I moved out the bulk of my personal stuff today including the wall of photos I’d printed and brought in. Â Some people noticed how bare the walls were but not everyone took it so well:
Coworker: Why did you take the pictures down?Edit
Me: Â I wanted to take them down while the weather was nice outside.
Coworker: I wasn’t done looking at them.
Me: They’ve been up for months.
Coworker: Now the wall looks empty because of you. Â I’m glad you’re leaving.
Everytime I return to work after a furlough I receive a new email address. I’ve had “terry.robinson@firmsname.com”, terry.robinson1@firmsname.com”, terry1.robinson@firmsname.com” and “terence.robinson@firmsname.com”. This most recent time I resisted this and reclaimed my first email address, a personal victory. I proudly registered all my accounts under my reclaimed “terry.robinson@firmsname.com”. I attempted to do a password recovery for an expired support utility with a 3rd party and had no success. I called:
Tech Agent: Sir, the email’s being sent.
Me: To where?
Tech Agent: terry.robinson1@firmsname.com
Me: HOW HAVE YOU FOLLOWED ME!
Tech Agent: Sir, I’m sorry I don’t understand could you please…
Me: I THOUGHT I HAD SLAIN YOU AND YOUR ILK NOW YOU RETURN!
Tech Agent: I can reset the address to another…
Me: FROM THE BOWELS OF HELL I STAB AT THEE!
Tech Agent: Sir, you appear to be having volume control issues, please tell me the email address to which the messages should be sent.
The ultimate coincidence would be me having yelled “KHAAAAAAN!” and the Indian Tech Agent responding “Yes?”
I had waded through a morass of odd paperwork regarding patch application and sought the originator of the byzantine crap to finish it off once and for all, this ensued:
Me: Why was my script not approved?
Him: Your failure was in not getting a pre-approval signature.
Me: Wouldn’t pre-approval mean I was already allowed to do it? I needed an approval signature.
Him: No, it’s pre-approval because it occurred before hand. Approval would be while I’m actually doing it.
Me: How can you approve something while I’m doing it? If you want, you can sit down with me as I do the work and countersign as I go.
Him: No, that would be far too wasteful.
Me: Ok, then what?
Him: Then you need a signature once your done to verify that you’re done as well as one stating you’ve completed it correctly.
Me: Two signatures, verification, that’s one; what’s the other one?
Him: Post-approval.
Me: *Silence*
Him: Ok, anything el-
Me: Sir, you or your department should be dragged before the MLA for crimes against English. Good day.
The results of the first test under the fake colon waste method didn’t come out as expected so I met with the requester to figure out what the cause was.
Him: There were two sources of error, first, I think you applied the product incorrectly.
Me: Really? I’ve done it this way for every previous running of the test.
Him: The method says use a round base rather than a square base that you used.
Me: But you said that was fine.
Him: Well, it wasn’t, do it again with round bases.
Me: You said there were two sources, what was the other?
Him: The recipe I gave you was off for a couple ingredients.
Me: How off?
Him: Somewhere between a factor of nine and a factor of 11.
Me: So, the recipe you gave me was off by an order of magnitude but you still think it was the shape of the base?
Him: Yeah, pretty sure.
Only one test method I’ve learned required signing legal documentation. The mixture for this particular method is the colonic equivalent of the recipe for Coke syrup and the entire time I’ve done this mixture I’ve treated it with a deference bordering on the sacred. Today I was running through the blending process when I found what appeared to be an error in mixing. I approached the creator:
Me: What the tolerance on the mixing of the 3rd ingredient set, I think your calculation is off by 2%?
Him: I don’t know. Anything within a factor of two should be fine.
Me: A factor of two? Like 200%?
Him: Yeah, this isn’t a precise thing.
Me: Your shitting me, I’ve been trying to squeeze measurements out to thousandths of a gram.
Him: Why?
Me: Because that’s what the method said. Didn’t you write this?
Him: No, a technician did a while ago.
Me: What happened to him?
Him: I fired him; he was way too uptight.
Hm…
Boss: Terry, did you disconnect that license server?
Me: Â Yea. Â It’s been down for an hour.
Boss: I can still connect to it.
Me: How?
Boss: Well, I can ping it. Â What do you think’s causing it?
Me: Honestly? Â Internet gnomes.
Boss: Gnomes?
