Working with me has GOT to be surreal at times

I just had an IM conversation at work that went like this:

Coworker: Hey.

Me (about ten minutes later): Hola, ‘sup?

Coworker: You at lunch?

Me: Nope – just had to move a hose.

Coworker: ?

Me: Graywater hose. WFH today, doin’ laundry. :) (inside my head: la la la I’m just livin’ my life, I’m not thinking about how WEIRD this might sound to somebody else, la la la)

Coworker: moving hoses? don’t get it

Me: Well, TURNS OUT, we have gophers in our garden.

Me: So instead of putting the laundry water into the watering tanks for the garden this week, I’m draining it straight into their tunnels

{long pause}

Me: I figure the combination of FLOODING and SMELLS LIKE SOAP + HUMAN UNDERWEAR ought to make them think twice about settling in MY garden, you know? (erm, waitasecond…)

{long pause}

Me: At least, I HOPE it does…(ya, this is possibly a really damned odd thing to be telling a coworker…)

Coworker: That is…possibly…the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard. In a work conversation, anyway. I think I almost choked on my tea.

Me: Oh. Sorry about that, man. They really should put “watch out for spit-takes around Tama” into our onboarding documentation. (inside voice: …oops…)

Coworker: Yes. Yes they should.  

{slight pause}

Coworker: Also, you should totally have your own reality show. :)

Me: You are not the first person to say this. XD (…whew, he’s got a solid sense of humor, I’m saved!…)

Coworker: That is not surprising to me. Anyway. QC # 5 for September release…

I think that is my favorite part: Note how he just sort of takes it in stride and goes on with his day.

Oh. I see.You were AFK for a few minutes because you were jamming a graywater hose down a new gopher tunnel so you could fill it up with laundry water in a (probably vain) attempt to encourage them to flee. Makes PERFECT sense, so, back to the matter at hand…

Yet another reason why I really just love the heck out of this team of mine…adaptability, my friends, adaptability…

Finished, in so many ways

We did yard work today. I did not particularly feel like doing yard work today, but it really needed doing. Also I was a bit troubled by some little piles of dirt I’d begun seeing. Little piles of dirt that made no sense. They weren’t anthills. They weren’t children digging. I had this dreadful feeling that they were going to be due to burrowing rodents.

Right off this morning, I noticed that a patch of thriving kidney beans…was now a kidney bean plant. And a lot of empty spaces where formerly there had been kidney beans. With quite a few new odd little mounds of dirt. Suspicious…

So I poked around until I found the tunnels. And then I said a few very salty words about it.

The damned gophers have found my garden. Awesome.

So we agitated things out there to make it clear that this was a bad place, a VERY bad place, you don’t want to live here, because it is BAD, VERY, VERY BAD.

I do not like killing things I am not going to eat.

And I do draw the line at gophers. Gopher a-la CrockPot is simply not going to be on the menu any time soon. So I really hope the “kick up a fuss and make them feel really unsafe” method works, and we don’t have to escalate the warfare any further.

And then I did a lot more weeding and digging, and digging and weeding, and replacing of broken sprinkler-things, and cleaned up some areas that have needed it for a really long time.

Several hours later, I stood soaked with sweat and regarded the fruit of my labor.

And then I may have cussed a little bit, because I was done-with-a-capital-D-Done for the day, but could still see a two-sided, tightly written 8-1/2x11 sheet of paper’s worth of things I really ought to get done out here in front of me.

Which is always the way of it. The garden is something that is never “done.” There’s always something starting, and something finishing, and something that needs weeding, and something needing harvesting.

A big old never-ending circle of chores. (Ha. You thought I was going to say ‘life,’ didn’t you!)

MEANWHILE…you know That Thing that happens with knitting sometimes, where you knit and knit and knit, but never seem to get anywhere?

I was starting to think the shawl was going to be the last project I ever did. Because I was going to DIE before I finished it.

But, suddenly…I went around the last corner. And then I was running in ends. And then I did a fast-block with it (dampen and lightly stretch, but not the full pin-out) (because it is going to need an actual washing, and it is both too late at night to be starting All That, and I am too stiff and sore to be crawling around dealing with 6,000 pins at the moment thank you very much)

I think I’m going to like this one.

It isn’t so fancy that you feel like you should be dressing “up” to wear it, the colors are friendly enough to play nicely with a lot of other earth-tones…I can see actually wearing it on my way to work.

Even though I’m probably wearing brown denim pants.

And possibly Thundercats sneakers.

Just to give the, like, one or two people tops who would actually notice something to gossip about for the rest of the day.

I have just discovered my new favorite way to handle BART annoyances!

So, there’s this owl called the Northern White-Faced Owl. It has a defense mechanism that is just…well, awesome.

But, I don’t know how effective it is.

So I think I’m going to mimic its behavior on BART the next time I am approached by someone who clearly is going to be a pain. (Video plays rather LOUD and BEAT-Y music, rocker discretion is advised for those taking a little break at work…)

Imma gonna go practice in front of the mirror, like, RIGHT NOW…

What EVERYTHING is doing to my brain

It’s funny how you can instinctively know something, and yet dismiss that innate wisdom as being some combination of impractical or not particularly do-able because of {convoluted reasoning that in hindsight is not so rock solid as you initially believed}.

