At Work

There's this one guy at work who is a real thorn in my side. He's not angry or belligerent, pretty nice actually, but he's always got SOMETHING to talk to me about.

He's the guy who came in at 5:20 the other day.

He's also the prime suspect when it comes to talking in nothing but financial mumbo jumbo.

Oh, and he also uses this phrase: "Quick question for yuh" as the opening line for what I can tell is pretty much every conversation he has with me. I bet it was his favorite pickup line back in the day too.

This guy needs a nickname. Mumbly Joe will do for now.

Yesterday at 5:15 (I really need to make sure I leave at 5!), I finished fixing one of his programs. It's a neat little program (I didn't write it) that interfaces with the mainframe and lotus notes and some other stuff in a nice little package. Its written in C# which is cool, but the kicker is that there were 6 copies of the source code.

So, where was I. Oh yeah, I finished fixing a small bug in it and let MJ know that it was done. I should have bolted out the door at that point, but I didn't and they ran one of the functions that they had been waiting for an hour (a whole hour!) to run.

The results of the function were not exactly the results for which they were looking. Something about marking records with "OD" when they should have been marked as "OK" because the customers had fracs. Ohhkay.

"I didn't touch that part of the program," I said, but because, like I stated previously, there were 6 copies of the source code, I wasn't able to sound too convincing. Heck, I couldn't even convince myself.

To make a long boring story much shorter, after hemming and hawing for 45 minutes, Mumbly Joe remembered that the mainframe will actually mark some of those records "OD" automagically based on its own logic regardless of whether the function in my program has been run or not.

Thanks, MJ.

As I was grabbing my backpack and heading out the door, Joe called out, "Thanks, Andy. You earned your paycheck today!"

No. You didn't just say that.