who you callin' stoopid?

[sergebroom]

Things were busy at the office, thus the penury of new entries until today. Besides, I didn’t have anything to talk about(1). Anyway. There is this project that I’ve been working on with one of our users, which involves capturing a new feed and incorporating its data into our database. I’ve dealt with quite a few projects of that nature, so it should have been a walk in the park(2), but this user is quite new with the team so she’s still figuring out our system. As a result, yours truly has been building this or that corner of the project, after which she’d update a lot of the specs that should have told me what to do before I did it. I don’t mind. This happens all the time. There have also been difficulties with the format of the data provided. We finally got all those hurdles out of the way, and I am cautiously optimistic that we will be done by Tuesday(3). This user, I’m sure, will breathe a sigh of relief when it’s over, but not because she didn’t enjoy working with me. Au contraire. Our users very much enjoy working with me because, if they are not sure of something, or if they have questions, they know that I won’t make them feel stupid.

I wish I could say my fellow programmers all act that way with them, or with me when I ask them questions. Most of them do. There is one though, whom I’ve mentioned in previous entries, who has a tendency to act like I am a moron. Luckily he didn’t do so while I was at the San Francisco office otherwise my body language would have made my feelings quite clear. Mind you, I was too busy that week cleaning up the database because his solution wound up making things worse than if I had done things my way. I had had this gut feeling that something wasn’t right with his solution, but my raising doubts would have caused him to get quite irate. Besides, everybody thinks he’s brilliant so who was I to question his wisdom? Last week though, because it’d affect the project mentioned in the above paragraph, I had no choice but to ask the other programmers if a certain table within our database was obsolete. Unfortunately it was the rude one who responded, using the reply:all option, thus exposing my stupidity where all could see, and saying that the table was unlikely to be obsolete because we still populate it with fresh data every month. I pointed out specific tables that we still update regularly which are most definitely obsolete. His next response, just as snooty as before, convinced me to explore less aggravating ways of finding out. To say that I was furious would be something of an understatement. So, when my user and I discovered that the table is indeed obsolete and that my reasoning, not the other programmer’s, had been correct, I gloated inside. Of course, I wrote to my fellow programmers, casually informing them of that table’s obsolescence. For some reason, you-know-who didn’t write back to thank me for the information.

Bleeping jerk.

----------

(1) “Like it usually stops you from posting.” Hey! I heard that!

(2) But not Central Park at night.

(3) Yes, my fingers are firmly crossed.

Comments

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

How do you type with your fingers firmly crossed?

Some colleagues drive one batty. I have one like that.

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

It's not that difficult to type with one's fingers crossed when one makes use of, at most, two fingers of each hand.

As for my colleague, he doesn't really drive me batty. The whole situation irritates me a great deal though. If I complained about his behavior, the higher-ups wouldn't do a thing because otherwise he'd just quit and take early retirement. If they did do something, it'd be to chastise me. After all, he walks on water, according to managers. Mind you, I've talked to people from other teams who had to deal with him and they think he's a jerk. Oh, and each and every one of our team's users hate working with him. My one consolation in all this is they like working with me, which is nice when the time comes for the yearly review.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

That last is the important thing!

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Yes. And it's nice to get some confirmation that I am liked.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is.

[kouredios.livejournal.com]

At the moment I'm typing without my right middle finger, as I left a chunk of it in my car installing Cassie's new carseat. And that's hard enough! *chuckle*

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Ouch! That's one dangerous carseat.

[kouredios.livejournal.com]

It's weird. I didn't even notice until I saw the blood on the strap...

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I hope the little one wasn't around when this happened and that you were able to wash the blood away from the strap.

[kouredios.livejournal.com]

Yes, and yes. :)

My evil ueber boss

[dragonet2.livejournal.com]

figured out that stepping into a situation and start questioning my process makes me go into a tizzy trying to figure out what I did wrong.

Then she started making sure that every time I started a new project that she would say, "you have to validate your process, yo can't screw up. don't screw up, I'm watching you."

Bear in mind she has never, EVER walked through one of my data to layout projects with me.

i'm not a programmer, I'm just a poweruser-monkey. But I've figured out how to use Excel/Filemaker/Word to output data so that layout artists don't have to touch every line of text to get it ready.

I'm training my 'replacement' and then I'm supposed to be a Customer Service rep for exhibitors for specific trade shows.

anyone know about any freelance jobs available? right now I'm riding it down because if I go "f-you I QUIT" I can't get unemployment for a while.

My evil ueber boss

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

I wish I could help you. My own situation isn't that dismal. Hell, it's way better than some jobs I've had, like the one where I was criticized for a project's late delivery even though it was late only by one week, and that only because I had to fly to the East Coast for my father's funeral. As for my current job... On my most recent birthday, there were two work emergencies that should both have been mine to handle, but my manager asked someone else to handle one of them so that my day wouldn't be totally ruined.

It's just that I hate being unfairly made a fool by someone who gets away with being a jerk toward many of his co-workers just because he's so smart and that supposedly makes him essential to our team's proper function. I'm not as smart, but that doesn't make me an idiot and, as last week showed, sometimes it's the plodding types who get it right.

[kouredios.livejournal.com]

My college boyfriend worked at the help desk of the OIT, and was always very patient with the clueless there, but then would come home and berate me for less-clueless behavior than they had. (And vent about them to me, as well). I came to the conclusion that many computer geeks just have little patience for anyone who didn't understand what they did. It's good to know you're not one of those. :)

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Oh, I definitely am not one of those. Besides, the questions from our users are not clueless. Sometimes, they need to know exactly how this or that bit of data is generated. True, the way they ask it sometimes betrays the fact that our computer system is a mysterious black box to them. It's not their job to know the intimate 'cogs' of the 'machine'. It's mine. Besides, I don't believe in rudeness as an initial response.

[tania-c.livejournal.com]

Aarrggghhh.

Remember - Friends help you move, real friends help you move the body. I have a truck, tarps, and duct tape. You have access to a lot of empty desert...

Nevermind the geographic dispersion of all parties involved. Just consider the possibilities...

[serge-lj.livejournal.com]

Heheheh... Thanks, although that solution is a bit drastic. I think I'll just try to tough it out for the next 2 years. That's when the jerk is retiring.