by ·0 Comments

My last day is April 1st and my boss has been accumulating tasks I need to do before departing and I probably have six weeks of stuff to do in my remaining four.  This has led to me being barred from doing other tasks for other people who’ve realized I’m leaving which causes them to issue me further to do list items leading to a To Do list arms race.  Today, two engineers were fighting over what I needed to do next:

Engineer 1: He’s the only one who knows this method and I need this data in two weeks.
Engineer 2: He’s the only one who knows this method that I’ll need three weeks from now.
Engineer 1: So my stuff’s more important.
Engineer 2: No, because he can just do yours later, I need him to train someone while my technician has time.
Me: I have an idea.  How about you just allow me to have over time?
Engineer 1: He doesn’t come out of my budget, sure.
Engineer 2: He doesn’t come out of my budget either, knock yourself out.
Me: Problem solved!
*After two engineers leave*
Boss: Please record how much time you spend on each of their two projects so I can take your overtime out of their budgets.

Problem solving through fiscal obfuscation.

by ·0 Comments

I plot desserts along three axes: ease of preparation, joy of consumption, and appearance.  I focus heavily on the ratio of joy of consumption to ease of preparation as that maximizes the brownie points I receive from my coworkers.  For instance, truffles are fantastically easy to prepare and quite tasty but ugly.  A ganache coating increases appearance but at the cost of difficulty.  Anything with a homemade crust is low on prep ease and medium in consumption so I generally don’t bother.

Cheesecake with a topping or filling sits at the apex of the three, being difficult to prepare well, pretty, and makes one feel like one’s tongue were being hugged.  The difficulty comes from handling as cheesecakes will crumble and crack if you look at them funny.  Additionally, they involve making a separate crust and blank-baking it and require a setting period that alternates between hot and cold and can take in excess of six hours.  So, what if I simply sacrificed appearance and slashed out much of the coddling?  I was going to find out.

One tactic to ensure even heating is to bake the cake in a hot water bath.  F that.  Another is to leave the oven door open a crack while leaving the oven at a low temperature for six hours.  F that as well.  I went for the much simpler “remove it from the oven and put it in the fridge” tactic and was rightly punished.  What emerged looked like the lid of a mason jar.  The cake had rose jack-straight about 3/4″ above the rim of the pan and then caved in like someone had put a belt around it only to return to its original width before flattening to a plateau evoking the cracked surface of a dessicated flood plain.  Hm…

Only in one other case had I refused to serve something because it looked hideous and that was because I literally dropped it.  I think my solution was somewhat clever: I popped the cheesecake in the freezer, firmed it up a bit, sawed the top off and glazed the remaining cake with cocoa powder and melted semisweet chocolate.  The best part was having an excuse to have a breakfast consisting of the top of  a cheesecake.

by ·0 Comments

As an hourly employee, I’m not a terrible fan of snow days.  Like most closings, it simply a way of saying “try and get 40 hours in now, bitch” while the full-time staff blows a holiday to make-up the difference.  Late openings are a different beast entirely as the calculus of presence changes.  If one shows up and one’s supervisor doesn’t, the work time is entirely unverifiable.  Alternatively, some may expect their wards to arrive on time in spite of the delay and yet others use it as an excuse to try to force time out of people later.  So, what was the outcome of the snow day roulette?  By some stroke of amazing luck all three of four of the full time office members were sick today.  What are the odds of this happening?  I wanted to find out:

The average American gets 1.7 colds a year lasting on average 3 days generate 2.8 sickdays a year.  Let’s assume most colds come in a 4-month window and that colds that are start at the same time are independent of one another.  What’s that come out to?  About 0.00041%.  Sure glad I trudged through the snow to get in my time and to see that statistical miracle.

by ·0 Comments

My supervisor wasn’t in yesterday.

Coworker: Think he’ll be in today?
Me: I don’t think he’d miss two days in a row without telling all of us.
Coworker: Want do you want to bet on it?
Me: Pizza if he doesn’t come in.
Coworker: Ok *plays message of boss not coming in*

I’ve been snookered.  I learned a lesson today: Never trust dwarf Vietnamese CAD designers.

by ·0 Comments

Me: Ed, do you have a ruler?
Ed: No, what do you need to measure?  I can eyeball most things within a 16th of an inch.  How about you John?
John: I can usually guess within 30 thousandths.
Me: Bullshit!  How thick’s your nameplate?
John: *closes one eye* Hm… about 125 thousandths.  A little less.
Me: To the micrometer! *gets micrometer*.
John: So what was it?
Me: 118 thousandths.
Ed: Impressive, but I can identify screw gauges at a distance of 10 feet.

