Wear Clean Draws  (’coz there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

ugh. it was a loooooooooooooong day. I went in early to decorate K’s desk with balloons. My software dev director and I took K out for lunch at a local Indian restaurant. Much better than the others I’ve been to — though not as good as the one in LimpDick!

It’s been pretty hectic b/c we’re on the last legs of our Web dev project, releasing the site next Wednesday. I was supposed to start as lead developer in January/February. However, my boss leaving meant that yours truly got to take over leading the team, such as it is, since there’s been attrition. So, I’m doing my regular developer job *and* doing the lead’s work. To boot? The QA department is run by a fucking asshole who, I kid you not, does other gigs while he’s on the job. Not other gigs as part of his varied tasking. No, he does web dev for his own business while at work.

The result? He doesn’t make sure any of the QA folks actually do their work. The result? I do not have anyone checking our work. So, I spent two long ass fucking days QAing our own website. I’m a picky bitch, so I’d rather find the bugs than not. But man, that meant that I spent two long days QAing and, now that the bugs are fixed, I have to go verify the fix, then set the bug to verified status and pass it along to the project manager.

Fuck me if I’m not sick of looking at this web site. Fuck. Me. Dead.

We meet with the business next week, which means I have to fix bugs and spend my weekend going through every dropdead bug — we can’t go live ’til they’re fixed — and anything less than dropdead, and give the business a status report as to where we’re at. aiyiyiyiyi. But it’s cool because my software dev manager has my back.

As I blew up balloons at 7 am, I contemplated whether or not, were K a 28 year old u.s.er, would I buy him a birthday card, get balloons, and make a big deal of his birthday? To what extent am I doing this because I feel a weird kind of protectiveness toward k, who’s from India, that I couldn’t feel toward a 28 yo u.s man? was this a kind of racism on my part? I’m not sure. I think, with regard to a u.s. male, I would feel uncomfortable b/c I wouldn’t want the attention to be perceived as flirting — which, in my experience, a u.s. male will seem to assume. But also, because a u.s. male has a kind of armor built up around him that would, to me anyway, seem to prevent anyone doing such a thing. Certain kinds of men, sure. But most of the nerds, geeks, and dorks I work with? Probably not.

Part of it’s just feeling motherly. Here he is, in a new country, away from family. So, I want to throw him a small party and make him feel welcome and cared about. This really hit home to me when, around midnight in Hyderabad, K started receiving phone calls for about three hours. That was because it was New Year’s there and his family and friends were calling. So, I thought: geez, it must be hard to be here and so far away from loved one. Hence, the birthday party.

I got my copy of Matt Wray’s Not Quite White yesterday and am about 1/3 of the way through this short, 144pg, book. It’s pretty interesting, so far, though not as profound as I’d hoped it would be. One thing I had to laugh about: as part of my love affair with this backwater city, I read a lot of books about the area. In one history of the region, I read about the travels of a colonial official who traveled the area to settle a border dispute. His diaries formed the basis of so much of what we know of the area at that time. As I read the excerpts from the diary, I was fascinated by the way the guy wrote scathing comments about the poor local whites. In those days, they were called “lubbers” which is an English slang word for lazy ass drunkards. :)

I remember reading those passages and thinking about how we rarely think of the class differences among colonial settlers. And what really struck me was how afraid of these guys some of the gentry actually was. No surprise about things like Shay’s rebellion, really. But I guess I was interested to learn just how many people saw a powderkeg taking shape among the disenfranchised, poor, marginally poor

Well, I’m sitting her falling asleep at the keyboard and have completely forgotten what I came here to rant about. Audi5 all.