Portrait of the Artist as a Young Geek

The roof office is on fire!

Well, was. See, Tuesday, around 5:20pm, we start smelling smoke throughout the office. While we're still making sure none of our computers are overheating, the fire alarms go off, so we save all our work and get out of there via the fire stairs. (Reminder: we're on the 15th floor.) Turns out there was a malfunction in one of the elevators: the emergency brakes engaged for no apparent reason but the motor was still trying to move the car, and either the motor overheated or the brakes started wearing away, I'm not sure which, maybe both. Either way, nothing actually caught on fire, and they fixed the elevator, so no harm done, other than some exhausted white collars needing to catch their breath in the parking lot.

...Wednesday, around 5:10pm, we start smelling smoke throughout the office. Aw, crap. This time we don't wait for the alarm; management makes a floor-wide announcement to start packing up immediately. And down the stairs we go. (Reminder: we're still on the 15th floor.) The fire trucks actually beat us to the parking lot this time. Completely unrelated incident, though; someone a few floors down plugged a low-power halogen lamp into a higher-power socket and the results weren't pretty. No real damage outside that one room, though; the walls are pretty fire-resistant here, which is comforting to know.

Anyway, it's 9:50am Thursday and nothing's burnt down yet. But we've got another seven hours to keep the "days without an accident" counter at zero; ganbare!

12 hours a day tomorrow through Friday. Possibly working Saturday too.

If you don't hear back from me by Monday, I didn't live through it. Start calling dibs on my stuff now to be safe.

Somewhere in the chain of communications and orders that lead us from "Hey, we need to resupply our water cooler jugs" to "Here are you water cooler jugs, sir," there was a snafu last week. What it amounted to was that we came in Friday and were out of water. Allen (all hail his generosity) drove out and bought a single jug, which lasted us a whole half-day, and then we were dehydrated again. Some people actually started resorting to drinking from the tab (gasp!) These were dark times, and they continued through the weekend straight through to late Tuesday, when, miracle of miracles, water came forth from the rock (or maybe the delivery truck), and we were saved. Now water is plentiful again, and all rejoice.

...I'm still at the office.

Thoughts are going through my head right now that are very unlike me. Thoughts of snapping necks until everyone's dead. That would be nice.

Someone added this yesterday. Looks the same as an earlier one, but if you look closer, you'll gain stunning insight into how testing feels sometimes...

"Ninety-nine points on the checklist to test, ninety-nine points on the list; you take one down, report all the bugs; one hundred points on the checklist to test..."

I've found my niche in the QA department. Give a testing objective to anyone else, s/he'll get it done in X minutes and dig up Y bugs. Give it to me, I'll get it done in 2.5X minutes and dig up 3Y bugs. I'm the one they send in after someone says, "Yeah, that part of the program is running flawlessly," so I can prove them wrong. I'm NOT the one they send in if they're in a hurry.

Water cooler in lobby down to the last 1/8.
Water cooler in break room empty.
No spare bottles.
Dehydration imminent; save us please.
Thanks.

The entire office went out for a (very early) Christmas celebration today. Big heaping portions of Italian food. Contractors like me did not get paid for time spent at the restaurant, but the food more than covered lost salary.

There was also a drawing of sorts. If you're familiar with white elephant gift exchanges, this was sort of like that, but not quite. Everyone put three slips with their names on them in the bag. First person to get drawn opened a present. Second person could either open another present, or "steal" what the first person got. Third person... and so forth. There were four changes from the standard gift exchange:

1) All presents were purchased by the company CEO, instead of the various participants.
2) The game did not end until the bag was empty; that is, until everyone had been drawn three times.
3) If stolen from, you didn't get to choose another present immediately; you had to wait for your name to get drawn again.
4) Forty people, six presents.

Ah, now you're getting the picture. All six prizes were nothing to sneeze at, but the pick of the litter was an iPod Nano, which for several draws after it was opened could not stay in one person's hands for more than thirty seconds. The next person would get drawn, and they'd immediately claim it, only to have it snatched by the next person after them... Amusing to watch, really. We all started chanting "Nano!" with each draw. (No, there was no alcohol at the table; who needed it?)

But after several minutes of this chaos, it became apparent how pointless it was to chase the Nano if you weren't literally the last person drawn from the bag. Someone would just take it from you, leaving you with nothing. So as each person got their third and final slip drawn, they decided to settle for some of the "lesser" prizes in hopes that they'd actually be able to keep them to the end. (Again, still good stuff, so even those got stolen more than a few times just for variety.)

But I will admit to being lucky... I was drawn fourth from the end and grabbed the iPod Shuffle (yes, two iPods in the game). Third and Second Place both decided they'd rather have something besides a music player anyway, and then the last draw-ee snagged the Nano for good. Which left me still holding the Shuffle when the smoke cleared. Score.

Sometime this week they got a bit more paranoid around the office. I think the non-employees wandering around like they owned the place triggered it. But they cut off use of floppy disks (USB drives had been out of the question since before I started) and they're no longer letting the contractors (that includes me) into the programmer's area without escort. Industrial espionage and all that.

The loss of the floppies is a bit annoying in that I can't use lunch break to work on personal stuff as effectively anymore, or save notes to self, but I can still write it down and type it up later, so I'll live. (You guys aren't going to cut off my pencil supply, right? :P) Keeping me out of the programming zone; that's more of a problem. Brian can easily be anywhere in that area at any time of the day, and he's my ride home most of the time, so this is going to make it that much harder to coordinate with him. On the off chance he is at his desk, I can IM him, but if he isn't, I've just got to hope he can spare a few minutes to let me know when he's leaving.

Everyone at the office is telling me how fortunate I am to be paid by the hour instead of on salary. Means I can't be kept any later than I want to be.

Maybe, if I had my own transportation, that would be true. But I have to get a ride from someone else, both going to and from the office.

But you have three people to give you rides! you say.

Well, yes, but frequently Allen leaves by 5 (having started at 7am). Hacker, lately, has also been asked to start work earlier than he'd like, and has retaliated by leaving at 4 every day. This leaves Brian, who usually leaves around my eight-hour mark (6pm). ...except when he's working VERY late because something tech-related needs serious adjusting. (Just last Thursday I found myself still at the office at 8:45pm.) So I can either get less than eight hours a day in, and cut my budget appropriately, or I can risk staying way later than intended.

Well, you're still getting paid for all that extra time if you chose the latter, right?

Well, here's the other thing. The three QA supervisors are Allen, Hacker, and Fei. The last of those three to leave (almost inevitably Fei) is required to establish that the QA rooms are cleaned, orderly, and secured. "Secured," as in, "locked up." So once Fei decides to leave, I'm not on the clock anymore; I'm just hanging around the office waiting for Brian.

Given a choice, I'd rather risk staying late, just so long as I have reading material to distract me. But this is just a reminder of why it was nice to have a car. If only gas weren't so frellin' expensive...