Someone brought up ‘london irving’ the other day. Funny name, right? Took me a minute, then it hit me. Yeah, I remember ‘london irving’. Not a person, not really a place for me. It was this… thing we were working on years ago.
The Grand Plan That Wasn’t
We got pulled into this big meeting. Suits talking big ideas. ‘london irving’ was the codename they gave this project. Sounded important, international, sophisticated. We were supposed to build this platform, connect some dots, make things smoother. Honestly, looking back, nobody really knew what dots or how smooth.
So, we started. First few weeks, lots of diagrams on whiteboards, lots of fancy words flying around. Buzzwords mostly. Synergy this, leverage that. Felt like we were building a spaceship with rubber bands.
- Got the initial specs. Vague.
- Asked questions. Got answers that led to more questions.
- Tried building a small part. Specs changed the next day.
It was like that for months. We’d spend a week coding something, then get told the whole direction shifted. ‘london irving’ wasn’t just a project; it became this running joke for ‘whatever shiny new idea the bosses had this morning’.
Hitting the Wall
We were patching things, using duct tape solutions because the core idea kept morphing. One week it was about customer data, the next it was internal reporting, then suddenly it involved integrating systems that were never designed to talk to each other. It was a mess.
I remember one Tuesday, we spent the whole day arguing about the color of a button. Not the function, the color. That’s when I knew ‘london irving’ was doomed. We weren’t building anything useful; we were just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, but the bosses called it ‘agile development’.
People started burning out. Good people left. Morale went down the toilet. Trying to keep up with the constant changes was exhausting. You’d fix one thing based on yesterday’s meeting, only to break three other things based on today’s ‘urgent pivot’.
Pulling the Plug (Sort Of)
Eventually, they didn’t exactly cancel ‘london irving’. It just sort of… faded away. The meetings got less frequent. The emails stopped. One day, someone asked what happened to it, and the manager just shrugged. Moved onto the next big codename, I guess. All that time, all that effort, just vanished into thin air.
Why am I telling you this? Because hearing ‘london irving’ reminded me how easy it is to get caught up in stuff that sounds important but is actually just noise. Wasted a good year of my life on that mess. Learned a lot, mostly about how not to run things. Made me way more skeptical about fancy project names and grand promises ever since. Now, when I hear big talk, I just think back to ‘london irving’ and ask, “Okay, but what are we actually doing here?” Keeps my feet on the ground.
