Thursday, September 16, 2010

Hard Core

For the last couple of weeks I've been making it to work by 9:30 so that I can follow the sporadically enforced "core hours" policy.

Theoretically, it makes some sense -- if everyone overlaps at work for at least five or six hours of the day, communication increases. In practice it means that I still work alone in my cube and have to listen to people talking about their personal lives all day long. Except for the times when they're talking about how other people aren't working.

Unfortunately, being at work by 9:30 means that I hit the tail end of the morning commute. And if I were to leave nine hours later at 6:30, I would sit on the freeway in Fairfield for twenty minutes every night. The real problem with the morning commute is that all of the radio stations have the morning radio shows on. I would rather scrape my fingernails down a chalkboard than listen to Mark and Brian, and the other shows aren't much better. So I broke down today and bought a new HD radio with an iPod input. At least I will have options.

The evening commute problem has been solved by working an extra hour for four days (because the traffic is mostly gone by 7:30), and then working four hours from home on the fifth day. There's some question about whether I am allowed to have a scheduled work day at home, so every Friday I spontaneously work from home.

Anyhow, it's all good because that leaves my spontaneous Friday afternoon to work on the novel, the finished first draft of which was in my New Year's resolutions. It's gonna happen, dammit!

9 comments:

Karen said...

like

Unknown said...

Your boss is a genius. I bet he can write bash scripts too.

Theresa B (of Nebulopathy) said...

K-poo: Like, your valley girl roots are showing, ohmygod. (And you may be entirely too young to get that reference. Do you even know who Moon Unit Zappa is?)

Rvan: My boss is a genius who can keep a straight-ish face while listening to me complain about Hibernate for the millionth time. Next I will teach you the one line of awk that is useful and then you will no longer be a manager.

jeff said...

Given the utter crap of a book I just read, you really don't have to work too hard at the novel.

Also, don't give away the awk secrets. I mean if the support folks ever figured out what computers are for, we wouldn't have anything to complain about. Um, on second thought, never mind -- we'll never run out.

Theresa B (of Nebulopathy) said...

That's it, knowledge should be free: awk -F' ' '{print $1, $2;}' infile.txt

Now there is no longer any reason to employ me.

Karen said...

I was looking for the "like" button, but I couldn't find it. I'm ready for the first draft!

Theresa B (of Nebulopathy) said...

Trust me, you don't want the first draft. The second or third draft, possibly. And if I put a like button on the blog, it's going to rick-roll people.

Eric said...

Your awk script has a superfluous character. Kids today.

Theresa B (of Nebulopathy) said...

It's sort of like religion. You know, at one point someone learns something and it makes sense, and then it's like a game of telephone and pretty soon you have old Irish dudes in dresses talking about drinking blood.

This is just the early stages of the cult of awk.