Upgrade from NT 4.0 to Windows 2000, upgrade from SQL Server 6.5 to SQL Server 2000, upgrade from IIS 3.0 to IIS 5.0 and convert all the ASP pages by hand that won't work on the new version, upgrade all the custom VB programs to use the new server technology because they are going to break anyway. There just isn't a "magic button" we can press to get it done in a few days. No coin to flip either to tell us that we can do it.

The same with upgrading all the VB programs I have worked on in the past four years to work with Windows 2000 and Office 2000. Can't be done in days, takes months. But the PHBs don't know that, they think all I have to do is just recompile. They have no idea that the Word object changed from Office 97 to Office 2000, and that I'll have to research it on msdn.microsoft.com and make some changes to it to get it to work. That issues will pop up like Word 2000 hanging after I enter a lot of data into bookmarks, print out the template, and then close out a template, that Microsoft is aware of the issue and is working to fix it on the next service pack, whenever it comes out. Everything I tried to get around the problem had failed. But they still want me to fix it! If I disable the closing of the template, and just let the user close it, then nothing locks up. If I don't close it and leave it open, then nothing locks up. What apparently locks up is the Word menu, and if the user minimized and maximized, the menu is restored to normal operations. This issue was not there in Word 97 on 95/NT. If they only knew the walls I had to face, the things I had to do to get around them, and the lack of help that was there from my coworkers to get around those walls, they would have understood why it took so long to get the stupid program to work. Still I got it working before the Windows 2000/ Office 2000 migration was done by the rest of IT.