Or say to yourself, oh pooh, you’re all up in arms over something that probably isn’t even a THING.

And you’ll convince yourself of this for the longest time, until somebody does a study that convinces you otherwise. At which point you can proudly say, “I knew it!” and claim to have had this information since long before it was, you know, out there.

Humans. We’re an odd lot.

For a rather long time, I’ve been finding myself less and less able to cope with something that is a fairly inescapable part of my daily life, both at home and (increasingly) at work: Constant input from multiple sources. Noise. Car horns. Train announcements. Blaring music. Conversations shouted over the general noise. Phones ringing. Researching five things at once. Getting sidetracked down rabbit holes while trying to figure out why something did what it did, even though it really doesn’t matter because we’ll never know why, it was a thing that happened because of other things, none of which are there anymore – so it’s like trying to recreate the exact shape and hue of a rainbow from last week’s storm so that we can force it to always have that exact shape and hue. Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, the guy next to you is watching Netflix on their phone without earbuds. Crying babies. Crying executives.

Kids hawking things on the sidewalk between the BART station and the office. Krispy Kremes, treat your coworkers, only $600 a box, IT’S A FUNDRAISER, DON’T YOU CARE ABOUT {cause du jour}?! We’re really trying to earn enough money to SAVE THE WORLD here…

Take a survey. Answer my email. I left a voice message. Instant messages. Instant messages asking if they can call you ‘real quick’ – which comes through as your phone is already starting to ring. Hey, pay attention to ME. Like, RIGHT NOW. Right now right now right now DROP EVERYTHING AND DEAL WITH ME AND MY STUFF, RIGHT NOW.

All day, all night.

The only tool I have to defend against it…is a set of headphones, through which I pump yet more noise and/or input into myself. Over the top of the Other Noise. Drowning it out with different noise, which (I tell myself) is better noise because it is as least noise of MY choosing.

I’ve been noticing lately that I have less and less resilience around it, too. As if when I get up in the morning, I haven’t recharged my batteries or repaired my armor – instead, I’m instantly just as exhausted, irritable and otherwise frustrated when the very first offense occurs as I was when I finally sloughed off the last of the one more things from the night before so I could crawl into bed.

And I’ve been plagued, day and night, with that vague feeling that I’ve forgotten something. That there is something looming over me. A check I didn’t deposit? A bill I didn’t pay? A form languishing at the bottom of a drawer somewhere? Left the milk out? Batteries?

And I was right. Over and over and over again, I’d run nose-first into a wall completely covered with a Technicolor mural of the thing I’d forgotten. The obvious thing, the thing I totally knew I had to do, or deal with, or move from here to there.

But somehow, forgot until that very moment. DAMN IT.

And I’ve been thinking to myself that the thing that is killing me is that complete inability to actually get some peace and @^*&@ing quiet; to get a little solitude, a break from the constant nattering and nagging, to have even fifteen minutes in a given day that wasn’t interrupted by somebody slamming against my door screaming that they neeeeeed something.

The constant flood of distractions, all of them claiming – vigorously – to be vital, important, super-urgent.

All of them wrong.

And then I learned that there is a book I need to read: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. The focus, obviously, is on the Google-effect – or rather, the email => Google => Facebook => YouTube => Google => Facebook => FailBlog => email => Twitter => GoogleTwitterFacebookWikipediaGoogleGoogleGoogle effect.

Y’all know what I’m talking about, right?

And this little video puts into words exactly what I’d been sensing was happening to me – but couldn’t prove or put into words myself very well.

This is what I’m up against; now, can somebody like me, who is easily distracted to begin with and “eats” information like an out-of-control sugarholic at an all-you-can-eat cake stand, actually do something about it, even if they know what they need to do to help themselves not lose their ever-lovin’ minds any more than they already have?

I have no idea. But I think I’d better make a strong effort at it, or I’m afraid I really am going to lose what little brain I have left.

Hot paws and annoying attitudes

Last week, I was rather suddenly made aware that I had a tiny wound on my right hand pinkie, near the top of my nail, right where you’d expect a hangnail to be if you had one.

I didn’t. I know this because I looked. Repeatedly. Because the way this invisible wound decided to get attention was to suddenly become infected.

And I mean, it was sudden-sudden. Like I had no knowledge that there was even a thing going on that morning, and then almost between one keystroke and the next on the keyboard the whole thing just…happened.

Except that clearly it didn’t, because wounds don’t get infected / hot swollen / gross that quickly. It had to have been simmering for a while without me noticing it before it suddenly erupted into flames got hot, started swelling, and exhibiting other signs of infected-wound status.

I tell you what: I learned that I type a lot harder than I thought I did, and also that I don’t strike the key squarely with the middle of the pad of that pinkie, but rather a bit on the right side of it.

Also, I can still cuss very inventively indeed, given the proper motivation. Such as the fact that poking at the sore finger caused it to – and who could possibly see this coming – really @^*&@ing hurt!

Which is a load off my mind, because I was a little afraid that I was mellowing with age or something on that front. @^*(&@!

