Then I sacked out for a few hours and set the alarm, since I had to wake up at 11:30pm and had to help migrate the website we built over to the new evil corporate platform. The stuff I had to do was reasonably easy and fast. I’d fat-fingered the temporary maintenance page config, but that only took two minutes to fix. No, after that, the other people kept running into things that they weren’t ready for or hadn’t thought through. We were all on a conference call, so I was able to hear all the gormless wittering. After hearing something particularly brainless, my boss texted me, saying, “Can you believe this? Oh. My. God.” At least everything we did worked out, so I was able to go to bed at about 12:45am.

Monday: I got up late and worked from home. This mostly worked out well. Moira liked being able to sit on my lap all morning. I learned that the new evil corporate website platform has several unexpected[0] bugs. Users were noticing these bugs and calling the customer service lines. This is, of course, bad. One of these bugs was rather simple—it’d be a 3 to 5 minute fix on their end. They said, “We might have that fixed in the next 4 to 5 hours.” This whole process has been like a Dilbert comic without the humor. I’m just glad I won’t have to deal with all the stupid fallout from this over the next few weeks, and I’m very glad I canceled the account I had with the site before they took it over.

[0] Unexpected by them, that is. I usually expect there to be five tons of new bugs and prepare various contingency plans, but they didn’t.

More epic stupid happened later, but I’m not sure how to phrase it best just yet.

At least You Don’t Have to be Evil to Work Here, but It Helps by Tom Holt has been an amusing book to read on the bus. Colin and Cassie are both in love with the wrong people, and they’re trying to fix that, and Colin’s father has decided to sell his soul to the Devil. Also, Cassie’s firm has been acquired by some efficiency experts, so all the employees have to do assessments where they’re quizzed about their abilities to proactively synergize core competencies value-orientatedly moving forward. Some of the parody there is far too close to what I’ve heard people actually say. (Poe’s Law?) Anyway, I’m only halfway through it, and it’s got a lot of Britishisms in it, but it’s been fun so far.

Then, of course, the database had a fit, and I had to get it working again. And when I was on the bus, I got a phone call saying that something really, really important had broken, and could I help fix it? Trying to talk on the phone and have someone else do semi-complex Linux tasks while on a noisy bus is not optimal. But when I finally got home and was able to look at a real computer, I found that the problem wasn’t with any system we were responsible for. Nope, some other people had done an unplanned reboot of something really important, and as a result, a bunch of stuff was completely unavailable for ~45 minutes. So naturally they called us. *sigh.

Unfortunately, we all found out today that Larry’s found another job, and he’s actually taking this one and leaving in a couple of weeks. This will make things interesting, since he’s involved with a bunch of important stuff. It seems as if the people who have other options have found different jobs or are trying to find different jobs, which is a bad sign. Not sure where it will all end. . . .

And then, it was the usual Wednesday night Rock Band 3, though Stephanie didn’t stay past dinner. Steve’s been having to work crazy hours. Zach showed up around 7:30pm since he was in town having dinner with other people. Steve said, “Yeah, I’ve been working a lot. But the boss said we’d get compensated well once everything starts working!” “Did you all get that offer in writing?” Zach said. “Um, no,” Steve replied. “You’re not going to get compensated,” Zach said, and everything I’ve seen about promises from management tells me that Zach is right. I hope Zach isn’t right, of course, but I fear that he is.

Thursday: It seemed like I couldn’t get five minutes’ peace all morning. The raft of requests didn’t let up all day, and culminated in somebody saying, “We noticed (problem) hours ago! Fix it! Now!” at 4:15pm. I just barely managed to find out what was wrong and fix it before leaving.

And, of course, I have to get up at 4am tomorrow to do some semi-complicated stuff with some servers.

The potluck went well. People liked the penguin appetizers. Some people asked me about them while I was riding the bus to work, since I had them in a clear plastic container. There was also macaroni and cheese with bacon, which was probably tastier than the penguins even though it wasn’t as eye-catching. There were actually a few penguins left over. I was surprised at that, but I ate one and took the rest home.

Steve couldn’t show up for Rock Band, since there were terrible things happening at his work. Stephanie and I had dinner without Steve, then I played through some of Dragon Age: Origins to show Stephanie what it’s like. It takes a long time to run through the adventure, though, which is why I’ve barely touched the game in the last year.

