Dammit, I need to let off some steam.

I'm trying real, real, hard for the image of my infant son relying on me for food and shelter to get me past the image of the enormous, ridiculous brick wall that my predecessor's built into what I'm working on.

I have tried my damnedest to redirect these people I work for around this problem, and every attempt I make to take the loaded gun they're pointing at their foot out of their hands has led to one more loaded gun they manage to somehow pull out of their cavernous desks/other spaces.

No matter what workaround I try, it's just not good enough for them. Yeah, I could easily make something new that would solve their problems now and in the next 20 years, but that's making something new, and that's something that they don't want to do, even if during the timespan of me modifying something old I could have made at least three new things twice as better.

People, please, momentarily stop rearranging the f'ing deck chairs on the Titanic long enough to understand what the heck a tradeoff is. Yeah, things are far from perfect. Yes, I hate the way I to get around them as much as you do, if not more-so. What I'm working on has been so enormously damaged and limited for so long by the people who came before me that it should be expected that there's a whole freakin laundry list of stuff that is going to suck and that you're going to have to put up with.

In the tradeoff, you accept having to deal with one thing for the ability to acquire another; in the case of this business, it's putting up with lack of explicit detail they so crave yet don't understand themselves in order to get what they want working at all. In the case of me, it's putting up with this situation so I get money to support my family.

Today (or I should say yesterday) at work, everyone all of a sudden couldn't get their e-mail. And who's the IT guy who gets called in to fix stuff (but doesn't get to make a single IT purchase decision): me.

So I look at what's acting as our e-mail server, which I shall now dub "Lime Betty"*. Lime Betty is a green 233 mhz iMac, circa 1998 or something like that. She has 256MB of RAM and a 5GB hard drive that's storing messages for the entire company, and it's doing no more good cause its all full. And Lime Betty's running OS X 10.3.9, just one step away from the current release of Tiger (the latest version), and it gets even freakier that the only way that the guys before me could get a computer that old to even be able to run such an advanced operating system at all is by the user having to type cryptic commands at the blank gray Open Firmware (equivalent to the PC BIOS) screen upon booting up. And the whole time, the hard drive inside Lime Betty is chattering endlessly, desperately trying to make up for her lack of available RAM. Lime Betty's only saving grace is that she's a very becoming shade of lime jello green and was joy to look at.

And the thing is, my superiors are wondering why this machine all of a sudden stopped working. All these years they've been using this thing, and have never gotten something more reliable and new because of a pervasive "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude.

Some times, I feel like I'm not working at an IT job, but at a fucking lemonade stand. At least they agreed to replace Lime Betty with a more modern but less visually attractive machine tomorrow.

• Lime Betty is a reference to a mysterious old 70's mainframe computer named "Black Betty" featured in a Dilbert TV episode that ran the whole company and that needed to be saved to keep the company afloat.

(Trying to work my way to 100+, baby! I want that userpic caption!).

Every week or so, I get one or two e-mails or calls from various IT recruiting agencies, either with HR/recruiter people with specific jobs that matched my Monster profile or who say "your resume looked really interesting, we should talk."

Up to this point, I haven't considered any of their offers. I felt that I should put in at least a year in my current job, so I'll get some more experience that future employers may find acceptable. Yeah, I know I probably know a lot more about developing software than the kid just out of college, but as far as an HR office is concerned, if you haven't gotten paid for it, and especially if you haven't gone to school for it, you obviously don't know it.

Before I took the job up here, I had doors repeatedly slammed in my face for hundreds of tech positions in NC, though it's not so much of a slamming as it is a "we'll call you back" and they never do. To paraphrase Woody Allen, I've found the computer job world "worse than dog eat dog, it's dog doesn't return another dog's phone calls." And that's before considering all the competition I'd have from all the people who make Raleigh-Durham one of the top ten info tech places in the country. In addition to local folks, I'd also get the stray e-mail or call from across the country about some job opening, and I pursued it will no better luck (till I got the one for up here).

