Life Keeps Being Annoying

Life suckage has achieved some sort of temporary saturation hereabouts it seems, which is a good thing.

Clueless people still fill the atmosphere of course. Right now II have one sitting across from me on the train. I'm in a four-seater, which means a two-facing-two configuration. My bag is ignorantly taking up the seat next to me which is a social faux pas but I will of course move it if asked. New Yorkers get offended by this behavior (while exhibiting it themselves) because they have the strange belief that they have a constitutional right not to have to speak to people and ask them to do what they want. Same New Yorkers think nothing of sticking their feet up on the seats of course.

But the clueless person in front of me chose to sit exactly opposite me instead of kitty-corner, then stuck her feet diagonally out. At the moment she's combing nits out of her hair with her fingers and flicking them my way. What an asset¹. She also has a cough, but since I'm developing a sneeze myself we sort of balance each other out, clue-wise there.

I'm getting a new boss. The old one is now showering me with all the information I asked for each time he made a request for automation (but never got despite repeated asking). Case in point: a baseline restore of a training database. Asked for three years ago ("I do it manually now") and got my immediate response "What scripts do you use and when do you run them?", and then got it two more times that week. Cricket noise until last Wednesday. That Friday, after sending five of the six scripts² he was amazed by the ease and ellegance of my solution. I can only guess that he was pulling down overtime for doing this stuff by hand after hours.

And yesterday I was pulled into an emergency meeting with my Boss's Boss. "The new C-level guy is telling us that his favorite product can do all the stuff we want from Project SinkingShip with none of the issues we see. He wants to meet. Here's an email he sent with a bunch of his answers to our questions based on what we hate about SinkingShip. I hate it all. Don't agree to anything. He garbles everything he says by misusing our technical terms and jargon. Say little and agree to nothing. NOTHING!"

I took a look at the questions and answers and made a number of observations about how our current solution works. I was argued with. I then went on to talk about what I could extrapolate about how the new thing would be working, which was a method we had rejected for SinkingShip. I was argued with. It should be noted that the person in the room with the most contact with SinkingShip was yours truly, yet I was told off for not understanding how we do the job and made to sit in the uncooperative corner.

Once the meeting with new C-level guy was in progress all my extrapolations on New Product were borne out. The slide he shows us on his hi-tech whiteboard to help explain to my bosses³ even matches the doodle I made for my own reference (none of my "superiors" would so much as look at it during the Shouty Disagreement phase of our own meeting).

Then my bosses start offering the new C-level guy congratulatory comments and announcing a new era of love for the new project. I am told that my lack of participation will be brought up in my yearly review, and I'm castigated for lack of team spirit and enthusiasm for new technology.

Ten minutes after the meeting they are all in denial about what they said to the new C-level guy. I've no doubt they will remember it a week from now as more "inaccurate use of jargon" on his part. As for me, I just want the project to be robust and not be a nightmare to fix when (not if) it all breaks down.

Oh well, at least my train is running late.

1. Female gender assh*le↑
2. the sixth was – and I quote - “an initiative test to see if you can find stuff for yourself”↑
3. who react to any suggestion that we use a whiteboard to resolve the to-me obvious differences in internal visualizations of whatever subject is at hand with hand-waving and cries of "we don't need that"↑