I still have no idea what actually caused it; there’s a big scab now, but I happen to know that underneath that scab there is not an equally big wound. The scab is that size because the microscopic wound bled a great deal, and had a great deal of, um, uh, not-blood stuff as well, and that’s what has hardened into this scab, and probably if I wanted to scrub at it a bit I would find that the “real” scab was just as microscopic as the original wound. But, I am a big fat chicken wise enough not to go poking at something that has only just decided to do me the courtesy of starting to heal, so, the oversized scab will be staying put until it decides to fall off.

It is in times like these that I have to just kind of laugh at myself – I can be amazingly stubborn sometimes. The sensible thing might have been to stop doing things that hurt, but, no way.

I’ll just figure out how to type without using the pinkie. So there. I’ll knit a little slower while I figure out a different way to tension. Ha! Plus, it’s not really that bad, you just need to not keep focusing on it, that’s what you need to do.

It is also in times like these when I realize just how annoying I must be sometimes. I can’t help it: I always think things will work out, one way or another. And that meanwhile, the best thing we can do is to do our best, try to work around it or work it out, just DON’T LET IT WIN, WHATEVER IT IS.

Really, it’s a bit of a wonder that nobody has just up and smacked me for being that way when they were trying to feel properly grumpy about something.

And I’m not sure I could blame them if they did.

When the Meh attacks

At this moment, I can think of several (dozen) things I really should go and do. And to each and every one of those things, I have the same response: Meh.

I think I’m even too tired to play Warcraft. I know, right?! I may just need medical intervention on this deal. Or at least maybe an afternoon early-evening cup of coffee.

The really sad thing is, I woke up this morning feeling ready to get out there and DO THIS THING! And for about the first third of the day, man, I was on fire. I was able to focus, and I was even able to multitask without completely losing focus on one or the other thing, and I was remembering things in a timely fashion, and I knocked out two relatively convoluted Solutions™ in short order and then I was actually contributing a little bit to our September development cycle planning meeting, and I was firing off emails and monitoring jobs (I’m primary on-call again this week…hip-hip-hoo-yeah-whatever) and communicating with partners and was just getting to where I was really entering into a major case of self-congratulations over my general awesomeness when it just…went away.

Next thing I know, I’m becoming aware that I’m basically just sitting there, staring at the same three lines of code like maybe they’re going to have changed themselves in the last ten minutes. I’m tired and droopy and clearly, I’m done for the day whether I’m ready to be or not.

And I haven’t even started thinking about any of the home-stuff I had hoped to get done today.

Damn.

My normal response to things like this is generally to just push on anyway. But as this has not been working out for me particularly well lately, I’m trying out this new thing called listening to what your body is trying to tell you.

I don’t think I like it.

My body seems to be a lazy good-for-nothing lay-about loser. I MEAN, YOU KNOW, REALLY... it’s very important to tend to your own needs (she said with an air of wisdom, as if she always does so instead of doing insane things like putting in two or three consecutive days on less than four hours of sleep a night while subsisting on Ritz crackers and tea while at work because she is “too busy” to stop and get real food, ahem), and I am heartily in favor of doing so. Not only is it only fair to take care of oneself (aside: the word ‘oneself’ looks so wrong to me right now…like it is either misspelled or misused, but at the same time darned if I can put my finger on WHY), it is in the long run far better for your overall productivity if you make sure to maintain the old machinery before it collapses into rubble around you.

But at the same time, I have an unreasonable distaste of laziness. I’m like a Puritan sniffing out the sins of others when it comes to laziness, and in my own private little world things like murder may actually be justified depending on the circumstances, but laziness? Federal. Offense.

So I’m always suspicious of my true motivations when I start with the “wah-wah-wah, I’m tiiiiired, I need a breaaaaak, I just caaaaaaan’t keep going…” thing.

{sniff-sniff} I SMELL LAZINESS!!! Do we think the world owes us a living? Well, DO WE?!?! I didn’t THINK so, now, get OFF that derriere and get crackin’, missy! Daylight is BURNING!

And then if I don’t immediately jump to it, I get very stern indeed with myself and start parenting: “You have to do at least such-and-so much more before you can plant your backside in that chair and play Warcraft or watch anime or whatever.”

…and then I do that thing where whenever I’m not looking, I cheat the finish line back a smidge. Oh, did you hear fifty FEET? No-no-no, I said fifty YARDS…

And then I’m stunned when my body goes all toddler-temper-tantrum on me. Oooooo, the shock of BETRAYAL!

But, all that aside…I’m trying to accept the fact that maybe I am coming into a time of life where I am not twenty-something anymore. And that possibly, the 18-hour day thing is no longer a sustainable lifestyle for me. It sits like a hair shirt on me, but at the same time I figure that I should be able to accept at least some signs of time marching on.

Particularly considering that my mental age hasn’t progressed much since my teen years. And push come to shove, if I had to pick one or the other, ‘growing old’ versus ‘growing up’…yeah. I’d take growing old.

But let’s be clear: I have absolutely no intention, ever, of acting my age. Not gonna happen. So don’t ask. Nyah!! {sticks out tongue like proper brat}

In other news, I’m making headway on the shawl. I’m about to round the second corner of the knitted on border (note how I gloss over how well I did the first corner, which would be ‘eh, not the WORST job ever but also not the BEST one’), and then there’s “just” the long charge down the second long-side…and the third corner…aaaaaand the slog through the second short side…AAAAAAAAAND the binding-together-of-the-cast-on-edge, which sure enough I did VERY poorly so it WILL show a ‘seam’ when I go to finish it, I’m about 99% sure (but I comfort myself with the thought that when worn on a living, moving person, the chances that it will particularly show are slim to nil) (quiet, you! Let me have my little fantasies!).

