Well, I am making this working for da man a self-improvement exercise. Things that I think that got my semi-fired from last consulting gig are ones that I am really concentrating on – especially being a leader. I think that is what my old job wanted and I didn’t deliver. So this time, I am putting myself out there. I am doing it in other areas as well, if I feel uncomfortable in a situation my old self would have just ignored it but now I am heading my fears head on. And things are going well.

Well, they were until earlier this week. I arrive at a client pitch on the opposite coast this past Monday after working my butt off to get our system working correctly. I put together a great presentation that everyone loved and got all the client’s expectations represented in the software. So my boss takes a look at the system late the night before the pitch to check out the work. So he logs on and he gets SYSTEM ERROR. I tell him to try again. Again SYSTEM ERROR. I am huh? It was working last night. So my stomach is doing backflips and I call the tech person and ask what went wrong. We find out that someone change a teeny tiny bit of code that effed everything else up. They say they’ll have working by morning. I tell them we have a presentation at 9am so it has to be working.

So I try to sleep around 2 am. Ha! I never got a wink of sleep. I was trying to tell myself Buddhaly things like “It doesn’t matter in the great scheme of things- if you fail, you fail” or “It is in the hands of God” (well actually it was in the hands of Doug, the developer. But what is the anagram of Doug? “U GOD.” Irony? Deliciously so). I finally get out of non-sleep around 6 am, look at my email and Doug says everything is AOK so I log on to the system and hold my breath and…. SYSTEM ERROR. I should have worn Depends.  I call the Doug and he says he’ll try and get working by 9am.

We go into the presentation not knowing if it would work. Each time my boss would click the next page, I would close my eyes and say a little prayer.

Well, my prayers were answered because Doug in the Highest came thru and everything worked beautifully. The clients were really pleased. But do you know what they were most impressed by? My presentation. They told that to my boss’s boss’s boss. Who shook my hand. Again I tried to be Buddhaly and not let the praise matter much. But it sure helped settle parts of my body that were in earlier revolt.

So I have been up and way down and way up this past week. But I look back and see what this week really was: a week in the life of a servant of Doug. Thanks, Doug I praise thee. Just don’t fuck things up again or I’ll have beezelbub slap you next time.