Yesterday was a banner day. Well, take that and make a statement meaning as much of the opposite as possible, and then you have the actual story.
I barely slept the night before for a few reasons, one of whom snores. So I started with only half a tank, physically. Off to work I went, dreading a meeting where I was bracing myself to keep quiet lest I literally get punched in the face for speaking the truth.
I found a few too many voicemails and emails from Friday indicating that there was a problem with a program and Department X was involved. (You don't want them annoyed with you.) For about 10 minutes after I figured out the root cause of the problem, (me, I made a small mistake - it took less than five minutes to actually do) I truly thought I might get fired. So I wrote the description up, emailed it to them, and thought, well, if you're going to can me over this, let's get it over with, and forwarded the email to my boss too. It was pretty much the lowest feeling I've ever had in the 20 years there, except for the day of the merger we had with another company, 14 years ago.
The phone seemed to be ringing whenever I was out of my cube and I didn't catch it. At one point I had 7 voicemails. I couldn't even really sneak out at lunchtime, which really sucked. Lunchtime is when I recharge, if I can. Fresh air and sunshine do wonders for me. Everyone should have at least an hour, and be required to leave the building.
So finally I left about 5:40, which is almost an hour late. I had to be somewhere at 6:30 and I looked bad, felt bad, and was hungry. So I settled for a bagel and some (surprisingly good) fire roasted tomato soup, both of which I grabbed after literally going into a drugstore, buying some makeup and hairspray so I wouldn't look like death warmed over, and fixing myself in my car. (I left my makeup bag at home, so after the "oh my god I'm going to get fired and be broke" crying I was pretty pale, and pulling out my hair left it a bit messy.) It was class all the way; I dumped some of the makeup in my car and had to clean it up with baby wipes. This is NOT how you want to live your life, trust me.
The capper was driving up a major road in the area and trying to dunk the bagel in the soup so I could it actually eat it, because I had NO TIME to sit there and use two hands. I figured if I used my cell phone too, I could be a complete loser.
Today has to be better, right?
5 comments:
I've never been fired over screwing up some program.
This includes, but not limited to:
Destroying a client's project time lines because of an issue with floating point decimals in lotusscript. Obscure, but destructive in context.
Sending 135,000 emails to clients from the president of the company because I didn't think about if agent failed before it deleted the trigger for the emails.
It's an unwritten rule when hiring programmers. Only hire someone who's really eff'd something up at least once. Otherwise, they probably don't know what they are doing.
Don't sweat the issues. They happen. We're all human and all that, and for God's sake, keep both hands on the wheel!
someone once told me all good programmers screw up. All great programmers screw up, immediately realize they screwed up, and fix it before anyone else notices.
And lunch? What's that?
Well, the thing is I changed entries in a group list... it wasn't even a code change. Never mind.
Johnny, I use your lunch time, because you never do. Haha.
I'd love an hour for lunch.... sorry your day sucked so bad. I hope next week is better!
Post a Comment