The work I've been doing for the last week, trying to massage somebody else's data to make a square peg fit into a round hole, turned out to be a complete and utter waste of time. The data is shit, corrupted and inconsistent and I have just informed the person who gave it to me that it is so. I could say that I hope he doesn't hate me for it, but honestly, that would be a lie.
Tag: dealing with idiots
Neighbour hell
Our upstairs neighbours are making our life hell. We're getting sucked into an immature spiral of making noise just to spite them for making noise. We need to get the fuck out of here.
The joys of passport control.
I got home at 1am last night. I am le tired.
Luton sucks ass as an airport. Customs control has to qualify as a lower level of hell. It's always the same. Since I don't have an EU passport, I have to go to the special queue with the rest of the foreigner scum (as we're treated).
Two fully loaded 737 planes landed at the same time. That's a few hundred people. There were maybe 20 people in front of me in that queue. The rest, EU nationals, in their separate queue WERE ALL PROCESSED BEFORE I REACHED THE FRONT OF THE LINE!!! In the half hour I was waiting, I was hot, was lugging my laptop and other carry-on luggage, had a screaming baby bawling right behind me, a jerk that kept hitting me with his bag in front of me, my feet hurt because of all the blisters on them and I needed to pee.
There was only one customs agent checking passport for non-EU residents. He shall henceforth be known as Mr. Efficiency. He was reading every page of each passport. When all the EU residents were processed, the four other agents started processing the people in my queue, so that started going a bit faster. Sod's law being in full force though, when it was close to my turn, another plane landed so we were forced to wait on Mr Efficiency again. Grrr. Finally, I'm at the head of the line and what should happen? Two security guards come up and start chatting with Mr. Efficiency. At this point, all that was needed to make this the lowest level of hell would have been that his tea break was due and he'd just get up and go. Finally, it was my turn.
It's always the same, and this is the most frustrating bit. The chat with Mr. Efficiency and his brethren always goes something like this:
Mr. E: Where did you travel from?
Me: Geneva
Mr. E: Where are you going in the UK?
Me: Cambridge
Mr. E: Do you work in the UK?
Me: yes.
Mr. E: *stamp* NEXT!
30 seconds of fun for 30 minutes of waiting in line.
Joy.
Banks are teh evil
I've done an international money transfer from my Natwest account to my Caisse Populaire account. The money left fine. Problem is, it hasn't appeared overseas yet and it's been close to a week.
I fucking hate banks.
Minor annoyances
I need input from other people before I can get some work done. Unfortunately, all those people are now on vacation. This annoys me to no extent.
How not to code
I am working with a codebase that is just…. braindamaged.
352 classes and NOT A SINGLE LINE OF COMMENTS!!!
Added to this loverly fact is code like this:
Iterator it = set.iterator();
for (readfileindex = 0; it.hasNext(); readfileindex++)
{
String filename = (String) it.next();
//do something with it
}
Anybody with a bit of programming experience will realize that, though this block is valid, it makes NO LOGICAL SENSE. Especially when you realize that the readfileindex is used somewhere else for UI purposes. It violates about every common sense rule for effective programming.
joy.