Tag: startrek

Work Day 13: I need to be cloned…

The good news is that I finally got the docking station. It’s an odd-looking little cube, like something out of Star Trek. The first one they brought up wasn’t the right kind. We (I’m using the royal we here…I had no clue) figured this out when I looked down and realized that my laptop was on battery power, and draining. The tech support guy came back up with the little cube, which is working like a charm. I’m still fiddling with where I want to put my two monitors and laptop. I’m aiming for that three-screen configuration, but I can’t decide if I want the open laptop in the center or to the side. I know…ludicrous first-world problems…

The bad news is that I’m still trying to fit everything into my now-bustling life.

I have TWO events over the weekend, one of which I’d love to jettison, but I’d feel guilty doing so. I’m still trying to get through my tutorials and my Udemy course (which, honestly, I’m getting much more out of than the tutorials, because they give you exercises to do). On top of everything else, I’m trying to finish the little sweater for my great-niece Maddie’s shower on Sunday. I’m on the final sleeve. It’s a baby sweater—you’d think I’d blow right through it, but the pattern is an 8-row repeat, so it’s slow going.

I’m still scratching my head over our instructor saying that he always has home coding projects going. I honestly have no idea where I’m ever going to find the time for a home project. I may have to skip that for now, seeing as a lot of my spare time is being sucked up trying to learn Java. I’m also still trying to look at our user stories to figure out how they were done and what jobs were used, so that I can possibly find some rhyme or reason to it all. My mentor confirmed today that there is NO documentation denoting which jobs go with which parts of the app. Also, there are hardly any comments in the code to give you any clue.

And don’t get me started on the README files…

Day 63: Transition…or, do I still remember all my passwords???

We watched more online training videos today (Zzzzz…), and had more guest speakers come in. I have to say, the DevOps speaker was very interesting, as I’m still learning about that. The other speakers were great, too. During the presentation by the Release Management speaker, however, I saw a lot of stunned deer-in-the-headlights expressions from fellow students who haven’t had any experience with the IT release process. I was thisclose to blurting out, “You poor souls—you have NO idea what you’re in for!” I also wanted to add that, even if everything in the release process is carefully followed anal-retentively to the letter, the resultant release can be a complete fiasco. I still remember the time years ago when a department did a demo to the masses (a “lunch-and-learn”, or as I call it, a “ruin-your-free-lunch-time-and-learn”) for a major release for a years-long project. They had to STOP the demo and end the meeting. Why? Because they couldn’t get past the first page of the site. Angry red error messages in big capital letters were blazing across the screen like a really bad scene in a Star Trek movie where the Klingons are about to blow up the ship.

The only good thing you could say about this is that at least I got to eat the rest of my lunch in peace…

As far as my transition plan goes, the good news is that my coworker emailed me the complete list of what I need on my new laptop, and what network accesses I’ll need. In fact, tech support has already granted me some of the accesses.

The bad news? My new laptop is going to take possibly 23 DAYS to come in. I desperately need a new one, as my regular work laptop is an ancient 2014 model that takes 10 minutes just to fire up when you turn it on, never mind anything else. We were provided lovely, sleek little laptops for our training that were just a dream to work with, but that was only for training. I can’t tell you how horrible it was to give back my wonderful laptop yesterday and revert back to my giant, crappy laptop that has all the speed, agility, and nimbleness of an aircraft carrier. My biggest nightmare is that my new laptop will take ages to arrive, and that the department will make me do BA stuff again, and I’ll be forever stuck again in the same rut. I’m probably being hysterical over nothing. My coworker assured me that, at worst, they’ll probably just have me study documentation and do Pluralsight Java videos until my laptop shows up.

More training videos…my favorite…