Whee!

Yes, you too can get up 45 minutes late and arrive at work on time.

I have a lot of fluff-time in my average morning. This morning? Up, breakfast, brush hair, out the door. No time to make a lunch; I'll go to the deli.

It was very worth it. I stayed up too late last night enjoying a pair (trio, really, if you count a "fade, resume two days later IC" break) of really good scenes on Amber. A whole lot of fun, and easily worth having to forego my usual morning routine.

I'm here, I'm alive. I have Spanish class tonight and I haven't read my articles. Oops. Oh, well. I've got two and a half hours between work and class. I can read the articles, hit the dictionary for some key words for discussing the general topic, and have time for dinner. It works.

And the day started so nicely, too.

My hot potato soup (be careful, they warned me - it was really hot - and it was) is now cold potato soup, with 3/5 or so of it untouched.

I love work. Really I do. I love being dragged out of my office, in the middle of my lunch, so I can stand around and listen to a supervisor pontificate at length about something someone else is working on, and make me be there so I can make decisions about whether or not to take his "advice". But who doesn't listen when I make those decisions, even if they are "yes", but goes on repeating himself.

Then the tester gets into the act, coming into my office less than a minute after I get out of that, and saying she's concerned that we're giving the poor guy working on it mixed signals (mind you, she wasn't even in the previous conversation, she was in the two before it, that I wasn't involved in), because my boss told him not to use the stuff from the other project, that it's awful, and he (my boss) had lots of good ideas, and... So I say, I didn't realize he felt that strongly about it, I'll talk to him and make sure we take it into account.

She goes on about it. For ages. Repeating herself. A lot. For gods' sakes, shut the hell up and get out of my office! You said it. I said I'd talk to him. I said I'd deal with it. And M. is not getting mixed signals; he's getting very firm ones, they just may be wrong, but I already said I would talk to my boss, which I can't do while you're sitting here scolding me, GOT IT?

Jeeeez. I value her opinion, I respect her knowledge, but her listening ability could really use some work.

Then I go talk to my boss and say I hear he had some pretty firm opinions and I'd like to hear what they are so I can make sure we take them into account and work with them.

He says he shouldn't have any opinions anyway, because he's only supposed to work on new products, and this is an old product.

He sits on that when I say I want his opinion, etc., etc.

I did eventually get them, and they are good ideas, and I'm still having M. take the old code first, because I believe it can be easily developed from that in phases.

Meanwhile, there are days that I really hate working in this office, with these people, and this is one of them. And the day started so well. It's pretty. It's rainy. Physically I'm feeling very good.

I just want to go home, now, and hide, though. Before someone else gripes at me to do something I've already agreed to do, and can't very well actually do while they're in my office being snippish. Before someone else decides that just because they're upset or depressed about something, they can't address or deal with a related situation. Gods. If I did that, I wouldn't get any code written or things organized some days, with the way people in this office act!

I'd also like to go home before I starve. $2 for soup isn't bad, but it's a lot better if you actually get to eat it, and this container is not microwave safe, and all of mine that are, are at home. *sighs* I'll get a sandwich in a bit. The cookies were good. The soup was only okay, actually; they didn't cost me a really excellent soup. But it's annoying. Oh, well.

Now, speaking of not letting moods stop work, I'm going to get back to mine, I think. Though I did sort the whole issue out and get M. firm instructions that take into account my boss's ideas, before coming here to grouch. (Oddly enough, they start out exactly as the original set did. Imagine that. Work can be done in stages, folks.... And the old version of this product is a great starting point for my boss's vision.)

Feh.

It's not all bad.

I talked to my boss's boss, and the new laptop for my team should be arriving next week. Also, he gave me more information on billing.

And he shared an amusing story. He wanted to know what we'd done to A. (one of the project managers), who talked to us yesterday. We had asked him a few questions, and told him we couldn't give him answers until a day or two had passed and we'd gathered all answers and could formulate our schedule.

