EXCHANGE INTERFACE

Things change so fast. Blink of an eye and you don't realise.

My mum had a mini-stroke this afternoon. Doesn't remember that I came around this morning, doesn't remember the garden she planted yesterday and today, doesn't even remember the big holiday we're going on in May next year.

Physically, she's fine. But there are things she can't remember: events, things, the prime minister, the party she's having on Monday.

People she has no trouble with - my sisters and I, my stepdad, my uncle, her boss.

She's having trouble remembering what happened to her - she's asked my stepdad what happened to make him worried about her three times so far. We're taking her to the hospital now.

eta 10:45pm: Back home from hospital. They did a barrage of tests, but no updates yet. Mum's short-term memory's still gone - she didn't remember that we came with her to the hospital, so after we came back from a couple of hours in the waiting room, she was surprised to see us. They'll keep mum in overnight for observation and we'll go back in tomorrow.

Thanks for the prayers and thoughts and well-wishes.

Once there was a computer system. It was an old mainframe system and had been designed and developed in Australia. It didn't mind much about incorrect batches, or odd material numbers, because it took the overall view that "It'll all work out in the end" - an overall attitude of lassaiz faire, although it would never have used such fancy language to describe such a thing! It was easy going and undemanding, and, for the most part, it worked, and its users were accustomed to its foibles and its follies.

Then, one day, it was replaced. Its successor was a client-server system originally developed in Germany that had been around for probably as long as the old mainframe, but which was considerably more complex and complicated. This new system required precision and dedication to detail. This material with this lot number was loaned out to Customer A, therefore it must be received back from Customer A before it could be sent back to Customer B. The same material with another lot number will not do because where is that material now? How can the system keep orderly records if the data comes back in such disarray?

And, lo, the users accustomed to the old system were Not Happy, Jan! And they did complain in great and multitudinous numbers as they learned to use the new system.

Unfortunately for the users, the new system with it's Germanic precision and organisation was here to stay. No haphazard 'tumble it all together and the white and colours will sort themselves out' thinking any more! No more 'she'll be right, mate' attitudes! No, it must be careful attention to detail and the necessity of playing by the rules - crayon marks within the lines - within, I say!

And, lo, it was a big headache for the little programmer sent far from home to help troubleshoot in another city.

tl;dr: I have a headache from dealing with the users learning to use the new system. The system is easy enough; it's the mentalities of the users that's hard to change.

So, we've reached Friday and the business is still going out - at least it is in Sydney. I hear Melbourne is having a meltdown and Perth isn't doing so well, but we sent someone down to Melbourne last night to help deal with the ins and outs of Melbourne, and the analyst who's helping them out over in Perth isn't generally considered one of the better analysts in the office.

By the end of Wednesday this week, I'd worked almost as many hours as I do in a regular week. Thirty-eight hours on the job by Wednesday night. I've never done a 50 hour week before, but I've hit it this one. (To those of you who've done the 50+ hour weeks, how do you do it regularly? I'm barely sane and it's only been one week.)

Fortunately, things are settling down in this office. I went out the back to the warehouse this morning to say hi to the shipping peeps, and when I asked one of them how he was doing, he said "Good!" in tones that suggested he'd expected the Judgement Day to arrive before he got an order out without needing to call someone over to help him solve a problem!

So, yeah, I think they've gotten on top of it, more or less. And while there've been a few scares here and there - most notably when we tried to pay some credit card bills on Wednesday (with a due date of Friday) and the payment authorisation transfer failed.

Anything involving money and banking and the word 'Failure to process' is A VERY BAD THING. Cue quite a few stressed people from Finance and one stressed Sel trying to work out what went wrong and fix it!

One slightly annoying point: a new co-worker who started just last week. He's nice enough most of the time - except when he leans over my shoulder to tell me something that I know but which is taking me a few seconds longer to process than he thinks it should. And he has a habit of saying "At [my old workplace] [statement that amounts to we did things better]..." Very frustrating.

*frowns* I've had a low-level headache all week. Caffeine temporarily helps it - I've learned to drink my coffee with less sugar this week, although I still prefer the massive sugar rush.

Downside: there may be weekend work involved fixing stuff. And I was desperately hoping to have either Saturday or Sunday off so I could work on my atlantisbigbang which still needs massive rewriting and rejigging to make any kind of coherent sense.

So, we lost the Grand Final - in Penalty Time.

