It's almost a cliche. Ever seen one of those movies where the bad guy's right-hand man screws up and he's executed on the spot. Then the new guy gets called in to take his place? Well, that happened today. And I'm the new guy. Around 4:00PM, I got called into the boss' office and was told that one of the employees had been dismissed. He was the only one working on a particular project, which is due in six weeks, and now the project has been given to me. I'll learn more about it tomorrow, but for now, I'm supposed to be on this thing full time until it's completed.

And the deadline (Dec 31st) is set in stone, because this is a payroll application that needs to be delivered before the beginning of the new year. In a perfect universe, the application would already be in final trials (after all, there's got to be time to ship and install the application at the end-users' sites) but this isn't a perfect universe. At this point, I really don't know how far along the project is, but I do know that I'll either be a hero or unemployed come January 1st.