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 Issue
3
California Dreaming turns to Southampton Nightmare for Senior Developer Angie
Baxter, as she heads off to the Depot From Hell. Could this be the last straw?
Monday
Summer’s over, we’re all back from our hols and development is about to re-start
in earnest. The holidays aren’t over yet, though, for the lucky person who gets sent
to Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference in San Diego, California.
Denny’s banned because he went to Nice (and bored us all stupid afterwards), and
competition is fierce among the rest of us. Mike’s comment that “he or she will
have to write a conference report” was encouraging, but despite that, and my Highly
Relevant OLE Skills (as I now call them), Carl is the obvious choice. Sadly not in the
running is Liam, who’s gone back to the AS400 team, although he’s still
“available for similar emergencies”. At least Carl and Denny have stopped
calling him my ‘boyfriend’, which was becoming a serious embarrassment for both
of us. What’s the weather like in California at this time of year?
Tuesday
A Drivers Allowances progress meeting, my favourite way to spend a morning (not!). One
small mercy is that Dave Hayes isn’t there to stick the knife in, although his boss,
Bill Hammond is, which puts Mike, Kevin and me on edge. Hammond’s a genuine Big
Cheese (Transport Operations Director, seat on the Board), but he’s actually quite
nice. On the plus side he seems positive about having a new DA system, and about IT in
general. On the minus side he seems to think that we’re making a mess of it, and that
doing it as a component-based Windows application was a bad idea from the start. I sense
Brian Wood’s influence behind this, as do the others, and I’m beginning to see
why there’s such mistrust between the AS400 and Desktop teams. The overall
outcome’s fairly good though, so we dash out for a rare lunchtime celebration at La
Mexicana down the road.
Wednesday
Disappointment. Carl’s got the San Diego trip, and flies out on Saturday. At least
he’s more laid-back about it than Denny was, declaring proudly that he doesn’t
know anyone from Redmond, and prefers New England to the arid Southwest anyway. The arid
Southwest would have suited me just fine, but I swallow my jealousy and congratulate him.
In consolation, Mike promises me that my turn will come, and points out that with DA
system tests starting next week, there’s no way I could have gone. That’s true,
although it doesn’t make me any fonder of the DA system, or of Dave Hayes, who, to my
horror, has wangled himself in as user rep on the tests. If I’m forced to go to his
depot in Southampton again, my misery will be complete. If anyone there calls me
‘sweetheart’ again, I won’t be responsible for my actions.
Thursday
Carl collars me for a chat about San Diego, telling me that, among other things, he’s
been told to expect announcements on COM 3.0, the new Hydra ultra-thin client and IE4.0,
and asking me what I think. I’m quite flattered, until I realise that he’s
actually picking my brains to fill the gaps in his own knowledge. I could be upset by
this, given that I’m quite up on all this stuff, but I’ve been around long
enough to know that pecking order beats skills audit every time, so I give him what I
know. He’s so grateful (“thanks Ange, you’ve saved my life”) that I
start wondering if he knows anything about browsers and Dynamic HTML at all, and consider
a last-minute approach to Mike. Knowing what that would do to future working relations,
though, I forget it and return to DA test planning.
Friday
My misery is complete. Back at home, Carl is packing his Ray-Bans ready for the
Californian sun. I, meanwhile, am in rain-lashed Southampton setting up for next
week’s DA tests. I’ve been up since five, Hayes is being his usual obnoxious
self, and the clapped-out, under-specced PC I’m using hasn’t got enough disk
space for my software. It should, I realise now, be me on that plane tomorrow, by virtue
of the hard work I’ve put in studying White Papers on everything from DCOM to Active
Server Pages. Instead it’s Carl, just because he’s been there longer - and, I
suspect, because he’s a man. A storeman arrives with a mug of revolting brown liquid,
says “coffee, sweetheart?”, and asks me what I’m doing at lunchtime. I
consider mindless violence, but settle for a career change instead. If this is all they
think of me, they can have my resignation, the minute I get back to civilisation.
Top of the page
Issue 3 - Contents
< Previous Angie -- Next
Angie >
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Issue 1
Issue 2
Issue 3
Issue 4
Issue 5
Issue 6
Issue 7
Issue 8
Issue 9
Issue 10
Issue 11
Issue 12
Issue 13
Issue 14
Issue 15
Issue 16
Issue 17
Issue 18
Issue 19
Issue 20
Issue 21
Issue 22
Issue 23
Issue 24
Issue 25
Issue 26
Issue 27
Issue 28
Issue 29
Issue 30
Issue 31
Issue 32
Issue 33
Issue 34
Issue 35
Issue 36
Issue 37
And the adventure continues at the HardCopy web site! More |