Greer's Law

Greer's Law

A computer program does what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do.

... an axiom amply demonstrated by the web applications inherited by the project team for which I write documentation.

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Adventures in sub-contracting, Part 1

My sole post last October was an announcement that I had finally landed a job after nine months on the unemployment rolls. I appended a brief description of the strange and abbreviated "first day at the new job" – which, it turned out, was just the prelude to an entire week of more of the same, exaggerated by a couple of orders of magnitude, a sort of extended, week-long "first day" that, remarkably, lingered on even into the following week.

More about that in a later post, but first, let me explain the nature of my employment, which has been a bit of a new experience for me. (Identifying names have been omitted to keep the author from being deemed a potential security threat.) See, I've worked in industry (pulp & paper mill); I've worked in the academic world, both private and public (Cornell University is a peculiar amalgam of "endowed" colleges and a branch of the State University of New York, and I worked both sides of the divide over the years); I've worked in small businesses in the game and software industries. But I had never worked in anything remotely connected with the military and/or Federal government... until that fateful day last October.

Those readers familiar with Hampton Roads are well aware of the strong military presence here; while the Navy may be the most visible (at least Southside), several other branches have installations of one sort or another in the area. One consequence of this situation is that the area also has a strong military contractor presence. The employment landscape is, in fact, fairly littered with military contractors, sub-contractors, and sub-sub-contractors. This explains some of the difficulty I had finding new employment: while there's a fair number of jobs around here for technical and proposal writers, nearly all of them want someone with military-specific experience either in writing proposals according to arcane government standards, or in documenting such esoteric topics as, for example, boat maintenance or strategic weapons deployment. My technical writing experience, though fairly diverse, does not extend to such domains.

Fortunately, I stumbled onto a sub-contractor to a contractor to one of those "other branch of the military" installations with somewhat more mundane requirements: they needed a tech writer who could document accounting-related financial management software tools. And while my last job was nominally documenting "healthcare information management system" software – which on the face of it might not seem to bear much similarity to accounting software – it turns out that a major component of "healthcare information" is actually accounting information. That is, while the software is busy tracking patient information, bed assignments, diagnoses, treatments, medications, and test results, it's also just as busily tracking how much to bill the hapless patient (and/or his insurance) for all that stuff. So this job hasn't actually been too much of a stretch for me. Debits and credits are debits and credits, even if they do have a military flavor.

Coming soon in Hinterspace: A description of the rest of that first day week on my new job.

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8 + 68 + 12 = Finally!

8 months, 68 applications, 12 interviews.

That's what it took this time to land a job. Three years ago, it was 6 + 46 + 15. Stark illustration of the state of the economy: 33% more time, almost 50% more applications, 20% fewer interviews. And the interview rate is actually worse than it looks; only 7 of the 12 were actual full-scale interviews, with the rest being "screenings" over the phone that didn't lead to anything more. Last time around, it was 12 out of 15. So, really, more like 40% fewer "real" interviews.

Oh, and it's a 10% pay cut compared to my last position. :-(

Nonetheless, it includes fully paid health insurance, ten holidays (first time I've ever gotten all the Federal holidays, like Veteran's Day), and a 401(k) that they pay 3% into whether I contribute or not. And the commute is no worse, and perhaps easier, than for my last job. So I can't really complain.

All that aside, I have to say that today was the oddest "first day on a new job" I have ever experienced.


I was told to arrive at 9 AM for "check in". I did so, and spent just one hour filling out paperwork, going over benefits, and getting assigned an email/intranet account.

At that point my new supervisor said that was all he had for me to do today, because the project I'm assigned to (technical writing/software documentation for an off-site client) isn't quite ready to start. He said I could go home, call him tomorrow around 1 PM (after the project's "kick-off" meeting), and probably my first full day will be Wednesday.

So, apparently I am on the payroll as of today, but have nothing to do until Wednesday. And next Monday is Columbus Day (one of those Federal holidays), so I'm off that day. Nothing like a low-key start on a new job.

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For whom the ball rolls

So, last night my employer hosted a bowling party for us at the local lanes. And unlike the last time I was invited to a company-sponsored bowling party (i.e., what proved to be the last corporate shindig at The Company), this time my carpal tunnel wasn't encased in a brace. So I actually put on a pair of those funny-looking shoes and spent a couple of hours heaving an 8-pound ball in the general direction of a set of pins that were not nearly as cooperative as those pictured here. (I'd have gone for an even lighter ball if there had been one with holes big enough not to threaten to get stuck on my fingers and drag me down the lane too. Though I might've had a better chance of knocking the pins down if it had.)

