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Brexit Friday
Friday, June 24 2016
The big news of the day was that Britain had just voted to leave the European Union, mostly on the democratic strength of the sort of bigoted aging white voters who would be responsible for a Trump victory were that to happen in the United States. Throughout the day markets crashed and talking heads predicted doom. The world seemed to be ending, at least for the suckers stuck on that now-blighted isle. As my co-worker Ca would say, "What a time to be alive."
I spent most of my workday trying to migrate to a new, very poorly-designed third party API from one that had been working perfectly well. Among its problems was a new limit of 100 of records per JSON object, a limit that would force me to, in some cases, make multiple queries and then merge the results.
During the Friday all-hands meeting, the HR guy who runs it gave a special shout-out to the IT team, saying we're doing a great job of keeping things running since the departure of Meerkat. That was an unexpectedly nice thing to say. All too often it's easy to take for granted the complicated systems that you depend on as they continue working without problems, never stopping to marvel (as in this example) at the fact that nearly everyone with institutional knowledge of those systems has been replaced and yet those system continue to do their job.
There continued to be more back and forth concerning that new non-IT tech hire intended as my assistant. Both me and Ro, the Director of Fundraising found Da's requirements that this person have five years of PHP/MySQL experience unrealistic, particularly given that some of the responsibilities for this hire would be installing software, maintaining workstations, and even data entry. But my communication with Ro had me feeling bad that perhaps I was working behind Da's back, and, politically at least, it made more sense to keep him happy. So I told Ro that we needed to have a three-way meeting with Da. Eventually we just sort dropped in on him in Google Hangouts and had that meeting. He was still pretty adamant about the job requirements, but softened a bit, saying maybe only two years of PHP/MySQL would be sufficient. Ro had a personal friend in mind in West Hollywood who knew Microsoft SQL and C++ but no PHP at all. I said that if he was a good autodidact, he could pick that stuff up quickly. Da was adamant that we not have to educate such a hire, but my point was that specifics of our work environment would be so unusual that he or she would have to be learning a lot on the job anyway, and it would be best if that could all be absorbed by a bright self-teacher. My plan was for this meeting to be clearing of the air, though unfortunately I think Da thought I'd been working to undermine him, especially after he didn't respond to a conciliatory private message. But what can you do? I'd thought his position was unreasonable and the hire wasn't even supposed to be for him.
Meanwhile Gretchen had been at the brick mansion all day showing it to potential tenants. She had some good prospects for the three remaining apartments (she'd rented one of them yesterday) and made some decisions over a beer out on the east deck. When a couple that included a plumber's assistant said he would be uncomfortable doing minor plumbing chores, Gretchen decided she preferred a hypnotist vying with them for the attic loft.
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