* * * * *
At least the vice president of our Corporate Overlords laughed jocularly when
I answered “Too short” when he asked “How was my vacation?”
Ah, the first day of work after a two week vacation—6,000 emails to catch up
on, mutiple fires actively burning, and the whooshing of deadlines as they
fly by breaking the sound barrier. I'm not sure what's worse—this, or the
freezing temperatures we left behind in Brevard [1]. Aside from dealing with
a week old request to reprovision our lab machines for the Oligarchic Cell
Phone Companies, the most pressing fire was dealing with a possible change in
“Project: Cleese [2].”
A proposed change in downstream processing with … oh … let's call it
“Project: Waldo [3],” is stalled because the data needed for “Project:
Cleese” to talk to “Project; Waldo” can't be generated fast enough. The data
technically isn't needed for the proposed change in downstream processing,
but to avoid changing “Project: Cleese” it was decided to generate fake data,
and yes, said fake data can't be generated fast enough (seriously).
The fix is easy—it's just the removal of four lines of code (checking for the
presence of the data, which now technically isn't needed), the modification
of one other line (to deal with missing data), and it will just work. Alas,
we're blocked by fellow cow-orker CZ (he works directly for the Corporate
Overlords, and has been assigned to my team to make up for loss of employees
in my department this past year) because of his extreme discomfort at
changing any code outside of what has been planned. As was explained by
several people, the changes won't affect the results at all, but CZ has yet
to be fully convinced. It's definitely a culture clash between the
Corporation and our Corporate Overlords
Yeah, my vacation was too short.
[1]
https://www.cityofbrevard.com/
[2]
gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2018/09/11.2
[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_manipulator
Email author at
[email protected]
