Blast from the Past

The project that I work on is coming to a close at the end of the month. We have a busy couple of weeks to finish testing the system, write up the test report and then hand everything over to our customer. Before we do all that we have to get them up to speed on how we do our testing and all the tools that we have developed to make our jobs a lot easier.

This week one of the customer staff came down to talk with the project manager about what we do in order to get a feel for how much effort is going to be involved in them getting everything set up and working efficiently. As part of that I was asked to go through what we do in order to run some tests and log the results.

When he arrived on Thursday I saw him sitting with the project manager and thought he looked familiar. I assumed that he'd been down for meetings or something before and I'd seen him then.

About an hour or so later one of my colleagues that works on another project came over to talk to his partner who is one of my bosses. He immediately got talking to our customer as he'd worked with him about 10 years ago. I assumed that they'd worked together on some project at the customer's site.

Later that afternoon I was asked to support a teleconference with some of our customers at their office. While we were waiting for them to join the teleconference the chap who was visiting us turned to me and asked me if I'd worked on project X Y Z several years back. I said I had and he then said so had he and mentioned working with a guy who's name I remembered but hadn't heard in years. I explained that I'd worked on the test team but didn't elaborate which probably left him trying to place me, something that has happened a couple of times now recently (I mentioned to the course tutor that I'd done a course with him a few years back and I could see him trying to place me).

Friday morning I spent a couple of hours running through our test process with the customer during which time I was acutely aware of my voice and consciously made an extra effort to keep it sounding as feminine as I could, something that is slowly getting easier as I'm practising more and more.

Next week we have two more of the customers staff coming down to be shown how we do our testing. Hopefully I wont have to go through it with them, hopefully someone else can deal with them, but I'm pretty sure as I seem to have become the de-facto test team lead that I'm going to be the one dealing with them. I don't mind as its good practice for me, which might come in hand for whatever role I end up doing from February.