I don't know how to deal with this, it's always complicated.

-customer sees some output from their computer they don't understand-

-customer comes up with a theory on why and some complicated logic to solve it and sends that as a request-

-i'm too stupid to realize it and follow their logic and hurt my brain until I realize it... no that's dumb...-

Result: time wasted

Today me with customer changes to things that they requested and now it is 'broken':

https://youtube.com/watch/...

Customer on a video conference always has his cord to his cheap-o headset twisted in new and exciting ways / poking him in his face.

Folks are spending lots of money with us, bro get yourself a nice headset!

"What would your perfect job look like?"

I remember when I got my first 'good' job. There were all these offices that were occupied and I wondered what everyone did in them. Some ... nobody even knew. Like I couldn't find one person in the office who knew what a given person occupying an office even DID...

I thought then (and I kinda think now) it would be fun to have one of those jobs that seems accountable to nobody and everyone at the office wonders:

"What does that guy even do here!?!?!"

Granted I'd probably just come in every day and work on a lot of personal projects (dare to dream) ... with the door closed... in peace...

Dude on remote meeting: -cough- -cough- I don't really feel that bad, I'm pretty sure i'm not contagious. I might come in.

Don't be that guy people (even outside of the COVID timeline...).

Fortunately he didn't come in so no harm no foul.

Customer has asked me to recreate a dashboard they use with a bunch of data, charts, etc.

Problem: The screenshots they sent me... almost everything is illegible. The fidelity of the screenshots themselves is just fine.

It's that their dashboard they have is straight unintelligible. The charts are all smashed up, scale is off, most data ... you can't even tell what it is.

On one bar chart there's just one bar, no x or y scale indicators ... and a random dot in the bar... what even?

Apparently they love this dashboard but as far as I can tell they can't possibly be getting anything of value from it ...

It's like I can cook... but I can't make a recipe .. wrong ... just like someone else made it wrong from screenshots. :P

Me: This email template design is simple and is easy to read.

-inserts customers text that looks like they took a shit on their keyboard and somehow hit send-

Me: Oh fuck it looks horrible now :(

Can't save customers from their own wads of shitty text....

Today it is the day of:

"Ok just a few more changes and this thing is good to go. Let me just look at this for a bit to make sure the changes work and...."

And now I'm looking at some APIs spitting out garbage and somehow everything is working and I'm questioning if I know anything at all now :O

Today I celebrated the independence of my nation by blowing up a small part of it.

Was fun.

"LOL what ass-hat saw camelCase and then decided to not use it --- oh fuck I'm the one..."

Classic support ticket:

Me: "Uh... those numbers in your screenshot look right"

Customer: "Well it wasn't yesterday, looks like it is fixed now"

Me: "...."

-closes ticket-

Forget work today

Legacy code horror story.

I had to work on code designed to identify dogs... didn't go well:

https://i.imgur.com/32IXo6Y.gifv

(Credit to reddit: https://co.reddit.com/r/...)

"Most unproductive meeting of career?"

2 stories

Story 1:

Company had 5k people working for it. We all had to attend a meeting about holding effective meetings.

Rule 1 was to have an agenda for all meetings and associated information so that people can come prepared.

In my 19 years at that company I and one other guy were the only people who followed that rule. Including the executives (never followed it).

People thanked me for doing it all the time... then they'd hold their own meetings and no agenda.

🤷🏻‍♂️

Story 2:

VP of our department would hold meetings and INSIST people ask questions / get upset if we didn't ask questions.

We were also told what we were NOT allowed to ask about.

At one point there were complaints that support was replacing too much hardware. So after lecturing everyone about replacing too much hardware ... nobody was allowed to even mention that the hardware was actually shit.... but we were supposed to ask questions.

Same VP would come back to us and moan about how he just couldn't get resources for our department... like bro that's your job don't whine at us about it, do the job...

Dude was just a weak man child.

I'm switching from that thing that is 'almost done' to another thing that was also 'almost done' months ago... and now going to spend some hours just getting reacquainted with it.

:P

Ah the classic meeting terrorist....

Us: "These emails are working."

Rando customer on conf call: "No they aren't, I haven't seen any of these emails."

Us: "Is your email on the list?"

Rando customer on conf call: "No."

Yeah fuck you.

The rest of us are paying attention here, can you please shut the fuck up on the meeting.

I don't know how to make this happen:

Me:

"And this is what the customer... wants?"

Someone:

"Yes."

Me:

"Oh ... could you devote a few more brain cycles to this discussion and tell me that again?"

