Thank God That Week's Over

Among several bad events last week at work was the Feature Lead meeting that a couple of project managers crashed (or were invited to, depending on who you talk to) in order to talk about a project-related issue. There'd be nothing wrong with that except that we, the Feature Leads, have been down that path before, and had our weekly meetings co-opted out from under us in the past by a flood of people who thought, "Fantastic! The Feature Leads are all together in one meeting room, so now's my chance to talk to them about ______!" After it got completely out of control a few months back, it came up in our Retrospective and we agreed, unanimously, to restrict this one hour each week to topics that we want to talk about, related to the job of being a Feature Lead, not the current events on a particular project. As someone put it at the time: "we spend the other 36.5+ hours of the week doing project stuff.. this is the one hour for us!"

Anyway, I shut down the project manager who wanted to present something/gather some info from us, and suggested they set up another meeting for their topic, or send an e-mail, or otherwise find a solution that didn't involve stealing time from our Feature Lead meeting. At which point it got ugly, of course ("But it's only a few minutes!" "Can't you make an exception?" "You're being unreasonable!"). It didn't seem to matter that we weren't prepared to answer their questions anyway (no one had told us they were coming), that we already had our own agenda, that less than half of the Feature Leads were there, or anything else that might've indicated what a misguided idea it was. Eventually I prevailed, after repeating "This is not the meeting for that" about a dozen times, but feelings were hurt in the process, and the individuals involved felt it necessary to escalate the matter to my boss. Since one of them was a friend of mine, that's probably ruined that particular relationship for me, since I think behaviour like that - going over someone's head, instead of dealing with them directly - is among the worst workplace politics imaginable. More than anything else, that event has me thinking that maybe it's time to move on, or possibly take a long break. If I can't even enjoy working with my friends, what the Hell's the point? It's not like Vicki and I need the money desperately enough to put myself through bullshit like that on a regular basis.