Me: Well, maybe faeries, but rarely do web faeries work on the business levels.
Boss: So, gnomes?
Me: Yes, gnomes are well known for finding packets destine for disconnected computers and ferrying those packets to the appropriate computers. Â That’s why my iPhone works in some train tunnels.
Boss: So… what do we do?
Me: Act quickly to get the server back online, otherwise, the gnomes will get tired and turn against us. Â Remember that day we had 10kbps upload to the offsite server?
Boss: Yes.
Me: We angered them without offering tribute. Â They extracted their pound of flesh.
Boss: Hm…
I love knowing I’m going to be fired.
My last day is April 1st and my boss has been accumulating tasks I need to do before departing and I probably have six weeks of stuff to do in my remaining four. This has led to me being barred from doing other tasks for other people who’ve realized I’m leaving which causes them to issue me further to do list items leading to a To Do list arms race. Today, two engineers were fighting over what I needed to do next:
Engineer 1: He’s the only one who knows this method and I need this data in two weeks.
Engineer 2: He’s the only one who knows this method that I’ll need three weeks from now.
Engineer 1: So my stuff’s more important.
Engineer 2: No, because he can just do yours later, I need him to train someone while my technician has time.
Me: I have an idea. How about you just allow me to have over time?
Engineer 1: He doesn’t come out of my budget, sure.
Engineer 2: He doesn’t come out of my budget either, knock yourself out.
Me: Problem solved!
*After two engineers leave*
Boss: Please record how much time you spend on each of their two projects so I can take your overtime out of their budgets.
Problem solving through fiscal obfuscation.
I plot desserts along three axes: ease of preparation, joy of consumption, and appearance. I focus heavily on the ratio of joy of consumption to ease of preparation as that maximizes the brownie points I receive from my coworkers. For instance, truffles are fantastically easy to prepare and quite tasty but ugly. A ganache coating increases appearance but at the cost of difficulty. Anything with a homemade crust is low on prep ease and medium in consumption so I generally don’t bother.
Cheesecake with a topping or filling sits at the apex of the three, being difficult to prepare well, pretty, and makes one feel like one’s tongue were being hugged. The difficulty comes from handling as cheesecakes will crumble and crack if you look at them funny. Additionally, they involve making a separate crust and blank-baking it and require a setting period that alternates between hot and cold and can take in excess of six hours. So, what if I simply sacrificed appearance and slashed out much of the coddling? I was going to find out.
One tactic to ensure even heating is to bake the cake in a hot water bath. F that. Another is to leave the oven door open a crack while leaving the oven at a low temperature for six hours. F that as well. I went for the much simpler “remove it from the oven and put it in the fridge” tactic and was rightly punished. What emerged looked like the lid of a mason jar. The cake had rose jack-straight about 3/4″ above the rim of the pan and then caved in like someone had put a belt around it only to return to its original width before flattening to a plateau evoking the cracked surface of a dessicated flood plain. Hm…
Only in one other case had I refused to serve something because it looked hideous and that was because I literally dropped it. I think my solution was somewhat clever: I popped the cheesecake in the freezer, firmed it up a bit, sawed the top off and glazed the remaining cake with cocoa powder and melted semisweet chocolate. The best part was having an excuse to have a breakfast consisting of the top of a cheesecake.
My supervisor wasn’t in yesterday.
Coworker: Think he’ll be in today?
Me: I don’t think he’d miss two days in a row without telling all of us.
Coworker: Want do you want to bet on it?
Me: Pizza if he doesn’t come in.
Coworker: Ok *plays message of boss not coming in*
I’ve been snookered. I learned a lesson today: Never trust dwarf Vietnamese CAD designers.
I don’t mind when companies greenwash something, as long as the benefits are tangible to someone. Hybrids aren’t nearly as environmentally friendly as one would wish, most paper doesn’t biodegrade in nearly the amount of time often stated, and local produce can generate more emissions depending on its location and the competing economies of scale. My employer switched from polystyrene cups to paper cups for sizes over 8 oz in its cafeteria and the legion failings of paper came out quicky:
The thing that annoyed me most was that I have a coworker that horded cups. If a meeting ended and there were extra cups, he’d take them. He said “one day, the Styrofoam will be gone, and I’ll be ready. *cackle*” I thought he was just being cheap, bastard was right.