I am free - almost!

Yesterday was the day that I turned in the results for the difficult "Big D" project. I felt so free and elated that I felt like a new man! To enjoy my newfound (even though shortlived) burden-free moment, I chose to listen to some Jackie Cheung's classic while cleaning my email inbox and desk. The songs brought back so much memories back in the early 80's, when Jackie first recorded classics such as "Smile Again Maria". I was so excited and engrossed in the songs that I couldn't help "lip syncing" the songs right in the office.

If you followed my blog you can see why I was happy when this project is done. (It actually hasn't been finished completely yet but I am pretty sure the results are 99% completed.) It has been long and full of frustrations, and also fluctuations. Just before I turned in my results last Thursday 4 pm, I discovered a wrong calculation which turned out to be deadly. In less than 10 keystrokes, my 7.6% savings became 25% cost increase! And worse, I had no idea what led to it. Either the data are completely trash or my design methodology is dead wrong. And I was afraid the latter was true after spending 4 hrs and found nothing wrong with the data. At one point, I was contemplating the possible reaction from my client if I, after spending hundreds of hours of analysis, told them nothing but all they were doing was great and there's nothing I could improve...and by the way, here is a bill of $xx,0000! I can imagine Donald Trump's favorite line popping up: you are FIRED!

As far as I can remember, never in my career I felt so clueless and discouraged on a single project. Usually I could find out what's wrong at least. So I consulted with my boss and we discovered some assumptions that should be adjusted. And after a long hard day of searching and recalculating, a modest 0.8% savings showed up. Not a lot, but better than any cost increase! That's 5 pm Friday. I joked with my colleague, saying that I probably shouldn't mess with the numbers again, lest the savings could be vaporized again.

I had a pretty good Saturday spending time with my family and Ching Yu, his son and his friend Matt. Ching Yu was visiting his son Benji who's studying at CCAD. We had a good and relaxing time. We stayed up late until 1.30 am on Saturday nite talking everything from American culture to Christian ethics. It was fun.

On Sunday I started working at noon after going to church. Man, I did not stop until 11.15 pm. I can count with 1 hand how many times I got up from my seat. And all that probably took 15 min total. I was not anticipating this. The reason is that I found more mistakes that turned the savings into the negative territory again. That forced me to keep digging into the details. And after 11 hrs of hard work (and thank Jesus), I pedaled the savings back up to 0.7%. And I called it quit, after finishing up the presentation materials.

We had an initial review this morning. The results looked fine to the client. There were only a couple easy things to change (keeping my fingers crossed). And we hope to wrap all up within a week. Thank God! This project has been a challenge to me in all fronts - technically, emotionally, relationally, spiritually and especially mentally. At many occasions, my mind couldn't handle the thought of going on. Because of God's grace, I could continue. I really can't wait to have it all done.