a week to reflect - i

let's see if i have what it takes to summarize this past week. it's been a bit nuts.

---work:

when the network goes down i become my own email.

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ceh caught me when already really tired and droned on and on about things that don't interest me to the point where my vision blurred and i was struggling to stifle my yawns. all i wanted to say was "i don't actually care, can we just finish with the work?" but he's a bit nuts and i didn't want to upset him. the cto already complained about walking past his cubicle and finding him repeatedly and violently slamming his keyboard on the desk...

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we have a new front-end developer who lacks in experience and education but makes up for it with enthusiasm. unfortunately, that cost me a good hour or so trying to explain how svn works. it was emotional.

during happy hour yesterday we were playing lunch money and really enjoying it. one of darn's developers asked for suggestions when playing a "humiliation" card. we'd gone with pantsing and a wet-willy before, the last thing we were expecting was for the new guy (creeper) to ask "how about fingering his asshole? that'd be pretty humiliating!"

we were all stunned. he's tying with ceh on inappropriate things to say to co-workers.

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last week we said goodbye to our interns and one of our star players; i handled the exit interviews. it's nice to close a term on a positive note in both directions!

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at one point during the week i needed to get stuff done and was told to work from home to avoid distractions. unfortunately, that meant leaving darn in charge and that's a recipe for disaster. what actually happened, though, was that i spent hours at home trying to decipher one of darn's developers' code (he's a great coder, but not into readability) while unable to use our software or development tools because mac.

i have been suffering my macbook since february and i can't believe i've lasted this long. i returned to work, interrupted darn sharing his opinions on a technical issue he wasn't familiar with, and spent a few hours configuring a new windows machine. i'm now off mac, all that's left to do is wipe it properly and return it to the company. the new machine has shitty battery life and i'll miss mac's touchpad, but otherwise it's perfect and lets me get shit done!

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overall this past week has been unbelievably frustrating and demotivating. darn has not only been a right prick (i've actually felt like hitting him on more than one occasion) but he's been sidestepping me and keeping me out of the loop. he and the two developers megaman brought in have done a bang-up job of forming their own private team. moonlighter and the cto are still into secrecy and merging surprises into our codebase. i don't have the energy to deal with this kind of shit.

newk'd has been disappointing of late, considering that we're friendly out of the office i felt bad dumping on him when he didn't perform. having said that, it's not like he's not trying and there are some things he does very well. when i told darn to get him to do one of those things, darn responded with "he's not credible". not only was that absolute bullshit, he said it in front of a new intern and that's not cool at all.

during crunch, there were days when i was in the office for more than eleven hours. in order to train and spend time with scrapper i was going in early, and there were a couple of late nights. since the arrival of darn and the institution of arbitrary deadlines i've found myself entirely uninterested in investing more hours in the office. it's actually become quite depressing. yesterday we demonstrated our progress and everyone was very excited, but leaving the office i found myself thinking about how disconnected i feel and wondering how much i've actually contributed to the current project. the hours i spent on development were mostly spent struggling with the environment and not actually coding, and most of my input has been in advising others or working on the tool chain. darn's developers are good even if they're not amazing, and they're at least getting shit done.

not only is this all not particularly fulfilling, but it doesn't amount to much when quantifying my involvement in the project. i'm not satisfied at all.

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