The Olympics Again....oh the horror (Part 1)

You'd think it would be really exciting to work on the official Olympic web site for the Network Who Shall Not Be Named (henceforth called The Network). You would learn so much about the sports and about reporting on a global event. Your company and The Network would make you feel like you're a part of one of the most important events on earth. When the web site performed almost flawlessly your company would generously reward your work and The Network would gratefully flood your workplace with swag. And if you did the web site again it would be easy because everyone would know how hard it is and staff accordingly and you'd have all that documentation of how to set things up, etc.

NOTE: Widget employees that are sensitive to criticism of their company should stop reading NOW!

I'm a survivor of doing an Olympic web site for The Network and I'm watching, even as I write, my former coworkers struggle through the games that begin next week. Part 1 is about the last Olympics.

The first time it was a challenge that we proudly took on. Working with The Network is a bit like hacking your way through a jungle (take a step, get stopped, whack your way through, take a step, etc.) so setting up the hardware and software side of the site was difficult. On my side we were doing things with XML and XSLT that no one had done before.

That was cool, trying to do something really hard. Unfortunately, the company didn't want to invest much money. Oh, they hired some very high priced consultants to tell us what to do. They also fought paying on-call pay for people that were going to be....on call...for seventeen days and complained about bringing in food for people that weren't allowed to leave the building. There was no encouragement, no swag, and only threats from management and The Network.

For the eighteen days of the Olympics I worked twelve hour days (6 a.m. to 6 p.m.) five days a week, less time on the weekends, and took phone calls at night. I worked for 24 hours the first day when we anxiously watched to see if our system would actually work. I worked because I felt responsible. When I wasn't mad about the way we were being threatened instead of enouraged, I was excited.

It worked. We delivered. The site stayed up, features worked correctly, sales were correct, and results hit the web site within seconds of the event ending on live TV broadcasts. Yes, there were things that weren't perfect and we fixed them as fast as we could because we knew it was important, not because someone in Greece was yelling over the telephone. Sure the page views weren't that great but they didn't market it. As far as I was concered it was a tremendous success.

When it was all over we got....nothing. Well, we did get the hundred dollars of on call pay and the food. Yay. What about the celebration that our grateful management put on? Nope. I had to ask an executive to come and tell my group that they did a good job. The Network said...I really don't know what they said.

I left Widgets months ahead of the Olympics web site launching when we were already falling behind on our build schedule but I'm painfully aware of what's gone on. That's for the next entry a few days from now.