Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Just Make It Pretty!

As part of my job I wrote a web site that includes the layout of a convention center. Apparently (and multiple people have told me this is true, so I sort of have to believe it) people pay money to join large crowds of idiots and visit both the Super Bowl trophy and some rings. Seriously. I despair for the human race.

Anyhow, the web site allows the engineers to monitor a bunch of things so they can make changes if something goes wrong. (Or at least, if something went wrong fifteen to twenty minutes ago -- it's not exactly real time...) It has colors and numbers and all sorts of things to make it useful. For monitoring, you understand.

Now my boss is much more concerned with aesthetics than I am. If I make a chart of some data it will be correctly labeled (with units!) and have useful axes. If he makes a chart of the same data it will be correctly labeled, have useful axes, use a soothing color scheme, and have a nice font. He has been known to call my charts ugly. I'd definitely use his charts if I had to do a presentation. On the other hand, both charts say the same thing, so who really cares? (Answer: he does.)

So when the engineers asked me to indicate on the convention center where the stupid trophy and rings would be, I added two labels. One said "trophy room". The other said "ring room". I thought that was the end of it... but no.

Boss: Can you make them icons? Put a picture of the trophy here and the ring there.

Me: There's no room. It will end up on top of the text. You know, the text that actually does something useful on the page.

Boss: Just move the text down a little bit.

Me: We can't put a picture of the ring on there. The Super Bowl ring has the winning team's logo on it, so we don't know what it will look like until after the game is over. (I googled this ahead of time -- I went into this argument prepared!)

(A five minute discussion follows about which team logo would annoy the top brass the most. Now there are six guys standing around talking about which team they hate the most. I reflect on the good fortune that I have no immediately available method of suicide.)

Boss: Just use a picture of a wedding ring.

Me: I'm not putting a picture of a wedding ring on there.

Boss: Engineer A will send you a picture to use.

Me: *rolls eyes and walks away*

February can't be here soon enough...

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