Today I was planning to work on a university assignment that is due later this month. Here’s how it went:
8:30 am - Email from my translation agency, they want me to translate about 20 words that the client added to a project I completed a week or two ago. It’s no problem, but they want it right now and that makes the kids a little late for school (it’s not the translation itself, it’s the email back and forth that takes the time)
9:30 - Back home again after dropping off the kids. Phone call from my wife - she’s worried about a minor medical issue that our son still has after a couple of weeks, and she’s managed to arrange a doctor’s appointment for 10:45. That gives me 30 minutes or so before I have to leave, as the doctor isn’t close to our home.
10:45 - The waiting room is pretty much empty, but the doctor isn’t there.
12:25 - Finally see the doctor, she’s happy with his progress and thinks he should continue with the current treatment.
1:20 - Back home with an hour to go before I have to pick up my daughter. There’s still time to make lunch for my son (it wasn’t worth bringing him back to school, but we did pick his bag up on the way home).
This afternoon I’ll be looking after the kids and promised to take them out for a while, so it looks like I won’t get much of my assignment done today. Sigh - it’s a sahd life (although I’m sure many women have the sahm experience too).
I’m working on some code I wrote, which was performing flawlessly. But today it wasn’t. I spent hours debugging, go I get to an area that I haven’t touched in weeks.
I see the problem, and exclaim to the office, “holy shit, I don’t know how this worked at all with these bugs. It must have been me. The only possible explanation was it was me. I have no explanation–sleep coding, similar to sleep walking?”
I get a ribbing from the office, I fix the issues, and check it in.
After I check it in, I see a tiny line that there was a change made… By the most senior guy there.
Inadvertently, unmaliciously he added this subtle bug (trying to make things cleaner) and I got credit for being a dumbass :D.
It doesn’t matter, except now I don’t feel crazy! I really didn’t check in non working code thinking it was working.
(He didnt even fuckin unit test it, which I’ve designed to take a hot second. Which is how I noticed. He didn’t escape a character correctly, that was all it was!)
(there’s a chance a course of steroids might give me my sense of smell back, but I’m not holding my breath)
I’ve checked in non-working code many times. IIRC, quite often it was by introducing a spurious ‘z’ at the start of the file after I tried to ctrl-Z to save it. Or something like that.
I guess non-compiling code is better than buggy code, anyway.
Love those. Last one I had 5 guys come in to apparently do little more than change the smoke alarm batteries while the remainder of them stared at the racks of gear on either side of my desk.
I’ve had ones like that before. I’m in an apartment and I’ve got enough computer / electronic gear for a small to mid sized business, so they sometimes get sidetracked.
I got a form from the DWP on Friday. It wasn’t the PIP form that I was expecting this year, it is an ESA form.
It looks like I’m filling in two stressful benefits forms this year, potentially with medical assessments by people with a history of not accurately reporting illnesses and disabilities.
Because of all my profs who think it’s a good idea to have group projects (or maybe because of the administration that tells the profs that they must include group projects in their classes), I would like to say Fuck Today.
Additionally, fuck these kids who can’t be bothered to have an original thought, and have zero follow-through when it comes to discussing the finer details of our assignments. They can’t tell me that they didn’t get my emails, BECAUSE I SEE THEM STARING AT THEIR DEVICES ALL DAMN DAY.
Seventh interaction with my pharmacy and they’ve screwed up. That’s seven for seven. But they screwed up less! I am now more invested in helping improve their processes than transferring to somewhere else.
Maybe I shouldn’t mention this, but that’s exactly the thinking of abused partners. It’s worth looking into if this is your default position in relationships, whether personal or retail.
My best group project ever was first year computer science. We got together and I said to my group, “Do you guys just want me to do this? It will be a lot easier for me to just do the whole thing than to organize it.” and they were like, “We can’t make you do the whole thing.”
Two days later, someone else in the group had just done the whole thing themselves.
You can lead the students to group projects, but you can’t make them bother to work as a group.
