A Job Well Done...

...is its own reward.  Or so some say.

I say...HA!  WHAT A LOAD OF !#$!$!$#!  That's meaningless tripe handed to you when you work in a place where NOBODY bloody well knows what you do, most particularly the people to whom you presumably report.  You're expected to pat yourself on the back as required, and keep working.   It's usually unsatisfying for the worker bee, but it's a lot better than being micro-managed, and it keeps anyone above you from blowing a brain stem putting too much thought into what you're doing.

On the other hand, it can be fairly liberating.  I had a project that should have finished this week not get completed.  Many moving parts, things happening in a precise sequence, just didn't come together...no one person's fault.  We'll continue next week.

Now if I worked in a normal place, best case I could expect some concern or questions, worst case I might be ripped a new one.  But in the world I inhabit, nothing happened.

And that, I think, is the actual reward.  Forget about feeling good when 99% of your work goes well; the true gift is that you don't have to feel bad when 1% goes awry.

Merry Christmas to me.

Your vs. You're

This courtesy of http://theoatmeal.com/comics/misspelling

Lose vs. Loose

I received a piece of email today at work talking about "use or loose leave".  Grrrr!  What's "loose leave", anyway, going off on vacation to work as a hooker?

So for all you dummies who still don't get it ... as our friends at theoatmeal.com said best (click the link!):

Lose = Opposite of "win"
Loose = Not tight

While you're at it, review the other 9 words you should stop misspelling, all described on the theoatmeal.com link above, because if you can't get lose/loose right, you're probably screwing up all the others too.

The person who sent me the loose email this morning later sent one with a bad apostrophe (stating she was working at the "Headquarter's Office").   We are a rather poor organization, perhaps we can afford only one Headquarter.

December blog

I've been so busy beating my head against the wall that I haven't managed a post for over a month!  Shocking, I know.  And since it now officially the holiday season - which means it is after Thanksgiving for me, none of this Christmas stuff in the stores before Hallowe'en garbage for me - I could wax poetic about holidays, togetherness, happiness, cheer, etc.

Hmm.  That's a little difficult when we live in such a partisan, bitter, bickering world, made nastier by the fact that most people do their snotty commentary anonymously in idiotic comments to newspaper articles or via mostly anonymous blogs.  (Oh, wait...there might be a problem here...)

Anyway, here's my suggestion for 2013.  Everyone should, as Mark Twain once said, never miss an chance to shut up.  Be nice to your friends and family, try to acquire some more (friends at least :-), don't talk to me about religion or politics (heck even Charlie Brown had that right 50 years ago).   Enjoy the holidays, whatever you celebrate, and if you don't celebrate anything, well good for you but don't get mad at me for doing my thing.

We will return to our regularly scheduled ranting, er, musings, in January.

Don't offer me technical advice...

...unless you actually know WTF you're talking about.

I have to sit through a demo tomorrow of someone else's web application that someone I have less than zero respect for said was "perfect" for us.  Yeah right.  It's written in a language we don't use, runs under a web server we don't use, and probably has s**t for permissions and data integrity.  Not to mention that even if they do have some stuff normalized, they aren't going to magically match everything we have already.  No, using this thing - if we do it at all - will still represent a significant integration effort...not to mention that we had something kinda sorta like this already that completely died because nooooooooooobody wanted to be responsible for actually maintaining the data (plus nobody ever used the data).....but someone said it was perfect so now I have to go waste a hunk of my morning sitting through this thing.  At least I'll get to enjoy shooting him down when he expresses his marvelous idea to management.

Except they won't get it either.

Oh, I give up.