Endearingly Optimistic
I’ve been at my current job for about 16 months, so I’m guessing I got this email based on it being a year since moving from “probationary employee” to “OK, we’re going to keep you around” full-time employee.
From: (our human resources director)
Sent: Friday, October 03, 2008 3:01 PM
To: (lovable old me)
Subject: 401kYou are now eligible to join the company’s 401k plan. Let me know if you would like additional information on the program.
(our human resources director)
voice: 503.xxx.xxxx
fax: 503.xxx.xxxx
Let’s see, HOW much has the market gone down in the last few days? I think I’ll just keep my money under my mattress, thanks.
Adventures in Software Testing
I had to file a bug, a couple of weeks ago, which read something like:
“Monthly reports for xyzzy corp don’t seem to work; I can see data in the DB tables but when I try to run the reports I get an empty xml file.”
About a week went by, because the developer on the xyzzy corp project has a zillion things on his plate, and I get a response which can be summed up as:
“Are you sure you were doing it right? You’ll only get results under conditions x, y, and z. Please try to reproduce it, this time with debug mode turned on (here are instructions on how to do that), and give me (this particular log file)”
This is developer-speak for “I’m busy and don’t want to look at the code. Here’s some tasks for you to serve as a delaying tactic while I work on other stuff.”
Anyway, I did the stuff he asked for. The log file he wanted didn’t turn out to be very large, which seemed odd, but I sent it along anyway.
His response, and I give him credit for being man enough to admit this, was:
“Oh, I forgot. I commented the monthly reports routine out.”
OK, it’s probably only funny if you’ve spent time as a QA geek, but trust me, it was hilarious at the time.
A wedding story.
So.
A couple of years ago, I’m working in an office building called Montgomery Park, in Portland. The reason it’s called Montgomery Park is that it used to be a Montgomery Ward’s warehouse, and by not changing the name much, they got to keep the huge lighted sign on top and just change a couple of letters.
This is not your average ex-warehouse.
It used to be a massive concrete cube nine stories high. It’s still nine stories high and looks like a concrete cube from the outside, but the inside… they did some pretty impressive stuff with it.
They knocked out the center portion of floors three through nine, leaving office space all around, and installed lots and lots of glass, so it has this massive open atrium in the middle, a largely open floor on the second floor, and then conference rooms and exits on the bottom floor. There are four glass elevators that look out on to the atrium… it actually hits everyone with a touch of vertigo the first couple of weeks you work there but it is really pretty.
Here’s a couple of tiny pictures.
The first is looking down onto the second floor from the glass elevators, the second is a view from the front of the building with the glass elevators in the background.
Now, the first and second floors get used for a lot of events after business hours and on weekends, so when I went in to work one Saturday and saw people setting up tables and chairs on the second floor, it didn’t really register with me. Honestly, I was kind of cross about going in to work on a Saturday anyway and just kind of focused on getting up to my desk on the ninth floor and getting stuff done and then trying to get out and save what little of my weekend I could.
I worked for a few hours and headed out.
I get to the elevator lobby on the ninth floor. There is a Montgomery Park employee holding an elevator door open, which is not service normally provided to random office workers. I process that, and then I process the older gentleman in the tuxedo and the young woman in the really elaborate white wedding gown.
I kind of stare at them a bit. It’s Saturday, I’m a bit worn out from staying up too late the night before. The only thing that comes to mind is “With the guy holding one elevator open, am I going to be able to get another elevator to come up to this floor?”
The Montgomery Park employee, displaying uncommon levels of understanding, interprets my look of absolute confusion correctly and pushes the call button. Another elevator immediately opens. I get in, push the first floor button, and walk to the back of the elevator so I can look down.
There’s an awful lot of people on the second floor, and an altar, and a minister.
The elevator door closes. As it starts descending, I hear music… the wedding march, in fact, and that is when everyone on the second floor looks up at me.
At this point, the confusion clears for me. I realize that the whole point of the bride being on the ninth floor is that she was supposed to be the person descending majestically into the wedding. Everyone looking up is expecting a young woman in white and her father, not a 30-something geek in slacks and a t-shirt.
I don’t know what the established custom is for this particular situation, but I managed a little half-hearted wave. I’m sure the videographer cut it out of the official wedding video.
