:/

I miss when this room had people in it.

Oh, Canada...

:)

I'm waiting for my blood pressure to go down.

It isn't working.

May I recommend beer?

Given that we're frequenting a tavern, and all.

A fine idea.

Un cerveza

I just dealt with a problem I've been having in a very angry way.

Hmm, that sounds less than ideal. Is the problem at least solved?

not really

Ah, sorry to hear that. :/ Well...at least it's the weekend?

Indeed.

If you want you could offer your professional opinion on my problem :)

You may overestimate the value of my input, but sure. :P

I work as a consultant.

I've been signed with the same client for four years.

They were bought by a larger company in another city.

nods

Since January 1 they've wanted me present in said city 3 times. The first time I was caught in the middle of two people arguing over when I should go.

As such didn't get to confirm any travel plans.

The second time I got a "So, you're going to be here next week, right?" e-mail as if I should have heard anything about that plan before.

This time, they had sent me to Chicago for a week of training last week, and this Monday indicated they "might" want me to come down next week.

The thing you have to understand is my wife isn't keen on being a single parent, so I don't make travel plans around a might, or even a "probably".

Right, and these are certainly not short trips from the sound of it.

So, I get the "You'll be here Monday right?" e-mail at 4:30 on Friday.

I fully intended to not flip out and simply tell my employer (not the client) that this was not going to happen again.

But it happens to be a holiday week next week, so flights available are scarce, expensive and at inconvenient times.

Naturally, since my main problem with all this is the apparent lack of respect for my time, I got kind of angry at all that, and sent them a, "Here I can be there these two days, and if you can't be bothered to get back to me tonight as to whether that's acceptable or not, I can't be there any days."

So that's that.

Now I'm drinking uno cerveza :P

I really don't want to have this client fire us over me sticking up for myself, but sheesh.

Honestly, I think your response was reasonable. There's no reason that any company of reasonable size can't adequately plan these kinds of things in advance. The fact that it's happened on multiple occasions sounds like some extreme mismanagement that you're being forced to bear the brunt of, and you didn't sign on for that.

Not helping my mood was that one of my vehicles has been in the shop for 15 days during which they missed the promised time the work would be done five times.

I mean, we all have to cope with less than ideal scenarios from time to time, but that's really asking a lot of someone to continually try and drop what they had going on to scrape together travel plans at short notice, heh.

Ouch, that's rough

Yeah, it was fun arranging our commute/daycare dropoff/pickup plans around that five times for no reason.

We did get it back this afternoon finally.

Everything seem to be in working order?

Yep.

It only cost $100 apparently.

The manufacturer covered most of the cost because it was only 1000 miles past its warranty.

Oh, well that's not a bad deal. I'm not sure I've ever heard of anyone getting something for an item being "only a bit" past its warranty. :D

Yeah, that was nice.

Though we had to argue a bit for it; I smelled burning intermittently well before the warranty ran out but didn't take it in because they would make me pay a diagnostic fee and not find anything (because of the intermittentness of it).

They agreed that made sense.

Evening sirs/madams, quick question: Unsung Hero..25% of what, total # of ACCEPTED answers or total # of answers?

Total accepted answers.

Total accepted answers, isn't it?

I know I don't have 25% of my answers accepted.

Whoops, yes.

Thanks for the quick responses

More verbosely, "Have more than ten accepted answers with a score of zero, and have those zero-score accepted answers account for at least 25% of all your accepted answers"

Right, cool. I'm 1 away!

Cool. :) Your accepted answers must all be at least ten days old to qualify, so once you snag the next one there'll be a bit of waiting.

Also they have to stay 0 for about a week after you reach that magic number.

What @Tim said =)

The more important question is: How much rep will you pay me to not go serial upvote your answers?

evil grin

Hahah :P

Well, thanks for letting me explain that Tim. I'm sure that will help. +5 internets.

Hooray! \o/ Well, I certainly hope your situation improves...I most likely would have flipped before now, patience isn't always my strong point. :P

I did flip several times, I just redirected before.

I vented at the partners in my company. What they failed to do was do anything about it

I figure those sorts of issues are more their pay grade :P

Heh, that's OK, I was annoyed about being forced to join a call today and said something critical of someone after getting off the phone...

Just, I hadn't actually gotten off the phone.

lol :/

but did you offend their favorite language/OS?

if not you're fine

I did not, thankfully. ;)

Well.

Now that you mention it.

I did sort of write a pointed e-mail about a database design decision I didn't agree with. Those can be matters of religion.

oh definitely, what was the decision (generally)?