I can't remember how long it's been since I last went bowling -- has to be at least 20 years -- but I'm pretty darned sure we were still keeping score on paper. (Live pinboys had, however, been replaced by automatic pinsetters.) Good job that it's all computerized now, because my aging brain cells have long since purged the memory of how to score spares and strikes. Not that scoring strikes would have been an issue for me, you understand; I'm not sure that I've ever gotten one in my excessively sporadic bowling experience, and I sure as heck didn't get one last night. To the astonishment of all (especially me), I did, however, manage three spares, with which I was quite content. In fact, the last spare would have been a strike had it only been my first ball of the frame instead of the followup to a resounding gutter ball. Timing is everything.

Speaking of gutter balls, I have to say that -- as welcome as automated scoring may be -- the concomitant cartoon displays to celebrate STRIKE!s and SPARE!s and, yes, GUTTER BALL!s get a bit tiresome after the fourth or fifth or thirtieth time they play. Especially the GUTTER BALL! announcements. I mean, c'mon, I know I just rolled a gutter ball. OK, two gutter balls in one frame. I don't need to have it advertised in technicolor for the entire clientele of the lanes to see. And as for the helpful little "sparefinder" displays after each first-ball-of-the-frame, pointing out where you should throw the ball to pick up that spare... well, shoot, even as rotten a bowler as I can deduce that I should aim at the single remaining pin rather than throwing it down the gutter. Duh. Of course, if I was actually capable of deliberately aiming the ball (instead of heaving it in the general direction), I'd be getting strikes instead gutter balls.

But all kidding aside, I had a blast. For some reason, bowling is the only physical activity that I actually enjoy despite my utterly wretched performance at the game. This goes all the way back to my freshman year in college (contrary to popular belief, bowling was not done with small round boulders even that long ago), when I managed to snag a spot in a bowling/badminton section (you got seven weeks of each) for one of my two semesters of mandatory physical education. The university couldn't boast ten-pin lanes, but they did have a nice set of candlepin lanes in the student union. If you're not familiar with candlepins (they seem to be peculiar to New England and the Canadian maritimes), they use these more or less cylindrical pins and a quite small ball (no finger holes -- you just hold it in your hand), with three balls per frame. I had a great time even though I ended up at the bottom of the class in terms of my cumulative score. And inexplicably, I got an A in bowling (the instructor said it was because I improved more than anyone else), which was a good thing because I flunked badminton, so I still got a C for the term and didn't have to suffer through another semester of PE.

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It's sucking the life force out of me

Well, it finally happened: After 16 years of having my own private office (with full-height walls and a closable door) at various workplaces, last Friday I became a denizen of Dilbert-land. I'd known for a month that this was coming sometime after the first of the year, ever since my supervisor snuck the information into my performance review. Which didn't make the actual move any more pleasant.

The rationale for my relegation to the cubicle farm is a bit fuzzy. Depending on who you talk to, it's because:

• The area where my former office is located is supposed to be for "administrative staff", which I am not. (But neither is the clinical analyst who's also housed in that area.) And it's not like they need that office for some administrative staff member; the office next to mine is still vacant since we moved in back in July.
  
• I should be in the cubicle area with the software developers because I "test the software they develop and write the documentation for it". (But I have practically zero interaction with them. I could be working in Timbuktu and none of them would even notice, much less care.)
• "Company policy" is for the offices to be reserved for managers. (Again, the clinical analyst isn't a manager, nor are most of the admin staff.)

Oh, and the CEO did hasten to say that I'm not "being punished" or anything like that. Strange, somehow being assigned to a space that's 40% smaller, with no door (hence no privacy) and walls barely taller than I am, doesn't exactly feel like a reward. I can't even listen to my CD player without headphones. And to rub salt in the wound, I can't take my little office fridge and microwave because "the electrical circuits aren't adequate for anything beyond the computers." Now granted, there are two full-size refrigerators and three microwaves in the break room, and I don't really care all that much about the microwave -- but I hate communal refrigerators; they're invariably overcrowded and rarely cleaned, and things are subject to being filched.

So, just as Dilbert found, my cubicle is indeed sucking the life force out of me.

Or to put it more succinctly, my cubicle sucks.

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Thump. Thump. Thump.

Or, to be more precise:

THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!

That has been the intermittent accompaniment to my workdays for the last couple of weeks, as a piledriver sets the foundation for that new office building I mentioned in my previous post -- the one that'll be going up just north of our building. The one for which all those trees perished to make a parking lot.

THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!

I can tell when I'm getting close to the office in the morning (assuming I'm not quite alert enough to readily recognize it anyway) when I start to hear...

THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!

I have no idea how many piles they've got to drive or how long this is going to go on. I'm just glad my office is near the opposite end of the building. Still, I'm keeping an eye on the knickknacks on my bookcase shelves, just in case they start to creep towards the edge.

THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!

Sometimes it will be quiet for a while and I begin to forget about it. Maybe they've gone to lunch. Maybe they've quit for the day. Maybe they ran out of piles! And then,

THUMP! THUMP! THUMP!


Not only do I miss the trees, I miss the quiet.

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Doesn't have to be paradise

... to get paved for a parking lot.

This birdseye view (courtesy of Microsoft's local.live.com) of my office building -- the one on the right -- shows the nice stand of trees that used to be behind the building's back parking lot, providing welcome shade for part of the day for cars parked along the back edge. The key phrase there being "used to be".


Because here's what it looks like beyond that parking lot now. They came in and clearcut it a few weeks ago, to make way for additional parking for a new building that's going to go up on that wedge of land between the two buildings in the aerial view.


I miss the trees.

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How long can you tread water?

Well, after a scorching August with two consecutive record-breaking days (101 and 102 degrees), the lawn turning brown, and the shrubs in a perpetual state of wilt, I think the rainfall deficit here has been made up, in spades. Or more appropriately, in buckets. Huge buckets, courtesy of Tropical Storm Ernesto.

My first big mistake was not taking the hint when I pulled out of my driveway to find water ponding across the width of my street, which I've never seen happen before. No, I had an 8:45 appointment at my doctor's office in Norfolk, so I forged ahead. But by the time I pulled out onto Indian Lakes Blvd (a matter of three blocks), I had hurriedly made A Change of Plans. No way was I going to Norfolk in that deluge, given the way Norfolk flash-floods in the area I would have been heading for.

That's when I made my second big mistake: I turned onto Ferrell Parkway to go to work instead. A lot of water on the road, but the traffic crawled along at 30 mph (the speed limit is 50-55) so it still seemed to be manageable. Once on Lynnhaven Parkway, though, the situation deteriorated rapidly. By the time I started seeing big pickups and SUVs hesitating to continue, I was about halfway between home and work -- and from the looks of the wakes being thrown out in the other lane, it appeared that turning around and going back was not an option. So, seeing several vehicles turn off into an apartment complex rather than proceed into what looked like dangerously deep water, I followed suit.

Third big mistake.

I was hoping to be able to drive through the complex and back out onto Lynnhaven beyond the deep water. No such luck; this complex was a bunch of dead ends with no outlets other than the one I came in. Back near the entrance, I parked illegally in someone's reserved parking space to assess the situation, and to call 1) the doctor's office to cancel, and 2) the office manager at my office to let her know I'd be, at the least, late.

Ultimately, by the time I got my courage up to try heading out onto Lynnhaven Parkway again, it was too late; the water was more than knee-deep. More and more vehicles were either making a U-turn (which as far as I could see was the worse alternative) or taking refuge in the increasingly crowded parking lots of the same apartment complex where I had stranded myself. Considering that a lot of those vehicles were SUVs, I decided the most prudent course to take with my poor little PT Cruiser was to retreat to the parking lot. (It might be significant that in all the time I watched passing traffic, I never saw a single PT Cruiser go by.) Once the parking lots were full people started parking on lawns and the grassy island in the center of a loop side street. "Island" was definitely an appropriate term, as you can see in these photos I took after eventually moving there myself.


In the end, someone from my company (the CEO, actually) came out in his pickup to rescue me. Even he couldn't make it as far as this street; he called my cell phone and said he was two streets away and could I walk over that far? So I took my tote bag, put on my already soaked rain jacket, and slogged through that parking lot you can see in the pictures (over knee-deep) out to the sidewalk and down to where he was parked. He said he'd never seen Lynnhaven Parkway flood that bad in 25 years.

Finally safe at the office, I thanked my lucky stars that I've been keeping a pair of long pants in my office (they're intended to keep me from getting frostbite on those days when the air conditioning proves too much for my shorts) so I had something dry to change into. I wrung out my socks in the rest room and went barefoot, and draped my soaked jacket and shorts over a chair in my office and aimed the space heater at them on "High". Then I actually got some work done. Thankfully it finally stopped raining in the early afternoon and I got a ride home from another employee. We made an attempt to get my car, but that stretch of road was still closed.

By 6:30 pm I had called the city police and learned that that stretch of Lynnhaven was finally open in one direction, though they couldn't tell me which way. Nevertheless, I asked my next-door neighbor if he could take me down to try to retrieve my car. Success! The eastbound lanes were open and the waters had receded from the parking lots so I could get to my car without going wading. Westbound was still under water so I had to go east and make a big loop back to get home, but at least I got my car out of there before someone decided to call in the tow trucks to clear out abandoned vehicles.

So, how was your Friday?