What also goes against me is that I also tend to be a very honest person, or at least I try to be. And honesty really doesn't go over to well with HR people. I could lie about or overinflate my skillset, probably get hired, and quickly learn enough about the technology to do the job at hand (one of my superpowers) and the HR folks and boss would never be the wiser. But I'd rather get a job honestly, and that is a massive strike against me.

The final thing about these HR people that really screws me is that they don't understand anything about the technical stuff I've done or the challenges I faced and surpassed. It's very rare that I've ever been asked "what was a really difficult programming problem and how did you solve it?" or "How would you come up with a solution for this hypothetical situation?" These people want buzzword-compliant people, not innovative people who can actually solve problems.

And don't even get me started on the recruiters who look for five years of experience in a technology that has only existed for two years.

If issues directly related to employment weren't difficult enough, I also had to deal with some personal issues with the way that some people I was close to back in NC dealt with my employment situation. These people didn't understand anything about the computer job arena, and they said I was "too picky" despite the fact that I submitted dozens of resumes a day for virtually any programming job out there. These same people then called me "selfish" for going to job interviews instead of driving them to various errands they were not able to drive to for stupid reasons of their very own making. Then these same people busted on me for being a 30-year old man who didn't have a decent job (now they're undoubtedly complaining about me leaving them and coming up here, and asking me when I'm coming back). I still really miss those people, but dammit, they were a pain in the ass.

To summarize the last five paragraph of useless memoirs, my attempts to acquire employement in the computer field tend to suck in general, and they sucked especially in North Carolina. And I found the whole situation when I was down there very upsetting.

So back to the present, I'm trying to consider other options than the place I'm currently working. Some people in the company where I work prevent me from doing the best job I can, yet they don't balance their expectations in light of that fact. While I don't intend to leave anytime soon, I do want to know what my options are.

So for the first time since coming up here seven months ago, I call a technical recruiter who left a voicemail a day or two earlier. And dammit, the whole experience on the phone was just the same as it was 7 months ago in NC. I was honest about what I had done (big mistake), I explained the database technology I was currently working on (PostgreSQL, which he had never heard of), I said a lot of the programming I've been doing recently is for Apple stuff (which he must have interpreted as the only stuff I could do), and I told him that the stuff I'm currently being paid to do is a very small subset of the entire skillset I have (which he basically ignored). He ended with a variation on "we'll call you back"--"you're entered into our database. Go to our site and we'll keep in touch". That went really well--not!

I guess I need to look for the positives here. Firstly, it's been months since I last talked to a recruiter, so this exchange was a good refresher. Second, he also asked about why I wanted to leave my current job, which I was a little unprepared for; I've now formulated better answers for the next time around. Third, as my dad would put it, talking with this fellow is a step towards realizing that I'm not trapped in my current job by a contract, and that I can leave at any time. And finally, this experience has reminded me that my situation could be worse; some people don't have a job at all and they'd probably kill to be earning what I do (which is still not a lot, but it pays the bills okay).

Now to fill in the blank of my second blessing for (e:carolinian,30) that I totally forgot include. For the last year or so, I've really started liking Neil Diamond, who in my younger days I considered to be "music for old people." So several weeks ago, I finally broke down and bought a Neil Diamond box set from Barnes and Noble. I really like it, and it's one of the best things I've bought in quite a while.

It was wonderful to get the posts of encouragement on my last journal. It's been kind of stressful for me to deal with this situation, and it's good to hear that I'm not alone in it. I'm sure that many people have endured far worse, and that I should probably be more thick-skinned about the whole boss thing.

I missed the violent femmes tonight. I'm bummed about that, but I'm trying to meet an unofficial deadline at work to get some progress made on the database software. While I don't think they'd let me go if I missed it (they are at least somewhat realistic about the large amount of stuff I have to do), missing it would bring in a different piece of software along with its corresponding consultant software company, who I am not very fond of.

