Le plus ca change...

The last couple of days have been tough.

I was really struggling with my Global Business Environment paper.  It started off with China being really bad by buying up land in Africa to grow food and then ship it home.  Then it got bigger, reflecting all of the Chinese activities in Africa.  How crazy is that?  I had to narrow it back down to agriculture.  Needless to say, I was still working on it with mere hours to go before the deadline.  In case you're curious, China ended up being good at the end of the paper, with a caution.

While I was supposed to be working on my paper, I would take breaks and indulge in my new addiction (Farmville on Facebook) and check my email.

Imagine my shock when I received an email from one of my team members announcing that he is withdrawing from the program.  Now, 24 hours later, it isn't such a big surprise when I look back on things.  At the time, it was a bit of a shock.  Queen's invoked our team coach who scheduled a conference call with us for this morning.

That was a nice distraction from writing the paper.  I sent a note to the team member, sent another note to the team members on the Annual Report Project who would be directly impacted by the departure, and then I called the team coach. I thought he should know that we have another stress on the team in the form of someone being out of the country without a confirmed return date.  He didn't know about it (called it a double whammy), which makes me wonder if anyone at Queen's knew about the out of country situation.  Certainly I cannot do anything about whether he ends up on academic probation.  (If he misses another class weekend, that is a possibility.)  I do have to make sure that any risks incurred from a project perspective are mitigated.

Then I finished my paper.  At around 11:30pm, it hit the submit button.  May I get a "B".  Of course, an "A" would be better, but by the end of it, I didn't care anymore.

At work, one of my colleagues was finishing up his last day.  I think that actually hurt more from an emotional perspective than losing the team member at school.  Today was a weepy day for me.

We had our conference call and the gist of it was to restructure the work and get on with it.  I don't know if that made me feel any better.  Since I had already started restructuring the work for the project that I am leading, it seemed a little hollow.  I think we needed a bit more in the way of grief management.  Some of us did, anyway.

Later on in the day, I sent a note to someone leading another project to see if he was going to restructure his resources.  He said we could talk about it on Monday night.  (We have Skype calls on alternate Monday nights.)  That wasn't exactly satisfactory for me.  The person who left is the second on it and was paired up with someone to work on a section.  If resources are being reallocated, then someone will move, probably from my pairing since we are actually three people.  I don't know about the other guys, but I intend on having my work on it completed by the end of the weekend... before the Skype call on Monday.  Since I am already taking on more work for the project that I am leading, I really don't want to get reallocated on another project...

Now I am finishing up my original deliverables on the Annual Report Project so that I can start my work on my new deliverables...