I brought in a spiced apple cake yesterday but I arrived somewhat late and it wasn’t completely consumed. At the end of work today there was a single piece left at 6 PM and my boss’s boss commented that it was sad that there was one piece left alone. I replied “I don’t consider it to be a piece, so much as a monument to the pieces who went before it”. He nodded in agreement and we bowed our heads a bit. With that, I downed the memorial piece. I wish all monuments tasted this good.
Tag: coworker
Reverse Infection
I got a computer virus today… from work.  I’m somewhat confident it wasn’t the other way around as my home computer recognized the infected autoexec.inf file on my thumb drive immediately and the worm it contained. I did some checking and the infection is spread via thumb drives which probably came to me via the technician that performed a setup operation on a computer attached to a device to which I move files with a thumb drive.  That computer doesn’t even have web access, so I’m confident the technician had it on his drive which he picked up from someone whose browser window probably includes eight toolbars, the original install of AIM and a Bonzai Buddy.
I find it strangely satisfying that our expensive McAfee license was circumvented in that the virus was being spread by a computer technician who will then have to repeat his circuit to remove the damage he’s wrought. There’s really no risk to the machines as the worm simply initiates a DDOS after contacting an IRC channel which isn’t accessible through works firewalls. So in my head I have a picture of every computer at work knocking on the work firewall going “I can has payload?” and the router going “No 1 hear, go hoam” which probably slows web access. A coworker recently said that there was no way the tech folks could slow web access anymore. Looks like they’ve outdone themselves.
Welcome to My Firm
Every company has its set of idiosyncrasies like oddities in work decor or strange holidays or seemingly backwards business practices. When these occur at my firm I’ve taken to saying “Welcome to <firm name>”.
For the last few days, a coworker and myself have been testing a patch to our CAD system to bring back a piece of functionality lost during an update. The functionality is non-trivial and involves CAD documents remembering their parameters. It would be analogous to a document that whenever you opened it all the formatting went away in addition to the information like when it was created and by whom. After doing a bunch of testing, the patch appeared to function correctly and we got ready to deploy the fix across our servers.
Me: I’m applying the patch to our development server.
Boss: Whoa, you can’t just change the CAD system.
Me: But this is the dev system. I thought we just had to document changes to our production server.
Boss: Nope, since the dev system receives changes that may eventually reach the production server those changes have to be documented too.
Me: Then, do we have a sandbox that we can just mess around with?
Boss: Yeah, we have a copy of the development server that runs as a virtual machine that we wipe each week. You can make any changes you want as long as you document it.
–Later–
Me: Ok, I’ve documented the change on the development server and I’m ready to roll it out to the production server.
Boss: You can’t just change the production server, you need to submit a business justification.
Me: I need to submit a business justification?
Boss: Outline costs, how it will change our operations, any training required. Yep, tell me when it’s done.
So, I need to write a justification, to get permission to apply a patch that’ll make our non-functioning system functional. That’s like requiring a business justification to turn on a piece of manufacturing equipment. I wonder if I should include the cost of doing the business justification in my business justification.
Welcome to <firm name>.
Problem Solving Experience
Joe Naylor recently started to work at my firm in the testing area and was looking for advice is stress fracturing a device used to keep little pieces of you in place while you’re suppine after surgery. He has somewhat powerful thumbs capable of delivering a near lethal nipple-ectomy, but even they couldn’t produce the simulated breakage requested. I tried to think of what a person recovering from surgery could reasonably do and came up with the following:I placed the testing rig in a bench vice and using one dead-blow hammer as a landing zone on the part normally held with your thumb, I smashed that dead-blow hammer with another dead-blow hammer. Strangely enough, the 1/8″ column of plastic held against the stainless steel wedge impacted by a hammer hitting another hammer broke under these totally reasonable real-world conditions…
Please note that in the context of medical device testing “reasonable break method” is defined as “anything doable to the device even if it requires invoking super-mutant powers or the phrase ‘so Hercules needs a colostomy’ regardless of the currently applicable laws of physics.”
Mixed Blessing
Joe Naylor started working at the same firm as myself. I thought it’d be fun but things have been far from all roses. Consider the following:
- Until he gets web access, if I want to talk to him I’ll have to get up, walk down the hallway and open three doors.
- My lies regarding the difficulty of my job are far more transparent.
- He now has an income stream barring my dream of having an indentured servant through debt from purchasing a stick of gun.
