Somebody needs to find out how they cured this swordfish

Just a couple days ago, I figured the swordfish was dead meat. Because of the trial schedule, I was pretty sure that Wednesday was when this project would look like this:

On the deck, dead meat, no life left. That didn't happen. So I figured maybe they would let us finish the week, which still meant the project was getting last rites:

Yeah, couldn't figure out how to Photoshop a swordfish into that picture, but you get the idea. In any event, I was sure today was the day I would get fired..

Nope. The firm came up with what looks like about two more weeks worth of work. It is meaningless make-work, so yeah, they are padding, featherbedding and milking this project for every nickel they can get out of it, but it is project-extending work nonetheless. Mostly, I think, they want to keep a fire brigade around, because this is litigation and you never know when a hand grenade is going to go off in a bucket of shit. When that happens, you really want some folks around to break out the mops. Once the main opportunities for that sort of clusterfuck pass, this project will be toast. In the meantime, giving us busy-work is better than paying us to do nothing, I suppose. What that means is that the swordfish suddenly looks more like this, at least for a couple weeks:

Not for me, mind you. Monday is my last day. I'm moving on to a new project that will have lots of overtime and a several-month lifespan, just in time to make up for the shitty year I've had so far. This is my new swordfish:



Strong, baby. Dig it.

High-tech life-support systems keep the swordfish going for reasons not entirely clear

We've been doing bullshit work for a couple weeks now, when we even have work at all. Really, we're the fire brigade, kept on just in case some kind of shit hits the fan and the law firms need bodies to do grunt work. Currently, we are doing reviews that the firm itself has done repeatedly -- they don't expect us to find anything, because they believe they already have found everything worth finding. They might be wrong, but they are probably right, and they certainly aren't relying on a bunch of mouth-breathing temps to find the stuff they might have missed. They probably already found everything worth finding, and they certainly don't think we will find it if they didn't. So there you go.

Why are we still here, you might ask? Because the firm gets to bill our time to the client -- at a mark-up -- the agency gets to bill our time to the firm -- at a mark-up -- and we still get paid. No one has any incentive to cut us all loose until there simply is no plausible reason for keeping us. Personally, I think that moment arrives either at the end of the day tomorrow or Friday. Anything beyond that is shameless padding, featherbedding, milking, whatever you want to call it.

Of course, that doesn't mean it won't happen.