Meanwhile at work I've been settling in somewhat. It appears I'm impressing people with my abilities at reading a bug and fixing it and logging what I changed to fix things. I'm a little shaky and slow on most things, but I'm getting there in time. Wednesday I had a gangbusters day of knocking out eight of the 17 listed pressing issues, although like four of them amounted to copy-editing changes. Literally in some cases; two of them were rewording the items on web pages.
I'm also picking up on gossip about the guy I replaced. Not from seeking it out, just from being quiet and listening when other people talk about him. I had got the sense he was in over his head. If nothing else some things like where he had this huge rickety tower of if/else statements where a switch would do suggest he at least had to code faster than he could think, always a bad state of affairs.
But there's also this sense that he was a real problem to deal with. A lot of people have, unprompted, offered that he was a jerk. A thing I overheard while at work Wednesday left me flabbergasted. My boss and my co-worker spent much of the afternoon with Former Guy's old work laptop, trying to get access to it and get his last data off. Why was this challenging? Because when he got admin permission for his laptop --- as all we developers do --- he removed the boss and everyone else's admin permissions. I couldn't imagine doing that, not for the work laptop, and as ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunny_hugger said, that alone seems like a firing offense.
Still, it's reassuring to know that for all the troubles they were having with this guy, he still stuck around for six years. Does mean even if I have a poor day or week I should feel not too insecure about things.
We're now up to Silver Balls In The City, the post-Christmas pinball tournament, so please enjoy a lot of pictures that look like every pinball tournament pictures. I know I will!
Preparing for Silver Balls! bunny_hugger, in reindeer costume, signs someone in (see the charity entry fee there) while we try and flatten out the Batman Pinball poster that Stern was kind enough to donate.
There we go. Who wouldn't want to have that filling up more of their wallspace than you realize?
The trophies bunny_hugger made, for first, second, and third place. First place has two figures on it because it was originally some kind of partners trophy for some event.
Folks getting ready for the tournament, many of them playing warm-up games. There was a lot of crowd!
RED fixing the broken change machine right before things start. Since we couldn't put the games on free-play this was a very, very necessary thing. (There's a change machine upstairs but it is SUCH a prima donna.)
bunny_hugger delivering instructions to the assembled crowd.
Trivia: Charles Guiteau barraged the State Department with so many letters asking when he would be granted the consulship --- preferably the one in Paris --- he believed himself entitled to that the chief clerk instructed the messengers to stop forwarding his notes, the better to shield James G Blaine, Secretary of State for President Garfield. Source: Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President, Candice Millard.
Currently Reading: A History of The World's Airlines, R E G Davies.
