Surprise!

     It was a surprise: a late-morning text from my boss, apologizing for having messed up the schedule this holiday week, when cut-and-pasting a month or more in advance.  (Like all the rest of us, he's doing three or four jobs these days.)

     "SO DOES THAT MEAN I'M WORKING?"  The automated holiday-and-vacation scheduler had confirmed my time off request last week, which usually means a Responsible Party has looked at it and given it the nod.

     "NO, YOU'RE OFF TODAY.  IT JUST WASN'T ON THE SCHEDULE SPREADSHEET."

     There's some reason, connected to the fixes put in place after a widely popular hours-recording app was hacked a year or two ago and down for months, why the time-off scheduler and the spreadsheet that shows upcoming hours and assignments can't be allowed to communicate.  It means extra busywork for the managers, and a degree of ambiguity in whether you're getting holidays and vacations off or working them.

     They used to scribble all this on a whiteboard.  You couldn't check it online -- but if we went back to the whiteboard, all we'd need to do to add that feature would be a webcam.