The Work Thread

I'm not sure if my brain is trying to reinforce it's negative idea of working, but I'm home again and I feel like the weight I got rid of last week has just come back.

It really didn't help we had 3 people off today and I came in first thing to like 25 tickets. All of them other peoples and I spent all day trying to catch up to what was going on.

God damnit.

Currently babysitting an installation wizard. It has taken an hour so far. It has no progress bar. It occasionally pauses everything to ask an inane 'Are you sure?' question.

I don't know whether I should blame the author of CPAN or BioPerl but one of them should be brutally killed. Or at least roughed up a bit.

I dress up if I don't know, I dress smart casual (dinner shirt and black or brown jeans, usually laundered or flat ironed) if I do know. I never dress down for formal situations unless maybe it's winter and it's so strawberry floating cold like strawberry float am I taking off my warm layer, which is usually a jumper or expensive hoodie of some kind (I'm talking in places like cafes and such), or if so only for a moment.

I dressed smart casual to an agency interview and I got the job but then I wore a tie (I think) and suit trousers to the job as it was in a large office.

When I dressed up for a speculative interview they said they were "blinded" by my appearance so I guess that can only be a good response, however, they also felt like they were wasting my time without a solid job prospect for me, meaning I walked away with nothing. Ho hum.

So yeah, I recommend having a decent selection of smart but not boring collared shirts and trousers other than jeans.

I only wear suits to weddings etc. although increasingly I wear a waistcoat and whatever I want.

Karl wrote:I don't know whether I should blame the author of CPAN or BioPerl but one of them should be brutally killed. Or at least roughed up a bit.

Ugh, Perl. Nothing good ever came from using Perl.

Tragic Magic wrote:Thanks. I'll deffo go for the shirt and tie then.

You can never ever ever EVER be overdressed for an interview. It always leaves a good impression.

Oh and agencies are gooseberry fool, dont go expecting much out of it. I went to one and spent an hour and a half talking them through my portfolio, examples of work etc to give them a great idea of what i'd be capable of and then at the end of it the guy said, "so if you see any jobs you'd like, let us know about them and we'll get in touch with them for you"

Jenuall wrote:

Karl wrote:I don't know whether I should blame the author of CPAN or BioPerl but one of them should be brutally killed. Or at least roughed up a bit.

Ugh, Perl. Nothing good ever came from using Perl.

Agreed. I have spent all day trying to get a legacy app working. It depends on several ancient utilities that no longer compile (the compiler literally no longer exists; by herculean effort I got their stone-age i386 binaries working) and this crappy Perl thing was the last piece of the puzzle.

It installed.

Karl wrote:

Jenuall wrote:

Karl wrote:I don't know whether I should blame the author of CPAN or BioPerl but one of them should be brutally killed. Or at least roughed up a bit.

Ugh, Perl. Nothing good ever came from using Perl.

Agreed. I have spent all day trying to get a legacy app working. It depends on several ancient utilities that no longer compile (the compiler literally no longer exists; by herculean effort I got their stone-age i386 binaries working) and this crappy Perl thing was the last piece of the puzzle.

It installed.

Sounds like a fun activity, good job on getting that working!

I think it must be a good 15 years since I had to get hands on with anything involving Perl, makes me feel old just thinking about it!

Ad7 wrote:

Tragic Magic wrote:Thanks. I'll deffo go for the shirt and tie then.

You can never ever ever EVER be overdressed for an interview. It always leaves a good impression.

Oh and agencies are gooseberry fool, dont go expecting much out of it. I went to one and spent an hour and a half talking them through my portfolio, examples of work etc to give them a great idea of what i'd be capable of and then at the end of it the guy said, "so if you see any jobs you'd like, let us know about them and we'll get in touch with them for you"

That's because agencies don't think the "creative industries" exists. And there's a reason most employment agencies can't process creative talent: you can't sum it up in a CV, and none of them are qualified or confident enough to assess a portfolio because it's all "talent" and "genius" and basically magic. Which is bullshit of course, it's usually immediately obvious whether someone can design an aesthetically pleasing layout or not, or follow brand guidelines, as that's about 90% of commercial work.

