"...I don't know how to paste...."
My week is now officially a write-off. We managed to do the software release yesterday with minor problems. Most of those were quickly solved. There were two small problems with related software we have and J was supposed to work on them from home. He was half dead so we left it for the time being. This morning was hell again. First off my journey to work. I ride the rocket. The TTC is usually on time and gets me to work in an hour. This morning they had problems on the RT system. We waited at each station for 10 minutes or so. The problem? "We are currently experiencing problems at Kennedy Station with a switch. Related, we are having computer problems. Now we also have a passenger alarm activated". Perfect. So I got to work 40 minutes later than I normally do. M, our CTO was wrapping up fixing another problem with our software and had to leave for another meeting. Then a user calls and says he's having more trouble. I get a short breakdown of what's happening but I need more details. I ask him to cut and paste a message on the screen and email it to me. "I don't know how to paste" he says. So after trying to walk him through it he says "well, even if I can paste it, I can only send emails to people in my address book". I thought "Umm.. ok, so how do you do business with new customers, mister?". He had to get someone from tech support to help him out. I finally got the details I needed and got to work. This small bug was fixed easily but made another bug appear. So I had to call the shots and had to do the unthinkable: authorize a hack. One line of code would solve all problems, but it was wrong, oh so wrong. I refuse to knowingly hack stuff into code. J on the other hand would do so after a short (very short) time of debating with himself. Unable to hand it off to him to authorize this time, I had to do it. After doing a mini-patch for our release, everything worked. There were no problems with the customers. Now we just have to spend a bit more time to clean up the hack so it won't be there for the next release. Leftover from yesterday was another customer problem. In short, they blocked our website and couldn't access it, so now we have to talk to the right guys to allow access. Two hours later my brain is fried. J is at home laughing cuz I'm sending him icq messages as to what's going on. So far, for my real work (not tech support stuff) i've managed to write 10 lines of code. Deadline is Monday. Enjoy your weekend folks.

BTW, if you're thinking our software has a lot of problems, it doesn't. It works very very well compared to the typical software. You're just looking through the eyes of two code monkeys here.

"...what if..."
Yesterday totally sucked. Today sucks rocks. In my frenzy yesterday I was bombarded with things to do. Major things that needed fixing ASAP. All of those were done by about 6:00pm. We were then at the final stage to release the next version of our software, meaning 'speak now or forever hold your peace' to the people in charge. Two things happened. First thing was someone spoke. One issue was left untested and needed to be tested before the release. The other issue was that since we were on a new server our release procedure was new and we encountered a few problems that had to be resolved. With J working from home these problems were far more difficult to fix than if he were sitting beside me. As soon as we got those problems fixed I tested the last section. Problem. At that point I called it a day, 12 hours with no break was already too much for one workday. This morning we fixed it, and again we were at 'speak now or...', and again someone spoke up. "Hmm.. I wonder what if I tried doing this? Nope, doesn't work, we can't go ahead with this". Well guess who's in the office right now working on this while everyone else is at lunch. Great...

Fine for now...
So far 5 or so people have called me on my cell at work "Hello? G? Why are you at work? Shouldn't you be quarantined? What about J?". I'm feeling fine. J is not. He's home sick, quarantined, but not for SARS. "Chill out" indeed.

"If you had a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters..."


Right now I wish a had a million monkeys with a million computers to do my work. I went to sleep last night with the thought "Tomorrow, I'm gonna do some kick ass work and get everything done". Well that isn't how its going today. Before I even had a chance to step foot into the office I was hit with my first job: "There's this guy that says his password isn't working...". That was a simple problem, just had to reset his password. Next I open my email and it was all over. There was a million things to do for everyone. I got to started on one thing and as I'm fixing one problem they come up with 5 more. What was that about when you rebuke an evil spirit it'll bring back 7 more? 'niscus (short for miniscus which is short for "my goodness" in my family) it was so brutal. Worst thing is I'd get an email, I'd read it, then the person would walk up to me and say "I just sent you an email about.... how soon will it be done?" and this happened for like 3 hours straight. About an hour ago I got two problems which were super-high priority. One was simple, I knew exactly where to fix it, the other was a nightmare, it was left out of the spec and it had to be done immediately. So before working on that I decided I needed breakfast. I made a quick stop at the Starbucks downstairs for my Vanilla Americano and a Double Chocolate Croissant which should have made the morning more pleasant, right? What if you were caught in a frenzy of work and you knocked over your coffee ALL OVER your desk, destroying your timesheet, mousepad, wrist rest, and making your own custom computer all sticky? 'nuf said.