cheat day

 i did *not* lose weight today.

mr smear woke up worse than he was yesterday, so he stayed home. i began my day on the balcony, cleaning up someone's cigarette ash (apparently it's the woman above us, she's promised to be more careful) and trying to read knights of sidonia, which seems cool but i struggled to make sense of what was going on, or care.

i've just read through some reviews, and i'm not interested in giving it more of a chance than i already have.

i hopped on a bus to herzeliyah, walked through my mom's favorite mall (most of the stores were closed, but in general it looks very much the same as it always did), then past the country club and the school i once re-took linear algebra in (and still failed to understand very much), and then to the company status.

"breakfast" was pretty good, pizza and a too-hot grilled chilli and a bunch of nice salads. heavy discussions about south africa, the state of the industry, and then my previous employer.

then we were given a motivational talk by omri rozenblit, which was really powerful, and then we had our status, which was... unsurprising, which is more than desirable. it's comforting to know and have known what's going on, and we got some clarity into how we're adapting to the rapidly-changing market situation.

i returned home, after waiting for a while in the sun, herzeliyah style, and stopped for a hearty leftover lunch. then i got mr smear to draw on two stickers for my work laptop, then i walked to the office.

my first meeting was with the guy who wanted to hire me at the beginning of last year, and it was pleasant, though i did make it a little awkward. the second meeting was with my line manager, and aside from it being a fun talk, i caught him off-guard when i spoke about conway's law and i enjoyed seeing his gears start turning.

aside from those talks, i had two meetings with a couple of my teammates, both of which gave me insight into what we're doing and one of which gave me some really cool ideas of how we could operate financial analysis in a similar way to how we write code.

i didn't need to snack so much in between all of those...

the end of the day was packing up our work stations for next week's move, my manager needed to remind me that this weekend is rosh hashana and that we won't be seeing each other in person until tuesday :P

i rushed home - stressed about tomorrow's acupuncture session in my calendar that turned out to be non-existent - to get onto a webinar about the metro works that are going to be starting in the next few months. it was a looooooong talk (i played a lot of minesweeper games) but with a lot of encouraging aspects, not least of which being how clearly the people responsible for public transport in this region understand their mission.

i coerced mr smear into giving star fluxx a chance, and we had fun, and then we started watching an episode of the wonder years which involved animal cruelty so we had to stop halfway, and mr smear and i watched an excellent talk on the history of sumeria while i not only cleared my very large plate of food, but also the rest of the bag of liquorice allsorts along with a few blocks of chocolate 🙄

...

dark matter upsets me. phenomenal writing, great concept, but i just can't deal with that level of darkness right now.

the first day of fall

 things that upset me in the middle of the night: looking at my phone's notifications, and then finding myself scrolling on instagram, and coming across these two self-hating jews discussing the ugliness of a rigged system that is everything anti-capitalists claim capitalism is: the opposite of a free market.

...

i'm regretting taking a puff before bed last night, partially because i'm feeling totally exhausted right now and it's almost 8pm and i'm drinking a fourth cup of coffee in order to be able to go rollerblading, partially because i passed in and out of conciousness earlier while listening to my new client's all-hands and i realized at some point that i'm not breathing with my whole lungs and when i do, it feels... smoky. like, tight and sticky.

i hope i don't regret this coffee.

mr smear surprised us by getting up and being ready on time for school, and then away he went. i took care of a bunch of first-of-the-month admin, and then suddenly it was time to go to work.

overall, i'm really impressed. the offices feel good, everyone i met seems relaxed and organized, even though they all described the work as anything but. during my first daily with the team mr smear called me, twice, while i was introducing myself - turned out he was worried that he couldn't find his meds, when he finished taking them yesterday already 🙄

i spent most of my day setting up my new machine and accounts and beginning the onboarding process, and talking to people, and i was *really* surprised to learn that my client offers catered lunches that include vegan options that are pretty darned good.

in the all-hands, i was literally amazed to hear them discussion employee retention and training, and making their approach very clear, and their approach is stellar. to go from a company continually laying off good workers to one making a point of developing theirs is quite a relief!

i guess mr smear and i shouldn't have eaten when i got home, because we also ate at dinner time and we both stuffed ourselves on gd's sushi while watching an episode of the simpsons that irritated me because its premise revolved around everyone in town being a total moron.

yes, yes, i know.

anyway, here we are. mr smear apparently had a great day at school, i'm going to at least try to go rollerblading tonight, and gd seems to be doing alright herself, so... 🤷‍♂️

false start

yesterday was NOT the big day i was anticipating! it was a super weird day, to be honest. when i finally got up (i originally woke up feeling totally broken, so i slept on the couch for a while), i discovered that my new client had sent me a message the night before informing me that i wouldn't be able to go into the office.

later i learned that this is because they forgot to send me an NDA in time. so now that everyone's signed off on it, apparently i'll be able to go into the client's office tomorrow. maybe.

in the meanwhile, i submitted my spec repo article to my employer's publication and sent the whole company an email, realizing immediately after the window to "undo" the send that the subject of the email made it seem like i was challenging the project our boss has been championing... oops.