I then realised I could charge a multitude more for the other 10% so strawberry float that gooseberry fool, get a robot to do it or just copy everyone else (which is by and large what you end up doing anyway, even if it's a bad idea or you simply don't want to).

I think the agency meeting went quite well. Main take away from it was that my CV was all technical and didn't give away anything about my character, so that's been rejigged to something he considers will be very successful.

That's what I was saying about covering letters. You can put that stuff in a short statement at the top if nobody reads them.

A lot of people find it difficult to write positively but honestly about themselves without feeing like a jerk. But it's better to sound like a jerk than an automaton or a bore. Few people seem to understand how important it is to sound like someone you would actually want to work with, rather than just someone who does their job.

Speaking as someone who has just done their job in the past and gets fired for strange or no reasons anyway. Last time it was because I seemed like I would "work better as part of a team" whilst recognising that I "turned up and did the work and had the skills". Because my manager didn't want to work with seemingly anyone. How odd. That's like the total opposite of what you'd think a large corporate creative services department would want. My agent in that case was really surprised because my reference was excellent and didn't really understand the reason and just told me not to get hung up on it and move onto the next thing. Which I did (actually, I haven't worked inside a company since then because strawberry float that nonsense).

That's probably why some people seem to keep their jobs even if they are obviously gooseberry fool at them.

People at my current placee seem to be obsessed with wash-up meetings and mop-up meetings (is there a difference?).
After seemingly every project, meeting, or conversation, you can guarantee to hear "we'd better have a mop-up meeting", "when's the wash-up meeting?", "shall we have a mop-up meeting?".

We only have wash up meetings after anything that's been considered a High or Major priority incident that requires the involvement of Incident Managers and people from multiple teams. Makes sense really as it's generally stuff that's had an actual measurable impact on the business and it's important to determine how to stop it from happening again.

I would have thought they were a good idea as you can raise lessons learned, any left over bits or next steps and stuff so that the information from the project or whatever isn't lost at the end of the project. So often at the NHS we would do some project get to the end and it would just end all the info we had gather would be lost in the ether and next project we would do a lot of the same stuff over as there was no process to get that info out into the rest of the organisation and stuff.

Doesnt make any difference how many meetings you have. Project managers and solution designers live in their own isolated universes and couldnt give any less of a gooseberry fool about learning lessons.

Errkal wrote:I would have thought they were a good idea as you can raise lessons learned, any left over bits or next steps and stuff so that the information from the project or whatever isn't lost at the end of the project. So often at the NHS we would do some project get to the end and it would just end all the info we had gather would be lost in the ether and next project we would do a lot of the same stuff over as there was no process to get that info out into the rest of the organisation and stuff.

We just call it a lessons learned meeting. Problem is, most of the issues are pointed out in advance so bit of a waste of time IMO, particularly when we don't learn from the lessons.

I thought that was called an evaluation, so much bullshit phrases.

Green Gecko wrote:I thought that was called an evaluation, so much bullshit phrases.

We seem to have several new phrases and terms every week. I detest this sort of gooseberry fool, people should stop strawberry floating about with terminology and stop trying to be clever.

One thing I find interesting is normal office work has tonnes of impenetrable ancronyms and buzz words and idioms but lots of "magic/genius" type disciplines like tech and art have some legit terms thoroughly grounded in history and logic etc but those are "fancy words". The point is you have to have those specific words because the subject is complex and there are insufficient or overly long explanations in less or simpler words, but for stuff like "use the phone or "send a message" or "check the [self evident contextually relevant] database" e.g. Rota there is so much gooseberry fool. I mean you can't really argue that someone in those fields is using deliberately alienating or unnecessary language, complex or lingo heavy sure but not straight up made up gabber.

Heard a new one yesterday:

Briefcase time.

Kezzer wrote:Heard a new one yesterday:

Briefcase time.

Instructions unclear, packed a briefcase with alarm clocks.