Category: Job Experiences

Movie tickets

Our project has a custom of handing out free movie ticket coupons every year as sort of a bonus. In the past, either one of the admins has handed them out, or just stuck them in an interoffice envelope. No ceremony or fuss.

This year, my boss Nancy comes over. She says that she’d had to go through my pimp for this (and I’m suddenly thinking “hey, is this my first raise in 5 years?”) and then congratulates me for a good year and hands me the movie tickets. Sure enough, as well as the usual cover letter from my boss’s boss, there is another one from the pimp agency. Knowing it went through them, I immediately counted the coupons to see if they took 35% of them. But no, it appears they’re all there. I guess there’s a first time for everything.

Inspirational quotes?

Somebody has put up a bunch of those oh-so-inspirational quotes where business leaders said something really stupid. I’m not sure how these are supposed to inspire us, especially since almost all of them are urban legends. One of them I walk by every day says

“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.”

— William Orton, president of Western Union, in 1876

I’m trying to figure out the clip art they used for a banner on the quote, because I really want to replace it with

“These digital cameras are a fad. People will always want the quality that they can only get with film”

— Any Kodak executive from 1975 to about 2005

Dear Boss

Three years ago, when I was asked to implement a DocumentCache class in the cinlib, I made a mistake so that first build that had it was actually horribly slower than before it was implemented. Yes, I admit it. But I fixed that problem in the very next build, and it actually did end up being a net gain.

So is it really fucking necessary that every time since then when there the slightest question about cinlib performance, the first words out of your mouth are “can we try disabliing the DocumentCache to see if that fixes it”? I mean, it’s been three years. Give it up, already.

Oh, this bodes well for meeting our end of month deadline

The ClearCase server machine is still dead. Evidently both hard drives went tits up yesterday, and nobody can bring it up. And I’ve got a bunch of files not checked in – from what I remember back when we had a ClearCase administrator, files that aren’t checked in aren’t backed up.

And just to make my day complete, I can’t log into Lotus Notes.

Good thing I’ve got some movies on my iPod.