that set the ball in motion for two things: first, establishing that i'd be spending my work day trying to get on board with the boss's project, and second, that i would go into our office to try and catch the boss for a face-to-face to assure him that my project supports his rather than undermines it.

i jumped on a bus, listening to transformed - it's got a lot to offer, but i think i'd have benefitted just as much from skimming one of the many product operating model web pages - and eventually arrived at the office to find it empty and locked.

fuck.

so i immediately caught another bus home, and said goodbye to that hour and a half of my life.

i spent the afternoon jumping between the boss's project and mr smear's horror game, eventually getting ahead with both, and then took mr smear to the supermarket to try and spend as much of my lunch allowance as possible before it resets at the end of the month.

otherwise, we opened cthulhu fluxx and enjoyed a fun game before dinner, we watched the second episode of fullmetal alchemist: brotherhood, and the rest of the evening was quite boring. we all went to bed relatively early, although mr smear didn't actually fall asleep until something like 1am.

i woke up this morning after a relatively good night's sleep, looked out into a world that didn't make sense - it was cloudy and rainy in tel aviv on this last day of august - was reminded by gd that i have a kindle (i had to explain squatting to mr smear so that i could call him a squatter) and read some more of stranger in a strange land, and was very excited to receive vocal support for my spec repo initiative from my boss and for them to have accepted my article into our publication.

now i've explained to mr smear that today is get-ready-for-the-first-day-of-school day, and i'm about to have breakfast, and then head to our office to see what the day brings.

rituals

 it's just after 6.30am, i'm sitting on the balcony with a clay-colored mug full of turkish coffee, having just woken up and performed the ritual brush gum guard - brush teeth - open windows - wipe down chairs and table, it's a beautiful morning and in about an hour i'm going to be off to my second acupuncture session.

i had a puff last night, which helped, but it didn't stop me from waking up almost an hour ago and being unable to get back to sleep. i'm still feeling a bit tired, but overall not bad, and i think the biggest thing i'm conscious of right now is how i hold my left shoulder. years ago (back in south africa) i realized that my left shoulder's always lower than my right, and when i remember and i make an effort to bring it forward my neck hurts less. but holding it forward is conscious effort, and if i get too comfortable and forget then i go right back to where i started...

i noticed last night that my mattress dips deeply in the middle. i don't know if this is good for me or not.

...

huh, i just noticed: someone put the word ritual in spirituality.

...

i started yesterday with doomsday clock, which so far isn't bad, but... it's not watchmen. and it's weird, in a not-good way. it's not bad, though, as i said, so i'm going to keep going and hope to not be disappointed.

i've been listening to marty cagan's transformed, at high speed and with skipping, and it's got enough interesting stuff in it to make it worthwhile. i think i'd prefer a summary, though. i mean, a book on this stuff seems a bit much.

the work day involved a lot of waiting (PR frustration on my second-to-last day!) but the results were worth it - five months down the line, a ridiculous number of lessons learned, and the "new" analytics data is being delivered and rendered almost exactly like the "old" data, but via a completely different technology stack. it's arguably better, definitely cheaper, and i've managed to overcome insane obstacles (mostly self-inflicted by the organization) and deliver just before my last day.

there is absolutely no way i'd have been able to do this without AI. this was a massive up-skill with big lessons in corporate engineering bureaucracy, and i'm really, really glad that i'm delivering the solution with a repo full of handover documentation and useful scripts for testing and generating reports. working with a project repo turned out to be one of the most important things i did.

...

on my way out the building, i chatted with two of the guys about a sensitive topic: the guy who disappeared almost two months ago (though it feels like only a few weeks) was fired mere days after his wedding. which reminded me of an incident a couple of years ago when a coworker was fired right after his wedding, and though i can't find my post about the actual layoffs (which is weird) i made sure to talk about my feelings on the matter.

i only realized that i'd essentially bad-mouthed my client after i'd described the behavior as cruel, and impossible not to take personally whether it's personal or not 😫

having walked, rollerbladed and then barely slept the night before, i was too tired to do anything physical when i got home. in any event, i came home right in time for a big sushi dinner and the wonder years, and after the bedtime ritual we sat down to finish crocodile dundee.

*SPOILERS* we were all upset by sue's shenanigans, but also puzzled by the question of "why in hell would either of them think that taking mick to new york would be a good idea?". we see him being led through the city and put on display in the rudest, most disrespectful way... but then i had a revelation: it's the australians who've made the movie, which means that the movie is actually as case of the australians treating the americans like weird creatures in a zoo, and our mick's as much the curious visitor as he is the curiosity. *END SPOILERS*

and then it was bedtime. now i'm off to my acupuncture appointment, and then it's on to my very last day with the client i've been working with for the past eight months.

official

 i didn't take a puff on sunday night, but i slept pretty well nonetheless. i started my day completing my favorite thing is monsters volume ii.

the artwork is no less phenomenal than the first volume, but overall it just isn't as satisfying, none of the elements that were "wrapped up" make much sense, and there are a bunch of events that were more focused on being anachronistically inclusive and less on the actual characters and story.

it's full of wonderful creations and interesting moments, though, and ultimately I enjoyed it a lot.

