If It's Not One Thing...

If it ain't one thing it's... two other things.

Frustrated with trying to decipher some code left behind by a departed member of our team, you'd think I'd welcome a break from it. But not when the break involves someone having trouble with one of the nastiest - and only partly-implemented - pieces of internal support in our product, or someone else having trouble with our product and seeing errors which look entirely incomprehensible. But, that was pretty much my morning and early afternoon.

I'm trying to manage my stress better. Not so much in taking on lighter loads or rearranging my schedule, but in just feeling less stressed. One guy on our team says he doesn't get stressed because he learned that he just doesn't need to get stressed. Nice idea, but not easily done. He's a pretty low-key guy, and so am I. So maybe it's something I can attain.

By 3:00 I was pretty frazzled, though, and went to vent to my boss (not really in a venting-to-my-boss manner, but more because I knew he could relate to the problems I was encountering). Then we went to get coffee.

I came back to e-mails from "bizarre error guy" (actually someone I've worked with before and who is a nice, understanding fellow) indicating that he was seeing errors due to a completely different system, and that it had nothing to do with our product. (I was somewhat vindicated in that I had guessed that some obfuscated element of the process was messing things up, and indeed there was such a thing going on.) And then I managed to figure out what I think is the last piece of the puzzle in deciphering the nasty code I'd started the day working with.

So all's well that ends well.

Well, except for cleaning up and finishing up the internal support that the second guy was struggling with. But that's not going to get finished in a day.

All part of the fun of working on a system where everything is changing more-or-less constantly. But, that's why they pay us the medium-sized bucks.