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I made a batch of bilaminate brownies to bring into work today.  These would be my last as I had no more Mondays before my firing.  People came by throughout the day to issue their best wishes but largely to have a brownie, but one person was moreso affected than most:

Him: Bilaminate brownie!
Me: Yes.
Him: That was the first thing you brought in wasn’t it?
Me: I think so.
Him: *far-away look* These are the last.  *sniffle* Excuse me. *runs out*

I asked him if he was crying.  He insists he was late for a meeting.

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Everytime I return to work after a furlough I receive a new email address.  I’ve had “terry.robinson@firmsname.com”, terry.robinson1@firmsname.com”, terry1.robinson@firmsname.com” and “terence.robinson@firmsname.com”.  This most recent time I resisted this and reclaimed my first email address, a personal victory.  I proudly registered all my accounts under my reclaimed “terry.robinson@firmsname.com”.  I attempted to do a password recovery for an expired support utility with a 3rd party and had no success.  I called:

Tech Agent: Sir, the email’s being sent.
Me: To where?
Tech Agent: terry.robinson1@firmsname.com
Me: HOW HAVE YOU FOLLOWED ME!
Tech Agent: Sir, I’m sorry I don’t understand could you please…
Me: I THOUGHT I HAD SLAIN YOU AND YOUR ILK NOW YOU RETURN!
Tech Agent: I can reset the address to another…
Me: FROM THE BOWELS OF HELL I STAB AT THEE!
Tech Agent: Sir, you appear to be having volume control issues, please tell me the email address to which the messages should be sent.

The ultimate coincidence would be me having yelled “KHAAAAAAN!” and the Indian Tech Agent responding “Yes?”

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I had waded through a morass of odd paperwork regarding patch application and sought the originator of the byzantine crap to finish it off once and for all, this ensued:

Me: Why was my script not approved?
Him: Your failure was in not getting a pre-approval signature.
Me: Wouldn’t pre-approval mean I was already allowed to do it?  I needed an approval signature.
Him: No, it’s pre-approval because it occurred before hand.  Approval would be while I’m actually doing it.
Me: How can you approve something while I’m doing it?  If you want, you can sit down with me as I do the work and countersign as I go.
Him: No, that would be far too wasteful.
Me: Ok, then what?
Him: Then you need a signature once your done to verify that you’re done as well as one stating you’ve completed it correctly.
Me: Two signatures, verification, that’s one; what’s the other one?
Him: Post-approval.
Me: *Silence*
Him: Ok, anything el-
Me: Sir, you or your department should be dragged before the MLA for crimes against English.  Good day.

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I made the error of saying I’d have an experiment done before the next day, forgetting that the process took six hours… and I’d have to run it twice, so I didn’t go home Tuesday night.  The experiment involves testing materials against a battery of dyed mock digestive fluids.  At about 2 AM I finished the experiments and was disposing of the excess in a large pressure-sealed drum and saw the added material start to foam.  I later went to add more and at the first touch of the lid-lift mechanism, the stored contents blew through the narrow opening and shot a streak of foam composed of green food coloring and fake digestive juices across the front of my lab coat.   I was baffled as how the contents could have possibly done this but everything turned out ok.  My clothing beneath the lab coat was untouched and I now had a green article of clothing for the holiday.

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I’m waiting for someone to buy my Rebel XSi so it’s been sitting on my desk at work and some people have asked to use it but decided not to when I told them it was a DSLR.  Today, someone asked to borrow it who swore up and down he was quite skilled with a DSLR.  When I got it back, the veil of his untruth was thin: The camera was set to “Auto” instead of Aperture Priority, the output format was changed to “JPG” from RAW, the on-camera flash was up and, most damning, the ISO was set to “800”; a region untread, like the area of my car’s tachometer above 4k RPM.  If this is his definition of “being skilled” I’d hate to see him “be skilled” with a nail-gun, microwave, or a manual transmission.

I passed his desk later that day and he thanked me for letting him use my camera.  It was not a chair he sat upon but a throne of lies.

