No Rack, but definitely an IT mistake

I sat down to write this on Christmas Day, but things went wrong... so here it is a mere month late!

It has been twenty years, so I feel comfortable sharing this one with you.

Christmas Eve afternoon my landline began to ring and ring and ring, foolishly, rashly I answered to hear an unfamiliar accent telling me to explain to them the complete inner workings of an intranet web service.  No hello, no explanation who they were, just a desperate voice asking, nay demanding, this information....

It took me a few minutes to collect my thoughts and realise what they were talking about.  At the time I was contracting in short sharp sprints between projects for various folks, I'd actually written three different web based systems in the prior three months; so i was trying to figure out which of the recent ones it was..... Only to then hear the name of the company and realised this voice was asking about a project I had been contracted to write nine months prior.

It was a very long ways away in my memory.

Not only was my memory foggy but I had ensured everything asked for in the contract was documented,  all the work was carried out at their offices, on their own machine, I didn't even hold a copy of their system.

Above all it was Christmas Eve!!

I explained that not only was I not contracted to support the project (a sore spot, as I usually made as much money supporting a project as doing it at that time); but this project had actually been a bit of a squeeze, for it had been two weeks work and absolutely no more.

Long story short I'd been contracted by one chap, the manager, because his in house analyst was overwhelmed and unable to cope, so he'd had me to quickly deliver this project for them.  It was a simple view over data on a few pages, driven from a server that the analyst knew and who deployed it out for himself.

The manager and this analyst signed it all off as I went, and I documented the whole thing, critically including how to edit the pages... So they only needed to know a bit of HTML, JavaScript and CSS to change any part of it as they felt suited themselves... and I left.... Getting my money a month later and never hearing anything from them.

On a shoe string I thought I had delivered them a real bargain!  Not hearing anything for all that time had made me confident they were happy.

So what was this desperate emergency?

The colour!  The guy wanted to know how to change the colours in the cascading style sheet...

It is Christmas Eve!  And this £100k per year analyst is calling me to ask for a crash course in CSS!!!

To say I was not amused is perhaps the understatement of the decade!

I politely explained that I was available (at an extortionate price her hour) from December 28th onwards and then regular rate January 3rd onwards for contracting, but right now I was not available.  And all this was available through my then solo contractor company.

The reply?  To be honest he was quite rude, at which point the telephone was returned to its cradle and the TV remote rediscovered.

The trill ring carried on until I unplugged the phone... and my mobile started to ring, my inbox fill, and my patience ran wafer thin.

But I was simply not going to be talking to this guy, my opinion all these years later was that the guy was a paper suit, he sat there getting others to do all this work for him, not even delivering to his own manager and said manager was just accepting of this for some internal political reasons I could guess at, but which were lost on me at the time.

I decided however to be proactive, I wrote up a couple of paragraphs on my headed PDF, attached the original contract, attached a proposal for employing me from the 28th for 2x8 hour slots and then from the first week back in January for 5x8 hours as a starting point.  I put this all together, with an estimate and I sent it in triplicate.... To this analyst, to the manager and to the HR department at said company through whom I had worked for them.

I then had the most interesting email, which only reaffirmed my paper suit opinion of the guy.... For this email was from the manager saying "Why are you sending me this on Christmas Eve?"

And I replied "because your analyst <insert name here> is contacting me, phone off the hook on Christmas Eve to ask me about that work I did in March".

I heard nothing more.... Until the week following the week back, I was at another contract and my mobile rang... It was a very polite voice, the manager, he wanted me to come work for them.... because Mr Analyst had left his role.

I asked a few poignant questions; essentially the chap was earning an absolute fortune (for 2002) at nearly £136,000 a year and he did nearly nothing, nothing.... he'd sat on projects, say on code, couldn't script, couldn't program, couldn't even communicate properly.  Quite how he'd got into the role I will never know.

I however simply kindly declined, I was due to go to Egypt on Holiday so I did that rather then try and fix that guys mess.

ChatGPT Poetry

I've had a play with ChatGPT, completely away from asking it to write or improve code snippets I asked it to generate some poetry...

Could you tell me a poem in the style of Wilfred Owen but about Strawberries and Skunks?

And here's the reply....

The strawberry fields, so red and sweet,

Are guarded by the skunk, so discreet.

He sprays his scent with such disdain,

To keep the birds and beasts at bay.

But man, with greed in heart and mind,

Does not let the skunk's defense bind.

He steals the fruit, so plump and ripe,

And leaves the skunk with nought but spite.

But in the end, the skunk prevails,

For though the berries may be hailed,

The smell of skunk, it lingers still,

And serves to remind us of our ill.

So let us honor the skunk's defense,

And give the strawberries their due recompense.

For in this balance, all is fair,

And all may share the bountiful air.

Prodj, Praw or Pro?

I've just had one of those moments, I speak with an accent from the British Midlands.  I've been told my accent is fairly neutral, but I know I have a Nottingham twang to certain words, and when I'm being lazy I can sound right common (that is lower-class).

The vowel constructs I know I'm worst at are "Op" such as "Open" and "Operation" and "Ov" as in "Over", and I often made even my wife's eyes twitch when I say "it's upen uver there" pointing at a shop or parking space.

Today however I'm picking on "Pro".... Now, as a British English speaker I've never had this issue locally, we all say "project" with a "prodject" sound, we don't stress the "pro"... It's a prodject, not a PROject to my ear.  It's like saying "podge" as in stuffed full of food, but with an 'r'.

Right or wrong this distinguishes that word with "Projector" and "projection", you know the habit of shining light through something to put an image on a screen or wall... that is "PROjection" when I say it.  And this has been automatic to me all my life and I've known what my peers at school, home and work meant we were all very local, so we all knew the distinction and never really thought about it.

However, working in game development with a very wide range of folks I've just been called out.

Talking about a project with graphics the projection matrix came up.... And yes, you guessed it, in the meeting I said (something like) "the prodject is coming along well, I'm using the inverse PROjection matrix to check a ray intersection".

I literally got called out at that point, never noticed it before, I've heard folks saying "PROject" but ignored them... The problem?

One of the folks happened to be from the North West of England (Manchester I believe) and he said... "PRAWject".... and "PRAWcessing".... Yeah, even I was twitching then.

Either way, it was an interesting moment.