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Square pegging and frozen treats
May. 30th, 2014 03:17 amMonday was a holiday, but I'd been meaning to do a few things to get my cube in order without any help or popcorn.gif from my co-workers, so I came in to assemble IKEA bits. Unfortunately, I'd got the coffee table instead of the hassock, so I went back to return the wrong part and got the right one, and set up a comfy chair in my cube.
Apparently LJ is under some sort of new ownership, and with it comes an actual![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
news post of some sort. IDEK.
Tuesday involved quietly dealing with bits and shards of inbox. Details of Tuesday are doubtless put where I leave all such details (in my worklog and in my email chains). There was also a ceremonial opening of the new campus bits, which involved not barging on to the lawn with all the suits, not proceeding downslope to make the pictures look better, and instead hiding in the shadow of a conveniently placed tree (TREEEEE) and swapping snark with Dogesitter Designer and the Stage Manager. The Stage Manager's goth skills extend to finding shade. I carried my issued first aid kit in case of emergency. No emergencies emerged.
I should be able to remember things about Wednesday, but the main thing was that I thought it was Thursday until late in the evening when Purple corrected me. There was attaching literature to bagged shirts and stuffing them in boxes. There was explaining that Atwood quote to a vaguely horrified Purple. There was doing things with things in my inbox. There were some delightful bits of silliness on chat. But mostly there was the headache at the end of the day (and the vaguely awkward comforting that did help some).
Today, I wound up having lunch with Purple's gang (Purple being nowhere in sight) and talking some shop (when folks on the ground in certain areas of R&D hear that you have contact with Real Customers, there are questions, which I disclaimed according to my role and answered to the best of my ability, between us chickens) and talking Google Glass and ethics. Including some of the "it may be legal but you're still a glasshole" scenarios.
I retrieved a new mouse from Helpdesk, and endured the lecture on having let the Stage Manager chuck the old mouse in the trash can. I returned the loaner mouse to the Dogesitter Designer. I emailed the Stage Manager with a note about proper disposal of dead mice. The more you know!
There was an inspirational talk on the lawn in mid-afternoon. I hadn't actually been planning on going, but Purple fetched me, and it gave my brain a break from the square pegging exercise. I brought my first aid kit to this one as well, despite the lack of all-call for same, because it's the sort of thing I feel I should be in the habit of doing. I may get a Safety Orange scarf and decorate it with some reflective tape, because the vests are awkward but it's good to be visible.
Purple is tall, and was therefore able to lean in to the ice cream bin better. Teamwork! In grave distrust of the flimsy-looking wooden folding chairs they had deployed, I pulled up a nice little patch of grass, and Purple joined me. Based on the comments from the speakers, I don't seem to need all that much inspiring, and I can be some sort of force for change, courage, and authenticity. Also, the Emergency Response Team (and the impulses that suggest membership in same) seems to be good at helping shape leadership skills. The price I pay for revealing bits of my authentic self at work is that pretty much everybody thinks I'm a lunatic, but I've been making peace with that over the years. ^_^ And I would not prefer swapping my manager out over a raise, and in fact I would be upset if I had to choose between keeping my manager and getting a raise. Because my manager is awesome. The sounds of agreement and appreciation from the crowd upon hearing the 65% number in fact prompted to email my manager to let her know immediately how much I appreciate her.
Also, I really need to make sure my annual re-read of Cyteen is in fact vaguely annual.
It is my guess that the root cause of some rather bizarre email problems emanating from a certain department and colliding with a browser problem may in fact be ultimately caused by a particular Kipper/Llama problem which causes second-generation template emails' HTML source to look more like web pages generated by MS Office Word. Mr. Zune got curious and examined the source in a proper editor, then showed us a terrifying screenful of redundant and unnecessary divs. In 2013 I described the second-generation results as "It shames my ancestors. It shames my godchildren." It did not go well then. We'll see if that communication comes to anything.
One of the refrigerators was making, but not delivering, ice. My ticket on the matter was rather horribly titled "The Ice Must Flow". The first round involved defrosting; today's round involved replacing the mechanism entirely. We'll see.
I've been collecting compliments on my new cube setup. It looks nice even with the things which belong in team storage, and the comfy chair has now been put to its not so stealthily intended use. I moved the rubber chicken out of getting-dust-all-over range of the comfy chair, so when Purple showed up and I still had to write the email to my manager over the square pegging project, he settled onto the chair and proceeded to become the peanut gallery as I wrapped up.
The square pegging project was a little exercise in comparing reality to marketing's convenient pigeonholes: I got to go through a certain amount of collected customer quotes and see which of five pigeonholes they fit best. Being me, I decided to do it in a systematic way, and yanked the pigeonholes open in another dimension so we were comparing apples to apples, oranges to oranges, and bananas to bananas, then highlighted the various boxes across the profiles that each customer fit into. That process took some time.
I probably would have finished the summary email a little faster without comments from the peanut gallery in the back of my cube, but such is life. ("La vie.") The consensus seems to be that you start the dirty version of the square pegging project with a square cucumber or something.
The stuff that disappeared from Purple's office has officially been lost. He's none too pleased. He moves tomorrow, which means his usually late evening at work will be curtailed.
I have been instructed to not fall over. This, when standing chatting with Purple, and with no other provocation besides just standing there without support, I teetered. Usually it's been because I leaned too far forward in the semi-regular artistic expression of the bro-hug. I don't think that I needed the steadying hand, but it was appreciated.