We played 70 minutes of game, 15 minutes of Extra Time and then went to a Penalty shoot-out. And their goalie is really good. (Ours is solid, but...not as good as theirs.)

*sigh*

It's a nasty way to not be Premiers - especially after we held them off and dominated the field for the better part of the 85 minutes.

( team trouble )

--

Go-live this morning. Up at 4am, into work by 5am. Two coffees before 7am. (One's a mocha, but still...)

It's gonna be a long day.

I have to support my section of the system for NZ and Perth? Which covers a day starting from 5am to 8pm Sydney time?

Query: Am I getting paid overtime on this?

Oy vey. This will not be pretty. (Of course, my system is such that, once it's all set up, it should run without problems. Should being the operative word, of course.

It's all fun and games until your boss makes you get up at 4am on a Monday to be in at the office by 5am for the go-live.

Sunday is going to be a very busy day.

1. if there are problems with my go-live uploads I'll have to go in for the morning to fix stuff.
2. hockey grand final at 12:30pm
2a. if we win, there will be celebrations at the RSL
2b. if we lose, there'll be commisserations at the RSL
3. the stepbrother is making dinner for the stepfather for father's day
4. go-live monday morning, 5am

I still have a sore throat. And now it's extended to the inner ear - that slight achey feeling when you swallow. I wonder if I could take a day off this week in the hope of recuperation.

Oh well, hot honey-lemon tea, here we come!

Dear co-worker,

It is not at all funny to say we should put a guy in a dress to pass him off as a woman because we don't have enough female players to play in the mixed soccer competition. Not. At. All. Funny.

You know why? Apart from the fact that 'putting a man in a dress' does not make him a woman, and that the idea that wearing a skirt defines gender is ridiculous in both an office where women were trousers all the time and in a sporting competition where not a single woman has ever worn a skirt on the field, and that you persistently make this 'joke' every time we're down on female players and seem to think it hilarious every time, it is frankly insulting to have my femaleness boiled down to what I wear, as though my body or history or the way I was brought up or my body chemistry has nothing to do with being female.

As though anyone can be a female just by not 'doing man-things'. (ie. wearing a dress.) As though being female is the refuse-pile of gender binary thought. (I'm not even going to address the problematics of gender binary with someone like you. You're not educated even halfway enough to attempt that conversation.)

That is what your comment boils down to - a particularly nasty breed of sexism that shoves anyone who doesn't adopt the behaviour or dress of what you think of as 'manly' into the category of 'a woman'.

I've been polite before. I slapped you back today with hints as to why it was aggravating. Make the 'joke' again, and I will have to explain with painstaking detail why this shits me and just how it is offensive.

You have a 12 year old daughter whom you love. For her sake, at least, think about the world you're helping shape and which she's growing up in and what your stupid suggestion really means when you peel off the layers of alleged 'humour'.

I sincerely do not know how the Basis guy is still sane. He's been working pretty much every day since May. I worked one day (8 hours) over the course of the weekend and I'm utterly shattered.

Hopefully this will not have to happen again for me, though. This is our Testing System, with only the Production system to be done, and that should be in the next couple of days. Well, we can hope.

They won't be getting me on my birthday weekend. At all. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!

One problem fixed, one to go!

\o/

Plus, conversation with guy-who-was-narky-about-me-taking-the-system-over seemed to go well this morning. Except for the part where I asked him to help us debug the script he wrote that isn't working. I couldn't get hold of him 15 mins after he hung up. (It was past 6pm in the US.)

In the end, it looks like it was a case of conflicting versions: the code is written with v1.5, the compiler on the system is v1.2. Once we changed the compiler version (or referenced a higher-version compiler), we were cooking with gas!

*watches the eyes of her f-list glaze over*

The other problem is a more complicated one - and more difficult to test since I have to get someone to go through a whole series of events instead of dumping a file on a directory to be picked up and processed.

So, we have two interfaces that have not been tested in months and neither are working. Our window for getting them working during this round of testing is Thursday (ie. tomorrow)

So far, I have people coming up to my desk and leaning over me, people interrupting me as I work and trying to make suggestions, people asking for updates. I'm tired, I'm still a bit on edge from the weekend, and I hate being under pressure.

It's going to turn out to be one of Those Days, and it's only just gone 9am.

I'd ask for teh SGA Kink Meme pr0n but I don't think too many of you are writing these days, let alone in SGA fandom...