I’m supposed to go on PTO this afternoon for a week, but Sunday & Monday are already pretty much out the window.
I’ve been getting dragged into so much client stuff it’s not even funny. Multiple items sent over that weren’t tested, tested in the wrong DB, been sitting since January, etc, etc. I punted one to a coworker because people keep forgetting she can look at these, too – and I won’t even have time to look at it today.
I know support is totally overwhelmed, but FFS, hire more senior experts, dammit. They have requisitions out, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
A “good” thing is once I realized I’m gonna work on Sunday and probably Monday, I said screw it and logged off last night before I told anyone to go fuck themselves. Today we have a half day and my ass isn’t working until 9AM and I will be logging off at 1PM on the dot and will have my out of office responder on. I’ll get more done Sunday/Monday anyway because NO ONE WILL BE BOTHERING ME.
This afternoon, I should get some things done around the house. I think instead I’m gonna sit my ass down and paint my nails. I’ve got some pretty colors just waiting to get out of the damn bottle.
Well, it’s almost 9AM so I’d best go get myself upstairs and open my laptop. Feels like a good morning to get that security training done.
You have a good Friday and don’t let folks drag you into shit that isn’t your problem.
And Happy Mother’s Day – if you have little ones, I hope they did not trash the kitchen trying to make breakfast for you.
It’s a lovely sunny day today and I have to work again, waaaaaaaahhhhhhh. ðŸ˜
But I did get a lot done yesterday afternoon, and took a long hard look at what needs to be done by tomorrow’s deadline – which has been overcome by events anyway, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Calculation group 1 can be cut in half, cause the second half is just flipping a switch that doesn’t actually do anything either way for that particular group. Not doing any more on Calculation group 2, cause I also have Calculation group 3 – which is just 2 on steroids and anything wrong with 2 will show up in 3. Would I like to do all of them in full by tomorrow? Absolutely. But, I don’t have at time machine, so, this will do. Work smarter, not harder or some shit. And they’ll all be retested by the end of the month anyway.
And to think last month our scrum lead was saying “maybe we can move this deadline to the end of April” – HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I kinda lost my shit in that meeting and said OH HELL NO.
In other stupid stuff, my local Giant food has fully implemented it’s “all our customers are criminals” recalibrations at the self checkouts and it is shit. I’m basically gonna copy & paste my bitch post about them and send it to corporate. The poor kid who works self-checkout watching me get into an argument with the damn register…he said hopefully if enough people complain, they’ll go back. I am ready to do my part!
Like, I had 4 cases of Coke. I did what a normal person does, take one out of the cart, scan it four times, put it back in the cart. Oh NO! It’s not in the bagging area! The bagging area that isn’t big enough for it! Tell me you don’t know how people use self-checkout without telling me. I’d love to use the regular checkouts, but they aren’t properly staffed!
Just stupid and maddening and a company that is NETTING 2.5 Billion with a B euros a year doesn’t need to be doing this.
Welp, time to go get some work done to make the money to afford the groceries that are up 43% year over year from the company who thinks *I’m* the criminal here…
The early bird gets the potato-cheese strudel at the farmer’s market before they sell out! I am fully back on my farmers market bullshit and I am so happy about it. 🥰🥰🥰
I am showing more restraint than I did the first couple weekends – my brain has acknowledged the fact that it is open every weekend from now until December 16th(!!!) and I don’t have to buy EVERYTHING I SEE. But it is wild what a happy dopamine hit that place is.
Today’s haul included the aforementioned strudel, salad greens, strawberries, cherry tomatoes, sammich & sweet breads, shortbread, potatoes, and paella! And for the potatoes, I grabbed some garlic smoked sausage at the market and I’m gonna do up a sheet pan roasted potatoes and sausage one night this week. Soooooo easy and tasty.
Gotta work this weekend, which suuuuuuuucks, but the upside is that I shouldn’t have anyone interrupting me asking to jump on a client meeting or make a tutorial or any of that nonsense. I don’t mind helping, but I wish we could share the love more among the QC team. When I tallied up things for my timesheet, I realized I’d lost an entire day this week to client issues instead of just doing my job…
The problem is that we have a chunk of clients that have these data restrictions where their stuff can only be seen by US citizens, and the bulk of my team is in another country – and this is why my position even exists in the first place. Which is great, cause I do like my job, but we could certainly use a couple more US based folks.
And Teams is doing its stupid shit again where if I don’t manually set myself as offline at the end of the day, it shows me as online & available when I am decidedly not. I forgot to set it when I logged off yesterday and this morning woke to a message from one of my coworkers in the Philippines at 1AM going, “Uhhh, are you actually online and still working?” I’m dedicated, but not THAT dedicated.
The bit I’m working on this weekend was this last little feature-y thing that got added at the last minute – and the testing needs to be done by Monday, which is fine, but I’m behind because of client stuff and testing other bugs that needed to take priority… But at least I know that the bugs I’ve already tested for shouldn’t be popping up again, so that will speed things up. And second, because I am the farthest behind of anyone in the group – any other bugs really should have been found by others by now.