I figure I should actually finish this thing sometime in the next six years.

If I don’t get distracted by new projects.

(Uh-oh. I sense a flaw in my overall plan here…)

Huge misses and tricky edges

Our last production release really didn’t go as smoothly as I might have liked. I feel as though I have spent the last month or so just…running, hell bent for election, trying to figure out how to handle the latest curve ball that was fired at me. From a cannon.

The keyword for this last cycle appears to be “miss.” When the requirements didn’t actually describe what was wanted? That was a miss.

When what was coded worked, but does it so slowly that it would almost be faster to do it by hand with a 10-key? That was a slight miss.

When half of the things in the release weren’t tested at all before they went to production because there simply wasn’t enough time to do the testing properly (and not enough appetite for saying ‘hold the phone, we better fail this out of this sprint and come back at it next month’)? That was a rather unfortunate miss.

When half of the SSIS packages weren’t deployed period due to a fascinating example of miscommunication? That was a huge miss.

And so on.

It’s funny how these sorts of words and phrases will appear in the business world. A couple years ago, the phrase “action the learnings” buzzed around for a while.

That one set my teeth on edge. Every time someone would say it, I would just cringe.

There’s “what is the ask on this” and “why don’t you reach out to so-and-so on that” and “does it family well with other things” and “let’s take this offline.”

But business is never content with the status quo, so, now our office is abuzz with miss. It’s a miss, it’s a small miss, it’s a huge miss.

And it now has legitimacy, because I’ve started a drinking game over it. Any time our project manager refers to something as a miss of any sort in a meeting, I must take a swig of whatever beverage I have at my desk right then.

(Unless it has mold in it. I get a ‘get out of swigging free’ pass if mold is involved.)

(That rule holds true for all drinking games. It’s universal. You may feel free to invoke it whenever you like. You’re welcome.)

Meanwhile in other news, after a ridiculously long period of no project at all, I suddenly took it into my head that I wanted to make something in the lace category.

Because there is something wrong with me.

Something very, very wrong with me.

So on the first of July, I cast on the center portion of Stripes and Torchon Lace from Victorian Lace Today.

 

Woo hoo! I said to myself after the first 2 repeats, when the pattern was settling into my muscle-memory and the center part was starting to grow pretty quickly. That’s right, lookit how FAST this thing is growing! I IZ A WIZZ-ARD 4 KNIT-TING!

…and then, well, I’d finished all the repeats for the center. And I was giving myself high-fives for being “almost done” and congratulating myself on how clever and also speedy a knitter I was, and other ways by which we invite the Imp of the Perverse into our lives.

And then I confidently launched into the knitted-on border.

And then I tore the first two repeats out and started over.

And then I tore them out again and started over.

And then I did two repeats of the stupid knitted-on chart without knitting them onto the stupid shawl-or-shrug-or-whatever-the-hell-you-call-the-stupid-thing-when-it-is-a-rectangle, to see if I could figure out why my stupid needles and stupid yarn couldn’t seem to count to {3, 5, 10, 17} reliably. Stupid things. (Because obviously, I do not have any such problem. It must be the tools causing it.)

And then I confidently knitted a repeat of the pattern onto the edge of the shawl again.

And then I wept.

And tore it out. Again.

And started over yet again, having identified my problem as being not one of counting stitches, but rather of having a bad habit of not always incrementing my row counter, because I thought I wasn’t getting up any time soon and was therefore “safe” to “just remember” that I was on row 17 now, not row 11.

{rubs temples}

I mean, honestly.

First of all, no, no I will NOT “just remember” which row I’m on. In point of fact, I can honestly and completely forget whether I was on row 11 or row 12 by the time I get to the end of that specific row. So if I set the knitting down for any reason – to answer the phone, look at an email, go to the restroom, any reason – it is 100% guaranteed that I will come back, look at the stitches on the needle, and say to myself, “…crap…”

And secondly, hahahahahaha, not getting up any time soon! I SLAY ME!!!

Yeah. Even the kittens have figured out that my lap is only acceptable if there are no other laps to choose from…because mine tends to vanish so suddenly, and at frequent intervals.

{fume}

Having finally taken to heart the necessity of incrementing the counter, EVERY SINGLE TIME, suddenly I started making some headway.

I’m still having a bit of a wrestle with that edging, which has more rows in the chart, and for some reason both my brain and my muscle memory are refusing to “imprint” even one row of it (well, that’s not entirely true…the wrong side is basically a ‘work even,’ so, I’m nailing that side)…so I’m having to keep my nose right up against the pattern the whole time, which makes for slower, more tedious knitting.

But all the same, I’m starting to become very fond of it; I think it’ll be rather gorgeous when it’s finished. (Assuming I can handle the corners correctly. Let’s just say I also have some Known Issues when it comes to that whole “getting an edging to round the corner NEATLY and EVENLY and without becoming a lumpy-frumpy MESS.)