- Someone now understands what I mean when I yell “Are we going to go to Babar’s house!?”
Robot Attack
I go out to lunch once a week with an engineer who does pretty well all the work involving sensors and today I told him about the difficulty I’d found with the work tech support and told him about the time someone at camp shoved a fork in a router. He countered with the time his kids filled his car CD player with change thinking it was a candy machine, I one upped him with the time I added an EZ Bake oven to a computer a brought it to Best Buy. He topped that as follows:
Him: So my buddy and I are working on this helper robot that follows people around with bricks. He puts in a circuit board, starts it and this cap blows. He makes the circuit again, I tell him it’s a bad idea and he turns it on. The cap doesn’t blow, but the robot goes at him full tilt and pushes him through a plasterboard wall.
He may have won the story content, but we’ve all lost when the robot overlords shove all of humanity through a wall.
6000% Efficiency
A coworker asked me to help him troubleshoot a Microsoft Word problem. He was trying recreate a hand drawing of how to fold a piece of packaging and he was having difficulty. Word doesn’t enjoy sub 1/10th inch placement of objects and often raises a fuss when creating a drawing area inside a text area inside a drawing area inside a text area. He’d created a mediocre hack job but found somethings wanting:
- A dashed line was created by making a bunch of little lines, spacing them, then grouping them together instead of using the right-click -> format -> line style option.
- Transparent figures where given white sublayers by creating white borderless boxes.
- All the text was in a single text box with each piece being located with spaces and tabs of various sizes.
I was able to replace his work with a more accurate drawing in Publisher in about 10 minutes including a narrative of what I was doing. I ask him how long his version took, “about six hours”. I asked him if this was average and it apparently was. This man is probably paid 50% more than me and received healthcare. I felt bad when it turned out the guy I replaced was 50% better than me at my then job, but I am roughly 60 times faster at this job than he is. I think I can make a reasonably strong productivity case for replacing him, should it come up in conversation.
Depths of Fatigue
I called it an early day yesterday and got 10 hours of sleep. If I go below 7.5 hours two days in a row I’m useless and if I get more than 11 I’m groggy. Between the two: magic. My oven was also replaced and made brownies, so I came into work at 5 AM chipper and armed with brownies like some alternative reality June Cleaver. This contrasted heavily with a coworker who lives off of 4 hours of low-quality sleep.
Coincidentally, we went out to lunch today and he asked me why I was so chipper and I told him it was due to 10 hours of sleep and his left eye started twitching. No the “I have a bug in my eye” twitch but the “the previous statement reflects a mode of being I have never occupied nor probably ever will. I will sleep when I’m dead” twitch. It was frightening until I realized his decimated cerebellum probably couldn’t muster enough coordination for he to stab me in any reasonably short length of time. I jokingly offered to replace our luncheons with me driving around New Jersey while he napped in the passenger seat sleeping. His mouth said “no” but his eyes screamed “yes”. Maybe one day I’ll replace his Tic-Tacs with chloral hydrate and he’ll get a quality afternoon nap.
Nametag Clean-Up
Our offices have name plates near the door with removable plastic strips with our names on them. As people come and go, the plates change. One contrarian fellow refuses to clean his plate off despite two of the people on it no longer working for the company. I removed the two strips for the non-existent employees, threw them in the fellow’s garbage bin and sent him a note:
“<person’s name>
I’ve removed from the nameplate the two employee’s there that no longer work for you. I’ve thrown them out in your wastebin should you want them.”
Reply: “Thank you”
I passed by the lab after receiving the reply and the name plates were back up.
Me: Did you put the nameplates back up that I threw out?
Him: No. I replaced them.
Me: Well, they look the same.
Him: Nah… these are bigger.
Indeed they were.
Lost and Dangerous
I was going back and forth between the R&D lab and the CAD room when I found a woman, walking dazed with two cupped hands full of broken glass. It looked like her desk lamp broke as it was that green frosted glass. She looked at me:
Her: Do you know where I put glass?
Me:Â Yes….
Her: Ok, I’ll follow you.
Me: No. You stay here, I’ll bring a container.
She stood there, stiff as a board, until I returned with a sharps container. She deposited the glass and life returned to her face. She thanked me and wandered away… I met her in a part of the build that is no where near the cubes like she’d broken her lamp and resolved herself to the life of the wandering hermit until she found a place to put it. Would one not leave the broke glass in place, find a repository, and then dump it rather than walking around a building with hands full of broken glass?