Real Kato Blog: Hardly Working

An article about my workday.

When people ask me what I do for a living, I reluctantly tell them that I'm a software engineer. The usual response to that is a long pause, followed by the question: "Do you like it?" Because, see, it's not an interesting job and no one has any idea how to make conversation about it, except maybe to say "I have a computer at home, and sometimes I get on the Internets."

So I'm going to write a little bit about my job. I don't know how much I can write about my actual workday, because there's the whole Dooce thing to worry about. But maybe I can at least share a few mundane things.

A lot of what I do is not terribly interesting. I mean, I have a fairly important position in my company, but the high-falutin' stuff is mixed with some, er, low-falutin' stuff too. For example, a frequent task I have is called "merging". Say you have some computer code like this:

  print("hello world");
  print("this is high-falutin' stuff");

Now say Person A makes changes to the code so it looks like this:

  print("hello world");
  print("this is monkey-ass work");

And at the same time, Person B makes changes to the same code so it looks like this:

  print("hello Internets");
  print("this is high-falutin' stuff");

So sometimes, my job is to merge the different changes from Person A and Person B, so the final result is this:

  print("hello Internets");
  print("this is monkey-ass work");

Isn't that exciting? This task consumes about 50% of my time, because there are dozens of people working on things, and thousands of changes occurring every day. I used to have someone working for me who did most of this, but he got laid off. So now the pleasure is all mine.

Last October my boss asked us to send an e-mail outlining what we would be working on for the next several weeks. My response was:

  Oct 25 - Oct 29: Monkey Work
  Nov 01 - Nov 05: Monkey Work
  Nov 08 - Nov 12: Monkey Work
  Nov 15 - Nov 19: Monkey Work
  Nov 22 - Nov 26: Monkey Work and Eating Turkey
  Nov 29 - Dec 03: Monkey Work

I got a response telling me I needed to improve my "attitude".

Another large part of my day is spent drinking diet sodas.

That's the collection of cans on my desk from this week. In front there is my Happy Fun Ball, which is sometimes the only smiling face I see all day. The empty cans tend to accumulate on my desk because it's at least a fifteen-second walk to the recycling bin, and I can't spare that much valuable merging time to go can-dumping. So today as I was taking this picture, it occurred to me that I'm telling the world I work with GARBAGE on my desk. Next thing you know, I'll have fifty cats roaming around my cubicle.

The rest of my day, I'm actually doing Important Work... as long as I can tune out the conversations of my co-workers. Don't get me wrong, they're all really nice people, but in their conversations they tend to throw out a lot of factual errors; for me and my OCD, that's just torture. I want to stand up and correct them, saying "No, aspartame doesn't actually cause lupus", but I resist the urge. I figure it's best not to get involved. I don't want to be the Cliff Clavin of the office, starting all my sentences with "Well, ah, ACTUALLY..."

Oh, I do sneak in a little blog-reading during the day, while I'm waiting for my slow-ass computer to finish something. I can usually count on Monocerdo to post something around lunchtime. That usually keeps the DTs away until I get home.

Permalink 3 Comment

Posted by Ken in: life

Comments

Comment #1 from Jenn (Guest)
2005 Apr 23 - 12:40 am : #

Oh, the things I miss by working from home...

Comment #2 from Scott H (Guest)
2005 Apr 23 - 1:30 am : #

Just remember a few Happy Fun ball rules:

Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.

If Happy Fun Ball begins to smoke, get away immediately. Seek shelter and cover head.

Ingredients of Happy Fun Ball include an unknown glowing substance which fell to Earth, presumably from outer space.

Comment #3 from Tim (Guest)
2005 Apr 23 - 9:56 am : #

You forgot to mention how great some of your co-workers are.

I mean... there has got to be at least one who is a BLAST to be around. Really funny, full of insightful commentary, clever, and smart.

Maybe one who stops by 6 or 7 times a day to chat?

No? I didn't think so.

Comments are closed for this post.

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