…for I just listened to 50 minutes straight of Weird Al’s polka medlies. Fifty minutes! In a row!
Think you’re hard enough?
Category: Workin’ for the Man
Caught Coming and Going
Question: What’s worse that getting a migraine because you’re stressed?
Answer: Getting a migraine because you were stressed, but now the stress has passed and you can relax.
Think I’ll pop down to the head exchange and get a trade in…
Just Another Day at the Office
You know you’re having a rough day when the only way to stay awake is to boot up the Fadades.
From the Trenches
I just recoded a client’s system to make 2 requests to the database in place of 16,000.
This would count as a triumph of programming skill if it wasn’t for the fact that I’m the idiot who coded it to make 15,998 unnecessary requests in the first place…
Good News, Bad News
Bad News – The Data Centre that hosts our servers went down on Friday afternoon, meaning that everything for all of our clients was offline.
Good News – It wasn’t our fault.
Bad News – Our clients are unlikely to understand the distinction.
Good News – They got everything back up and running in a couple of hours.
Bad News – Except for one of our critical servers.
Good News – The critical server was up and running by Saturday evening.
Bad News – One of my esteemed colleagues – who I have to work with today – lost a big chunk of his weekend getting it back up, and will most likely be in the kind of mood that would make the Pope kick little children in the face.
Good News – I got to go home early on Friday.
Bad News – Having gone home early on Friday I don’t get paid as much.
Good News – I decided to catch the bus into the city rather than to Subiaco, and along Mounts Bay Road, just near the Eliza statue I spotted a fin poking out of the river. My first thought was “shark!” but then I realised the shape was wrong, and a flash of back and a puff of spray revealed it to be one of the Swan River dolphins. Awesome! I’ve never seen one of them before!
Then when I got home I had to time to do up a few more Snoos for the Warhammer subreddit’s Snoo contest. Which was a good thing, because the Eldar Farseer Snoo I put together ended up winning! đŸ˜€ It can now be seen on top of the subreddit, and the mods liked my work so much that I’ve been contracted to create a new Snoo each month for the forseeable future. In return I’ve been allocated the title of “Honored Artificer of the /r/warhammer Snoo” and awarded a $25 Games Workshop voucher, which is nothing to be sneezed at.
Bad News – The $25 voucher is in US Dollars and hence (apparently) can’t be used to buy anything from Australia.
Good News – GW has an excellent customer service reputation, so I’m confident that if I email them I’ll be able to get it sorted out.
That is all.
Just Another Day at the Office
Note to clients. If you get third party content suppliers to email us material with subject lines like “Your Master Africa file is ready to Download!”, attached zip files and no explanation or notice that they’re working for you and you want it put up on your website, we WILL consider it to be virus laden spam and delete it.
Thank you.
And if Andorra is 6 then Greece is 7
Dear Australia Post,
Thank you for increasing your international parcel post zones from 4 to 8. Thank you also for making the only way to get a complete list of which countries are in which zones by going through and checking each country individually via a dropdown menu on your website.
Thank you. Thank you a whole freakin’ bunch.
Currently Making my Life Hell…
Imagine, if you will, that you’re a mechanic. Not the world’s greatest mechanic by any means, but a decent mechanic who earns a decent wage fixing and tuning cars and trucks.
One day you get a call from someone wanting you to come out and tune up their car. So you hop in your van and drive out to their address. On arrival however you discover that it’s not a car.
It’s this….
Before you have time to react, the Captain whacks a hat on your head, says “Welcome aboard! You’re our new Head Engineer!” and drags you down to the engine room.
Which looks like this…
Mistaking your look of horror for one of mere concern, the captain says “Don’t worry, the manuals are right here…”
You pick up one of the decaying books at random and open it. Every single page looks like this…
The Captain continues “All set? Your tools are over there…”
“…and we think the forward port engine is about to fall off. Have fun!”
Through strenuous effort (and a lot of desperate banging on random pipes) you manage to keep the ship in the air. You even manage to accommodate some of the crew’s requests, such as restoring the air conditioning and halting the gradual detachment of the starboard mess hall. Buoyed by your apparent competence the crew send in a flood of new requests for things such as hot tubs and mood lighting, some of which you can manage and many of which you have to ignore.
Making matters worse, through all of this the Captain insists on a weekly meeting at Airship HQ in Zurich. Once a week you have to fly to Zurich and sit in a small room staring at a list of requests and upgrades. After about an hour the meeting is declared a success and you fly back to the airship to continue banging on pipes.
You find yourself entertaining thoughts of sabotaging the engines, or at least ignoring the more desperate maintenance tasks so the ship will fall out of the sky and (as long as you survive) you won’t have to deal with it any more. But your professionalism wins through, you take a deep breath and get on with tightening a valve that you think will correct the water pressure on deck three. Maybe.
Attention Ladies and Gentlemen
This is what happens when you don’t close your tags.
That is all.
Down at the Office…
Coworker: Ruby 2’s out!
Me: Wasn’t that a Stones song?