But, of 22 bugs that were spawned since this code went in, I opened 16 of them – which is why I get a little salty sometimes and feel like others are waiting for me to find things first. And I found another one yesterday that I need to write up and post.
And that is what slows me down so damn much. When everything works, testing goes FAST! But the minute you get a weird number, you have to stop. Is the software wrong or is my calculation messed up? Is it the test data? Then have to setup a totally clean test to replicate and give to development. (I do a separate example so I can just continue on with my primary test data and don’t have to worry about dev going “I went to your example data and it’s all gone.”) Then check prior versions to see if this has existed forever and missed, or if it’s really new. So, that is like an hour right there. Then I continue with testing to see what else is up. Then once the fix is in, I have to start the testing over.
So, the more you find wrong, the longer it all takes. It is what it is, but also, THIS IS WHY IT TAKES ME FREAKING FOREVER AND I DON’T KNOW IF ANYONE REALIZES THIS.
OK, enough yelling for one morning – time to put on my testing hat and get this stuff knocked out.
The week is almost done, yay! I’m realizing I’m gonna have to work this weekend, boooooo.
I have a terrible feeling the client I wrote the tutorial for is going to want a meeting and training session once they see it. I want them to read it, try it in test, then come back to me. Preferably the first week of June. I have a terrible feeling they’re gonna be mad I couldn’t write it with their data – we have a copy of their stuff – but the way the security is set, I can barely get to the data, and can’t actually save anything to turn around and show it to them. Good security measure, seriously inconvenient for this scenario.
But honestly, my tutorial with my sample data is actually better – the example is complex enough to mirror what they have going on, but waaaaay more streamlined so it’s easier follow how to do everything. Also, cause it’s my data, I know 1+1=2 and I’m not wading through their data going, “WTF did you do here?”
I genuinely don’t mind helping, but there is never a good time to lose so much time to client issues that really boil down to training, and especially right now. Yesterday I was thinking “finish the tutorial and then go back to my actual job” but by the time I was done with it, it was already late and I was just spent.
At least if I work this weekend, I’ll park my happy ass on the sofa and have sportsball on all day, and no one can ask “hey can you jump on a meeting?”
I still very much like my job and the work I do and the folks I work with, but hooooboy, we are definitely to the point where it’s time for a bit of a break.
With this next release coming up, we’ve got some procedural changes – truly temporary, but they don’t really make any obvious sense, folks don’t really get it and the procedures are getting fucked up – and it’s hardly the end of the world, it’s gonna happen, especially since the changes just don’t make any sense. I am “eh, whatever” about it – if someone does it wrong, it doesn’t really mess me up, so I don’t worry about it and try to explain IT’S NOT CLEAR THAT’S WHY FOLKS ARE FUCKING IT UP to others who are getting their knickers in a twist over it. (To no avail, but I try.)
Then on Monday of our devs gently circumvented the entire process and went on vacation for two weeks. Honestly, I howled when I heard. Like I said, it doesn’t make sense and people are gonna make mistakes with it… (And again, not the end of the world.)
And also with this release we’re in the crush of final testing and…I am feeling inadequate. My work on this one app has been so, so slow going – I’m finding things wrong, which is GOOD AND THE POINT OF ALL THIS – but once something gets fixed, I have to start everything over again. Which isn’t hard – I’ve managed to sort of automate the “reset/reload/restart” process, and every test run goes faster, cause honestly, muscle memory kicks in real quick. But I just feel the need to scream, “I’M NOT SITTING HERE ALL DAY CONTEMPLATING MY NAVEL, I SWEAR.”
And in the midst of all this, I’m getting dragged into client stuff. Like, no, not now, please. I do not have the time, energy, or patience for it. Especially the patience.
My whole afternoon today was writing a tutorial for a client, because, of course. Will it help them? Will it make sense? I hope so – I’ve run it by the product manager, because it makes perfect sense to me, but that isn’t exactly saying much.
But tomorrow is Friday, this too shall pass, and just one more week until vacation.
The past couple days has been A LOT. And going about your day, and having any other feelings beyond sadness, grief, and anger can almost feel disrespectful.
But it’s not. Things still need to get done. Dinner has to be made, errands run, the bins have to get to the curb.
It’s OK to turn off the news, step away from social media, be annoyed with stupid little things, and happy for good things, and get the dishes done.
You can hold space in your heart for the grief and the anger and still have space for the joy.
This country is so fundamentally broken, and I don’t know how – or even if – we can turn it around. I’m not saying we shouldn’t try, it just feels really fucking bleak right now.
In the aftermath of the horrific murder of Jordan Neely, the ghouls coming out of the woodwork to justify it has been sickening.