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The Imaginary Invalid

As I've been editing those old software docs (and some new ones), a particularly annoying phrase keeps coming up: "valid [something-or-other]", as in "Enter a valid department code" or "The following valid entries may be made in this field."

For example, here's a section in the chapter I'm currently editing, entitled "Defining Valid Departments". I'm naturally expecting it to be followed by a companion section entitled "Defining Invalid Departments". I mean, really, if there are instructions specifically for defining valid departments, doesn't that imply that there must also be (presumably different) instructions for defining invalid ones? Alas, there is no such section: it seems that this section is simply about "Defining Departments", and that the very act of defining a department is, in fact, what makes it valid.

And so it goes.

A table lists "valid date entry formats", which seem to cover every conceivable way of specifying a date and some that I would have thought not conceivable; in fact, in the context of this documentation, I don't think there is such a thing as an invalid date entry format. Any combination of numbers seems to translate to some kind of valid format in this imaginary software world.

In the job scheduling software, "Jobs have three valid types of schedules". It doesn't say how many invalid types of schedules there might be. Inquiring minds want to know.

"You can enter data in a field ... by selecting a valid entry from a list." I sure hope the entries in the list are labelled so I know which ones are valid -- I wouldn't want to inadvertently select an invalid entry.

"Table 6-1 lists the valid record types" that are recorded in the audit file. So does that mean there may also be invalid record types recorded in that file, but they didn't bother to list them in that table? How the heck did they get there in the first place?

It was admittedly many months before I finally figured out just what it was that I found so irritating about the word "valid". Then it finally hit me -- it harks back to the heady design days of First Edition STCCG. The designers kept talking about how some action could be performed only as a response to another action. But when I proposed to perform that action in response to some specific action, one of the designers told me I couldn't do that. "Why not?" I asked. "I'm responding to my opponent's action." "But that isn't a valid response to that action," he said. That was the first time I had heard any indication that a "response" had to be "valid" -- whatever that meant. Because, you see, the designers had never defined -- at least not publicly -- what constituted a "valid" response as opposed to an "invalid" one.

When I think about "responding", I picture something along the lines of "You do something, and then I respond by doing something else." For example, you ask me what movie I want to see. I can respond by saying, "I want to see Superman Returns", or "I'd like Chinese food." Either way, I have given you a response, even if that response was a total non sequiter (i.e., an "invalid response"). But the designers were telling me that I wasn't even allowed to say "I'd like Chinese food". I either had to say "I want to see Superman Returns" (or some other movie) -- i.e., make a "valid response" -- or I couldn't say anything at all. Now, if I don't say anything, I haven't made a response, invalid or otherwise. So under the designers' rules, an invalid response is actually an imaginary concept. I can't make it, so it doesn't exist.

In the same way, "invalid" seems to be an imaginary concept in my software documentation world. If I define a department, it is by definition a valid department. If I haven't defined it, then it doesn't exist to be considered invalid. If the only items available for me to select from a list are "valid entries", then there is no such thing as an invalid entry.

It all gives me a low-grade headache. In fact, it's enough to turn anyone into a temporary (but only imaginary) invalid.

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Displays, defaults & values

One of my prime responsibilities as a technical writer is to edit into usability (and eventually post online in HTML) several dozen user manuals that were written by employees of the previous owners of the "legacy" software suite now owned by my current company. These manuals have already gone through a preliminary conversion process to extract them from a CD-ROM-based version that uses something called a DynaText Browser (sort of a proto-Microsoft Help), as well as a preliminary content edit by one or another of our programmers/analysts to account for changes to the software since the last CD-ROM update (which was quite a while ago).

You might think that wouldn't leave much for me to do. You would be wrong. Programmers and analysts are the last people who should be writing or editing documentation for end users. Not only do they litter the docs with jargon, bad grammar, and stilted language derived from programming requirements or specs, they can't even punctuate.

For example, whoever did that edit on the manual I'm currently working on seems to have been suffering from "Eats, shoots & leaves" syndrome¹, aka a surfeit of random commas. Mind you, the original (which I have in its entirety for comparison) was not wanting for extraneous commas to begin with. Nevertheless, these evidently weren't enough for our editor, who blithely inserted additional ones wherever, apparently, they took a breath while editing.

One of the most egregious -- and confusing -- examples of these respiratory commas was the following:

You use function numbers to control access to those functions you want only specific employees to perform.... Functions, which do not require control, do not need function numbers.

OK, let me get this straight: Function numbers control access to functions, which do not require control, so they don't need function numbers. Huh? FinallyI got the bright idea to check the original. Sure enough, it was supposed to read "Functions which do not require control do not need function numbers." So functions which do require control do need function numbers.

Other examples were not so much confusing as they were simply wrong:

"Function and user records must be coordinated to make sure that staff, have full access to the appropriate functions."