I’m just really glad that I was going to the first floor, not getting off on the second floor in the middle of everything.
I left the building through the back doors.
So I found out I’ve been driving my boss insane.
At work, there’s an analog clock on the wall near my desk.
It’s typically about 5 minutes fast. I’m basing this by comparing its time to two different cell phones - that automatically have their time set from the cell towers - and the time on our network, which agrees with my cell phones. I’ve even checked the USNC clock via time.gov.
I’m pretty certain of the time difference between this clock and reality, is all I’m saying.
So: if I’m leaving after most people have gone home, I take it off the wall and set it to the proper time, or even a couple of minutes slow because I thought it was going fast over time.
I found out last week, by overhearing a conversation between my boss and one of my co-workers, that the clock is really getting under his skin because “It used to keep the right time, and now it goes slow all the time!”
He wasn’t quite frothing-at-the-mouth mad, but he had that little twitch to his voice that makes me wonder if there’s a fire axe anywhere on the premises and, if so, maybe it should be removed.
And then I watched him carefully set the clock again 5 minutes fast.
So my moral quandary is this, now: Do I keep setting it back to the right time and see how long it takes before he snaps?
Job Satisfaction
I actually don’t have an unkind word for my current employer. I’ve been there about 10 weeks and I quite like everyone, even my boss, so this shouldn’t be taken as a neener, neener, kind of post.
My current position is Software Quality Assurance. I design tests for software so that, in theory, customers don’t see many of the bugs that developers write. It’s not exactly a glamor job, but it pays well enough to keep the cats fed.
Today my boss walks in to my cube. Without saying a word, he takes the keyboard, pushes a few buttons, and demonstrates for me a really nasty crash. As in, oops, the product is completely unable to perform a fundamental operation and any customer trying to use that basic bit of functionality will hit this bug.
I look at him. I nod in agreement. Clearly he has found a nasty nasty bug.
Without saying a word, I open the bug tracking system. I show him where I found, and wrote up, this same bug on Friday. Furthermore, it’s assigned to him to do something about.
He mumbles something about needing to read his bug reports more, and leaves.
Now that’s job satisfaction.
Reflections on (abusing) trust.
So I’m about 3 weeks in to the new job and starting to build a rapport with our development staff. It really is a pretty decent place to work, and they’re all pretty pleasant which is fairly unusual for coder types.
Yesterday afternoon about 4 one of my new co-workers gets up to leave, but stops in another developer’s cubicle on the way out and makes some comment about having the worst desktop he’s ever seen. This piques my interest, so I walk over and butt in. The desktop in question is covered with icons - there’s maybe enough room for two more down in the very bottom right, but… it’s a mess.
In a joking way, I say “I bet you won’t hit two keys for me.”
“What are those?”
“Control-A. Enter.”
About 40 minutes later he was finished closing everything.
What made it extra fun was: Opening that many applications at once makes them start to crash pretty quickly. The machine had visual studio on it. Visual studio tries to launch a debugger when something crashes. So, on top of trying to open dozens of documents and applications, the machine was trying to launch a development environment every time one of them went foom, which was pretty often.
Apparently he’s never doing anything I tell him to do ever again. Oops. 
Grammar checkers am fun
I have a new job, so I have to learn a whole new set of processes and development tools, including a new bug tracking system.
I was taking notes today while I experimented with the bug tracking system, and I typed this into word:
“Presumably, blocks another bug until this one is fixed”
…and it underlined “blocks another bug until this one is fixed” in green
I right clicked on it and didn’t like any of the options, so I changed it to
“Presumably, blocks another bug until this one am fixed”
…and that goes right through the grammar checker, without comment.
So, I’m leaving it as is.
Job Hunt 2007 update
After bitching about how submitting resumes via Craiglist felt like throwing them into a bloody black hole, I was pretty surprised when sending out 3 applications today resulted in 2 personal - not canned! - email responses.
Granted, neither was “get down here for an interview! we need you!” but both were at least cordial We-Got-Your-Resume-Thanks emails.
I choose to look at this as a positive sign.
Linda, Linda…
OK, more like Lara, Lara. All apologies to the Blue Hearts.
Keeping up to date, today’s weight check : 194.4.
