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

heh. i have been looking around for a new place to live, one with a kitchen that I can live with.

i have an opportunity to live in a real warehouse, an old bottling plant, just across the train tracks from the main drag in yuppieville. it has real brick walls, with crumbling brick dust an’ all. the ceilings are covered with golden pine wainscotting — i guess that is what it is called, so no exposed ducts. wood floors — real ones — and the floor is even a little sloping b/c, well, it really is an old building.

the drawback is that there is no porch, at all, which means I won’t fulfill my love of sitting out on a porch, or something akin to one, reading and watching people go by. it’s possible to turn the garage, which is huge (because it’s an old warehouse), into a place to sit. but i’m not so sure that I would be so ambitious.

another drawback is that it is a mile further away from work, though with biking that’s not a big deal. otoh, i am taking my life and health in my hands every time I get on the bike, given the way people drive, given the lack of a bike lane, and so forth. but, i’m not the only one who rides to work from that end of town. and the bulk of that ride would be on side streets. so.

meanwhile, i could also just say fuck it and go for a place closer to work, possibly with a small porch or balcony, with all the accouterments of YUPPIE living — a decent kitchen is imperative — that wouldn’t be in an old warehouse. It would be kinda sorts fake warehouse living: some cookie cutter condo in the old warehouse district, where they knocked ‘em all down, except one, and put up condo developments by the river.

what to do. what to do.

what would you do?

i wonder sometimes about how silly I must look, at my age, riding my bike to work, wanting to live like a 20-something in a warehouse, in a real warehouse district, with glass strewn on the roads and pallets piled up behind warehouses, and lots of trucks and gravel and dust being kicked up. Not far from the train tracks, with a lively training that goes by day and night.

one day, riding past the courthouse, there were two female guards sitting out front, watching me ride by.

they were probably my age. and they were pointing at me and one was laughing.

!!! harumph! I thought. At least I’m trying to better myself. But maybe it really *does* look freakin’ ridiculous to people. well, i guess i don’t really care, and only realize I might when I get the occasional weirdo, laughing. When I pull into the garage where I park, there’s always a bunch of guys sitting around in the alley as I pass by. Once in a while they make some remark, mostly cheering me on. Good for you.

Meanwhile, I went to the harbor festival over the weekend, leaving what was really boring, to go to dinner. We rode our bikes to the festival — only a mile and a half away and parking bikes is a lot easier than parking a car for events like this. So we rode around looking for a place to eat, where we could sit, rest our dawgs, and enjoy air conditioning. We decided to go to a new place that served New Orleans style food, completely with jazzy interior and an absinthe fountain.

When we left, we were mounting our bikes as this drunk or high or both 20-something said, “wow. you rode your bikes. That is so hardcore.”

how it was hardcore was a puzzle to me, but I suppose it might have thought it was hardcore for people our age to do it.

heh. speaking of the festival, they had free concerts and I wanted to see the Navy band — because it reminds me of watching military bands as a kid, with my dad, who’d been a paratrooper in the army. I was also in this totally amateur drum and bugle corps, something my dad’s friend tried to fire up. Looking back on it, it was the weirdest thing. I don’t recall that any of us who joined from the neighborhood actually knew how to play a drum or bugle and I don’t recall lessons while at practice. But we did practice marching — a lot. round and round the parking lot we’d march. I remember trying to concentrate and do the right thing, and always feeling like I was fucking up and always wanting some coaching from my dad’s friend. But he was constantly running around, trying to patch together this amateur band where, I swear, no one know how to play a thing, let alone march.

They would manage to get access to parking lots on weekday evenings, and we’d practice marching around. around and around and around. Up this way for a while, then turn and march that way. Turn and march still another way. This way and that. I don’t recall a thing about what we were taught to do, in terms of actually stepping up to some fancy marching like I’d seen with mom and dad. Surely they must have tried to teach us to march in formation and play some striking military marches. But my mind is a blank about any teaching, demonstration or instruction. Just endless marching it seems. And trying to spit something out of that dang bugle.

Later, I was in band, playing clarinet — not my first choice, which was flute. Too many girls wanted that slot. So i was shuffled to the clarinet, which I paid for with baby sitting and newspaper delivery money. Later, I borrowed a neighbor’s flute — she gave up on it — and taught myself to play. It was Chicago’s Color My World over and over and over again. mom says that she can remember cooking dinner, listening to me struggle to get it perfectly. I would sit on the floor in the dank basement, playing that record on a phonograph, sounding out the notes and writing them down. Over and Over and Over Again.