Someone:

"Sure .... oh ... yeah this is horrible... I'll go find out what they really want"

When I'm working through back end stuff ....

I'm at the point where I need a physical button on my desktop where I hit and it just fires off the API and I look at a monitor and there ya go, the output.

Grabbing my mouse and etc each time I iterate not sense.

I've adopted this per task desktop management think. Anyone else do this?

I make a new desktop, for a given task, support ticket, or whatever. And when I'm 'done'. I keep everything (ticket, whatever I was working on in vs code, related emails) open but minimize it all except the pull request waiting to happen.

If I get some feedback on the PR / changes I just fly through my virtual desktops and there it is and I'm ready to work.

Then after the PR goes through ... I keep it open for a bit anyway to be sure nothing bad happens.

Then after a while I shut it all down assuming that it is working well.

All this so I don't have to fire everything up again for a rando request or dork up or whatever.

"It's really important this gets done."

"Also in fixing one of the APIs we changed the format of the data returned and now things are broken on the front end ...."

🤔

"The value used to compute the x position of either side of the rectangle."

and

"The value used to compute the x position of the other side of the rectangle."

I get it ... but man documentation if you don't already get it ... like nobody is gonna get that.

Ever have one of those days where you're just:

"Man i don't want to get into THAT right now, don't know why but I just don't...."

Then a task jumps out at you.

"Oh shit that, yeah I want to do that!"

I don't know what the difference is but sometimes one task seems more motivating for no reason at all.

So I got a mice, and arm for it and etc.

Figured out how to do some noise cancelling.

All good for some voice overs!

ON the downside I didn't realize how much smacking and noise I make just opening my mouth ... I'm like some sort of uncouth barbarian via audio.... not just video.

LOL CUSTOMER THAT DATABASE ENTRY DOESN'T 'JUST CHANGE' YOU CRA-----

Uh wait a ...

Oh.....

oh fuck....

Stand up today:

"Hey send a kinda mean email to to them, and I'll follow up with them with a call."

"Oh yeah I'll send one like <customer X>."

"Well we don't want to be assholes..."

Everyone has THAT / those customer(s).

Anyone have an inexpensive (relative to...I dunno) microphone they use for recording audio?

I'm recording screen captures and adding narration for some 'how to' videos for my employer's apps.

The audio on my headset is really 'tin-y' and I want something that does better. Doesn't have to be spectacular.

Slack that notifies me about github events has gone and started notifying me about EVERYTHING again.

Having said that it is amusing when I see a commit:

"FUCK THIS SHIT" go by ;)

FIRE DRILL!!!!!

Customer who decided to deploy our system in the middle of their busiest time ... and kinda ad hoc-ed their ... human processes (not sure what to call it). Just to get by, and then sort of let things rot.

So last week they contact us and say "OMG some poor soul at this company was spending hours making spreadsheets to track what they were doing... and they keep fucking it up because it's nigh impossible to get right".

Real story, big shake up at the company, and someone said "lets look at our process" and they discovered "holy fuck we have this software but we're doing shit like it's the damned civil war".

This naturally raised questions about the competence of the folks we work with ... who chose our software, and thus our software.

So now we're flushing out all the stuff we asked the customer to figure out months ago that is usually done via a months long implementation / integration ... in a few days. Also ... I'm making some new things for them.

WEEEEEEEE

Granted, we're billing them like mad for this so no big deal really.

Wooo hoo! I got suspended from reddit!

Never happened before to me (not site wide at least). Apparently for 'report abuse' from some report I must have made like a month ago?

Some user posting in a sub apparently had a theory that a bunch of other subs and other users were in on some conspiracy against them, supposedly sending death threats and 'spreading lies'.... kinda hard to imagine that some subs with thousands (some with millions) of users are all in on this wonky conspiracy against them....

So anyway I report his nasty little post to the local moderators of that sub because it usually is a chill sub and his post is full of insults and so on.

Turns out... that guy is also a mod of the sub I reported him to.

A month later I get suspended from reddit for 'report abuse'... of course I can't see the 'report abuse' (can't see reports...) so how do you even speak intelligently / appeal?

Moderation at scale is hard, but kinda crazy to think someone employed at reddit decided "yeah this crazy guy is right" and does their bidding ...

I used to moderate a busy gaming forum, and sniffing out the crazy folks was part of the job when accepting new moderators. Wasn't that hard...

Granted no big loss here, just a few days.

Been listening to this while coding lately:

https://youtube.com/watch/...

Make me feel like some super coder guy ... dude ... bro ... something.