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like a triumph
Wednesday, June 11 2025
I had a nearly perfect day at work, at least by my standards. It started with a 150 mg dose of pseudoephedrine, which I figured I would need to push through a difficult database debugging session in the unpleasant world of an Oracle database (which I recently told my good buddy ChatGPT seemed as if it had been designed and built by prison labor). It took awhile to get going on my actual work, but once I did, things went great. I quickly diagnosed and fixed a problem that turned out to be the result of a header I'd put in a web.config file, a website I hadn't had enough access to actually test until this morning. (That's pretty typical of the kind of shit I have to deal with in this workplace.) Then I turned my attention to a database issue. Some data that was expected to flow from some deep tables in the schema was not, and my job was to figure out why. I'm pretty good at this sort of debugging because I have a natural fluency with SQL. If I have a specific question and don't know the answer, I can find for myself the series of queries to get the answer. It can take hours of focused work, as it did today, but eventually I will have my answer. By the end of the day, I had written a detailed email presenting my findings. It felt like a triumph. I've had better, more productive days in a workplace, but nothing anywhere near as good as this in this particular workplace.
At lunch today, I'd brought a couple small puffballs I'd found yesterday along the Chamomile Headwaters Trail. One of the guys in the lunchroom court, the only software developer besides me, actually ate a piece of one on his own initiative. This led into a brief series of not-very-funny jokes about psychedelic mushrooms made by people who are clearly much more "square" than me. This then led into some tittering about a scene in a Cheech & Chong movie where our stoner heroes decide to smoke dog shit after one of their dogs eats all their weed. That's a pretty hard thing to top, but I nevertheless managed to with the real-life story of how I lost one of my dental crowns and then found myself searching through not only my shit but also all the shit of my dogs, not knowing if I or they had eaten it. (It turned out to be on the walkway in front of the house the whole time.)
At some point today, I happened to look up the CEO for my company on Facebook just to find out more about him. (This was triggered by the fact that he'd happened to be following me for most of my drive home yesterday.) I like the guy, so it was disconcerting to see that he's apparently a big right winger. He does share something with me, though, even when he is posting political nonsense: he uses North Korea as his touchstone of awfulness, in this case referring to Joe Biden as "Kim Jong Biden" while defending Mike Lindell, the pyschotic pillow entrepreneur. (It's hard to imagine what about Joe Biden could be considered the least bit similar to such a ruthless totalitarian, but there's clearly a derangement syndrome at play.)
Back at the house at the end of the day, I took the dogs for a walk in a small loop west of the Farm Road, though I returned home prematurely after I kept hearing Facebook direct message alert sounds on the audio being broadcasted from my computer on the FM frequency I use. Fearing Gretchen was having some crisis, I hurried back. But no, it was just Eric P, one of my old high school buddies, sending me a deluge of info about a guy who looks like he is wearing a rubber mask instead of a face. Meanwhile Gretchen was going to dinner with her friend Lisa P, so I didn't have to make dinner. So instead I drove out to 9W to pick up some non-slip aluminum plates I'd ordered to attach to the steps at the cabin so I will never slip and fall on them again. While I was out there, I also wanted to buy a special LED bulb to put in a beautiful retro-style desk lamp I'd bought (it requires a 78 mm long bulb, the kind that is traditionally filled with halogen gas). I wanted to get that and some garden soil at Lowes (since Gretchen hates it when I shop at Home Depot). But only Home Depot sold the bulb I needed, so all I ended up buying at Lowes was a heavy bag of organic soil supposedly engineered for raised beds. The checkout guy in the garden center had a badly mangled right hand that looked a little like it had been generated by an artificial intelligence (though, in truth, I never looked directly at it).
By this point I'd decided to celebrate my workplace successes today by drinking a strong IPA, something I otherwise wouldn't be allowed to do by my personal drinking rules. I also took advantage of all the solar-heated water in the hot water tank to take my second bath in as many days.
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