The intellectual equivalent of a ham sandwich.

Posts tagged ‘work’

Unambiguous Ways to Tell Someone You Don’t Particularly Care for Them

  1. You know when you’re drinking from a water fountain right next to a bathroom and someone flushes a toilet and the water pressure on the fountain changes and for a second your brain thinks about a flushing toilet while you’re drinking water? That’s how I feel when I see your face.
  1. Being around you is like eating lunch when suddenly a commercial about how many bits of dead rat, bugs, dead skin, etc are allowable in food processing.
  1. Have you ever walked to the bathroom and when you go inside you see that the stalls are full so you do an about face and leave the bathroom and your boss and boss’s boss are right there and they give you a quizzical look and you feel awkward so you say, “changed my mind!” but then you realize you should’ve just kept silent and walked away, but now you’re feeling like you can’t leave on the ‘changed my mind’ note so you force a laugh and that just makes things worse. It’s like … being around you feels like that.
  2. Have Clint Eastwood’s resting face.

    And this is him looking forward to seeing someone.

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Was That You?

The area where my work is located is also great for jogging. It’s a suburb of Houston that has a lot of sidewalks and you can map out a bunch of different routes for different mileage. Plus, since I lived near work for so long, jogging around that area makes perfect sense.

Except.

Except for the occasional honk from a co-worker driving by. But wait, you might think, isn’t that nice? A little cheer from a co-worker? Yes, you’re right, it is nice.

But.

But what if at that moment I’m doing something I’d rather a co-worker didn’t see?

  1. Getting angry at a car waiting for a light to turn green that has pulled up onto the walkway. (Darn you.)
  2. Getting angry at a car inching forward to turn right on red while only looking left (meanwhile I am to the driver’s right hoping he/she sees me and trying to determine what to do).
  3. Musical butt (sorry … but it’s true)
  4. The runner’s nose blow (where you use a finger to plug one nostril, then just BLOW from the other nostril and whala, nasal passage re-enabled!)
  5. That time I grew out my Abraham Lincoln/Amish facial hair and ran shirtless during the summer (6’3 of skinny whiteness with a thick tuft of neck beard … blech) (Thankfully this is not a current scene that can be witnessed, but I do can still easily look like a nut while running – as seen here)

 

Thank you for supporting your local jogging enthusiasts while they are out doing their thing, just please wipe the memory from your mind if I look crazy/mean/smelly.

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My Legacy at Work

I work with a group of very intelligent people. It’s nice. My co-workers also have long memories of who wrote what code and they are quick to give credit to people who no longer work here.

Unfortunately, people can also be quick to be frustrated with and blame co-workers who are no longer working here for code that they originally wrote which appears to be bad. (Sometimes people speak too soon, sometimes people don’t speak up soon enough … How very Zen and noncommittal of me to make this comment.)

What I would like to do is this …

I am going to bring in a stuffed animal to work and name it Brad (my name). Also possibly a few others for co-workers who have left and there is a lot of code that is in use that is still seen as “theirs” more than anyone else’s (like the current maintainers).

I will get people in the habit of addressing these stuffed animals by name so that the names will be instilled in everyone’s brains.

Then, sometime down the line, a new person will arrive.

The new person will be learning about this and that and will eventually hear a co-worker say, “oh that’s Brad’s code … No, he has a mistake in that area with threads. You have to watch out. You have to make sure YOU’RE thread safe because Brad’s not thread safe.” (Some coders I have worked with also have the habit of using someone’s name in place of the name of the function/class/whatever code thing you are looking at.)

The new person will wonder, “who is Brad?”

Then, a few days later perhaps the co-worker will ask the keeper of the stuffed animals, “mind if I ask … what’s up with the stuffed animals?”

And hopefully, from wherever I am at that moment, I will magically sense that I should be laughing, because the new guy now thinks the co-workers who are prone to blaming are abso-freaking-lutely nuts.

It’s all about the little joys in life. And plush stuffed animals named Brad. Who are bad about threading issues.

What’d you do this time, BRAD?

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