You must read this post from Tim Ford to understand the next series of random words you will read. I will attempt to accept this challenge in each of my blogs, my work blog, my personal blog, as well as my hobby blog. It will be an interesting challenge, and I hope you enjoy reading it.
It is a Monday, not unlike any other Monday I have suffered thus far. However, the issues that will arise today will make this Monday top the charts for oddities.
The day started out like most days with a team meeting. Since there were no issues from the weekend, we simply discussed what was coming this week. As these discussions were occurring, we all noticed that we had received an emergency ticket from Customer Service. One of our applications were returning an error none of the CS representatives had seen before. The details I will not explain here, but the oddity in the message baffled us all. The error message stated something to the effect that a value could not be retrieved from a table, but the table name it referred to was 'Live Nude Cats'. Obviously this needed to be researched a bit more, as something very odd is occurring in our code. I recall a similar event a year ago; an offending error message occurred not with a cat, but with the reference to a pony. This representative became very upset as the result of scanning a particularly troublesome error message, but as soon as he looks down he’s going to be very sad about the pony pictured at the bottom of the error message. Why would one of the developers put in a picture like that, on an error message. What the heck was occurring in the development group? We have all stuck bogus code, names, even pictures into our applications on a lark. But these things should have been pulled out way before the end product made it to the client. For shame.
I march down to the bullpen, where the developers hang out, and find them split down the middle, yelling at each other. This is also not atypical of this group. Today's topic was Star Wars, and I have no idea what the subject was, but as soon as I heard one of them scream out 'Just ask George “Let’s Have Padme Die Of A Broken Heart Instead Of Anakin Crushing Her To Death” Lucas', I lost it. I screamed at the top of my lungs to get all their attention. Nothing seemed to phase them. They continued on their tirade of injustices perceived by fictional characters in a story that seems to have struck a chord with so many to cause them to vehemently argue one side or another. I like the movies, I enjoyed being entertained, I enjoyed showing them to my children, but that is not the point here. Having encountered this fanaticism before from this group, I realized that the only way I could gain any attention whatsoever was by simply using some magical tool, library, or bong. I was fresh out of library, but happened to have a bong that was also some magical tool.
I used the magical device to cause a trance to overcome the developers, lulling them into a sense of purpose beyond the realm of Star Wars, and back to a more humble reality. Back the the faulty error message that someone had slipped into our application. After explaining what had occurred, getting some help from the developers as to where we could possibly look to solve the issue (although none of them fessed up to inserting the bogus code and picture into the product), I realized that this was now my task. I would be spending the rest of the day on this issue, creating tickets, discovering what needed to be fixed and so on. Oh well, its just a Monday. I’ve started, so I’ll finish!
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