Issues of Scope

I was originally going to make a post this evening about the bizarre creature that is Japan's CD rental industry, but work has made a rare intrusion into thoughts. I'm a little peeved/angry/upset/whatever, so you'll have to deal with it.

For whatever reason, we have a design that had been sitting around for, oh, a year or so that I got assigned to deal with a few months ago. So I finally get the thing to the point that I'm comfortable demoing it (which was longer than normal likely - I'm not used to dealing with this particular user), and suddenly I get all this crap I hadn't heard word one about sprung on me. It doesn't help that something I'm sure worked earlier is suddenly broken when I show said user how to do it.

So it looks like I've run into a pretty nice wall with no real clue where to start. I've been redirected to a design document that, if I have seen it, I apparently didn't look at long and hard enough. Lord knows I've batted this thing around enough since I took it on. Taking a closer look at it, I only notice one thing in that design that's not handled (integration with another project area's system - which makes me ask the question, why aren't they doing this?). I'll say that some of the other suggestions are good ideas, but even some those I wonder if they work at cross-purposes to what I thought we were intending to do.

So, a combination of apparent lack of research on my part and some not too unreasonable requests and I'm back to what feels like square one. It's not, I've gone too far to scrap much, but it sure feels like it. Why do I feel like I've just managed to get screwed by some sort of user-politics game that sat this particular system in my lap? But they can't take all the blame - I didn't read close enough.