I received a stay of execution and my contract may now end in March instead of December. To celebrate, I brought “The Codebreakers” into work as my new bathroom reading and things haven’t quite worked out. I simply can take a book that big into the work bathroom. I stand up, grab it and immediately am mocked by my own brain.  As I walk towards the door with five pounds of book I start losing strength in my legs and my hand shakes as it goes for the knob. I simply can’t into the work bathroom with that much… book. Frailty, thy name is textbooks-on-cryptology.
Tag: work
Problem Solving Experience
Joe Naylor recently started to work at my firm in the testing area and was looking for advice is stress fracturing a device used to keep little pieces of you in place while you’re suppine after surgery. He has somewhat powerful thumbs capable of delivering a near lethal nipple-ectomy, but even they couldn’t produce the simulated breakage requested. I tried to think of what a person recovering from surgery could reasonably do and came up with the following:I placed the testing rig in a bench vice and using one dead-blow hammer as a landing zone on the part normally held with your thumb, I smashed that dead-blow hammer with another dead-blow hammer. Strangely enough, the 1/8″ column of plastic held against the stainless steel wedge impacted by a hammer hitting another hammer broke under these totally reasonable real-world conditions…
Please note that in the context of medical device testing “reasonable break method” is defined as “anything doable to the device even if it requires invoking super-mutant powers or the phrase ‘so Hercules needs a colostomy’ regardless of the currently applicable laws of physics.”
Scientist/Engineer Dichotomy
The first question that was asked in my undergraduate organic chemistry course was as follows:Â What is the melting point of bread?
Normally, I wouldn’t insert a carriage return there except that such a statement has such aneurysm-inducing levels of stupidity within its words that I fear it may spread if not properly contained. Today I learned an interesting diagnostic for differentiating between an engineer and a scientist by asking each the above listed question of the damned and gauging their response. The engineer will look at you like you’re a moron, say “that’s a stupid question” and laugh. The scientist will look at you like you’re an idiot, say “that’s a stupid question” and glare. It appears to all be in the eyes.
Indirect Revelations
I’d never seen a direct organizational chart of my firm. I knew it was somewhat flat in that there are more layers between a CIT and a Camp Director than between mail room person and president at work but I didn’t quite know its extent. I’d asked for one offhand before and always received a shoulder shrug as to where one could be found and some people claim that one didn’t exist.
Today in a bit of deus ex I got my answer: Someone asked me to print it out. It is a somewhat wide organizational chart in that it’s 136 inches wide and 15 inches tall (9:1) with each person listed in about 12 point font.  I think we should get it rendered in chenille and print up a couple to use as doormats. That way as people shuffle in staring at their feet they’ll learn something.
I Can Make the Pain Stop…
I’ve been emailing a programmer back and forth regarding making a web page built into a processing program we use. I considered the task foolish as web pages aren’t often designed with printing in mind and each browser renders tricky javascript and css differently. He came up with a solution for Firefox, he came up with a solution for Chrome, but my boss told me it had to work with IE 6. The programmer tried three or four fixes each of which failed due to IE6’s inadequacies and sensing his frustration I asked if I could call him.
Me: Hi, this is the fellow you’ve been working with regarding making pages printable in IE6. Â Do you want to be done with this?
Him: Very much so. I think this is a lost cause. The setup was designed for neither IE6 nor printing and the number of changes required would number in the hundreds.
Me: Ok, the next email I send to you with a question simply reply “Sir, what you ask for can’t be done. Please upgrade your install.” Got it?
Him: Yes.
Me: It’s be a pleasure working with you.
Him: Happy Holidays.
I wonder if one can be fired for colluding with tech support.
Halloween at Work
Normally, there’s a few people at work in dumb Halloween costumes. Today, I saw none. There was recently a wave of firings. I wonder if I discovered their decision criterion. I approve.
As a Haiku:
No costumes at work/
Wave of wrath may be the cause/
I approve of this.
Peekaboo Troubleshooting
Me: Hi, I’m having a problem with the CAD worker agent not starting properly.
Tech Agent: Ok, please open the console to the CAD worker console. Please hit the “start all” button and you should be done.
Me: I did. The program immediately shuts off.
Tech Agent: Ok, please hit the “start all” button again.
Me: Done. The program has immediately shut off.
Tech Agent: Ok, please hit the “start all button” again.
Me: It’s shut off again. If you tell me to hit the “start all” button again I will scream. Don’t you think the fact that the first three tries didn’t work suggests something else is wrong?
Tech Agent: Sometimes it takes a try or two before the program figures out what’s going on.
Me: Understood, are you the only technician for CAD worker support?
Tech Agent: No, I work in a group of five.
Me: Thank you, it worked magically.
I think I got the guy who thinks that jamming the elevator door button repeatedly makes it go faster or who patiently presses the crosswalk light for five minutes. If I wait about five minutes, he’ll probably have another call so I’ll get one of his coworkers. If that doesn’t work I’m use a British Accent and use the name of a coworker.
Getting Old(er)
Today marked the six year anniversary of me starting to use the precision fart generator at work. Later I walked into some technicians holding the door to the hotroom (environmental chamber held at 40°C/75% relative humidity) open while passing pouches in.
Me: Why are you holding the door open? Just lift the cart in and put up the pouches. It doesn’t require three people.
Tech: But it gets hot in there.
Me: Hot! You’ll be in there for five minutes. When I was your age I spent hours putting up hundreds of pouches.
Tech: That sucks.
Me: I was thankful for it, because <coworker> spent his days in there testing adhesives.
Tech: Oh.
Me: Kids today.
I’m 25 and I just had my first “you kids, get off of my lawn” moment.
Mixed Blessing
Joe Naylor started working at the same firm as myself. I thought it’d be fun but things have been far from all roses. Consider the following:
- Until he gets web access, if I want to talk to him I’ll have to get up, walk down the hallway and open three doors.
- My lies regarding the difficulty of my job are far more transparent.
- He now has an income stream barring my dream of having an indentured servant through debt from purchasing a stick of gun.
- Someone now understands what I mean when I yell “Are we going to go to Babar’s house!?”
Microsoft: Speedbooster
My little hack arrangement of Filezilla, FlingFTP, the WAMP stack and AbiWord for documentation hummed along smoothly for the first part of the day, gleefully grabbing files, moving them to a new location, uploading them to a server and then retrieving them on the other side of our corporate firewall until it all suddenly stopped in the afternoon. We had n f*#$ing clue why.
We contacted the remote worker and tried to replicate the situation in the lab running a nearly identical rig and we experienced a similar crash when opening a program, so we fired up task manager and eyed the CPU usage as we opened various programs. We started at about 80% and opened Outlook, when it dropped to 76%. We opened Excel, it dropped to 72%… Finally we opened Word and it leveled off at 70%. WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT. The only way we were able to kill it? By opening Powerpoint while running something in Microsoft Search 4.0 WHILE running Prime95 and searching for Mersenne primes, a phenomenon the remote worker probably wasn’t enacting. Next I’ll find that Chrome is just Internet Explorer with a different theme and browser.bugs.enable set to “0”.