My recruiter seems to have found a couple of decent leads to throw a resume at and hope it sticks, and I’m of course sending off all manner of resumes myself, but while I remain out of work the game consoles continue to get a workout.
After Panzer Dragoon Saga, I went through the Saturn shelf a little more, and came up with Tomb Raider, possibly the most popular series nobody believes launched on the Saturn.
I’ve never finished it. I got quite far - looking at the level list on Wikipedia, I think I was about 3 levels from the end when I ran into a boss fight that I just couldn’t seem to beat. All things considered, it seemed like a pretty good choice.
But, one of the flaws with the console versions was the frequent deaths and very infrequent save points, and I don’t know if I’ve the tolerance for that anymore.
Anyway, I own the PC version, something I got in one of those “Mega Hits” collections, and I knew that had save-anywhere functionality, so I put the Saturn version aside and tried to install that. Not so much the worky. A little digging online revealed that, while it can be made to work under Windows XP, or even Vista, it takes a degree of mucking about that I wasn’t willing to do, and even if you got it running it didn’t have as good of music as the console versions. Shameful.
And… apparently they’re doing a remake of the first game ANYWAY, for the 10th 11th anniversary, and it will be a budget title, so why not wait for that?
Instead, I jumped forward two generations and picked Tomb Raider Legend off the shelf.
I played most of Tomb Raider, as I mentioned, and I played enough of Tomb Raider II on the Playstation to get to the point where running out of flares got annoying (very early), but I’d missed III, Chronicles, Angel of Darkness, whatever else was released thereafter. Comments I have heard over the years have indicated that I didn’t miss much.
Tomb Raider Legend, however, I heard good things about, so when we bought our XBox 360, it was one of the four games we picked up with it - Dead Rising, Ridge Racer 6, and Dead of Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball 2 were the others, and one of these days I will actually give them some playtime.
It was rather a different game than 1996’s game. Much more shooty, for one. Far fewer animal enemies, and especially NO UNDERWATER ENEMIES. I confess that I have a serious case of the heebie jeebies that comes from fighting stuff underwater - this was a big problem back when I was playing the first game… all those crocodiles, brrr.
I think I can leave aside the oohing and aahing at graphics, etc. It’s a 360 game and in hi-def and stuff, yes, it looks good. I got a kick out of a bit where, just after I’ve finished going “wow!” at a particularly neat bit of scenery, Lara makes a crack about going into the postcard business.
Most of the time I died due to falling off things, and most of those were due to me being a bit of a klutz when it comes to playing 3rd person games. I did die an awful lot, though, and in the Nepal level it managed to get just a bit frustrating, but never enough to make me toss the controller and give up. This represents a difficulty level that anyone who’s actually good at these sorts of games will probably consider childishly easy, but for me, I was happy to be able to see the whole story.
Another one down. With 12 years worth of games to choose from, what comes off the to-play pile next is anyone’s guess.
This needed a PS: The game includes forklift content. Apparently I’m doomed to forklifts. I’m 6 hours into Beyond Good and Evil now without a forklift in sight but I have no faith in that.
Vague and pointless ranting.
When you’re trying to keep a log of your job applications so you can have it handy in case the Oregon Employment department ever asks you to prove you’ve been looking for work, anonymous craigslist job postings make keeping said log a genuine pain in the ass.
Maybe I’m just easily annoyed. Actually, that’s kind of a given, I AM easily annoyed. I just hope that if I ever do get asked, the person asking will understand the concept of “I’m throwing resumes into a black hole. I don’t know where they go but I hope that someone on the other side of the black hole replies.”
Oh, and 195.6 this morning, two days in a row actually. Progress! Slow progress, but progress.
About
About the author:
I’m a married 30-odd-year-old fanboy, college student, and software QA guy, mostly recovered from an 8-year long Everquest addiction and trying to catch up on the last decade of videogames as a result.
I’m working towards a BA in Japanese and hope to be done by 2011.
This blog contains an awful lot of posts about games as I finish them, occasional rants about keeping in shape, the odd bit of bitching about the antics of the instructors and students I cross paths with, and every once in a while a post or two related to weird things I’ve seen while traveling.
Oh, and the occasional post about videogame girls in glasses because I like making my wife roll her eyes and shake her head at me.
