I made the music, thought that was mine

[austin_dern]

And now for news from my modestly ridiculous job. It's been odd going over two months without being able to work on the project for which I was originally hired. It makes this job stranger than the temp job I had in the mid-90s where I did the work of a defective Perl script. But the process of my coming in, being told that I might have something to do, and then not getting anything to do might be at a partial break. Maybe.

Earlier this week I was supposed to go to a meeting -- off-site, even -- with the people for whom this project was supposed to be done. Unfortunately, that day was, unknown to anyone else, the same day as my court appearance for the ticket I got from my traffic accident (I'll blather about that in time), so I had to miss it. News that I would have this meeting came late, by way of a phone call from the company owner to my brother (I gave him my brother's home phone number as a contact number, since he never uses the home phone for anything, and thus any messages have an immediately obvious context), who then called me with the news. My brother reached my father, at least, who then told me. My father, after relaying the message to me, later told my mother that my employer had called my brother with a message for me. This confused her since there didn't seem to be any role for her in this message chain. We still don't know why it was brought up to her.

But the meeting went ahead without me and afterwards I received -- at long last! -- two databases that I could use and -- finally! -- a reasonably clear idea of what the project was to be. The catch is that the database with the information that's to be outputted is indexed by unique identification numbers, while the database with the names of people involved -- which would be input -- doesn't seem to have anything remotely like these identification numbers in it, so there's no way of connecting one database to the other. I'm told they're going to look into this and have something for me in a couple days. Then maybe I can get to work.

Trivia: The Moon's shadow across the United States in the Great Solar Eclipse of 29 July 1878 was 116 miles wide, with three minutes of totality. Source: In Search of Planet Vulcan, Richard Baum, William Sheehan.

Currently Reading: The Ancient Engineers, L Sprague de Camp. The Great Wall of China claimed to be visible from the Moon? Honestly, Sprague, you should know better than that.

Comments

[terminotaur.livejournal.com]

On an off-topic note, I tried to send you an E-mail regarding the dragon picture thingie, but it was bounced back by your e-mail service. Is there another address I can contact you at? I have a quick question.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Uh ... hm. That's curious. I've sent you an e-mail with the three or so best addresses to contact me; at least one of them ought to work.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Well, if you have to bring your mother into the conversational chain, next the cats will be there, and then where will it end?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Most likely it'll end with the younger cat examining the shower because she's really fascinated by the water being around.