Fuck Rachel! Fuck her fake smile. Fuck her emails. Fuck her fake ass responses. And fuck her shitty idea of collaboration. I’m not even redacting her name. Her actual name is Rachel and I don’t care who knows it. Lemme tell you about this bitch.
If you haven’t read the other parts, go read them because there is context leading up to this. The dude they hired for the project in the organization I was collaborating with dipped. It was unclear why [REDACTED] didn’t want to do the job after 2.5 months of being on the job, but he got shuffled off to another project fairly quickly. This brought me a little bit of joy because he clearly didn’t know what he was doing and one of my team members got passed for the role that they gave him. So I felt vindicated. Regardless I tried to speak up and say, hey put my girl back in the game or let me lead the work since, ya know, we are supposed to do it together anyway. The Senior VP of the org said” that is a great idea.” I truly believe her that we were going to get the work handed to us. She said “work it out with the director”. So I met with him and told him the same thing. Let me lead the work since I already have the team and we have to cut back on spending. He said, weeeeeeeeeellllllll we already gave it to Rachel. my reply, “Who’s Rachel?”
Rachel is the newest lead on their team overseeing another technical area. It is a specific thing in software engineering that is very important to all IT solutions, and I’ll leave it at that. So, I reach out to Rachel and let her know that I’m to be overseeing the work as the subject matter expert in this other area that she is managing. She was supposed to only be managing the project from a paperwork perspective, and I was supposed to be leading the technical work, as is my role in general. So we meet and we plan, and we replan with the budget that went from $4.5M to $550k. Yeah, that’s how much they cut us back. They “reserved” the rest and were going to revisit in June to release the funds for the rest of the project. For those of you who are not keeping up, this is foreshadowing.
We planned and we had to do it quickly because [REDACTED] bounced and we were already behind schedule given that all other projects had kicked off at the start of the year and we were in the last week of February. So I put together a technical proposal and we are supposed to review it with the director of the organization. I should mention this guy is my peer, like we are at the same level. So this bitch, Rachel, decides that she is going to make some changes.
And by changes I mean revert the document completely back to its first version which was her first draft of what she wanted to do. She stated that it was because what I had put together wasn’t going to meet the direction given to “achieve something tangible within a 3 month time-frame”. Not that she would know because she is not an expert in this field, I am. I pushed back on the fact that what I proposed was necessary and achievable. She told me to “stay in touch”, and that she was going to present her original proposal. I mentioned that I was supposed to oversee the technical work, and she said that wouldn’t be necessary since she was leading the work.
She then proceeded to tell me (a director) that I was not qualified to lead the project and that she had to go through several rounds of interviews and write an essay to get her technical lead position in her organization. I said, “bless your heart” (derogatory) and that I was told by her Senior VP that I was to oversee the technical work. She decided that wasn’t going to happen, and kept insisting that I would not be doing that. My frustration growing, I decided that she can go fuck herself. I then refused to attend the other meeting, and let the Director know that Rachel didn’t want me to participate, as she had not invited me to the meeting. He saw nothing wrong with this so I said he could also go fuck himself.
Wait it gets better!