“He’d been arrested a bunch of times” – not for anything that carried a death sentence. “He was homophobic” – being an asshole isn’t worthy of a death sentence. “He might have had a gun” – well, maybe we should think about gun control “No one tried to stop it, so they must have been OK with it” – once we got hold of unedited video, yes, people DID say the chokehold would kill him. And I suspect others watching really didn’t know how it would end. Would you?
You useless piece of shit, you shouldn’t have to believe in any higher power to be able to safely go to a fucking outlet mall.
There are photos and videos of the shooting and its aftermath circulating on social media – so please take care. I saw one photo, and while the victims were covered, I certainly didn’t need to see it.
And I understand that folks are circulating these because they feel that we do need to see it. But I think those in power who truly need to understand what happened and what these high powered guns do, likely already know and just do not care – and these photos and videos aren’t going to end up in front of them.
And they will blame everything but the guns, while not doing ANYTHING about any of those other issues.
Meanwhile, I can’t think of a single place I can go that someone hasn’t opened fire. Places of worship, grocery stores, sporting events, festivals, movie theaters, concerts, shopping malls – the list just doesn’t fucking end.
And to the jackass open carrying at Starbucks this morning – FUCK ALL THE WAY OFF.
By 10:30 I’d made the coffee run, hit up the farmers market, got myself a lovely ginger lemonade, and watched the post-coronation coverage.
And as much as I love some sparkly pageantry, they both just looked rather ridiculous. He struck me as a sad old man who is still mad he had to wait so very long to be king, and that it rained on his big day. And we know he’s gonna be a complete twat given what we’ve seen so far. Also – why was her crown bigger than his?
But some banger tiaras and hats, and Harry looked his usual hottie self. BTW, England, he’s ours now.
On a personal note, I don’t feel like crap anymore and I’m not afraid to eat, YAY! And another negative Covid test, YAY!
Big plans for today are figuring what I still need from the grocery store, go and get it, then pretend I’m going to get a ton of housework done, but not actually get any housework done, LOL. I did make the bed and get Iggy’s rollers and filter all cleaned out, so that counts as something!
The grocery store is stumping me – we need some shredded carrots (didn’t realize that when I was at the farmers market), italian dressing, and a headband because mine has disappeared yet again. And check if Coke is on sale cause we’re starting to run low? We haven’t had to buy Coke in ages because the last time they had a “buy 2, get 2” sale I got 4 cases, and put them in the dining room and forgot to mention to my brother that we were well stocked up, and then he saw the same sale that week when he was out and about and he got 4 cases…
But I feel like there is definitely something I am forgetting. But we have bread, milk, unopened lunch meat nowhere near expiry, proteins for salads and the other various and sundry salad fixings, eggs, and dinner is sorted. But my brain is going “Little bro mentioned something and you didn’t immediately put it on the list…” He’s now added butter, shredded cheddar, and bacon to the list – so I think we’re covered.
Hopefully talking all this out with you, my darling readers will ensure that I am not back at the market tomorrow morning. I do appreciate the indulgence. 🥰
You have a lovely Saturday. Eat some good food, take some time to relax and take care of yourself.
And I kinda sorta have today off! Need to log on for about an hour or two and wrap one thing up and then it’s the weekend! I’m keeping the out of office autoresponder on, and I did sleep in this morning, so while it kinda sucks a little, it’s all OK. If I hadn’t needed to take Tuesday off, I’d be in the clear, but eh, it’s all good.
Still playing the “was it food poisoning or Covid?” game – I feel fine now, especially now that I’ve gotten past the “afraid to eat” point. But I’ll keep testing for a couple more days just to be sure. Let’s all keep our fingers crossed for continued negatives, OK? Not just for me, but my brother has something fun this weekend and I don’t want to ruin it for him with “I have Covid and you probably do, too.”
Other than a bit of work today, the fun plans are UNBOXING ALL THE THINGS! Ordered some bookshelves from Amazon and they were all “do you want it on your ‘Amazon Day’ and get a digital credit”? Sure – not like I was gonna be doing anything with them until the weekend anyway. And then I had to order other various things that weren’t critical and said, sure, lump them all in with the Thursday delivery. So, I suddenly have a pile of little boxes that need to be tended to.
This pile of boxes also tells me I order too much shit off Amazon, LMAO.
Welp, time to top off the coffee and go whip through a couple test runs in stealth mode. I think I’ll set my Teams status as “If you think you see me today, no, you don’t,”
Apparently part of getting older is your body just going, “Oh, no, you can’t eat that anymore.” And that message manifesting itself at 4AM when you wake up feeling like you’re being poked in the abdomen with very sharp sticks.
At least I know what it was – I was feeling wobbly on Saturday after running errands and wrote it off to being up too late Friday night and one too many beers. But there was one thing eaten both Friday night and last night, so…
7AM I emailed work and told them I’d be in at noon. Slept a while longer, dragged myself up to the market for ginger ale, gatorade, and crackers. It’s helping, but I have a feeling I’m just calling out for the rest of the day, cause all I want to do is sit very, very still.
Musings of a marginally sane feline-appreciating female. 