From: Bragg, Kathy
Sent: 05 April 2007 11:34
To: $Employer_Global_List
Subject: IT support 12.00-13.00
Hi,
the IT department (me) is going to lunch from 12.00-13.00 today, so if you’re going to break anything, please schedule this for before or after this time. Should anything really disastrous occur, that you think I can help with, please call 0789404**** and summon me back.
Kathy Bragg
Systems Developer
$Employer_Name
I’ve just been sent a copy of the contact list for our major client. Listed within are instructions as to how to navigate the automated switchboard to reach various people.
As some of you may know, I’m in the throes of redesigning the software our company uses to manage its contracts/contacts/operations and stuff. What didn’t occur to me was to build in some facility for storing pathways through switchboards. Maybe I’ll just make the telephone field a bit bigger…
It seems to me that I’ll never be done designing, never mind building - there’s always something that no-one thought to tell me, or that I didn’t question sternly enough what I was told.
This is one of the thoughts that stops me from being self-employed: I’d never be able to get the full picture out of the users, not being fully immersed in the situation, so I’d never be able to design something that matched exactly to what is required and I’d be so fearful of making a shoddy system that I would be quite unable to produce anything at all for fear of it being unhelpful. That tells you too much about me, I suspect.
Having said that, I did spend some time working on a system for a local council, and managed to conquer my fear of producing Bad Things enough to deliver a system that seems to have made them happy. It would be too much to expect *two* such happy outcomes from freelance work..
Maybe I’m just too much of a perfectionist, but everywhere around me I see the results of bad software causing people to have to do daft things and I’d never want to do that to anyone. The infamous doom-system that I babysit here has a screen that I can’t even begin to fathom how to use, and apparently you can’t add more than one entry at a time, you have to close the screen and go back in every time. Personally, that would make me stabby if I have a pile of 50 things to process, but apparently ‘it’s always been like that…’ so it’s okay. No damnit, it’s not okay. If we put up with things like that then standards won’t ever improve.
I learned today that one of the more pleasant and amusing members of our company is off to fulfil her dream of working with her twin sister on her glassworking hobby and hoping to make a business out of it. I’m jealous beyond all measure.
In a desperate attempt to prevent the proliferation of sticky notes in the around-the-monitor department, I added a feature to our system to provide an electronic version - available from the toolbar - where users could store these scraps of information, with the added benefit that they could now copy and paste them.
It was well received, judging by the table contents. One entry amused me greatly - from a user who hadn’t read the email explaining the use and purpose, and discovered the new menu option on his own (it should be noted that ‘1154′ is the name of one of the screens in the application):
“JMC Vessel Red Dwarf Log 26/02/07
The scutters have just found this facility on Level 1154. Rimmer is convinced it’s some form of alien life. Will monitor over the next few days, then jetison as a waste pod if Kryten is unable to connect his groinal attachment.
Lister
JMC Vessel Red Dwarf
Log Addendum 02/03/07
Kryten has reverse-engineered the particle flow accellerator using spares from the android cargo ship we picked up last month. We’ve lost most of the functionality but the memory dumps are very effective for recording notes. Rimmer is dissapointed he couldn’t blast it with the phaser guns.
Lister
JMC Vessel Red Dwarf Log 06/03/07
Ace Rimmer and The Cat are down in engineering to investigate the blockage in the soup dispensers. Last time they were gone for three days. He’s such a smeg head.The laundry deck’s now back on line and Kryten’s caught up with the ironing but I wish he hadn’t put such sharp creases in my boxers.
Lister
JMC Vessel Red Dwarf
Log Addendum 07/03/07
Rimmer and The Cat got back this morning. Bad News. We’re down to out last 4000 poppadums.
Lister”
I’ve set up a blog for our marketing people to start actually putting some content on our company website, and the first thing they did was complain that their first post looked strange on the blog.
Hmm, says I and had a look at the source. Full of Microsoft proprietary style information. I realised pretty quickly that he’d pasted it in from a Word document. Why? I don’t know, I really don’t. I though the Wordpress WYSIWYG was pretty user-friendly. Clearly only Word is inside the comfort zone at the moment. This will change, eventually, but in the meantime, there is a hidden feature in Wordpress 2.1 (I’ve not upgraded yet!) that will make life easier for my marketing guy.
In the visual editor, hit alt-v (IE) (alt-shift-v in Firefox) and you get a sekrit menu appear, one of the options being ‘paste from Word’. So clearly he’s not alone in his clinging to Word as an editor…
As many of you will know, I schlepp my weary carcass from Maidenhead to Basingstoke at an ungodly hour of the morning. One of the unexpected benefits of this routine is that I get to see some pretty cool sights of a morning usually involving sunrise, a windmill, a rubbish tip, deer and some random game birds (as yet unidentified).
Taking photographs from a rapidly-moving train is an interesting challenge, and more often than not I mis-time it and get a smeary tree-filled picture that makes my eyes water in sympathy. Sometimes though, they come out okay..
I wish. For almost a week now I have been unable to switch my brain off at night, and have found myself spending hour after hour designing the new database that is required at work. Don’t misunderstand me here, there is no-one jumping up and down for this new system, so there is no actual need for me to spending my night hours working out the best way to structure the darn thing.
I am tired. I am so very tired. I now have some kind of cold-thing that the philb was harbouring last week. As a result I am more or less subhuman today. I am weeping with tiredness but still I cannot rest. As soon as I shut my eyes, I find myself fretting about suppliers and services and rent and fees and…
I have to confess that I have always had this problem, albeit to a lesser extent, and have become used to waking in the morning with the answer to something that was puzzling me the day before. I used to solve things in my sleep. Now, I’m not getting as far as the actual sleep.
I have tried relaxing, listening to null-music, reading, bathing, drinking warm milky drinks. All the usual attempts. This morning I woke at 01:47 and lay half-awake until the alarm went off at 05:40.
This cannot continue, I feel weepy and hysterical, like an overtired child. Which, I suppose, I am.
My next batch of Open University study material arrived this morning, and I’m ambivalent towards reading it. You see, I’m studying relational database on this course. Do I really want to be encouraging myself to be thinking about databases, when this is the very thing that is costing me my sanity right now? On the other hand, it may well be of assistance, giving me alternative (and simpler) problems to think about, so I can get the monster out of my brain for long enough to sleep.
As a complete aside, I’m finding the wordpress option/feature ‘Post slug’ a little disturbing. Not that I know what it means, or does, but my enfeebled mind is boggling at the wording. Maybe I should look up what it does, so there is one less for my tired brain to worry about..
