Next round?
I got so much done yesterday and last night (working until 1:30) on W’s project that I let myself ’sleep in’ an extra 20 minutes or so this morning. I was just flying through things last night, it was incredible! But then today I had a terrible time getting rolling. Quite frustrating.
Lately I’ve also gotten some more details on the next steps from W in an email. I got the email a couple day ago, but since it didn’t have any impact on what I’ve been working on I never looked through the attached documents. So today, while I was having a rough time getting anything done, I though it was time to take a look. Oh, disaster!
Nothing that a 45 minute phone call didn’t solve (or at least solve for now) — and hey, 45 minutes is an extremely brief meeting with W. Extremely brief.
The problem was, again, that W ended up confusing themselves after our previous meeting. They suffered a relapse on two topics. One of which we had been over once, one of which we had been over three times. So this was at the same time a second and fourth iteration. Still keeping our average of third time’s the charm…. But this was a particularly frustrating call, because the last time I had gone over these topics wasn’t just a conference call, it was a full blown dress-up and sit-down-at-a-meeting-site-with-them kind of discussion. And it lasted 2.5 hours. Most of which was spent covered these same two fairly basic topics.
I won’t go over the specifics, because my avoiding the use of specific terms will no doubt make things seem much more complicated. But here’s the gist of our discussion today:
Me: If you remember last time, we discussed that the only way we can organize these is if we can do it like B. So we can’t arrange these like A, as you proposed in your outline.
W: Oh ok, I see what you mean. Well, how about if we did them like A?
Me: Well, that’s exactly what I was just talking about, we can’t do them like A.
W: Well, what about like A?
Me: That isn’t really any different. We can’t do it like that.
W: I don’t understand, why can’t we do A?
And if you think 45 minutes of that is fun…well, I’d like you to be available next Wednesday to act as translator when we have our next meeting.
Some of it was just ridiculous. Okay, now much of the site is arranged in categories and subcategories. One part of the site lists these same categories as options in response to a question in a form, so when I’m storing the category names in the database I’m storing them with multiple names. The first name is used in the site navigation. The second name is used in the form. The idea is that they have the option to change the way the catagory name is phrased so that it can better reflect the question it will be answering in the form. So part of what they were giving me was the names for the categories, rephrased as answers to the questions. Last time we had discussed this, I stressed the importance of these having a 1-to-1 relationship, since the actual category/answer is being pulled from the same database row, and the only difference is the verbage that is displayed. We went over this for about an hour last time. But I still got this in the conversation today:
Me: Now remember we had discussed that these answers are on a 1-to-1 relationship with the categories. Here’s one of the problem spots, you have categories X, I, and Z here, but you only have one answer here.
W: Yes, we decided that the one answer covered all three categories, so we left the other two out.
Me: Well, that’s not a 1-to-1 relationship. That’s a 3-to-1 relationship.
W: I don’t understand….
It was aggravating, to say the least.