Someone else had a trumpet and a lack of desire to play, so I borrowed that and taught myself a bit. Never anything like the flute though, since I had nothing at home, record-wise, to use to teach myself how to play. So, I puttered away, trying to produce something. Eventually, I gave up. For some reason, I vaguely recall getting my hands on a sax, but that memory is so odd and vague, I wonder if I made it up simply because I wanted to learn to play jazz music so badly. I’d hang around, listening to the jazz band practice sometimes, pining. I think I picked up the desire from watching old black and white movies about jazz musicians, and watching old musicals on t.v.

i was in the marching band for awhile, until I was asked to be watergirl for the football team, which ate into band practice — and was much more, uh, popular than being a band geek. As much as I learned that popular kids were idiots, it was hard to resist when they decided I was one of them and invited me to play along. I would catch myself telling them off every so often. Like, when someone would snub someone they’d decided didn’t belong, but I was friends with them, I’d get on my high horse and tell them to pound sand.

I ended up being kind of an outsider on the inside, refusing to be in too far, insisting on hanging with the stoners, the losers, the geeks — if there were friendships or acquaintances I’d made.

Due to that history, I love a marching band, and I love to listen to military bands. But dang, the Navy band hardly played any at all. They played the fight song for all the military branches, including coast guard — some little medley they’d put together. But for the rest, they largely played popular tunes — like some medley from Star Wars. OK. OK. The composition wasn’t so bad. But I wanted to hear military music damn it!

They had four singers, two men and two women. Man, one of the women could belt out a tune. She did some Patsy Cline and some of those belt-em-out songs anthems like Bruce Springsteen and U2 are famous for. It was a very contemporary song, but I couldn’t for the life of me pin a name to the tune or the band that normally performed them. (I suck when it comes to remembering titles and band names)

It made me wonder as I sat there, sprawled out on a picnic blanket in the grass, staring at the sky and listening as a plane flew overhead with a banner: “Cindy will you marry me? Greg.”: why, if you had a voice like that, did you land in a regional Navy band? I suppose for all kinds of reasons, including a realistic assessment of the competition and the challenges facing anyone who is a singer, artist, musician. But damn, she could sing. They all could.

Anyway, I’m going to go chill after a crazy week. We released some new software for the businesses and it was a nutty time.

Get this, for those in the business, we did it ALL with utterly no specs. It started out as some minor enhancement to the web site, tracked in our issue tracking system. NExt thing you know they’d racked up 59 of these tickets for change requests to the web site that involved changes on nearly every single one of the pages, plus alterations to a backend product that is used by our major customers. What a nightmare.

Yes, no specs. No specs on a project that huge, that important, that crucial. On a project for which there were so many moving parts and so much involved in our database design… The third party that we were working with, using their API? Well, the whole thing blew up because our queries on their product were so freakin’ huge that we had to figure otu another way to get the data during the last two weeks of development. It was a frickin’ nightmare.

And we kept our cool. And we taught those fuckers to abuse us some more. god damn!

It has occurred to me that I should not have taken such care to do a good job. I should have made sure no one on the team sweated the situation. By pulling it off fairly well, without specs, we taught them that we did a great job and the fuckers will now think they can do it some more.

god damned!

meanwhile, i’m having heartburn as I set up the microdeliverables for the next project. the product developer who started it sucked hind tit. The specifications were the most outrageously bad thing I’d ever seen. It became clear that, because the guy’s writing was so awkward (for a position which, at heart, is totally about the ability to write well!) that it became clear that the deal was: he doesn’t know how to do the job, has winged his way into it, lying or something, and is faking it.

great!

It was awful.

I found myself doing his fucking job and I was yanking pissed off about it too. If the economy didn’t suck right now, I would have escaped right then and there I was so mad. Mad because I work my ass off, try to think of ways to help the entire company, etc. and then they have the nerve to care so little that they hire people and don’t actually train them. NO one whatsoever was looking over this guy’s shoulder to see to it that he was doing the job right. No one whatsoever was coaching him, mentoring, sharing information. he was left to dangle there, flapping in the wind, winging it.