"Select the department whose, device list you want to copy."

As for the bad grammar and stilted language, nothing gets my editorial dander up more than the use of "display" as an intransitive verb. If I had a quarter for every instance of "Screen X displays" or "The password does not display on the screen" that I have changed to "Screen X is displayed" or "The password is not displayed on the screen", I'd be able to play the slots in Vegas through a very long losing streak.

In a similar vein, we have "default" used as an intransitive verb, as "This value is defaulted into the field." (This is a compound offense by virtue of using an awkward, and totally unnecessary, passive voice.) Now, "default" is a perfectly good intransitive verb, but that's in the context of defaulting on a loan or failing to complete a contest. If you're talking about automatically assigned settings or values, it's a noun or maybe an adjective, as "This value is the default for the field" or "This is the default value for the field."

And speaking of "value", another construction I see in our documentation that grates on me is, "You should value this field with an appropriate code...". I don't know about you, but I don't hold a database field in high regard or estimate its worth.

It's even entirely possible for more than one of these pet peeves of mine to appear in the same sentence. In fact, I ran across this prime example this very morning (I swear I am not making this up!):

"The record for entity 17, displays with the existing information defaulting into the fields on the editor screen."

Excuse me while, I go bang my head against the, wall.

¹Although you might not place a book about punctuation high on your list of must-reads, I highly recommend "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" by Lynne Truss. The title refers to a murderous panda. If that doesn't make any sense, well, read the book.

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Ramblings from Hinterspace

This blog seems to proceed by fits and starts. For a few days I'll be inspired to post daily, and then nothing for weeks at a time, as the minutiae of daily life overtake me and consume my blogging time. But never fear, I'm still alive out here in Hinterspace. So here goes with my latest bloggin' fit (or start, as the case may be).

• What possesses my air conditioner, after running like a top for several weeks, to suddenly decide it's going to take a siesta every afternoon so my house can heat up to 80+ degrees in time for me to arrive home from work? For, say five days in a row, until I call the A/C service guy and set up a service call threedays hence, at which time the air conditioner cancels its afternoon naps so the A/C guy will say he really can't diagnose the problem if it's not doing it. And then, once its sure I've cancelled the service call, it waits till the Fourth of July to snooze off again.
  
  This is not random, spontaneous appliance behavior, I say. It is a premeditated job action, calculated to drive me insane. Or to give me heat stroke, whichever comes first.
  
  
• My company scheduled their move to the new offices to begin on Friday, June 3oth, and extend through the sort-of holiday weekend. Fortunately, my supervisor, who is based in California and thus exempt from such madness, decreed that I should work at home on Friday (and thus was one of the handful of people in the company who actually got something accomplished that day). Also fortunately, I had the foresight to claim July 3rd, well in advance, as a vacation day. This not only gave me a four-day weekend in which to fight with my recalcitrant air conditioner, but also allowed me to bypass any and all moving-related activities on Saturday or Monday.
  
  
• At the old offices, there has been a constant battle over the thermostat between the CEO -- who likes it on the cool side -- and everyone else (except me, I like it cool too) -- who are always complaining "It's freezing in here!" To which I say, put a sweater on. Now you might not think there would be much of a battle with the CEO -- he's da boss, so it should be any damn temperature he wants, right? -- but (a) he's often out of town on business, leaving the thermostat to the mercy of all the freezing people, and (b) he was never around at the satellite office, where I spent the last month in a seriously undercooled state.
  
  So, when I noticed at the new offices there were clear locked boxes over all the thermostats, I had hoped it indicated that said CEO was going to control the temperature to his liking, which hopefully would be more to my liking. Be careful what you wish for, "they" say, and "they" are right as usual: my office seems to be hovering around 65 degrees, which would be dandy for sleeping under a toasty comforter, but for sitting at a computer all day... not so much. I spent today bundled up in a sweatshirt and long pants and was still freezing. Seems like we could come to some happy medium between 65 and 75.
  
  
• After a two-and-a-half-year hiatus I have returned to eBay-ing as a means of getting some of the excess stuff out of my house (and, incidentally, a bit of cash back in my bank account). So far I have managed to unload a few unused board games bought in a weak moment at PrezCon four years ago; a box of Scum & Villainy that's been lying around since about the time I moved to Virginia; and a crap-load of Star Trek TNG paperback novels that I have finally concluded I am highly unlikely ever to want to read again. Next up: a couple of Hallmark Keepsake ornaments that I no longer wish to keep(sake), yet more Star Trek paperbacks, and some Star Trek trading cards (no, not the CCG cards -- those are for later) that are just taking up space I'm sure I can find a better use for.
  
