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now hopelessly broken
Thursday, July 7 2016
I went to the brick mansion early this morning, mostly with the goal of installing a better latching mechanism in the second pocket door of 1L. The woman who was to be moving in there wasn't actually living there yet, so I could work without distraction. The new latch was complicated by the fact that one of its parts had to be orthogonal to the other part, and I hadn't been able to find any latches specifically designed for this orientation except for a window pane lock. But it was so flimsy once installed that I replaced the bolting mechanism with a conventional surface-mount locking bolt. When latched, it penetrated a hole in the pocket door and held it shut. That hole was surrounded by a metal ring, and I had to chisel a square recess into the door to accommodate it.
Another HVAC guy came by while I was there to give an estimate on the cost of replacing the heating systems with a modern efficiency unit. He was the guy Gretchen had been kind of mean to the other day on the phone, and in person he seemed like a nice guy with thick, calloused hands. He looked into the possibility of making the old brick chimney into an air intake, but it seemed to have a jog in it, which would make lining it with PVC impossible.
Next I turned my attention to 1L's refrigerator door, which was missing the hardware to secure bottles placed in the door. I thought perhaps I could improvise such hardware using aluminum and epoxy, and so I bought such things at the Home Depot. By this point I was a little emabarrassed by my odor; wafts coming up from my shorts smelled a little like a homeless guy. I'd thought I'd washed them the other day, though evidently I hadn't done a very good job.
Back at the brick mansion, I found the new tenant moving into 1L. I cleaned up the detritus on the floor from all the chimney examinations and also from the bottom chimney cleanout (from which I removed nearly five gallons of gritty Victorian aggregate, sending dark clouds of soot that I later found in the toilet paper into which I blew my nose). Then I went upstairs to have a look at the refrigerator in 1L, but of course the new tenants soon had me doing something else: unsticking windows. She had a lot of nice stuff, and there I was covered with Victorian grime and smelling like what one imagines Victorian urchins smelled like. When I finally went to look at the refrigerator, the last of the bottle-holding bars in the door disintegrated in my hand, its brittle plastic snapping like a taco shell. Real nice, Gus! I took it with me for use as a model for fashioning a replacment.
On the way back from Woodstock today, Gretchen picked me up some Red Rose tea at the Hurley Ridge Market. She couldn't find a 100-count box, so she got me two forty-counts instead. When I went to open one of them, I was horrified to find the teabags were each in their own little paper envelopes. One has to remember that the only reason I have any brand loyalty for Red Rose at all is that their teabags do not come in envelopes of any kind, and so the process of drinking tea only generates tea bags, an item that is easily composted. Paper envelopes, with all their ink and bulk, complicate the composting. They're also an annoyance to open, adding a completely unnecessary additional set of actions to the preparation of every cup of tea. It might sound like a small thing to you, but tea is an important aspect of my day, and anything that affects, even in small amounts, effects my day appreciably. I left a couple disappointed messages on the Red Rose Facebook page, and of course their response was to offer me more of their now-annoying tea. I will probably have to switch brands to Tetley, which still doesn't come in envelopes.
At some point tonight there came news of a mass shooting in Dallas. A large, peaceful group had gathered to protest police violence against innocent black men (of which there had been two notorious occurrences recorded on smartphones this week) and a madman with a gun had taken the opportunity to pick off white police officers from sniper positions on the upper floors of nearby buildings, killing five and wounding more than that. Things had been grim, what with the rise of Donald Trump, Brexit, and the recent police killings, but this seemed to push things over the edge, as if the world really was now hopelessly broken.
I'd gotten up at 6:30, worked at the house, and then put in a full shift of remote web development, so by about 9:00pm I was in desperate need of sleep. I lay down and slept until somewhat past 11:00pm, at which point I was awaken by a call from Da. One of the servers was sending repeated emails complaining about a database issue, and I was the only one in The Organization who would know how to fix it. I solved that problem by restarting the MySQL process, but in the process of poking around, I discovered a far more serious problem: there is a database that is supposed to be the master repository of contact information, but it was no longer being updated with info that was going to the mass email system. An API had broken down. Initially I feared maybe I'd broken it (always the most likely explanation), though later I would discover it was probably the result of Da's monkeying around with server settings.
This wasn't even the first gut-churning database anomaly I'd discovered today. This afternoon I'd found one that was creating an extra contact record with every imported donation record. These contacts had no first name, no last name, and no email address. They had nothing at all except for a flag set saying they were not deceased. But that flag had apparently been set that way as a default. The logic was adding these "contacts" whenever a set of data had any valid data in it, and all it took was the deceased being set to something to cause these contacts to be created. With nothing to characterize them except their not being dead, I jokingly referred to them as "undead." Though initially I'd assumed these phantom contacts were the result of my incomplete debugging, my investigation discovered the underlying bug dates to February 23rd, seven weeks before I was hired.
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