Writing In Twilight

Why is it that so many people seem to believe that keeping a tech person in the dark is the best way to get a problem fixed?

Maybe it's just that I'm a sharing kind of person (in some cases, possibly over-sharing). But dammit, when a customer wants their problem fixed, they never seem to give me more than one-line describing the problem. No example of how they got the problem, the data they used, the example that takes place.

Seriously, an extra five minutes on their part saves me an hour on mine and they get their problem solved sooner.

I am not a mind-reader, and I really dislike being expected to read minds.

Insert your own horror stories of people who said "this isn't working" and then failed to specify exactly what wasn't "working".

Buddy, you wrote the damn thing, you know perfectly well how it works. If you'd spared 15 minutes this morning to explain what was going on, then I could have saved a large portion of this day.

I have never worked on this system before, I didn't even know how to connect to it, and it took me a couple of hours to work out what was going on.

Yes, you're on another job, but even some information yesterday at the end of your day (when I first asked about this issue) would have been helpful.

And now it's nearly 4:30pm and I'm only on this testing work for the day and it looks like half the things we're supposed to be testing are only half-done, and half-assed half-done at that. But rather than put me in a position to fix it, you're hanging me out to dry - without even a "check this out here" to help.

tl;dr: I hate it when people get territorial about their work.

eta: "It should really be very simple." If it was simple, then I wouldn't be asking your help. Stop fucking patronising me and start being helpful.

I came in to work, expecting that a few people would be in, but all the people are in systems support rather than the development area I work in, and it's dead quiet in the office.

Originally, I thought I had a client to work for during January, but I've heard nothing and I have no emails about this, and it's just on 9am and there's nobody here.

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I wonder if I could go home at midday...

Saturday
8am - get in to work, check all the communications, drink lots of coffee
9am - testing starts
9am-3pm - troubleshoot, troubleshoot, troubleshoot, fix any issues that arise, pacify all clients running around like headless chickens,
4pm - final house inspection
nighttime - collapse

Sunday
8am - get in to work, drink lots of coffee, check on anything that was working yesterday that it's still working today
8am-11am - troubleshoot, fix issues, pacify client
11am-3pm - 2 hockey games
3pm onwards - drinks with the hockey teams at the RSL (maybe)

Monday
8am - get in to work, watch everything go crazy
2pm - settlement happens, get a call saying everything has gone fine (or else that everything has gone pear-shaped)
5pm - finish work, pick up keys to house, go to house, BASK.

Somewhere in the midst of all that, I have to finish this PH and write an assignment.

. rarepairfest due tomorrow - wordcount: 809. It's going to be down to the wire and very terse. And probably not what the recip wanted, but so far as I can tell, the recip didn't leave a letter and I have no idea what they want. Other than the pairings listed.

. marvel_bang has 8K due at the end of the month. Current wordcount: 99. Plot is 80% worked out, but that last 20% with the conflict? Iffy. Very iffy. I may need an alpha willing to discuss plot and ideas via email. PM me if you're up for it. (eta: got someone - thank you!)

. Writing: so hard right now; I have these little "oh, yes, I want to write that" but I have no writing brain. And I want to write this YA series that I've had in my head for years but I feel like I can't. Or that people will look down on me for writing YA. Or that I'm just not good enough. It's all so terrifying and just freezes me.

. Renovations: had the builder around to the place on Monday to talk renovations/repairs, he's supposed to get us a quote later this week. But our changes look doable, the question is the price. We have quite a bit of room in the budget, though, so I'm not worried about the financials. It's just one more thing to think about as we go along.

. Garden planning. I have SO many ideas for the garden. Currently the plans are at about 20 fruit trees of varying types and kinds, with 2-3 chickens in the 5m x 7m backyard. We need a hedge to give us a bit of yard privacy, so I figure we might go with a 'fruit and nut' hedge (avocados, citrus, almonds). There's space for raspberry canes on one side of the lattice next to the driveway, and blackberry brambles on the other. And my sister loves strawberries, so we're going to have as many of them as we can plant! Lots of plans, which are going to have to be implemented in phases.

. Packing and sorting: going to start this weekend. Toss clothing, sort books, probably divest myself of a bunch of fannish stuff that I'm no longer into. Question: should I just throw it out or offer it to other fans? I know I've benefited from a bunch of other people who've passed on their collections to me, and it feels wrong to just toss it out.

. Work: pretty much two weeks to go-live and I'm still working full-time on this project when I thought I'd be only a couple of days a week. Frustrating, because I come in and spend most of the morning writing journal entries and fic, because I'm waiting on people for the first half of the day - and then everyone brings their problems around in the afternoon. Like, at 3:30pm in the afternoon. It's exhausting.

. Sisters: specifically B2. She has a place; there's a deposit down, the bank is speaking with her on Friday, the parents are standing guarantor. And now I'm fretting about her being alone and managing okay. We'll only be 20 mins away, and B1 intends to go and stay over every now and then, but still. Big sister syndrome.

. Quilting: I was quilting madly up until a week ago, and then all my creativity just drained out of me. I'm going to pack up all my fabric this weekend - sort through and box up everything I'm not using, leaving out only the projects that I'm working on right now.

After being crazy busy for the last four days (mostly checking connections, getting failed connections working, trying to troubleshoot for every interface and their pet bunny, and avoiding being snarky when people come to me with stupid questions), yesterday we pronounced the pre-go-live production system all connected and threw out all the data we'd been throwing back and forth between our pre-go-live production systems and other pre-go-live production systems.

This morning, I switched all the connections to inactive.

And I have thenceforth sat at this desk twiddling my thumbs. Well, reading through documentation and making sure it's up to date. Which is pretty much twiddling my thumbs.

Frankly, I didn't need to be here today. I could have been at home, sewing or writing or cooking, or planning the house.

Oh, wait, I have something to transfer from development into our testing system. Whoopee!

The one in the arcades? Where you try to whack the sharks/moles/creatures that pop up out of the holes. No sooner do you get one then another pops up.

And sometimes I think this guy believes I'm doing this to spite him. He certainly behaves like I'm actively sabotaging the system.

Dear Customer,

No, we cannot code to remove all "weird characters" from the dataset. Because what will inevitably happen is that we'll remove something that you need and then you'll be screeching at us that we've borked your business processes.

This error occurred because someone copypasta'd from an email with a linefeed. The sending system caught the linefeed. The receiving system doesn't have the appropriate character for it in the codepage. This will occasionally happen.

Unfortunately, we cannot code against the ingenuity of human stupidity. If there was a "remove ridiculous human error from calculation" function, we programmers would have started using it a long time ago.

So we leave the code as it is, and you will occasionally have a piece of grit in your oyster that does not become the proverbial pearl. You'll just have to learn to spit once in a blue moon.

with a great deal of irritation and absolutely no respect,
Sel.

Not liking my team lead at all right now.

Every time I have a problem caused by someone else, he's all "well, can't you just jimmy it to fix it?"

Every time someone else has a problem caused by someone else, he's all "well, the other people need to fix it!"

It's getting on my nerves.

Oh, the joyful frustration of someone trying to tell you UR DOIN' IT RONG when they have no concept of the processes you're running.

No, we can't do what you're suggesting because this is a standard system process over which we have no manual control. Our external "interchange system" passes it to the standard port, and the system decides internally how to deal with it. Which happens to be this standard-system programming routine to which we've added code so it can deal with our changes. The added code is not a problem, so far as the system is concerned. But the modifications you are proposing would change the way the system deals with this standard port and its standard programming. Which is highly inadvisable.

Yes, I get what you're trying to do, and why you're suggesting it. But it is not possible the way this is configured. Trust me.