I've been asynchronous enough in IRC that I wound up responding to some of fishie's thoughts in email. Whee.
Tomorrow is Friday.
Apparently LJ is under some sort of new ownership, and with it comes an actual
news post of some sort. IDEK. Tuesday involved quietly dealing with bits and shards of inbox. Details of Tuesday are doubtless put where I leave all such details (in my worklog and in my email chains). There was also a ceremonial opening of the new campus bits, which involved not barging on to the lawn with all the suits, not proceeding downslope to make the pictures look better, and instead hiding in the shadow of a conveniently placed tree (TREEEEE) and swapping snark with Dogesitter Designer and the Stage Manager. The Stage Manager's goth skills extend to finding shade. I carried my issued first aid kit in case of emergency. No emergencies emerged.
I should be able to remember things about Wednesday, but the main thing was that I thought it was Thursday until late in the evening when Purple corrected me. There was attaching literature to bagged shirts and stuffing them in boxes. There was explaining that Atwood quote to a vaguely horrified Purple. There was doing things with things in my inbox. There were some delightful bits of silliness on chat. But mostly there was the headache at the end of the day (and the vaguely awkward comforting that did help some).
Today, I wound up having lunch with Purple's gang (Purple being nowhere in sight) and talking some shop (when folks on the ground in certain areas of R&D hear that you have contact with Real Customers, there are questions, which I disclaimed according to my role and answered to the best of my ability, between us chickens) and talking Google Glass and ethics. Including some of the "it may be legal but you're still a glasshole" scenarios.
I retrieved a new mouse from Helpdesk, and endured the lecture on having let the Stage Manager chuck the old mouse in the trash can. I returned the loaner mouse to the Dogesitter Designer. I emailed the Stage Manager with a note about proper disposal of dead mice. The more you know!
There was an inspirational talk on the lawn in mid-afternoon. I hadn't actually been planning on going, but Purple fetched me, and it gave my brain a break from the square pegging exercise. I brought my first aid kit to this one as well, despite the lack of all-call for same, because it's the sort of thing I feel I should be in the habit of doing. I may get a Safety Orange scarf and decorate it with some reflective tape, because the vests are awkward but it's good to be visible.
Purple is tall, and was therefore able to lean in to the ice cream bin better. Teamwork! In grave distrust of the flimsy-looking wooden folding chairs they had deployed, I pulled up a nice little patch of grass, and Purple joined me. Based on the comments from the speakers, I don't seem to need all that much inspiring, and I can be some sort of force for change, courage, and authenticity. Also, the Emergency Response Team (and the impulses that suggest membership in same) seems to be good at helping shape leadership skills. The price I pay for revealing bits of my authentic self at work is that pretty much everybody thinks I'm a lunatic, but I've been making peace with that over the years. ^_^ And I would not prefer swapping my manager out over a raise, and in fact I would be upset if I had to choose between keeping my manager and getting a raise. Because my manager is awesome. The sounds of agreement and appreciation from the crowd upon hearing the 65% number in fact prompted to email my manager to let her know immediately how much I appreciate her.
Also, I really need to make sure my annual re-read of Cyteen is in fact vaguely annual.
It is my guess that the root cause of some rather bizarre email problems emanating from a certain department and colliding with a browser problem may in fact be ultimately caused by a particular Kipper/Llama problem which causes second-generation template emails' HTML source to look more like web pages generated by MS Office Word. Mr. Zune got curious and examined the source in a proper editor, then showed us a terrifying screenful of redundant and unnecessary divs. In 2013 I described the second-generation results as "It shames my ancestors. It shames my godchildren." It did not go well then. We'll see if that communication comes to anything.
One of the refrigerators was making, but not delivering, ice. My ticket on the matter was rather horribly titled "The Ice Must Flow". The first round involved defrosting; today's round involved replacing the mechanism entirely. We'll see.
I've been collecting compliments on my new cube setup. It looks nice even with the things which belong in team storage, and the comfy chair has now been put to its not so stealthily intended use. I moved the rubber chicken out of getting-dust-all-over range of the comfy chair, so when Purple showed up and I still had to write the email to my manager over the square pegging project, he settled onto the chair and proceeded to become the peanut gallery as I wrapped up.
The square pegging project was a little exercise in comparing reality to marketing's convenient pigeonholes: I got to go through a certain amount of collected customer quotes and see which of five pigeonholes they fit best. Being me, I decided to do it in a systematic way, and yanked the pigeonholes open in another dimension so we were comparing apples to apples, oranges to oranges, and bananas to bananas, then highlighted the various boxes across the profiles that each customer fit into. That process took some time.
I probably would have finished the summary email a little faster without comments from the peanut gallery in the back of my cube, but such is life. ("La vie.") The consensus seems to be that you start the dirty version of the square pegging project with a square cucumber or something.
The stuff that disappeared from Purple's office has officially been lost. He's none too pleased. He moves tomorrow, which means his usually late evening at work will be curtailed.
I have been instructed to not fall over. This, when standing chatting with Purple, and with no other provocation besides just standing there without support, I teetered. Usually it's been because I leaned too far forward in the semi-regular artistic expression of the bro-hug. I don't think that I needed the steadying hand, but it was appreciated.
I've been asynchronous enough in IRC that I wound up responding to some of fishie's thoughts in email. Whee.
Tomorrow is Friday.
