recalculating

 today was a DAY. i managed to get some annoying admin taken care of after mr smear left for school, and sort out an impending price hike from my mobile carrier, and try to help prepare gd for her day ahead with the cigarette bugs.

just before i left the apartment, i pulled the trigger on my PR, knowing that my bulgarian support team was on holiday and praying it wouldn't break anything.

i was still extremely anxious on my way to work, but i got in touch with my mentor and managed - through a bit of blathering - to explain the situation. he, positive as usual, assured me that i'm doing great. he asked if i've verbally abused anyone in the office, or physically abused anyone in the office, and said that as long as neither of those things have happened and that i'm doing my best to operate as professionally as possible, i can stop worrying about my misjudgment hurting my employer's reputation (and therefore my standing with my employer). and that besides, everyone must be fully aware that i'm doing damage control on a system that has been left in utter chaos due to bad management... just like everyone else's.

so that was really comforting, and although i still have leftover anxiety, it's worlds' less than it was.

i came in to find my deployment successful, which was another relief.

then i was asked by one of my client team's how long my contract is for, to which i replied, somewhat evasively, that i don't really know. on the one hand, i'm learning a hell of a lot of what i'm supposed to be learning. and it's a great place to hone my craft with (somewhat) less risk. on the other hand, it's a really toxic situation. although apparently on par for the course, these days.

i discussed yesterday's achievement of disabling all of the garbage that was unknowingly being injected into each and every prompt with a couple of people, two of them heavy, experienced users of AI. not only was i pleasantly surprised by their finding my personal skill-sharing strategy intriguing, but they'd never known about the extra weight either and one of them asked me if i wouldn't mind giving a short talk to the group about it 😅

i spent some time crafting a message asking for help with the new data pipelines, got called in to consult on a language identification problem and was surprised to find myself effectively running the meeting, and then i left the office to return home for lunch, stopping by the supermarket on the way home and finding precisely the kinds of plastic containers i was hoping to pick up for gd, who was apparently up to her elbows in cigarette beetles.

i believe i have a handle on their life cycle, now. it looks like if we manage to, erm, contain the present situation, we should be able to put a proper stop to the next potential generation. unfortunately, gd's had to throw out an enormous amount of very expensive food, which is thoroughly distressing.

i think i may have mentioned that money's a little tight right now...

after lunch, i returned to the office and began redesigning the monitoring dashboard. i would spend most of the next four hours troubleshooting the results, half of that time refining my agents' troubleshooting and self-improvement skills. while the improvements after yesterday's cleanup were palpable, by the final stages i just wanted to tell the AI "don't be an asshole" even though i knew that that probably wouldn't be constructive :/

i also finally delivered that report that had been causing me so much trouble - once the product guy gave me the green light this morning, it took about six hours to run...

i received an unusually helpful answer to my plea for help, from a couple of guys i've worked alongside before. one of them was in the office and introduced me to the two people who can actually help me, who very luckily are also in our office. and now i know that the work i've been planning to do - AI-guided, of course - has been entirely wrong 🤢

once my dashboard was looking good, i made my way home, dropping off my bag and picking up my child (essentially rescuing him from the trauma of experiencing gd freaking out over the nuisance beetles all afternoon) and heading to the container store. we bought a bunch of stuff - it's a little more expensive than the supermarket, and not quite as high quality, but it was a bunch of different shapes that we needed - carried everything back home and then continued on to the supermarket again, picking up a bunch more containers there.

we got home in time for a take-out dinner (gd was in no position or mood to cook), watched casual geographic and learned about gay giraffes, which was awkward.

we chatted with my mom, but mr smear brought the vibe down considerably when he became uncooperative at shower time. then, to make matters worse, he decided he needed to toilet. for almost an hour. it was very late by the time he finally had showered and brushed his teeth and gotten in to bed. i don't have any idea where we're supposed to get the patience from.

it's been a day. i think i'm probably going to go to bed soon. i'm expecting to sleep a bit better, he said out loud and then instantly regretted it.