Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Doctor office ettiquette

Is it better for the doctor's office to be open, with all the front
office staff coughing and sniffling on everything, potentially getting
patients sick... Or to have patients wait a week or two to visit the
doc?. I mean, if it was an emergency, you'd go to urgent care anyway,
right?

Monday, January 28, 2008

Chain reaction

One stoplight out on Oak.

That's all it took to change a 10 to 15 minute bus trip into a 45
minute trip. As I sat on the bus, stopped as often as not in traffic
on Lincoln, I imagined the weekend's rain had blocked a sewer drain
and led to lane closure or that there was some horrific accident. But
no...

If a simple change from metered traffic to a stop sign created such a
large impact in such an uncomplicated system, I shudder to think about
the impact of my own mistakes and accidents on the much more
complicated and possibly more delicately balanced systems I
participate in.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

The wrong technical decision

I awoke sometime before dawn and didn't bother to check the clock,
thinking I'd get back to sleep, as I usually do, without any trouble. The dream that I awoke from, however, must have been more disturbing than my usual bad dreams.

I sit in a conference room with a coworker whom I normally regard as
amiable and not harsh at all. The dream has distorted hir features,
but I know who it is. We discuss something about work, and I ask for
clarification about something.

Then he talked about a specific technique which I hadn't heard of
before (something sie described as "trapping"). I said as much which
elicited a sneer of condescension and the rebuke "you don't even know what... Which finally goaded me into a defense of my intelligence, and to assert that I could grasp the concept of whatever sie was talking about.

This sets hir off on a rant about how I will go round and round
seeking understanding, wasting hir and everyone else's time, and that eventually I'll make the wrong technical decision anyway which will necessitate me or someone else rewriting the functionality in
question, wasting yet more time. At which point the meeting ended, or i awoke.

Good dream to have the night before going back to work.

Tuesday, January 01, 2008