I am such a saint, you know? I’d do it all a zillion times better (sorry, needed to mock myself).

meanwhile, they hire another guy who is supposedly experienced. he was to replace the guy who’d quit. after delaying the project for 6 weeks while he caught up, he’s a little better, but not by much.

it is the suckage. I am pissed, and I have heartburnish feelings in the pit of my stomach — from the anxiety, the responsibilty, the burden. The anxiety is from what a piece of shit these specs are. I should just let the whole thing fall down around me. I should let everyone flounder because the specs suck. I should allow a crappy product to be produced. I should stop making myself and letting k, my sr. web developer, to do such an outstanding job. I shouldn’t push my UI designer to do a better job either. I shouldn’t keep pushing him to be more responsible, thorough and conscientious. I should let him behave the way that is normal for him and a lot of other people: do exactly what is written, nothing more or less, don’t ask questions, don’t make suggestions to make things better, etc.

if the person responsible for getting the business stuff correct fucked it up, don’t fix it up. leave the mistakes out there, for all to see.

I should not pick up the pieces. I should do what other developers do: if it doesn’t say it in the spec, don’t do it. If you read it and the spec looks like it might be wrong or wrongheaded or not what the customer wanted, just ignore it. it’s not your job. if there are spelling errors, grammar problems, ignore. it’s not your job. If the designs are inconsistent, looking one way on one mock and another way on another, don’t say anything. Just follow the mocks and make it exactly as designed.

if the functionality is fucked up, if they are creating a spaghetti mess, if they are overloading the database with badly considered business logic, ignore ignore ignore.

that’s what a lot of other developers tell me to do.

but i can’t. first of all, it’s not in my constitution. second of all, rationally, considering my (and our) self interest, guess what? my team will end up fixing their broken stuff anyway. and it will be under less than ideal conditions. they will discover their error and, in post-release phase, will have a freak out and expect us to redball release the fix out the door: hurry, hurry, hurry. oh lord how could we have this mistake. fix it now now now!

*sigh*

so, deal with it now, by sending a zillion corrective comments and questions to the product developer. That seems to be the only option. I’ll be damned if I’m going to have the VP fuming because we fucked it up again, blaming developers when the real blame lies with the shitty specifications. Because I know that’s what will happen, seen it before.

I’m sure the product developer, who was left to hang flapping in the wind like the other, guessing what to do and how to do it, he probably wants to shoot rotten vegetables at me at this very minute. I shot him so many questions via email today as I planned out the microdeliverables, making notes for my developers, telling them not to figure this problem or that problem, to watch out for this bug or that, etc.

Or, I could refuse to ask questions and deal with it later, with everyone “hot” as my buddy, K the sr. developer, calls it. He means that people are angry. LIke, when a product release goes to live/production and there’s something wrong: people get angry. So, it’s become our code word, special team language that makes us laugh.

Shag’s hot, he’ll say. (He doesn’t like it when I’ve gotten hot on occassion.)

Another example of that is “the bible”. Whenever I’m preparing release notes, I start out by keeping a running list of all the bugs, issues, and suggestions that start popping up toward the last days of development, just before we are to release. I do this because we have no elegant, automated solution for keeping track, and our QA team sucks. If we left it to them to find the bugs, they wouldn’t and then we, the development team, would look like shit. So, I tend to make everyone QA the hell out of their work — because if we don’t, no one will do it.

So, the release notes draft is a place to keep a running list of bugs that we can fix. Once fixed, I cross them off. bugs that we can’t fix before release, but will address post-release, will stay on my known issues list for the release notes. I then keep track of suggestions, issues to address for future iterations, etc. These I turn over to the business and the product development team for pondering and chewing on before we go into the nexty round of development for the product.

These release notes, he calls “The Bible.”

Or, he’ll see me writing a big product review doc during code reviews, where I’m pounding away at the product, looking for errors, bugs, etc. it’ll be dozens of pages long, what with all the screenshots and documentation I fold into that document.

K calls these documents “the bible.” He’ll come to my desk, take a peek to see if I can be interrupted and say, “Working on Bible?” He is teasing me, but it’s out of respect because he knows that he sucks at details, and I save our ass by keeping track of them. We’re a team like that, have always been. Love that guy.

But it always makes me laugh, the name he’s given it: The Bible. Me? A Bible? Right.

So, that is code for the team and all the new people I’m training now have been taught the special language of the team.

I know, the language is stupid, but the fact is, at least with K and I, we are a team. And when we’re all working really hard together, a well-oiled machine, we do feel like a team, bound up together and working together against a common enemy that we must vanquish: kill the project!

yeah. I’ll shut up now. I had one of those huge frothy icey coffee things during my 3 pm lunch today. It appears I might be wired. ha ha ha.

so, yeah, if you’ve read this far, I was curious: live in real warehouse or go for maximum comfort, no surprises and live in a yuppieville that has the pretenses to want to be in a warehouse, but isn’t? Which would you choose? And why?