Negative reinforcement works!

Yet again I work in a C++ project. The deadline looms closer. We've no working system, a lack of specification, people working on their modules in autism mode and general confusion about what we're doing anyway.
Personally I've been struggling with an impossibly retarded build-system for the past three weeks, I tried to get the "big picture" to compile so I can work against something that runs. I too will resort to implement an interfaces that understand the protocol instead of trying to integrate.
Ahead of us lays undoudbtedly a big-crunch integration-havoc and possibly worse things.

Blame can be laid partly to a development/source control system that easely breaks, and is very slow to operate due to sheer size and bad setup. ( honorable mention of sniff+, Sun Workshop and Synergy CMS )

Part of the blame firmly rests at the fact that 5 weeks before the deadline nobody who worked on the previous prototype is present, the chief developer has just taken off on a 3 weeks vacation and 20% of the team are noobs to this project.

We ( meaning the noobs, including me ) still struggle to grasp the system, while our deadline is 2 1/2 weeks ahead of us.

Regardless of expirience in this project, we all have no clue what's supposed to happen and how we get there.

Oh, and I should mention that I've two deadlines, one for my implementation task, and one for the completion of something completely different ( packaging stuff we should assume responsibility for after customer decided that this should be our task ).
Lo and behold, both deadlines accidentally fall to the same day. Of course for the packaging stuff I'm equally clueless as anybody, and the guy who did this before will embark on a three-week vacation a week before the deadline.

Sometimes I figure I got the short-straw in the game, whatever it is. Ah that reminds me of the fact that I still have 5 weeks of vacation to kill this year. I wonder if this would be a good time...