I feel even more good about it when I kind of stretch it out so that it starts to look at least kinda how it will look after it has been dunked-n-stretched for its final blocking.

(And use the flash on my cell phone. This is actually much closer to the actual color of the yarn, but still falls short of how it looks in real life. It’s Lisa Souza's Lace, in a colorway called “Mahogany.” It has the kind of subtle / not-subtle variegation that from afar looks “just brown,” but as you get closer you say to yourself, “Oh. It’s got highlights and stuff.” And then as you get closer still, you become aware of a delicious layering of colors, and there’s a bright, excitable copper that jumps up going “HI! I’M EXTREMELY CHEERFUL!” out of there that I love so dearly it is possibly unhealthy. The skein has been marinating in my stash for a few years now, so I’m extremely excited to finally have a project that went “click!” for it…although I’m also realizing that I can probably make, like, four of these from the one crazily-generous skein [well, three, at the very least], sooooooo, this won’t be my last adventure with it.)

And that’s pretty much what I’ve been up to all this long time between posts. Losing my mind at work due to misses large and small, and then “relaxing” by attempting to knit a border on a lace shawl-thing.

Tune in next week, when I might do something WILD and CRAZY, like having crackers and diet soda for dinner, film at 11!

The Morning After The Deploy Before

Now, I know you all have long wondered what a typical deploy cycle looks like. Who are the players in these mysterious circles? What sorts of science create the magic of a (mostly) functioning web application? How do the various parties work together to create these glorious examples of intelligent application of information systems technology?
WONDER. NO. MORE.
It pretty much goes down like this.
Our Players:
This is Princess. She is usually some combination of business-type person, analyst-type-person, and project manager.
: This is $DEITY. Which you don’t really need to know ahead of time because $DEITY will tell you so every time he speaks. He is usually Princess’s boss (or her boss’s boss), and will occupy a fairly high rung on the food chain.
: This is Coffee Cup Guy. He probably has a title like Database Developer V. Probably also had a new nameplate drilled for himself that says “Coffee Cup Guy: DEV V” on it within hours of the promotion. Tends to be dragged into things whenever Princess isn’t hearing what she wants to hear, agrees with her that whatever it is would be “very simple” to implement and then proceeds to actually do…nothing.
: This is the new kid, Ms. QA. Wait. Ms. Analyst. Wait. She also does development work. Even though she has absolutely zero dev experience. But that’s ok, because Coffee Cup Guy will tell her is it very simple, point her at the first site he found on Google with at least some matching keywords and then claims he ‘taught her everything she knows.’ VERY enthusiastic, somewhat light on experience and commonsense.
: Here we have Tech Lead. He might be a for-real manager, he might just be The Guy Formerly Known As Coffee Cup Guy, before he titled-out of the system and had to be promoted to a management position due to there being no ‘Developer VI’ in the HR book. Cool guy, but tends to not have time to get into the trenches with you.
: And this is our developer. Or, as we like to call him for the story being told here, the only sane person in the whole @^*&@ing organization. (Note that who has this ‘only sane person’ title varies from story to story…sometimes it is the developer being a complete idiot, but for this particular vignette, he is our one sane crew member.)