Ah, yeah, one of my coworkers had a pretty lengthy discussion with several other people over naming conventions for the database tables...that was a fun conversation.

I guarantee I've seen the worst of anyone here

Me bringing up table-per-class at a meeting the other week was deemed scoff-worthy but the final decision was to go with an exclusive arc pattern (which table-per-class would eliminate the need for)

I was kind of offended at being scoffed at then having the final decision be an actual anti-pattern.

that's unfortunately a common event

one guy on my previous team was scoffed at for suggesting nhibernate

you know what they ended up doing? code gen

argh

and it broke often...we'd have files that gen'd that just STOPPED halfway

entire thing didn't compile

Did I mention the project lead at this new company (we're basically rewriting my work from last year) was saying how horrible/confusing, etc. my UI implementation was loudly to someone else while sitting two feet from me?

She had a few valid points. Nothing, of course, that would take more than 20 minutes to fix.

But let's spend more time in meetings with this huge team than it took me to get the entire first iteration out writing requirements documents so we can avoid those shall we?

Sounds like an awesome plan

haha meetings...the worst is when you're in a phone meeting and have almost no reason to be there

Figured it's about time to make my semi-annual appearance here;-)

I hate being jaded. I need to stop this.

@ScottW I agree.

@Pearsonartphoto Hooray!

I'm rather amazed, my reputation is getting to be quite a bit higher here than on SO...

=)

wow you have a lot of sci-fi/fantasy rep, I've been reading A Song of Ice & Fire lately

great books

@Pearsonartphoto Yeaaaaah....

sorry @Pearsonartphoto

Optimism is better than cynicism. Even when it feels naive.

:)

I'm one of the mods there, I should have a lot of rep there:-)

haha what are some of your fav. authors?

@mootinator We should form a club.

David Eddings is one that comes easily to mind.

@TimStone The Bedazzled?

Rick Riordan is one of the new authors I'm rather impressed with.

:D

@Pearsonartphoto cool, I love k. dick and clarke

And of course the Harry Potter books:-)

never read those actually

They are a good read. I resisted myself for a while, now it's hard to believe I did...

I've been waiting to watch A Song of Ice & Fire on TV.

it's very well-done, I recommend it

season 2 is starting soon, can't wait

It's kind of funny, I heard about HP back when there were only 1 or 2 books. I resisted until the 4th one was coming out...

oh you said "waiting", my mistake, thought "wanting"

when did they start making the movies?

I heard it's well done enough that reading it doesn't add much.

around book 4?

It was about that time.

yeah I remember it was very popular before the movies

I remember the corner store by the house where I grew up having a launch event.

I thought that was very odd.

I remember hearing on the news about this new book coming out in England, that they had to make stores not sell it until after school so kids wouldn't ditch school to read it...

I think that was the 3rd book...

The later ones came out on Saturdays, to avoid that problem.

haha reminds me of Dragon Quest games in Japan, kids do ditch school to get it

that series is mega-popular there

I also remember everyone ruining stuff that happens in HP

online and other places

wont' mention any specifics just in case!

I'm a bit surprised. Normally when I do a release of my Android game, there's a ton of downloads the next day. Not so this time...

As far as HP goes, I've read the books within a week of them coming out since book 4, so...

Actually, not true, I missed book 6 by a few months, but I wasn't on the internet much then, so...

haha you're lucky

@ScottW Ah yes, I do remember the launch event spoiler videos.

I remember being really mad because my mom and sister bought book 4, and my mom would read it outloud to her... We weren't aloud to touch it until they were done either...

I actually snuck into my sister's room in the middle of the night, grabbed the book, and started reading it one night...

haha

Well, mayhaps I'll return here sooner than every 6 months, but if not, been nice talking to you all;-)

@Pearsonartphoto Take care.

@Pearsonartphoto later

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO not 5 minutes of maintenance

Everyone will stop talking if that happens!

I hope this is the super update that implements every feature request I've ever upvoted

the stackoverflow/stackexchange is hardware love, primarily. Hitting OS updates while there too.

do you use the load balancer to point at the "down for maintenance" page?

Maintenance?! How am I supposed to occupy my time idly clicking now?

@awoodland in truth, I let the sysadmins worry about that

Was very necessary though

@MarcGravell Leaving yourself open to blame Zypher & co. is always a good idea, yes.

@Pearsonartphoto Haha, reminds me the Nicolas Flamel series by Michael Scott - I finished reading of the book few days after getting it :-)