Category: work


An Open Letter To My Work Laptop

Filed Under: work by topenga — Comments Off on An Open Letter To My Work Laptop
July 22, 2011

Dear Lenovo T400,

You are a “high powered” laptop. You are supposedly “smarter” than the two desktops next to me.

But you aren’t.

You are a fucking moron.

Why do you lose basic system settings? Why do you insist on turning off “prompt for password” when coming out of the screensaver? Why–and this really gets on my tits–WHY do you randomly hop on the wireless network WHEN YOU’RE DOCKED??? There is a physical cat5 cable coming out of the dock’s ass. You’ve had no problems being on the wired network for months. So why are you suddenly in love with the goddamn slow ass wireless network whenever I need to pull down big ass files?

Is it the corporate crap I have o have? Possibly, but you’ve lived with all this shit for over a year! WHy are you being such a spaz now?

You know what? Fuck you. All wireless radios off. You’re grounded.

Signed,
Me

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Creamer or Chicken Soup

Filed Under: work by topenga — Comments Off on Creamer or Chicken Soup
November 30, 2010

There’s packets of chicken noodle soup in the breakroom. Why? Because we’re out of creamer, of course! Seriously. This makes no sense. The restock guy came by, restocked what we were out of but somehow thought that packets of Cup of Noodle chicken soup (with dehydrated chicken bits!) was an acceptable replacement for fucking creamer.

I know that since we’re under the Big Blue Brother our budget has been cut, but fuck me running, we’re still in this building for another couple of months. Do you think the coffee drinkers will stand for this much longer? Holy shit, I’m already afraid to go into the break room in the mornings! The hot chocolate was gone months ago, the creamer has disappeared, and the filtered water dispenser likes to “pee” on itself every couple of days. And cups! Holy crap, you would have thought there was a nationwide cup shortage. Granted, we should all be using our own reusable cups but sometimes you just need a paper cup.

Or a paper towel.

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An Open Letter To Lotus Notes

Filed Under: work by topenga — Comments Off on An Open Letter To Lotus Notes
November 30, 2010

Dear Lotus Notes,

Stop telling me I have new mail in my xplanner folder. In fact, I don’t have ANYTHING in that folder. It’s empty. I deleted everything. And yet, you insist that that there’s new mail there. You are wrong. It’s okay to be wrong sometimes.

Stop telling me I have mail then not show me the new mail. I get little popups all day saying I have mail. But sometimes it’s just not there. Stop doing this. It’s annoying.

Stop delivering mail 18 hours later. I watched someone send me mail yesterday afternoon at 3:30pm. I watched him do it. He typed, he entered my name, he hit send. I didn’t get it until 10am this morning. What the fucking fuck? This happens on a regular basis. When my email is suddenly quiet, I know that the next morning my inbox will be chock full of messages from the day before, sent when I was still in the office, with a delivery date and time of the day before.

LET ME SHIFT CLICK ALL MY MESSAGES, RIGHT CLICK, AND SELECT “READ ALL”. WHY CAN I NOT DO THIS? WHY? THIS IS BASIC UI SHIT!

You sent me a message to turn off my Out Of Office message. How nice of you. Silly me, I thought that since there was a goddamn end date on the out of office reply thingy that you would, you know, stop sending replies and turn yourself off after that date. How wrong I was. Yes, you didn’t send replies, but you didn’t manage to turn yourself off either. You sent me a message telling me how to turn it off. Which leads me to…

Stop giving me wrong instructions. You sent me a message on how to turn off my out of office replies and they were wrong. Hilariously wrong. You sent me to a menu that didn’t even exist. What the fuck is that about? How do you even do that?

Lotus Notes 8.51, you are a festering pile of shit. A festering pile of failed shit in a misery and woe bowl. Christ, if I could not use you, I would. I never thought that I would say this, but you make me miss Outlook.

Die in a fire.

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Today’s Reason Why Agile Sucks

Filed Under: work by topenga — Comments Off on Today’s Reason Why Agile Sucks
January 14, 2010

I have spent the last two weeks wrestling with this mostly broken piece of software. Once I get it finally working with the 15 steps I need to do to get it going…the process changes. And not by a little. By a whole fucking lot. By the time I get the last build going (last night’s build), by fucking NOON it’s different. I have spent every morning asking “why does this part not work?” and getting “oh, pick up the new build and do all this shit that I never documented and no one in their right mind would think to do to get it working.” from the developers. It’s not really their fault. Not totally. But this severe lack of documentation sucks. Isn’t this why we have a Wiki for the project? <insert loud peals of laughter> I cannot read your goddamn mind. Tell me how I’m supposed to get this shit working so I can stay productive which is the whole goddamn point of Agile.

And before you say it, no, we’re not doing Agile right. Not yet. They’re still learning. It takes time. They still think it’s perfectly reasonable to drop code for testing MINUTES before an iteration review. We had 6 carry over stories from the last iteration. SIX. Fixe of which were not marked complete until this past Tuesday. This, is a bad thing. Some carryover? Sure. A big horking chunk of your stories? Bad. Still earning. Yeah yeah. In the meantime, I’m losing my goddamn mind.

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Another year

Filed Under: school, work by topenga — Comments Off on Another year
May 4, 2009

So, today is my birthday. Yay me! This time last year, I was studying for a final, convinced I was going to fail. It was the worst thing going at the time. That and did I really have enough money for a party. The next day, I was laid off. Well. Fuck.

Here I am now…not exactly studying for a final but working on final projects for one asshole (not in the good way) and my Tuesday night class; convinced I’m going to fail the Tuesday night class; and having realized that throwing a party now is just too much. We’ve already had layoff announcements here just last week, so that worry is not completely out of the way. But, shit. Is this how early May is going to go? Finals, hard class, layoffs? Fuck that. This needs to be the last year layoffs happen at this time.

Economy, hurry the fuck up and rebound.

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No Shit, Sherlock

Filed Under: work by topenga — Comments Off on No Shit, Sherlock
February 5, 2009

I love what I do. Really. And I’m happy at my job. Shit, I’m happy to have a job. But there are days, oh there are days. See, I went from a big mega-corp to a smaller (exponentially smaller) company. There’s not much process, they’re growing, etc. So there are times when I read an email from my manager spotlighting something “good” that another coworker has done to encourage us to follow some sort of process. That’s great and all but the things he’s saying I think “well, yeah, that’s what you’re SUPPOSED to do. Do you want a cookie or something?” Once or twice, sure. But I find myself thinking it a lot. And it really bothers me. To me, this stuff should be common sense, so I feel rather insulted sometimes. But that’s something I gotta get over. In the meantime, fuck, I’ll suck it up and continue to draw that paycheck.

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