|
|
|
a good day after nearly a month on the job
Thursday, April 17 2025
I've been working in this new workplace for nearly a month and today finally I had my first genuinely good day of work. What does it take for a work day to feel good to me? I have to feel like I accomplished something valuable for the company and was recognized by a coworker for this. This hadn't happened even once yet, but today it actually appened twice. The first time it happened, I'd finally gotten the Cypress end-to-end testing framework to successfully login to one of the company's web apps and the lead developer (who has given me a surprisingly long leash) happened to come over, and I could give him a pretty solid tour of how Cypress works. I'd told him the testing task was a little "quagmiry" and that he should feel free to come up with other things for me to do. So he'd given me a problematic Azure Devops pipeline to fix. I'd quickly found the nature of the problem (that the agent needed VisualStudio installed on it), and with that fixed, the pipeline broke later in the process. This gave me other opportunities to showcase my skills, and by the end of the day I had just debugged a PowerShell script and the pipeline was running to completion.
At lunch today, the lunchroom king was there with a court of just me and one of the young IT guys. That guy doesn't talk much, so the king was monologging in his usual tiresome manner about a product the company manufactures (something he knows about from having worked for many years in the little factory in the back). At some point I jumped in with a question and managed to steer the conversation to a general one about business rules and even automation. (Our company's products have automated a fair number of people out of jobs.) I then concluded by saying the robots would surely be coming for my job eventually, though perhaps they'd be frustrated by the complexities of our company's complex business rules.
After work, the weather was sunny and warmish, and I took the scenic route to the west of Stone Ridge using Kripplebush and Pine Bush Road. This time I made it all the way to Mill Dam Road, meaning my route home had been almost entirely through rural countryside.
Back at the house, I found Gretchen had been spending most of the afternoon out on the east deck for one of the first times this season. She eventually drove up to Troy with our friend Alana to attend some kooky performance art theatre thing (the kind that would make me "slit his wrists" as Gretchen later told Alana). Meanwhile, I spent a good hour working on the extension of the Chamomile Wall west of the Stick Trail. Later I tried to walk the dogs, but neither Charlotte nor Neville wanted to go. Instead, Charlotte just wanted to yap with her piercing bark north of the house in the general direction of Crazy Dave's cottage. At some point Crazy Dave's dog Brigitte came barrelling through the yard like she often does, though she and Charlotte never actually made contact. At some point in all this, a friendly DHL driver arrived to drop off a box of amazing vegan cookies from the best cookie maker in the world: A Cookie Called Quest (an export from a country Donald Trump wants to turn into the 51st state). The DHL driver wasn't the least bit frightened by either Charlotte or Neville, and they were friendly in return.
This evening after a second bath in as many days, I went out in the shop and fashioned a set of brackets out of that think steel piece I'd bought at that hardware store in Accord earlier this week. This involved cutting it into two 18 inch pieces and them clamping each in a vise and banging them over into L-shapes, a technique I actually learned in the one shop class I took back in high school (Electricity & Electronics). But because the metal was so thick, I couldn't do the banging with a conventional hammer; instead I used the blunt end of a splitting maul. Then I mixed up some JB Weld and used it to coat the parts of the brackets that might come into contact with a screen as they're moved around. (I don't want that to get scratched up.) I will ultimately bolt these brackets onto a monitor arm currently attached to one of the pillars holding up the solar deck, giving me a place to put my work-issued laptop when working from home.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?250417 feedback
previous | next |