Now I know what my engineering challenge will be next week.

by ·0 Comments

Every once in a while I’d run off 60 copies of something for Roundtable and would worry that since documents were tied to a particular user and any admin can pull up the print record that I’d someday be called to task for consuming company resources and be unceremoniously shitcanned and be denied the Elysian Fields of New Jersey unemployment benefits.  Then I started thinking: I don’t drink coffee at work.  Each of the packets costs at least 33 cents even when purchasing literally thousands of them and assuming two cups a day for six years that’s quite an implicit employee resource pool.

If I stick around for another 3 years I’ll feel fully entitled to just take the photocopier.

by ·0 Comments

I was migrating a program from one PC to another and learned I needed to turn on ftp on one of the computers.  I didn’t know how we did that at my workplace so I asked my boss who to ask:

Boss: You should contact the head of server support.  But you can’t just call him.  You have to call the helpdesk have them tell you that they don’t know how to do it and then contact him.
Me: Can I just call him and say that the helpdesk wasn’t, well, helpful?
Boss: No, he’ll ask for the ticket number.
Me: Ah, so I need to show him the bruises on my head before he’ll believe me that I’ve been banging my head against the wall?
Boss:  That’s probably the best explanation of our tech support system I’ve ever heard.

by ·3 Comments

Person #1:  You’re up late.
Me: Yeah, I’m staying up to see the shuttle launch at 4:30 or so.
Person #1:  That’s like 10 minutes from now.  The server time’s in Central time.
Me: Crap.

I jump from my treadmill put on a coat and gun to my car driving at excessive speeds to my chosen viewing area.  I step out into the parking lot in my sandals and exercise shorts with my camera poised at the horizon and waited…10 minutes later after seeing nothing I checked the launch status on my phone and the launch had been scrubbed due to cloud cover.

I waited again today at 4:20 AM in the parking lot of workplace, and 6 minutes after launch a white dot a bit bigger than Venus began screaming North about 5 degrees (3 fingers) above the horizon.  It puttered in and out of view obviating every cloud between the dot and I.   I choked up a little and then went about my day.  And by that I mean I nodded off while removing crapware from a PC I was recommissioning.

by ·0 Comments

My productivity has been… below average over the last few days.  I encountered some roadblocks that I’ve not had the capacity to tackle in a meaningful way and I just finished a tech project that also made it appear that I was suddenly doing nothing.  My boss saw me sitting listlessly reading the forums for a software tool we used and said “I need to talk to you about something later.”  Crippling existential dread would probably be the appropriate descriptor to the response I have to such statements.  I know I’m being fired in two months, but still, I’d rather go gracefully.  I quickly went through the checklist of things I could do right now that my boss could reasonably ask me if I’ve completed and over two hours knocked off three of them.  Later, he returned called me into his office and asked the following:

Him: Terry, there’s something I’ve been meaning to bring up with you for a while but just haven’t known how to approach it.
Me: Yes?
Him: Well, to put it bluntly, my mouse sucks.  Do you have a recommendation for one?
Me: Yes, the Logitech G500.
Him: *checks Amazon* That looks like it’ll do perfectly.  Your usefulness never seems to end.

by ·0 Comments

My flavored coffee servings arrived and I was bathed in boxes of Caramel French Vanilla, Winter Mountain Blueberry, and Fairtrade Dark Roasted Hazelnut and took my fare share of jokes for it.  Most people thought I didn’t drink coffee, I don’t as I’m hesitant to put “Dutch Mochachino” in the coffee category.  The calibration guys where in and they’re usually somewhat rough around the edges guy.  One walked by my desk and picked up a “Dutch Chocolate” cup when I interrupted him:

Me: Yes, I actually drink it.
Him: Hm… I always considered you a Swiss Raspberry person.
Me: Dirka?
Him: Yeah, Gloria Jeans makes some wonderful small batch flavored coffees this time of year.

I came back to my desk after lunch and he wrote the sites of two discount coffee vendors that’ll give you a discount if you’re a “business”.  These coffee people are everywhere, I wonder if I can shave another 10% off the price if I learn their secret handshake.