Tag: dealing with idiots

Sometimes, I hate people

Posted on By admin

I hate having to deal with people by email.

Sadly, it's a big part of my job and also the only way I have to deal with some people. It's too easy to avoid answering emails you don't want to deal with. I know I'm guilty of it myself, but I do make an effort to at least give a token reply.

This is a public service announcement broadcast: if you really want to piss me off, ignore my emails. Especially if it's important. Even more so if it'll only take a yes or a no answer to send me on my merry way.

</sarcasm>

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The universe is conspiring to piss me off today

Posted on By admin

I am not a happy bunny.

I'm so out of it today that I didn't even realize that it's my least favourite day of the week: meeting day, aka thursday. I get clued in when I see everybody heading to the group meeting while I'm shuffling into work so I throw off all my stuff in the shed and I scramble to get a coffee before the meeting.

I then proceed to sit through the most boring presentation in the universe.

This is a website. If you click here, you see this information. If you click there, you get that information. This is how you edit the website. If you click here, you can edit this page. If you click there, you can edit that page, which is quite a nice feature indeed. If you click here, you can create a new page. If you click there, you can edit your previous page to link to the new page you're working on, which is quite a nice feature indeed.

For 30 fucking minutes.

Which means that the cafeteria stopped serving breakfast, to which I wanted to treat myself in the hopes of feeling less pissed off, while I was listening to some webhead prattle on about a piece of software I don't care about.

Also in the vein of pissing Richard off day, I've still yet to hear back from the tax attorney filing my taxes this year, nor how much the Federal government will be sucking out of me (money which I don't really have), nor how much the tax attorney will charge me to try and minimize the sucking-of-money-I-don't-really-have.

I still don't know for sure if the people I've asked to do our wedding invitations are willing to take the job or not, so I think I'll have to start working on them myself.

And now gmail is down.

Blergh.

I want to go back to bed.

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A week of productive head-banging

Posted on By admin

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.

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The joys of passport control.

Posted on By admin

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.

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How not to code

Posted on By admin

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.

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