Thursday had even more trouble tickets. I got three or four at once as I was riding the bus in to work. Only one of them was a real problem. Then, I had to deal with being the only one of the team who was actually in the office. There was a really bizarre problem with the dev site that neither Bill nor I could figure out, though we were both looking at it. We finally said, “All right, leave it for now, come back a bit later and try again.” Then I took a good look at the directories. The place where everything worked had files 1, 2, 3, and 4. The place where nothing worked had files 1, 2, and 4. One of these things is not like the other. . . . Sigh. Well, once I’d copied the missing file over, the dev site started working, and there was much rejoicing.

I’ve still got tons of things to do, though. The cat above is engulfed by bunnies; I seem to be engulfed by problems that are a lot less cute and fuzzy.

But after work, Steve came over, and we had Chinese food. Apparently, he’s now a full-time employee, which will be great for him, since he can get cheaper medical insurance. His older son Adam did something stupid, though, so that was annoying. Stephanie came over as well, though she was late. We ended up talking and looking at the ThinkGeek paper catalog instead of playing Rock Band. The catalog has a ton of interestingly weird and geeky gifts, like caffeinated marshmallows and T-shirts that say, “The book was better.” Anyway, it was different, but interesting.

Thursday, I saw some interestingly obvious stupidity:

• In this established and semi-anonymous forum, 95% of commenters hate it.
• In this non-anonymous forum where all comments that appear must be approved, 40% of commenters hate it.

So, they appear to want to turn a thriving comment section into a moribund wasteland of suck. This isn’t entirely unexpected, just. . . really stupid. And of course, we also recently learned that there are going to be furloughs next quarter. Not everybody has to take furloughs, though. People who work directly for corporate don’t have to take them. Everyone else does.

On a slightly happier note, I did my annual donation to Child’s Play tonight. Hooray for helping kids out, or something.

But anyway, we tried to learn everything possible from Chris. I also tried to deal with the usual raft of really weird problems, requests that made no sense, and recalcitrant Citrix clients with singularly unhelpful error messages and terrible UIs. But I got most of that stuff done.

Finished reading The Wake, the last book of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman this evening. That book is about everyone saying goodbye to Morpheus, the main character of the series. It’s been a few years since I’ve read the whole thing. Like most long and complex works, it gives you a different experience every time you read it. Well, The Kindly Ones, the second-to-last book, is “big and heavy enough to stun a burglar if you hit him with it”, which is apparently a good criterion for judging whether something’s a good piece of literature. . . .

And of course, I learned that Chris has found another job, and his last day is Friday. This is slightly inconvenient as he’s been here for a long time, and he was working on a really important project. Which he doesn’t have time to finish writing. So, instead of taking a couple of days off this week, I’m going to be there all week, trying to learn everything I can about everything Chris knows. And we’re going to have 3 people where we used to have 5 for a while, since Aaron is out for several weeks due to medical stuff. So it’s really not going to be fun in the next month or so.

Is it time for November to be over yet? The month has been way too eventful.

After work, I went over to Stephanie’s house with my “Psycho Jester” costume from last year. She’d had a few trick-or-treaters last year, so we thought we’d both dress up and hand out candy. Not a single person came to her door this year. This was a bit annoying. Oh well.

Tuesday: Apparently, some brainless idiot at corporate has made a decision that’ll slowly but inevitably suck the life out of a portion of the website. Nobody who was in the staff meeting thought it was a good idea, but they’re going to do it anyway, because <SARCASM>the people at corporate obviously know what they’re doing more than those of us who live in the online world and deal with users every single day</SARCASM>. They’re doing a trial in a few weeks. I think this trial will suck horribly, but popular opinion is that the person responsible for this decision is extremely stupid and clue-resistant. So even if the trial fails horribly, we’ll be forced to use the thing everywhere, and the pain and suffering will begin. (Yes, it’s amazing how many things from TV, books, and video games relate to the real world. I just wish this didn’t feel like the beginning of the Monumental Stupid that happened at the old company, which cost that company hundreds of thousands of dollars for no good reason!)

No trivia tonight. Almost nobody could make it. We’ve rescheduled for next week.