The Morning After The Last Disaster Deploy:
: OK, so, Developer, here are your tasks for this release. There are nine of them total, but I want to bring your attention to this item in particular as it is a Priority 1 task. I have attached the finalized requirements documentation for your review; I don’t think there are any surprises there, as we discussed this earlier. Keep in mind that as a priority 1 task, it is a must go, so, the whole thing must be 100% finished before 7/15. You sized it during our pre-sizing meeting last month at 15 hours, so this will not be a problem.
 : Hmm. OK. Let’s see here. Oh yeah, I remember this one…land new data from blah blah blah…whoa-whoa-whoa, time out! Princess, what we discussed and I estimated 15 hours for was one (1) new package to load three (3) tables from one source. This item has twenty-seven (27!!!!) new tables from FIVE (5!!!!!) sources?!
: Ahem. We discussed this. Oh. Wait. You weren’t invited to that meeting. Because you did not need to be. Plus I think you were trying to catch all those snakes somebody released in the server room…did we ever figure out who did that?! Anyway, don’t worry, we did adjust your sizing to account for the additional tables.
 : Oh, I see, OK, well…heh heh…yeah, because, the last time you did this, heh-heh…
: We’re not idiots, you know!
 : Heh-heh, well, I wasn’t trying to imply…
: So, you have 20 hours in the plan for this.
 : …
: What?
 : …
: WHAT?!
 : That’s a big old negative, there, Princess. I’m gonna need more like 150 hours total. This is four brand new sources. I have to set up application user ids, get connections strings, update Oracle linkages, get data review and governance, build four additional packages, not to mention creating all the objects themselves…
: Pffft. It’s cookie cutter. Once you’ve done the first one you can just copy/paste the others. 25 hours.
: It really is very simple, you know. In my experience, Cntl+C and then Cntl+V will work for that.
: Exactly. It is very simple so it really shouldn’t take that much longer. You’re being ridiculous.
 : Uh-huh. Very simple. Copy/paste. Gotcha. Tell you what: How about you show me how simple it is, Princess…?
: I am $DEITY. Let’s keep the conversation constructive.
: Sigh. 70 hours.
: No.
 : Do you want this to fail?
: No. It cannot fail. It is a must go item.
 : 70 hours.
: No. I can give you 30. Plus Coffee Cup Guy.
: No problem. Always glad to help the juniors out with stuff they don’t understand.
 : …
: 600 hours.
: Fine. No Coffee Cup Guy, and I’ll give you 35 hours.
 : 60.
: 40
 : 55
: 45
 : 55
: No. You’re supposed to say 50.
 : On this planet, we have an assortment of things called laws. There are the laws of time and also of space, and…
: DADDDDDDYYYYYYY!
: I am $DEITY. Princess is right. You will have 45 hours. 
: {thinks} @^*&@ you, $DEITY…
: I AM $DEITY. I HEARD THAT.
 : {thinks harder} CAN YOU ALSO HEAR THI-
: {texts} Time outta, bro.
: {texts} Doughnut comment suey side on this.
: {texts} Dammit. Don’t. Comment. Suicide. LOL. Autocorrect.
: {texts} *commit
: {texts} I got ur back. Will dizcus w/Big gay l8r.
: {texts} Dammit.
: {texts} Big Guy. LOL. Autocorrect!
: {texts} agree w/Pins for now, will fix l8r, gtg letz bee done hair!
: {texts} *here. Argh. Autocorrect.
: {texts} OK, thanks. {says} OK, fine, 45 hours for initial rough-out, but my lead is going to circle back with you…
: {texts} np, btw, am OOO for 6 wks lol but this 1st thing when back, kk?
: {texts} WUT?! out of office, WTF man?!?!
: {texts} in hq mtgs then PTO, sent email?
: {texts} @^&@!!
: {texts} all gud, I got this 4 u
: So, actually, my lead is out, maybe we should revisit…
: You said you were fine with 45 hours! It is carved in stone on these tablets! WE ALL HEARD YOU!
: I am $DEITY. It was spoken. It is now written. So it shall be. 45 shall be the counting of the hours. I am $DEITY.
: …I hate my life…so much right now…oh well, maybe a miracle will happen…let’s just…moving on, where was I in this unending nightmare…blah blah blah tables blah blah blah schedules blah bla-…wait…you want to land all this garbage directly into…um…hang on…you realize that’s the application database, right? That’s our transactional tier, we can’t start landing large tables there, they have to drop into staging first and then…
: YOU ARE BORING ME. I NEED THEM IN THE APP TIER SO THAT I CAN PLAY WITH THEM AS THEY ARE MY NEW SHINY TOYS. MAKE IT HAPPEN.
: Um, I really have to push back on this one, because see, if we do that, we will be using up resources that are needed for even super-basic functions within…
: PUH-PUH-PUH! Just stop right there. Someone wants to say something to you about this!
: I am $DEITY. Do what Princess says. My orders. It is necessary.
: …
: …
: Ooookayyyyy, this has Bad Idea written all over it, but, you’re the boss…lessee…you want to land etc. etc. etc…lemme just take a look at these source tables HOOOOOOOOOLY CRAP-APPLES OF DIVINE RETRIBUTION +10 OF THE GODS!!!!
: {does bunch of calculations on scratch paper} {does them again} {pales} {re-reads requirements} {throws requirements across room} {picks requirements up again} {does more calculations} {picks up phone, has terse exchange with DBA team in re: storage space, buffer memory, transaction log size and so forth} {discusses what kind of idiot would decide this was a good idea with now equally irritable DBA} {rinses mouth out with soap} {returns to discussion}
