What killed my enthusiasm was the Mash team’s response to one particular incident. The feed from my primary blog at Blogger wasn’t feeding at all. I wrote about this repeatedly on Mr.Aldrich’s profile, until I succeeded in getting his attention and was finally given a contact address. Contacting the man in charge directly may sound like a recipe for frustration and it was, BUT there was no other easily visible means of contacting the team. Going to “help” just brought up a menu of documents, which aren’t going to be of help when the problem is a maintenance issue on the provider’s end.

I sent an e-mail to the address provided, and what I got back didn’t build confidence in the product: an e-mail that turned out to be intended for somebody’s supervisor, instead of me, in which the employee stated that she had no understanding of the blog module. Fair enough, though seeing that note with no other explanation, addressed to me, was a little mind blowing. That, by itself, would have merely made me do a double take and then laugh a little, but I never heard back from anybody else on the team, and that’s where “that’s funny” turns into “really not a good sign”. When a problem is assigned to an employee who hasn’t the background needed to handle it, it doesn’t get reassigned, it simply vanishes into Limbo.

Nobody knows how to do everything in any field, and if management is just going to stubbornly refuse to reassign projects under these circumstances, or somehow fail to support employees when they periodically find themselves in over their heads, then a lot is going to break down and never get fixed. This is a sign of headaches to come.