Biking has been an excellent way to dissipate some of the stress at work. When that fails, I rely on my trusty sidekick, humor. Some inadvertant snippets from this week…
To our IT person, regarding a problem I’ve had with email since we installed the new CRM system:
Typically my use pattern is I get an email and start editing a response. Another email comes in. I may jump over to that. Often, when I return, one of three things happens: someone’s responded, I decide it’s quicker to walk over and have an actual conversation, or I lose interest in responding.
To the company designer, After Yet Another Bleeping Debate about where a project feature needs to reside in our home-spun project management software. You can still smell the restraint:
I’ve renamed the project feature to [something that sounds infinitely more fun and visibly demonstrable] and assigned it a negative hours so it will fuel everything we want to do through the rest of the century.
Finally, to a good friend who asked me to be a reference for him:
Just got done talking with [the guy who’s interviewing you]. He had the standard set of questions: how long have you been a communist, why did your professional wrestling career end so abruptly, and what is your favorite flavor of Krispy Kreme.
I guessed “chocolate covered,” and my friend got the job.
I’m having a similar week. We have two particularly cantankerous pieces of hardware to repair. My favorite ALF from Utah has a theory that if it takes a woman nine months to have a baby, the process can be improved and shortened to one month by having nine women work on it in parallel. This theory he applies to every job he touches, including the two I’m working on. I’m continuing the search for the alternate universe in which this is actually true so I can ship these things out of here.