  Conveniently, the new company offices are literally across the street from the main Virginia beach post office, so all that eBay shipping is going to be a piece of cake.
  
  
• Why can't my hydrangeas and daylilies grow as rampantly as the weeds in my lawn?
  
  
• Cutting the daily commute from 30 miles a day (round trip) to 16 saves me 20-30 minutes of commuting time each day, $110 a year on my car insurance, and, at today's prices, at least $45 a month in gas.
  

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Can't teach an old Romulan new tricks

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I had to move from my company's main office to its auxiliary site, which is about a mile closer to home. Now, given my known difficulties in changing set habits -- back when I moved from an apartment to my house, for at least a year I would periodically space out and miss the (earlier) exit I needed to take from 264 going home from work -- I was fully expecting to spend my first week or more bypassing the turn for the office and finding myself en route to corporate. But to my surprise, I settled into the new route with no problems.

Until this week. Monday morning I experienced a classic case of delayed-reaction habit regression. (I just invented that phrase.) When I came to, I was in the left lane of Laskin Road at the light where I needed to turn right. So onward to the Farm Fresh where I could turn around in the parking lot and head back to my turnoff.

Relatively trivial fix at this point, but now I'm taking bets on how long it'll be, when we move the whole company to the old VEC building on Viking Drive, before I find myself on 264 heading for the Oceanfront when I should be parked and walking in the door to my office.

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So what else can go wrong? No, wait, I don't want to know.

Thursday 5/18 AM. I make a trip into Norfolk to get blood tests done (cholesterol and thyroid). The nurse can't raise a vein in either arm and finally has to get it from the back of my hand. Ugh.

Thursday 5/18 PM. I walk into the house after work and can tell immediately that the AC is off. It's stuffy and several degrees warmer than it should be. Repeated attempts to get the compressor to start fail. I finally shut it off at the thermostat and spend the night with the window open. Call an AC contractor and determine it's not an "emergency", but they'll call me first thing in the morning (i.e., 8 AM) to set up an appointment.

Friday 5/19 AM. No call by 8 AM and I need to leave for work. Call contractor who says the service group isn't in yet, maybe half an hour. So much for "first thing in the morning" being the same as "8 AM". I leave my cell number, and drive to work. No call by 9:30. I call the guy who serviced my AC once before. (OK, it's been two years. I wasn't working last year and didn't have the cash for it.) He tries to tell me it must be iced up because it's too cool out but finally says he'll come look at it. I turn around and go back home. He finally shows up after getting lost and calling me so I can talk him in ("You see the shopping strip on the corner with a Food Lion? Turn left at that light. Now take the second left, then the third right..."). After he runs over my ground-cover juniper at the corner of the driveway while trying to park his truck, we go inside and turn on the unit at the thermostate. It starts right up and runs like a top. Shit. He futzes with it for two hours, replaces a valve he says is leaking, and dumps 5 friggin' pounds of Freon into it. Costs me $310 and half a day of PTO. And I get to drive to and from work twice.

Tuesday 5/23 PM. My doctor takes me off my cholesterol meds after hearing about the muscle pains I'm having. That's one of those "rare" side effects that they always tell you to watch out for when taking statins. When I get home, the AC is off again (it ran fin all weekend, dammit) and it's around 77 in the house. I shut it down for a couple of hours and then turn it back on. It runs. It cools.

Wednesday 5/24, 5 PM. Fifteen minutes before my quitting time, my boss (who works out of California) calls and says she's just found out I need to move my office. Well, shoot, we're all moving July 1 to our new office building, so what's she on about? No, this is something different. They're hiring a new software developer who'll be starting Tuesday, and they need to have him at the same office as the rest of the developers. My office is the only place they have to put him, so I win the dubious distinction of getting to move twice: right away, to the other office, and then again in a month when we all move.

Thursday 5/25. I spend half the afternoon packing boxes and taking some things over to my new quarters.

Friday 5/26. I spend half the damned day moving the rest of my stuff, including my PC, monitor, UPS, and a dozen or so cables and peripherals, and getting set up. (Desktop PCs suck. Give me a nice laptop any day. No trouble moving them.) Early evening: I come home to a temp of 81 inside. No telling how long the AC has been off. I "reboot" it and it takes 5 or 6 hours to cool it down to a reasonable level. Late evening: My cable connection goes south and refuses to come back online.

Saturday 5/27, 9 AM. Still no connection. I call Cox and the upshot seems to be that my cable modem has taken a shit. 10 AM: I call a new AC contractor. Since I'm not already a customer, the earliest they could schedule me is week after next. Since the AC is currently running OK, I decline. Afternoon: A new cable modem, from Circuit City, runs me $80 (less a $20 rebate in the offing). I spend the rest of the afternoon getting it hooked up and online and getting my Mac and Toshiba laptops to talk to it. My wireless router still refuses to talk to it, leading me to believe I'm now going to have to replace that too.