: OK. Um. Let’s…just take a quick sanity check here…what are you going to be using this data for again?
: Stuff!
: L’il more detail?
: Lotsa stuff!
: Not exactly what I need to know…maybe if I explain the problem…seeeeeeeee, it’s going to take, 5-6 hours to pull just this one 300+ column by 800 million row table, and, you’ve got eleven others just like it listed here. That you want pulled daily. Each table will eat up around 50 gig of storage space, plus of course using tables with that big a footprint in update statements is, just, wow…HOW ABOUT if we just pull over the eight or so columns we actually use, and only the source types we need…that’s 20 minutes start to finish and under 3 gig of data, which…
: BLAH BLAH BLAH, just stop talking! SIIIIIIIIIIGH…look, I do not understand any of that mumbo-jumbo. And I don’t know what I need. Or might need someday. Just pull all of it. Besides! We might want to do analysis and some junk!
: …
: …you’re going to do “analysis”…directly on our application tier… which runs our web services…against tables that size…lemme guess, you’re going to be joining them to every other table in the tier?
: Probably! We will need to see all the stuff!
: …I am…it’s just…there are no words for this feeling…
: Pffft! don’t worry! Coffee Cup Guy will handle that analysis portion!
: SELECT * really is the fastest way to get all the information from a table, in my experience.
: Tee-hee! Oh, Coffee Cup Guy, you’re so smart!
: Yes. Yes I am. Note how my coffee cup says “#1 Developer” on it. Because it is true.
: Uh-HUH. Well, I guess I’ll start working on the…
: Oh. Real quick, just a couple little things…we kind of need it all done by Thursday afternoon at the latest. Because I hired a new QA person, well, actually, she’s more of a BA but she has super-crazy-MAD database skills!, and since she has no idea what’s going on pretty much at all yet, she’ll need the extra time for testing sooooooo we need it done-done super-early so she can test it while it is still in the development environment.
: HI! LOL! I’M ENTHUSIASTIC! LOL! DO WE GET A KEYBOARD? ROFL!! HOW DO I CONNECT TO THE DATABASE DO I NEED A PASSWORD OR SOMETHING? ROFLMAO! I USE SELECT * EXCLUSIVELY BECAUSE SOMEONE SAID IT SHOWS ME EVERYTHING! I ONLY USE LEFT JOINS BECAUSE THAT ALSO SHOWS ME EVERYTHING! AND I DON’T KNOW WHAT A WHERE CLAUSE EVEN IS, LOL!! ALSO I KEEP TYPING ‘DATABASE’ INTO THE RUN COMMAND WHICH IS ALL I HAD TO DO AT MY LAST JOB WHERE I WAS THE SUPER HIGH RANKED LEAD DATABASE PERSON EXCEPT THAT MY JOB TITLE WAS ‘GOPHER’ BUT THAT WAS EVERYBODY’S TITLE PRETTY MUCH AND GOSH, THIS NEW BLACK SQUARE OBJECT THEY GAVE ME COMES WITH A CUPHOLDER AND EVERYTHING! SUPER FANCY! WAIT! WHAT ARE WE DOING AGAIN?! I LOVE IT! EXCEPT THAT YOUR STUFF IS WRONG, BECAUSE I COMPARED IT TO THE TABLE OF CONTENTS IN THIS BOOK I FOUND UNDER MY DESK AND I THINK THE DATA TYPES ARE DIFFERENT!
: OMG IT’S WRONG?!?! WTF, DEVELOPER?!?!
: …I haven’t even started it yet, how can it be…?
: An experienced developer would have known not to make that kind of rookie mistake…
: Does this mean the task is red? It’s red, isn’t it? We’d better have a meeting about this! The task is clearly red if the data types are wrong!
: THE DATA TYPES AREN’T WRONG! THERE ARE NO DATA TYPES YET! Geez. We haven’t even started the deploy cycle itself officially yet, so -
: YEAH LOL BECAUSE YOUR DATA TYPES ARE ALL WRONG IN THE TABLES I FOUND ROFL ABSOLUTELY NONE OF THEM ARE ‘PICKLE’ THEY’RE ALL THINGS LIKE ‘VARCHAR’ AND ‘NUMERIC’ ROFL I MEAN LIKE WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?! RIGHT?!?! PLUS I’D PREFER IF THE QUERY WINDOW WERE PURPLE. CAN WE MAKE IT PURPLE? PURPLE IS GOOD. MORE GOOD THAN BLUE. AND DATETIME ISN’T EVEN A WORD, YOU KNOW, LOL? SO YOU TOTALLY NEED TO USE DATA TYPE = PICKLE THERE. IT ONLY MAKES SENSE. ROFL.
: …
: …
: …Kill it. Kill it with fire…
: I do not appreciate your tone. If you had just done your coding right in the first place, you have nothing to fear from our new QA person.
: I’M NOT AFRAID OF HER! She’s just…wrong. She can’t be looking at the tables and finding issues, because they do not exist yet. I don’t know what she is looking at, but, I’ll come in again!, whatever she just QA’d? Was not THESE tables!
: I am $DEITY. The QA person is right. Your code must be wrong. The item will be pulled if you do not fix it per QA’s findings.
: With all due respect, on this one, QA is wrong. Among many other things…“pickle” is not a valid data type.
: I am $DEITY. You will crate a new custom datatype called “pickle” and assign it to those columns.
: BRILLIANT PROBLEM SOLVING, SIR!
: That’s why they pay him the big bucks, for sure!
: JUST LIKE WOW ROFL!
: I am $DEITY. Have a benevolent smile! {beams}
: I…work with insane people…
: OO! MY ACCESS REQUEST CAME IN! WHAT DOES ‘SYSADMIN’ MEAN? IS THAT GOOD? DOES THAT MEAN I QUERY STUFF NOW?
: …dear mother of god…
: I am $DEITY. Watch it.
: I LIKE PICKLES!
: I will now quote an extremely long beat poem regarding pickles…a-chem! Pickle…pickle…pickle-pickle-pickle…pickle on hamburger, pickle on rye…
: I’m just…gonna go over here and…see if I can’t somehow get a hundred hours of work done in the next two days…
: Is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet is it done yet
: IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET IS IT DONE YET