I got out of work at 11:00. I need to get this project finished so I can start having a life again.

Wow, this is going to probably be a really long post. There's just so much that's happened, and plus I've let a day or two lapse.

The Good:

This weekend was probably one of the more social I've had in quite a while. I had a lot of fun spontaneously meeting up with all those peeps I hadn't met before (plus the existing ones I had) at spot on Friday. And I had a good, slightly freaky time going with (e:vincent) to Diablo last friday--lots of interesting 'angsty' people. Kinda like me. Sunday meeting more (un)known peeps at spot also rocked.

I also picked up a copy of O'reilly's "Google Map Hacks", and found what I needed to calculate distance from latitude and longitude (plus other useful stuff).

The Bad:

As wonderful as the weekend is, Monday really sucked. Most of it was work-related. (And here, folks, is why I don't want to be Googled. I won't reveal anything classified or damaging, but I want to be able to write "I had a bad day at work", etc).


As some background (my job deserves a post of its own at some point), I was brought on board this company as the sole programmer to fix the database system that my company has been migrating to. The previous programmers (there used to be several of them) screwed up their stuff (with a lot of help from some of people in the company, so the rumors go), and I was hired to do the herculean job of cleaning up their herculean mess (about 12,000 man hours of stuff); the rough deadline of this was going to be around at least december. The CEO moved the target date to the beginning of this fall, which has greatly increased the pressure on myself.

Many of the problems I run into are people problems and not problems I can solve with my technical abilities; if one person thinks one type of behavior is a bug and the other a "feature", and no one remembers which it should be--I can't really fix the problem when I don't even know what a solution is supposed to look like. There are some technical problems, and these are largely that a lot of the stuff that programmers wrote in undocumented spaghetti code (especially the stored procedures on the server), and there's no clear policy about what layer of code (DB stored procedure, DB views, high level obj-c objects, obj-c database bindings) is responsible for what. This project is really a reverse-engineering project more than anything else.

At this point in time, after six months of me trying to untangle this Gordian knot to save the company, the CEO on Monday tells me that I'm doing it all wrong and that all the lack of progress I've made is due to my lack of documentation and keeping track of the changes I've made. I've been using a code versioning system and bug reporting system, I've been logging the changes I make in the database structure into the version system, and colleagues from my former university used to remark that I'm a sick bastard for writing a line of comment documentation for every line of code. But the CEO pulls this out of his ass and says "now we're going to do this 'my way'". He was at least partially complicit in the mess that was created before I arrived (to what extent is still in question), so I start worrying that our early fall deadline won't be met, and I'll get blamed for not meeting it if I let him do what he wants, and if I disobey him I'll get blamed (and possibly fired).

After work, I drive back to my apartment and call a friend from back in NC to talk about my day. While talking with him, I realize that there are 40-60 baby spiders crawling on my bedroom ceiling. For many years, I've tried to trap spiders inside something like a cup or tupperware and release them outside without killing them. I don't want to take life I don't have to. That day, in fact, I took two such spiders outside to avoid the whole squishing thing. But this was at night, when I had work the next day and couldn't spend the several required days scooping every baby spider into a tupperware bowl. And I knew that if I let all those spiders grow big in my bedroom, which is the worst place for someone who finds spiders creepy to have spiders (bed, clothes, etc are in there) I could never get any sleep. Plus, I would get bitten dozens of times during every night.

So I had to kill just about all of them, apologizing to each one before I squished it. I did manage to let 1-2 spiders out of the house, because I felt that the female spider should at least have a few of her babies survive the terrible things I did. But in the end, almost none of those in my bedroom made it, because I had to make the difficult choice of putting my safety first. To the spider Jaoquin (another subject for a future (e:strip) posting) wherever you are, I have failed you. I am truly sorry.

Back to work.