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I was called mad for making a square cheesecake but after watching a cake cutting pattern best described as cubist I decided on a shape less likely to succumb to the surgeon-during-an-earthquake style that’s currently used by my coworkers.  Square baking is tricky, as there’s the pointy bits that’ll finish first but with temperature control this can be eliminated.

Or at least I thought it could.  The middle cooked but also kinda collapsed as sometimes happens with custards.  I hid my mistake with a pool of ganache topped with fudge.  I got the comfort of knowing that an 8×8 could server 16 people with 2″x2″ pieces and they got… fudge.

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One of my duties is to patch our servers when we find issues.  It’s not terribly difficult but involves some things people are uncomfortable with like Remote Desktop, Drive Mapping, and the Command Line, so I gladly do it as a two-hour “Get Out of Legitimate Work Free” card.   I wanted to patch one of our systems as a test and requested remote access as the access restrictions had changed and was surprised by the response:

Him: What would you like to do?
Me: Apply a patch to the test machine.
Him: Please provide documentation that the patch will function.
Me: I can’t, that’s why I want to try it on the test machine.
Him: I’m sorry, I cannot allow access without proof of efficacy.  You can try applying the patch locally.
Me: So, you recommend I take the software to which we only have one license, took a specialist 3 weeks to setup, and normally requires 3 PCs in a cluster to run, and run it on my local machine?
Him: *no response*
Me: *hang up*

I’m going to take a stab in the dark and assume this person isn’t familiar with the setup.  Work around: Create a batch file that when run produces a wall of text followed by the line “Patch Applied” and send him a screen shot of that.  If that works, my last few weeks of work just got a lot easier.

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The results of the first test under the fake colon waste method didn’t come out as expected so I met with the requester to figure out what the cause was.

Him: There were two sources of error, first, I think you applied the product incorrectly.
Me: Really?  I’ve done it this way for every previous running of the test.
Him: The method says use a round base rather than a square base that you used.
Me: But you said that was fine.
Him: Well, it wasn’t, do it again with round bases.
Me: You said there were two sources, what was the other?
Him: The recipe I gave you was off for a couple ingredients.
Me: How off?
Him: Somewhere between a factor of nine and a factor of 11.
Me: So, the recipe you gave me was off by an order of magnitude but you still think it was the shape of the base?
Him: Yeah, pretty sure.

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Only one test method I’ve learned required signing legal documentation.  The mixture for this particular method is the colonic equivalent of the recipe for Coke syrup and the entire time I’ve done this mixture I’ve treated it with a deference bordering on the sacred.  Today I was running through the blending process when I found what appeared to be an error in mixing.  I approached the creator:

Me: What the tolerance on the mixing of the 3rd ingredient set, I think your calculation is off by 2%?
Him: I don’t know.  Anything within a factor of two should be fine.
Me: A factor of two?  Like 200%?
Him: Yeah, this isn’t a precise thing.
Me: Your shitting me, I’ve been trying to squeeze measurements out to thousandths of a gram.
Him: Why?
Me: Because that’s what the method said.  Didn’t you write this?
Him: No, a technician did a while ago.
Me: What happened to him?
Him: I fired him; he was way too uptight.

Hm…

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Boss: Terry, did you disconnect that license server?
Me:  Yea.  It’s been down for an hour.
Boss: I can still connect to it.
Me: How?
Boss: Well, I can ping it.  What do you think’s causing it?
Me: Honestly?  Internet gnomes.
Boss: Gnomes?
Me: Well, maybe faeries, but rarely do web faeries work on the business levels.
Boss: So, gnomes?
Me: Yes, gnomes are well known for finding packets destine for disconnected computers and ferrying those packets to the appropriate computers.  That’s why my iPhone works in some train tunnels.
Boss: So… what do we do?
Me: Act quickly to get the server back online, otherwise, the gnomes will get tired and turn against us.  Remember that day we had 10kbps upload to the offsite server?
Boss: Yes.
Me: We angered them without offering tribute.  They extracted their pound of flesh.
Boss: Hm…

I love knowing I’m going to be fired.