Crazy Talk At Work

Today I gave the new guy at work an introduction to the wonders of screen scraping mainframe terminal screens using VBA.

I could tell he was totally impressed. Stick a pencil in my eye impressed.

Ahh, the wonders of 21st century technology. And this, the soon to be #2 brokerage firm in the country.

A large, loud, old woman burst into my office around 4:30 and barked, "This list you gave me ain't complete!"

In my head: "Your triceps are bigger than Conan the Barbarian's, but less firm."

What I actually said: "I will look into it."

After taking a deep, deep breath, what I told the new guy: "You'll probably see me flip out here pretty soon."

It was that kind of day, too many people doing too much bursting.

Another large, loud, old woman threw a thousand page report on my desk dated 8/6/2007 and asked why her "stuff" didn't get "built".

In my head: "How the eff should I know? I wasn't even here then."

What I said: "I will look into it."

I had the new guy look into it. There's a three part process in all of these reports. One program downloads them off the network, another program parses the files and puts them in the database, and a third program builds whatever it's supposed to build.

Of course, if any one of those programs crashes, which they do often, then the other programs can't do their job. A month after the fact, it's pretty hard to tell where it all went wrong, but I just told her it looks like "the program" "crashed" and because it only runs once a day, when it ran the next day, it only looked at the new batch of reports.

Sounds plausible.