Today, I start going by the plan the CEO wants. He tells me I should have changed the parts in the live database (that we currently use for some company uses) to match what I've done in the experimental database, and that this should be done by having stuff changed in the original database we're migrating from (we have an import export script I wrote to go from old to new). Yesterday, I thought he wanted me to start this whole process off by us reproducing our original problems, so I didn't change anything, because that's what I that he wanted me to do. Having now gotten chided today for this, I do what I definitely think he wants me to do this time around and I go to a mechanical engineer and ask him to make a change in the old database like he said that I should have done yesterday. The CEO then drags me and my immediate supervisor into the conference room. While storming to the conference room he says to my immediate supervisor "this guy doesn't get it. How stupid can you be?"

Once in the conference room, the CEO screams at me and accuses me of trying to "run a one-man show", of being arrogant and thinking that I know of everything that goes on in the company. He has some valid points about my communication skills not always being the best (I eventually told him about my Asperger's and ADD after he rhetorically asked 'is there anything physically wrong with you'), but other than that, I'm not trying to be any of those things. He accuses me of not listening to his orders to not go talk to anyone in the company about the results of the test program until he comes back with the results himself. My understanding of the situation was that he was going to hand people the test stuff and that every thing else was still up in the air, which I why I made the mistake of asking a coworker about the results before this whole thing began. The CEO then starts telling me to answer all these Yes/No questions, along the lines of "Did I say this or didn't I?" kinds of questions. If you answer "Yes", you're basically saying you knew exactly what he said and you disobeyed him; you answer "No", you're calling him a liar. I ask him if it would make him happy if from now own we used e-mail to communicate exactly what he wants, as doing things this way keeps an irrefutable proof of what was said and documents the process. He tells me he'd be too lazy to write the e-mails.

Eventually, he says that the solution is to get even more draconian and we're going to have a meeting to sort this all out in the afternoon. The afternoon meeting was actually productive and a lot of things got clarified, but for the rest of the morning and into the afternoon, I was feeling really sad and really angry. I was sad and I couldn't express it--being a stoic and being male, I didn't cry; but I kind of felt like it on the inside. I was angry and couldn't express it--not wanting to thought clinically insane, I couldn't do something like hit a brick wall with my fists like I ordinarily would given the lack of a convenient punching bag or pillow. I wanted more than anything to tell that a**hole off and point out all the stupid things he had done or allowed in his company that could have contributed to the current situation with the database, but that would be None Too Wise for my career. All I could do that entire morning was just sit in front of the computer try to look like I was doing something while I let the shock of me being ripped a new one wear off. It was impossible to think about anything else.

It did help that some coworkers came by my cubicle and said "Don't worry about it, he does that to everyone. Take the few valid points he has and throw everything else out." I was especially touched by my immediate supervisor doing this, as I had assumed he wouldn't say anything at all. I guess I've completely misjudged my immediate supervisor and I was wrong for doing so. I treated myself to dinner at the Indian Diner in the evening, since I didn't eat lunch all afternoon because I was worrying that if I'd clocked out for lunch I'd be absent for his impromptu meeting whenever it would be, and he'd go back to screaming.

I'm feeling better since I talked to some more people from back home about this, but I'm still worried that in future heated encounters he'll push me past my breaking point and then I'll start speaking my mind about how I really see things in our organization, and how I see him in particular.

For the little remainder of tonight there is, I will try to look for some happiness in the world, some thought of pure beauty or joy that makes me forget the pointlessness of some things.

Today the HR person from my company called me into their office and told me that after several months of temp-to-hire status where I was the "temp" I am now basically a "hire" once I finish the paperwork.

This is going to be a big load off my mind. It's never easy thinking "what if suddenly find myself unemployed next month", and now I probably won't have to think about that unless I do something really stupid. Getting permanent status is also nice because I've put off so many purchases for so long, trying to save up as much money! as possible for the possibility of not being hired on and having to move back to NC.

I wanted to go to the Layette square concert to commemorate the occasion, but I was feeling so tired I had to pass. But I should definitely find some small way to celebrate this weekend--perhaps I should invest in that bottle of Goldschlager that I was so craving last weekend.