Category: Rant

Kill me now. Or better yet, kill him now. With fire.

A guy moved into a nearby cube a few weeks ago. Just now I had to go over to tell him to “keep the humming down a bit”, because it was getting increasingly loud and atonal. So now he’s started drumming.

How long do you think it will be before he starts using his speaker phone to talk to somebody two cubes over?

I’m getting flashbacks to Blue Lobster and Global Crossing.

Sleep Study

I had a sleep study last night. I very nearly had two at two different centers, but we got that straightened out and I only had to be in one place at a time.

I arrived at 7:30pm, and was shown to world’s most boring and utilitarian hotel room. It had a TV with basic cable, but no WiFi, so StackOverflow was deprived of my brilliance for the night. Around 9:30 the technician came in and started drawing on my head and attaching electrodes. As well as ones around my head, there were ones under my eyes to measure eye movement, ones on my legs to measure “restless leg syndrome”, ones under my chin to measure teeth grinding, a couple of straps around my chest to measure breathing, and others on my chest for the ECG. The wiring bundle was about a 2 or 3 centimeters in diameter. And then, just to make sure I couldn’t sleep, they hooked up a nasal cannula with another tube that sat on my upper lip to measure my breathing, and a pulse-oximeter for my finger.

With all that on, it was time to try to sleep. And believe me, I tried. Besides the wires that pulled every time I moved, and the hoses in my nose, I also had to contend with a narrow single bed and a not very comfortable mattress. I was actually surprised when I woke up one time during the night because I had thought I wouldn’t sleep at all. Turns out I did, just not well or long.

They kicked me out of bed at 6am, and here it is 7:08 and I’m using the WiFi at Panera to try to catch up, but what I really want to do is go home and sleep. Unstudied.

Busy day (Busy? I just spent 4 hours burying the cat!)

Let’s see, today I

  • Fixed a bug that I’ve been working on for over a week (which I would have fixed in a day if the China team hadn’t put in a kluge to hide the most visible symptom). Oh, and the root cause was a module that the China team had written violating a basic assumption of my pre-existing gui code.
  • Had a job interview at Paychex which went pretty well, but included a strange little math test at the end which was fun but I’m not sure how relevant it is.
  • Went for a paddle – I meant to make six miles, but I only managed four because my shoulder is bugging me.
  • Got a call from the sleep clinic at Sleep Insights “reminding” me that I had a consult appointment at 11:20 am tomorrow, which is kind of strange because I had a sleep study at a completely different sleep clinic tomorrow evening.

I thought about writing more on each of those things, but I figured my blog is boring enough without the help. So if you really need more details, comment and I’ll inflict more detail on you.

History to repeat itself?

It’s always been said about me that I can irmprove a workplace by leaving it.

Several years ago I worked at a small start-up called “Blue Lobster Software”. I’d accepted a salary about $15K less than I should have, along with stock options, thinking I was going to make it big on the stock options like so many people were doing at that time. After a year and a half or so, they got bought by SAGA Software, a former division of “Software AG”, a German company (SAGA originally was an acryonym for Sofware AG America). “Finally”, I thought, “it’s going to pay off”. Well, the first disappointment was that the stock options ended up only being worth about $2K. The second disappointment was that the new owners immediately made us sign new contracts with them, at exactly the same salary as we’d been making before (but no stock options this time). I said “that’s bullshit”, and immediately left, getting a job at Global Crossing within a few weeks.

As soon as I left, SAGA sent out a memo to all the remaining employees saying that the initial contract we’d signed was just to tide us over until they could review salaries, and within a week or two they’d given everybody who stayed big raises. Nice of them to tell them that *after* I’d jumped ship, eh? A couple of the developers thanked me for pushing them to give the raises sooner rather than later.

So flash forward to the present, where there are 4 or 5 of us on contract here at Kodak who’ve been getting jerked around over getting permanent offers, and getting our contracts renewed month to month at the last possible minute. And I’m about to jump ship, coincidentally to Global Crossing again. Who wants to bet that before my notice period is up, they find a way to make permanent offers to the other people who are in this boat?