: I am $DEITY. Is it done yet. I am $DEITY. Is it done yet. I am $DEITY. Is it done yet. I am $DEITY. Is it done yet. I am $DEITY. Is it done yet. I am $DEITY. Is it done yet. I am $DEITY. Is it done yet. I am $DEITY. Is it done yet. I am $DEITY. Is it done yet. I am $DEITY. Is it done yet. I am $DEITY. Is it done yet. I am $DEITY. Is it done yet. I am $DEITY. Is it done yet. I am $DEITY. Is it done yet. I am $DEITY. Is it done yet. I am $DEITY. Is it done yet. I am $DEITY. Is it done yet. I am $DEITY. Is it done yet.
: …pickles on my eggs, pickles on my cheese…
: RU thr bro? lol, bahamas r gr8, hope L iz gud tlk l8r!
: Screw you, guys. Seriously. OK. These are done and will import daily. These five are too big to be pulled in daily. We don’t have enough disk space, plus it is causing some dangerous locking / blocking on the system in the test environment. Given the overall loads in production right now, trying to pull all of this in this way at that time of day might well crash the box. We need to rethink these and do them in a future release. 
: Nooooooo, it is a MUST GO. ALL the tables must go!
: I am $DEITY. Make all the tables go.
: Oy! Read my lips: Laws! Time! Space! Cannot be done. PERIOD.
: It’s actually very simple, you know…
: Cool. You do it.
: Ohhhhhh, yeahhhhhhhhh, would love to take up the slack and get this done for you since you’re struggling with it, buuuuuuuuuut, I’m up to ‘here’ in pickle-related testing right now. Sorry.
: HEY! HEY! HEY! I CAN DO IT! I CAN TOTALLY DO IT! I HAVE MAD SKILZ! WATCH!
: Um, no, if you do that you’re going to lock down the whole app fo-
: I’ll mentor her. She can totally handle it. It really is very simple. And mentoring is a major part of my job function. Developer V stuff.
: I am $DEITY. She will do this work. This is a must go item.
: You’re going to break the…!
: I FIXED IT! COFFEE CUP GUY SENT ME A WEBSITE LINK AND I MADE A PACKAGE LOL! AND IT WORKED AND NOW THE TABLES ARE LOADING YAY ME! ROFLMAO!
: YAY! You’ve saved the day! Gosh, I guess you learned something today, huh, Developer?!
: My pleasure, Princess. After all, I taught her everything she knows. Mentoring is a major part of my day-to-day.
: I IZ A NATURAL TALENT ROFL!
: It’s so great working with such smart, positive people! Everyone should try to be more like you guys! {significant glance at Developer}
: {glances at code, winces, shakes head, closes program, sits back and waaaaaaits for it}
(Fast forward to the morning after go-live)
(!!!!!!BOOM!!!!!!)
: OH MY GAHD THE SERVICE IS DOWN! NOBODY CAN DO ANYTHING! EVERYONE IS LOCKED OUT! WHAT HAS HAPPENED! IT’S THE END OF LIFE AS WE KNOW IT! FIRE ALL THE PEOPLE! FIRE ALL THE PEOPLE!!
: I am $DEITY! Someone will fix this!
: WOW THERE’S LIKE NO DATA ANYWHERE LOL IT’S LIKE THE DATABASE ISN’T EVEN THERE ROFL IS THAT BAD ROFLMAO!
: Ya, I told you guys this would happen…
: No you didn’t. You recited poems about pickles and said it was very simple.
: And that you taught Ms. QA everything she used to build the package that blew out the transaction logs, locked all the resources, corrupted half the tables and then threw the entire app tier into recovery mode.
: At 2:15 in the morning.
: Which was what time the REST of us got paged to come in and deal with it, by the way, just sayin’.
: WHAT’S RECOVERY MODE LOL? IS THAT LIKE FOR DRUGS OR SOMETHING ROFL?!
: I am $DEITY. You will take the database out of recovery mode immediately.
: Can’t. That level of access is restricted to the DBA group. As I’m sure you recall, they don’t report to You, sir, they report to Herself. I’m sure you’ll be hearing from Her soon. Oh hey, is that your pager going off?
: …mother…of…Me…
: Yeah, pretty much. Have fun with that, sir.
: …whimper…
: Aaaaaaaaaand, I’m BACK! What’d I miss?!
: Nothin’ much. The usual.
: Hokay then! If you need me, I’ll be unavailable due to meetings!
: Cool. Later man.
: So. While we’re working on fixing the problems your bad code caused…
: …wait, wut…?!
: YEAH LOL B/C THAT’S LIKE REALLY BAD CODE ROFL YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER THAN TO DO THAT ROFLMAO!
: …the @^*&@?!?!?!
: No worries, man. Everybody screws up big time now and then. Except me. I’ll clean up your mess for you. You’re welcome, bro.
: Don’t touch it. Seriously. Look at my eyes: I will literally, with malice aforethought and quite thoroughly, kill you dead if you even open the package and look at it.
: No, no, hey: it’s cool. I’m here for you buddy. Gotta mentor the juniors, kinda part of the gig for the #1 Developer. {points at cup}
: YOU ARE NOT THE…
: …aaaaaaaanyway, I’m gonna need your sizing on these items for the next release…we don’t exactly have any requirements documentation just yet, but I think what we’re trying to accomplish is plenty clear without them, we just want to put the thing back in the other thing if a bunch of stuff is or isn’t a certain way. So! Now that you understand the whole vision there…whaddya think? Three hours? Four?
: I quit. I mean it this time. I quit. Wait. You want to put what things in which place? Hang on, because, where are you going to get the…
{becomes absorbed with interesting problem to solve, forgets is quitting, quotes time estimate based on phone conversation with Princess about project because never, EVER learns, like, EVER}
{go back to top and start over, because this is an infinite loop that repeats itself over and over and over and over and over and over and…}