They bake cakes at every opportunity. Children In Need. Red Nose Day. International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Bring Your Teddy To Work Day…

No wonder the lift’s broken.

They also have this tradition that you’re supposed to bring cakes in if it’s your birthday, or you have a kid, or your kid has a birthday, or your goldfish. If you don’t want to tell people how old you are and you don’t have kids or pets you’re allowed to bring cake in for other notable events, so last week we had doughnuts and pasties (interesting combo) because somebody’s hoover was still going strong after five years.*

If you don’t have any other excuse, you can just bring cake in for the sake of it.  The Shoeshy Fingercracker brought some of his home baking in last week, and looked mortified that I didn’t feel like filling my face with baclava at 9am. Jesus, what did he expect? I can just about stomach something sickly-sweet by lunchtime. I hadn’t even managed to digest the latest round of corporate spam (“Quality in 360 Degrees = Operational Excellence”, whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean), and my early-morning wakeup coffee was still on it’s way down my neck.

So that’s my workplace – feeding time at the hippo pool.

* (obviously isn’t a Dyson, then).

The bruises from SLF have just about gone now, apart from the huge yellow one still on my right tit where I bounced off a particularly bony elbow to the sounds of the fast bit at the end of Doesn’t Make It All Right. Classic stuff – thought I’d grown out of all that (out of sheer medical necessity, if nothing else), but it seems that doing a couple of half marathons (sigh, yes, I’m doing the one in March) means I don’t need to stop for emergency oxygen after five minutes of moshing any more.

Sorted.

There might be something in that old “music soothes a savage breast” thing after all – I’ve not been feeling particularly anti-work recently (hence the lack of posts?). In a unexpected but not unwelcome twist of corporate fate I’ve been shovelled onto a different dungheap, which means that I no longer sit within earshot of the Wooden Spoon’s babbling stream of meaningless management twaddle. I’m almost missing it, as I’ve less things to feel indignant about.

The new dungheap isn’t ideal, of course.

My immediate neighbour spends a lot of time trying to tell endless funny (to him, at least) stories using as many words from the OED as possible, which means that he can squeeze two in a day – one just after the morning scrum (“That reminds me of the time…”), which ends just before lunchtime, and the other just after lunchtime (“I had a prawn cocktail sandwich from Boots today. That reminds me of the time when…”), which is usually still ongoing when I make a run for it at 5:30.

I’ve slowly worked out that the best way to avoid being on the receiving end is to arrive at work with headphones in ears and only remove them for the scrum. As soon as the boss says “ok, thanks” they’re back in and my head is nodding ferociously in a I’m-utterly-into-this-and-I-can’t-hear-you fashion, even if there’s nothing actually playing.

Makes for itchy ears though, so sometimes I have to chance it and unplug myself for a few minutes. In those few minutes he’s usually cracked his knuckles very loudly at least five times. No idea if he does this throughout the day, as the headphones filter it out even if there’s no music on. I guess he won’t be playing the piano in his seventies though.

Unfortunately they can’t filter out his smelly feet. He takes his shoes off and sits there wiggling his socks at us for most of the day.

I think I must be showing signs of strain already. The guys on the other side spend most of the day typing rapidly and sniggering. My guess is that they’re on Microsoft Communicator and chuckling over the new guy’s discomfort. Either that or they’re even nerdier and more socially inept than they seem, and they can only communicate with each other via key presses and snorts despite the fact that they sit on either side of the same partition.

So, to summarise the last few weeks – bosswaffle makes way for smelly feet, schoolboy sniggering, and fear of being entertained.

Hmmm.

Credibility, already badly dented by attire, utterly destroyed in one sentence. Impressive.

I heard that the Apple store in town is almost buried under piles of Cox and Granny Smiths (and a flower or 10,000), so I didn’t bother trying to get my dodgy MacBook screen repaired today.

What’s going on? The world is less one rich person (I assume the extra £75bn that the B of E just printed doesn’t end up in one pocket), so why this vomitworthy Lady Di Syndrome?

Get some perspective, people – he didn’t invent our way of life – he nicked the GUI from Xerox, stiffed his mate Wozniak, nearly axed the team that gave us Buzz Lightyear, and persuaded me to buy a mobile phone (not the iPhone 4 though, as I’m a weird left hander and the aerial’s got something against me).

That last one is actually quite impressive, I’ve never been one for phones. In fact, if I could delete the phone app and just have texting the iPhone would be ideal. But as it stands I still like it – it’s ideal for buzzword bingo in boring meetings, and I’m even writing this fascinating post on it.