At the new meeting for his estimate, he upped the hours in his project to something around 3000.

For, admittedly, both systems, not just mine.

That's over a man-year. For what are, essentially, near-baseline products. It's true, there are things we need to do for them, but most of them are not customizations, but baseline changes.

Way, way too many hours. He's lowered his revenue-per-hour drastically by doing that, which will tend to put him last on our list, which is not what he wants. It was rather the wrong move - he had plenty of hours for our stuff, and I've been telling him that. The question is not if we will overbill his project - even before this, it was almost certain we'd underbill it because we simply don't need those hours. The question was when we would manage to work on it!

Geez, A. Get a clue. Please. Here, have two. Have three. (If I throw enough clues at someone, even if he's not taking them, do you think I can bury him too deep to talk or write emails for a little bit?)

Humming along....

the reproach in your daughter's most beautiful face
made me wonder just how she could know
of something that happened between you and me
so much more than a long time ago

I love this song. The sound of it is just incredibly well-suited to the words.

Okay, I love the CD, we knew that....

The code is behaving itself. I've almost got one of the load-from-database routines written, and once that's accomplished, I can put all the others together off of that template.

...of course, that means I'll have to update the validation routines to check two tables. Aie. And a few other fun things....

(no subject)

From an email from a coworker (regarding a site and system I don't work on - in the process of explaining why his part of what I do work on is delayed - names omitted):

* continues to choose the most time-consuming and painful ways to move forward with fixing their data issues.

And...class.

Man, when a day sucks, it really sucks, doesn't it?

No, this entry isn't in Spanish, though I probably could do it that way. My Spanish is fairly decent, though not as good as I'd like.

But it's too bloody much effort to deal with Spanish, after class sucked. I was a little tired but basically coping okay, but today's topic was food.

I am so sick of topics it's hard for me to talk about. And as much as possible, since it's a Spanish class, we talk about things as they relate to our experiences in Spanish-speaking countries.

Un problema. I spent a week in a car in Mexico. I barely remember it, it was years ago, and my two strongest memories are getting what was probably a fairly mild case of dysentery, and being told I couldn't have a carved cat I desperately wanted (and for which I had the money). Alas, it was rather large, and I didn't get it. :(

Anyway. Given that my interest in food is fairly blah - I mean, I don't think about it except when I'm faced with the need to acquire it, I hate cooking, and I generally don't find it worth my while to wait in a restaurant for food to be made when I can eat something that I'll remember just as long out of a box stuffed in the microwave.

Once again, my Spanish is fine. My interest in the topic is nil.

I attempted to talk about it, and they asked if I liked ice cream. I said yes. They wanted me to say more. What? I like ice cream, in fairly plain flavors, like chocolate and vanilla. That's it. What am I supposed to say about it? I don't have a favorite brand, I don't really have a favorite flavor.

But thank you so much for mocking me, and saying that because I'm not too interested in it, as long as it's safe and the flavor's not too strong, and I don't like taking the time to cook or go to the effort to get to a restaurant and order food there and wait for it, thank you very much for commenting that food isn't important to me and I don't like making time to eat. Thank you for joking amongst yourselves about it.

I probably took it a lot worse than I should have, because I was tired. I realize this. But you continued after I corrected you, and you laughed, and you drew the other students into laughing, and I'm wondering why the hell I'm in this class anyway.

Just. Fuck. Off.

At least next week's topic is "pets", but thank you to the professor for saying she was sure I wouldn't have anything to say about this either. I'll be lucky if I don't freeze up next week just from the expectations.

I am not taking this class again, certainly not with this professor, most likely not at all. Forget maintaining my Spanish, it's not worth it.

And yeah, tomorrow I'll probably feel different...about maintaining my Spanish. My opinin of the lady teaching this class is pretty well shot.

I'm going to go get some sleep now. Not being tired generally helps my mood, and tomorrow will be pretty hideous if I don't sleep well. :)