All this gig lacks is Japanese soldiers bayoneting us when we fall exhausted into the roadside ditches

The swordfish isn't dying on this job; it fucking quit. We started with 6 people on a "2-3 day" job. One guy quit after day 1. Claimed his previous project started back up. Or his mother was really sick. I forget which. We got jacked up for being shitty coders on day 2, and mysteriously another person had a "family emergency" and didn't show for day 3 or today. When you miss days 3 and 4 of a :2-3 day" project, odds are fair that you have no plans to return, since you should have no expectation that a project will be there to return to.

Even with four of us left, one guy is virtually useless when he actually shows up, and he generally shows up pretty late. Today, he left for most of the day because his dryer was being serviced or some such shit. The fourth guy disappears for hours at a time and doesn't do much work as a result. Basically, the only two people there every day, all day are me and this one other woman. We happen to also be the fastest reviewers, but as we are the only ones actually working, even among the people still on the project, "2-3 days" already has turned into 5 and counting, and probably at least 6. If the main burden remains on the two of us, we're probably looking at a day 7, as well. All in all, it is starting to feel like the Bataan Death March. No end in sight, and not clear who will survive. With no overtime, I think I might prefer to get bayoneted in the ditch.

I don't even know what this means

Today we switched from occasionally having a rush project interspersed with days of doing nothing to working on another project entirely. We are still employed at the same agency, working with the same law firms for the same client, but now we are working on an entirely unrelated project. This, apparently, is to keep us busy until we might -- or might not -- be needed to put out fires on the original project. Basically, this is an effort to keep us around in case we are needed.

There are indications that the effort is not working. We got called into a meeting this morning to let us know what we would be working on. There was substantive stuff (how to do what we would be doing) but there also was procedural stuff (how many hours a week, work window, etc.). It was the second batch of information where they started losing people. We now are capped at 40 hours a week, which means this is officially no better than any other project in town. Anything that offers more than 40 is automatically a better project and people will leave. The guy next to me quit already, just said fuck it. We've been told we probably will go back to overtime later once this little detour is over, but who knows? Plus, they are insisting that we do our 40 hours over 5 days, Monday through Friday, and be there from 9 am to 4:30 pm each day. This is just stupid. Even with the reduced hours window, folks could do 9.5 hours per day through Thursday, then do a very short Friday -- or even blow it off, since it would only be two hours. Those options were officially nixed this morning. I, for one, plan to ignore that directive. I'll be working four days. No point in incurring increased commuting costs for less money, after all.

Ultimately, I guess we'll have to wait and see if this project remains viable. But the law firm did themselves no favors today. The swordfish might be fixing to swim somewhere else.