But really, none of this is up there with penicillin, is it? He was a bloke who worked out how to make lots of money by selling us cool fun stuff that we don’t really need, that’s it.

Thought so.

The comments in the code defy description. Sure, the words were English(ish) on the surface, but any meaning was buried (and remains to this day) deep within the misfiring synapses of the stressed-out, burnt-out graddie who wrote them.

The code was written six months ago, so naturally the perpetrator has long since been head hunted and is now burning out even more brightly in another Bangalore sweatshop. Good luck to him/her.

In the meantime, I’m left trying to figure out what the hell s/he was thinking. So naturally after about 10 minutes I got bored and started wondering about how difficult it must be for somebody who doesn’t speak English as their first language to use the if-else/do-while constructs of a programming language.

Wouldn’t it be easier for them to marshal their addled thoughts if they could use their own grammar? Their own set of meaningful function names?

Enter Wikipedia.

Turns out that at least one bright spark in Iceland had the same idea back in the 80s, and “Fjoelnir” was born.

What does this do, I wonder?

    bottles ->
        stef(;n)
        stofn
            val n úr
            kostur 0 þá
                skrifastreng(;"no more bottles"),
            kostur 1 þá
                skrifastreng(;"1 bottle of beer"),
            annars
                skrifa(;n),
                skrifastreng(;" bottles of beer"),
            vallok
        stofnlok

See what I mean? I can see that it’s a switch statement, but it hurts my head. No wonder most of the code coming out of India is crap – not only do they have to deal with English in the programming language itself but they’re increasingly faced with design patterns* that most native English speakers find hard to internalise.

Wouldn’t surprise me if the programming languages of the future are based in Esperanto. Or Latin. Luckily I won’t be around to see it.

* or “knitting patterns”, as I like to call them when trying to make a point to an imagination-challenged colleague

NOW WITH 25% EXTRA*

The * is theirs, for once, so being the ever-cynical tw@ that I am I bought the packet to see what the * meant, as (at the moment) even a bunch of mnygrbbrrs like Frito-Lay (aka Pepsico) have to own up somewhere if they’re trying to pull a fast one.

Turns out that the * meant “compared to previous 16.4g packs”

Ok.

Problem 1: our lardmachine used to sell 20g packs of Quavers until this New Generous Offer.

Problem 2: unless I’m rubbish at maths (which I am, but I don’t think I’m *this* rubbish), the difference in weight is actually 18%. Which means the “extra 25%” must apply to something else.

I wonder…

In those odd momentary* lapses of concentration at work I occasionally find myself in need of something to stimulate what’s left of the pickled walnut in my skull. This week I’ve been trying to work out how to make a Whatnot move along a line, for reasons I won’t bore you with until it’s on the AppStore and in need of charitypurchasing.

Imagine my amazement when I tried out the latest scribblings (above) on the laptop at lunchtime and THEY ONLY WENT AND WORKED, DIDN’T THEY.

Erm. Wow. Exciting, and yet somehow frustrating, as I now have to face up to an afternoon of SQL because I’ve run out of interesting things to do.

* some moments have been known to last for hours, proving yet again that time is indeed relative

It’ll be a while until the Wooden Spoon works out what’s happened, of course, as there are far too many pseudofires for him to fight at the moment. Staff numbers are way down as everyone seems to be getting a bite of this year’s training budget (whether they need/requested it or not). Turns out that Uberboss realised recently that none of the training budget had been used up for the year, and that if it wasn’t used up soon he’d not be allocated any for the next financial year.

Result: lots of people away “learning” irrelevant stuff at the same time, leaving their projects in crisis and their managers running about looking pale but important (yet failing to solve anything of consequence).

Now, tell me again what “to manage” means? My dictionary says “to regulate and administer”.

Fair enough, I suppose there’s nothing in that definition that presupposes “competence”. I guess it *is* possible to regulate badly and administer ineffectually, but I doubt even Success Factors would let that sort of behaviour ride for long. Perhaps I’m just being an idealist again, although I thought I’d finally woken up to the fact that it’s idealism that leads to a constant state of disillusionment.

No matter. I’m busy doing nothing much for The Man while blissing out to The Humans and dreaming of drum kits.

Oh yeah, and we had a scrum meeting for the first time in ages this morning. Can’t remember what happened in it. So everything’s fine in paradise.