I love this new job, but being Day 3 of "officially" having this new assignment I came in a bit early, day 2 of the smoke tests I insisted on, because we had this big "dry run" with the whole team present and lots of integrated parts. I found a bit of a problem, well, actually the smoke test failed. Ok, it wasn't a small problem. It was a MAJOR catastrophic problem.

So I emailed the team off of the chat room we were all in because I didn't want to shame anyone thinking that well, maybe what we have on the "dry run" setup is different than our staging server. I don't want to rock the boat since I'm already a newbie. So I send out the email, and 20 minutes go by, and I hear nothing. I join the conference room to "kick off" the process and they immediately ask me and the other QE if there are any issues. WELL! I'd sat on vital blocking information for 20 minutes. I was so afraid to cry wolf again that I didn't say a word to the public and no one had seen the email. So, I wasted everyone's time.

I've had strangers tell me that my mouth gets me in trouble. I just got fired from the HOA volunteer job I had for refusing to comply with a request from another board member that I didn't think was ethical and telling him that he could do whatever he wanted including fire me, but that I'd never comply with a request I didn't believe in and I wasn't going to cooperate until I felt I was doing the right thing. It turns out with the new job I wouldn't have had time for it anyways, so luckily for me I got fired. The point is, I don't like conflict, but I certainly don't run from it. I'm a big mouth and I'll stand up for what I believe in, when I'm pretty sure I'm right. That's the issue. I defer to those who know more. I'm just learning what I know and don't know on this job. I'm still digging through the log files to find out what is important and what is not. I'm still learning how everything connects and how to prioritize the bugs and tests. So this once I didn't speak up.

The last time such a thing happened, I turned to my best friend and sang, "God is mocking us, God is mocking us, God is mocking us,..from a distance." Now, she's a believer, both of God and of Bette Midler, so she understands I meant it in the best spirit, but even you atheists have got to admit, that's pretty funny when that happens. When the mouthiest person doesn't speak up, that's Murphy's Law.

Now next time I'm going to be all hysterical pre-maturely about a bug and it won't even impact the whole group and I'll look foolish.

So, today I learned the following: If you come in early to run the smoke test on a big day and it FAILS? Don't send email. Call people, tell the group, and send it with high priority status even if you risk looking like a fool. If it could waste the time of many people if you do not? Take the risk of looking foolish.