And to top it off, I just realized that the DVD Netflix sent out to arrive Tuesday never showed up, so I had to report it missing.

So how has your last week and a half been?

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What goes around...

In the wake of last year's Series of Unfortunate Events, I spent more time than I care to think about visiting the Virginia Beach office of the VEC (Virginia Employment Commission). Hell, even one visit would have been one too many, but as it happened I was there at least five times to jump through one stupid hoop or another in connection with collecting unemployment.

As luck (?) would have it, about a month after I finally found a job and the unemployment checks stopped, the state closed down that VEC office, consolidating its functions with the Norfolk office. Good riddance, I thought, and breathed a silent sigh of relief that I wouldn't be going back to that office on Viking Drive ever again .

Hah, said the universe. That's what you think.

When I started my current job, I knew vaguely that the company was tight on office space. The local staff was divided between two inadequate office spaces a mile or so apart; they had been hunting, unsuccessfully, for a single suitable building for maybe a year, and had just reluctantly renewed their lease on the rented space. (I'm located in the building they own-- the one with the dolphin.) Since then, they've continued looking, though, and last week finally signed a lease on a building that has two and a half times the square footage of our current two spaces combined. And wonder of wonders, when we move in July, it will cut my 30-mile round trip commute to just 16, because the building's on Viking Drive.

The former VEC building.

Thankfully, it's undergoing extensive renovations (the mile-long counter and the "holding pen" in the front are gone already), and since I'll probably be parking in back and coming in through the back entrance, I can hope it won't hold any bad vibes for me. Still, it has to be one of the weirdest coincidences I've met up with yet.

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Dolphins on parade

My former colleagues from The Company are bound to be familiar with Norfolk's ubiquitous "Mermaids on Parade" mermaid sculptures, one of which is shown at right. (You'd have to be blind to live or work in downtown Norfolk and not have seen dozens of them.)

But have you seen the dolphins? Those of you who scattered around the country and beyond in the wake of the layoffs probably have not.

Last summer, a Virginia Beach non-profit called "A Dolphin's Promise" started selling sponsorships for lifesize fiberglass dolphin sculptures to raise funds for the Lance Armstrong Foundation. While they're nowhere near as widespread yet as the mermaids, this one recently appeared near the entrance to my current employer's parking lot (our CEO is a sponsor). I'm told that the artwirk depicts the oceanfront skyline (i.e., hotels).

That was a few weeks ago. Then, a couple weeks ago, I noticed when I drove in to work one morning that something looked odd about the dolphin's ass end (which was the first thing you saw when you drove in). Turned out to be red and white stripes on this new dolphin that replaced the other one. Yes, it's now facing the other way; it got turned around a week after it was installed.

Apparently, the CEO sponsored two dolphins, and decided to have this one at the office and the other one in his front yard. Unlike the first one, the replacement has a name, on that little white sign on the pole: "Freedom Rising". The artist, according to the sign, is named Violet Rose Gold.

Just thought you former denizens of the Beach might be interested in seeing VB's answer to the mermaids.

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Flashback

Key people from the company where I'm currently employed are attending a major trade show at the San Diego Convention Center this week, and our CEO sent back a batch of photos from their booth setup and the first days of the conference. Browsed through them this morning and experienced an overwhelming "con" flashback.

While I never made it to Comic-Con (so the venue itself didn't mean anything to me), from '97 through '04 I attended a dozen or so Origins and Gen Cons (and one Spiel), mostly as part of The Company's team. One look at the CEO's photos and it all came rushing back -- shipping crates, booth setup, towers, signs and banners, long aisles of other companies' booths, "working the booth" after the convention opened... it was all there. In fact, my first thought was that the photos looked remarkably like the ones I used to take documenting the convention experience for The Company's website.

My second thought was, "OMG, I'm so glad I don't have to do all that any more!"

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Numbers don't lie

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Company (clothes)line

Like most of my former colleagues from The Company, I managed to accumulate more company-logo shirts than any one person could wear out in a lifetime. This was mainly a consequence of the fact that at least one new "official" T-shirt or polo shirt was created each year for convention season, and all staff were supposed to wear the current official shirt at the booth and on the tournament floor. With most of the cons running four days, we'd generally get issued four T-shirts. Add to that special T-shirts for tournament prizes, promos, product launches, product champions, in-house departmental shirts, and annual World Championships, and you can pile up a lot of shirts in eight years of volunteer, contract and full-time work.

