There’s A Method To The Madness Of The Meetings

I work in a tech company. Usually, we have a software deployment every other Thursday. The team usually has a long meeting — two or three hours — on Friday after deployment. However, we usually have some minor issues after deployment, and I have to do a lot of monitoring and fixing, so I usually ask the team to push the meeting to Monday so we can stabilise the system first.

A few weeks ago in the meeting, they pointed out how I was always postponing the meetings, and we never had them on their set date, which is Friday.

Me: “Usually, the system isn’t stable on Fridays and I have to fix it.”

Team: “No, we must stick to the schedule!”

Me: “Okay.”

After two weeks, I attended the meeting at its scheduled time on Friday. It went on for like three hours. When we came out, there were hundreds of emails and tickets from the client; the servers had been down for hours right at peak usage time. Our clients were PISSED; they had lost tens of thousands of dollars during that time.

The thing is, it was already the end of my workday, so my boss had to pay me a hefty amount for working on weekends and twice the days in leave as a replacement.