Here’s a picture of My Cube, the place where I live and spend most of my waking hours. Please excuse the mess, it’s a reflection of my cluttered mind.

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i made a post a little while ago about funny characters from work. (you may remember – ‘crazy tech writer’ and ‘talks to himself’. so today there’s a couple others i’d like to talk about – ‘asian porn star’ and ‘arrogant new guy’ – these are 2 guys that work here. ‘asian porn star’ is a tall guy who has a mustache that is totally circa 1970’s pr0n work. every time i see him i crack up internally, thinking about the mustache. he’s a really cool guy, and very pleasant, and i just wonder if i’m the only one who thinks that. on to ‘arrogant new guy’ – this is an engineer who is one of the newer peeps here and he comes to me occasionally and asks condecending questions about code that he doesn’t really get. like ‘why do you do ‘a’ when you could be doing ‘b’ – it’s twice as fast, and much easier. then i get mad (hidden) and have to tell him ‘we tried b, but ran into problem x, and after talking about it, ‘a’ was the only way to get around it.’ he thinks about it for a while then comes back and says ‘i think i figured out a way to make ‘b’ work.’ and this leads me to 2 thoughts: 1) why weren’t you doing other work, since we all have tons of crap to do? and 2) why can’t you just take my word for it? i wrote the damn code and i’m pretty sure that i’m smarter than you. so usually i end up saying ‘well, if you want to try, go ahead, but make sure you test it really well, since it’s already working right. you need to test these 19 parts. go for it.’ then a couple days later i realize that he never checked in any changes.. guess his idea didn’t work out. i can remember when i started on as an engineer… i would find bugs in my code belonging to my peers and boss, but i’d make the changes and test them thorougly before going to them to tell them. that way at least i was right :). cheers all.

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so sometimes i gotta work late.. why is best left for a whole other raging rant, since i’d probably be foul about it. sometimes i’m like “yeah, cool, i’m in the zone” and i crank through some stuff.. other times it’s like the most exquisite torture ever, it sucks so bad. i frickin hate working late most times. who wants to work late when i could be hanging out with kel or the bean, or playing hockey? but then i think about all my friends, and how some of them lost their jobs, and how they haven’t found new jobs yet and how much *that* sucks, cause then i feel guilty for raging at my job since i’m lucky to have one. but that doesn’t make it any better when i’m staring at some piece of code that is just reminding me “you could be out mackin or hanging or watchin tv or something, but instead you’re trying to write a thread-lock, hahaha”. yeah, i’m weird because my computer talks to me, but it’s mostly really mean and i don’t listen any more. anyways, enough of my rambling. if you got a job (even if you hate it) remember that it could be a lot worse (ie: no job). and if you don’t have a job, keep the faith, something will turn up. check out oddtodd for some laid-off humour.

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