To be exact (well, I think I found all of them, though there could be one or two more lurking in the far reaches of the closet), my company shirt tally comes in at 33 T-shirts and polos (25 of which are black), plus 5 long-sleeved black cotton shirts. I know some of you had even more, as you were full-time employees for much longer than I was. Regardless, that's a crapload of shirts, and a lot of them aren't exactly something you'd use for everyday wear outside of The Company. (There's something a tad conspicuous about a black T-shirt with STAFF in 6-inch high red block letters on the back.)

So what does one do with a plethora of company shirts when one no longer works for that company? Well, for one thing, I'll certainly never have to buy a pajama top any time before I die. I can wear'em for painting a ceiling with no regrets when I drip paint on them. They're great for yard work, too; I can dirty up two or three a day without ever running out of clean shirts. And a couple are souvenirs that I wouldn't part with for anything, like my 1997 Worlds Finalist shirt. Still, 33 T and polo shirts are more than I need – I mean, it's not as if these are the only shirts I own, far from it – so it's past time to ship some of them off to a local thrift store.

Especially considering that my new company just gave the staff sweatshirts with the company logo for Christmas. Only one apiece (we don't have anything akin to a con season, thank goodness), but it's begun, and I don't imagine it'll stop there. Best I make some room now.

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Flashback

Had a disquieting moment at my workplace last week. Picture this:

It's early Friday afternoon. Earlier, there has been a fair amount of upper management discussion behind closed doors (though that in itself isn't unusual). Now, the company president goes around and gathers the members of the project team into one of the offices for a quick meeting. A couple of people make lame jokes of the "Uh-oh, are we in trouble?" and "What'd we do now?" genre. I don't laugh. My former colleagues from The Company will understand why, I'm sure.

Turns out one of the remote employee/contractors is being let go. My stomach does a somersault. But thankfully (at least from my perspective, though perhaps not from his), it's not a portent of cutbacks; apparently there was some kind of issue with this individual (we didn't get any details). The project team is being told before the weekly company-wide newsletter circulates the terse and damning "We wish him the best of luck in his future endeavours" message. A couple of the developers who had worked with him want to email the guy to say goodbye, but for security reasons, his email account is going to be shut down immediately, and no one has an alternate email contact for him.

I go back to my office and breathe a huge sigh of relief.

I hate deja vu.

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Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy...

My friend Tim recently posted, in the course of musing about his career, what he called the "digest version" of his eclectic work history. The fact that this digest included no fewer than 19 different jobs made me wonder how my own compared. So I reached back into the mists of time and dredged up dim memories of some paying jobs that I hadn't thought about in years, as well as those I remember more clearly, and here's what emerged.

Pre-college:

• Babysitter. Definitely not my favorite job – I'm no good with kids.
• Office assistant to the elementary/middle school principal.
  

As an undergrad at the University of Maine:

• Evening receptionist in my freshman dormitory.
• Chemistry stockroom attendant.
• Lab assistant, preparing organic chemistry labs.
  
• Organic chemistry teaching assistant.
• Computer programmer for physical chemistry labs, using an obscure language called NUTRAN.

As a grad student at Penn State:

• NMR operator.
• Chemistry teaching assistant.

After leaving school:

• Inventory-taker at Hills Department Store. (OK, it was only a one-day job, but I did get paid.)
• Chief chemist in a pulp and paper mill in Maine.
  

At Cornell University:

• Freshman chemistry teaching associate.
• Lab technician/lab coordinator/lab supervisor (Chemistry Dept). I went through three job titles, but I was doing pretty much the same job the whole time. Does that count as one job or three?
• Senior lab technician in Agronomy Dept soil testing labs.
• Hazardous waste analysis and disposal technician, Chemistry Dept.
  
• Assistant Director of Laboratories, Chemistry Dept.
• Computer support person for chemistry course coordinators.
• Temporary computer programmer (Basic, FORTRAN, dBase).
  
• Manager of Laboratory Services and Safety, Chemistry Dept.

Self-employment:

• Freelance photographer. Included photography of theatre and ballet performances, nature/scenic stock photography for various magazines and newspapers, technical photography for a chemistry text, and wedding photography (once).
• Freelance writer for The Duelist and Scrye gaming magazines.
• STCCG rules guru for The Company.
  
• Product development assistant for The Company.

After moving to Virginia:

• Web writer/web content manager/webmaster for The Company.
• Technical writer.

Wow. That's actually 25, even counting the three-job-title gig as one job. I knew I had done a lot of different things – you don't spend six months tailoring resumes for 40+ job applications without being aware of at least the important stuff – but everything that came before the "After leaving school" heading was either never on my resume or else dropped off it long ago (in a galaxy far, far away).

Well, considering that I am a few years (around 12?) older than Tim, I guess I'm entitled to have a few more entries in my job list. ;-) But I'm quite frankly hoping that the next job title I have will be "retiree".

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