...

a significant chunk of my morning and evening were spent worrying about finances. we're barely scraping through this month, and as a result of gd's panic (and her refusal to use cheap, effective but gross solutions) we've spent an enormous amount of next month's money on lice treatments that may or may not work.

it's not clear right now if we're done with this super-lice saga yet. we've established a protocol that we're going to stick to, wartime or peacetime, and we're going to hope for the best.

...

i started listening to the audible* audiobook of marty cagan's transformed yesterday on my way to the office, at 1.5x speed and trying to skip as much fluff as possible. so far, my biggest takeaways are that transformations are whole-org things that require buy-in from everyone, and that *gasp* small, frequent release cycles and CI/CD need to happen together or they're meaningless.

* i think audible should consider selling lifetime memberships and then charging a small amount per audiobook, rather than huge amounts per audiobook on top of expensive memberships.

...

a truck just drove past and made a sound like a quiet sneeze.

...

my first encounter in the office was dx, and when i shared my thoughts on the map generator lessons from sunday night and what i thought might be the next step, he told me something encouraging: "i wouldn't be surprised if that's what everybody's doing in a few months from now". so now i'm motivating to figure out a good way to make a spec library so that i can tell my agents to insert a <pattern> in whatever project i'm working on and have it pre-loaded with everything it needs to ask instead of having to describe what i want from scratch.

...

i was sitting with my new manager, and we were discussing how we were both taken by surprise by yesterday's news that this is my last week, when my previous manager from bulgaria suddenly walked up and joined us - i've never met him in real life before! so that was cool.

the work day was mostly scrambling, because that's what this week is all about, to close up everything. and a break for an employer's group meeting. and another break to talk to one of the data guys after learning that a bunch of them have just been retrenched*. and, towards the evening, buying tickets to gd's and my first date night since my mom visited last year.

* i referenced the town hall here, but couldn't easily find my immediate thoughts on it, which were all around gratitude that this is my client and not my employer, because i would not have felt in the least bit safe.

i got home relatively late, and we watched the wonder years over gd's second delicious attempt at daal, and after catching up with and saying good night to my mom we did the shower and lice protocol thing and then settled down to watch about half of crocodile dundee together.

i was tired, which usually meant going to bed early and then waking up for hours in the middle of the night, so i took a puff, and actually slept well until morning.

shorter notice

 t'was a weird day. first and foremost, because i received a kickoff email from my employer informing me that i'll be starting work at my new client in a week, when on thursday my current client assured me that we still have a month together. i inquired, but i haven't yet got a response.

i reached out to my new client, who quickly responded positively and said that i have an advantage if i like shuwarma. i asked if vegan shuwarma counts, and i got silence... for just over an hour... before he responded with a "lol" followed by a "no" 😅

i struggled today with tiredness, motivation, and caffeine efficacy. and snacks. i've been putting on weight again. in spite of all that, i managed to put together two strategies for one of the projects i've been working on, and ran an investigation to confirm my troubling findings from thursday, and took the next step in the big project i've been working on for months and now need to bring to a close even faster than i thought.

once i was done with work, mr smear packed his borrowed books into his bag and we walked to the library, along the way stopping to marvel at all the glass skyscrapers that are effectively being built on sand. my favorite part of our walk was having to assure him that although his hormones will make him think and do stupid things when he hits puberty, all he has to do is be aware of them and try not to make things worse than they need to be :P

i did a little more work on the map generation for mr smear's project, then we had a good couple of math fluxx games before dinner, and then we watched a couple of episodes of the simpsons, and then - post shower and toothbrush time - i invested more time in the map generation.

i'm just now discovering just how much of a waste of time a generic map generator might prove to be, as i'm struggling to make it make sense for both mr smear's horror game and my tarot game. this might just be one of those expensive lessons i've heard so much about...

circles

having barely slept the night before, and with my hip flexors threatening, i took a puff. i'm still tired from the sleep deficit, but i slept really well. it's weird to sleep well and not remember dreaming.

i got up, had a coffee, looked for an didn't find my last MRI, then i walked to the bus stop and went to the clinic for an acupuncture session. my body was profoundly calm for most of the duration of the treatment, though i did develop a random itch that made my leg twitch, and i've just gotten home (trying hard to stay in the "comfort" bubble in spite of the world around me, i think next time i'll walk instead of taking a bus) and am having a quick breakfast before heading to the office.

...

i made some progress on the map generator problem before going to the office, and the work day was mostly completing the backfill (it still required some fixing). i came home for lunch, then returned for a talk by a south african "CTO" that turned out to be a thorough waste of 45 minutes of my life that i'll never get back. the title of the talk had been misleading: i thought it was going to be around organizing a company's structures around AI, and instead it was about how a junior dev became a senior dev with a fancy title and how the south african tech industry is years behind us in terms of working with AI.

a little later i walked past my client team and inquired after the weirdness that was going on - my client / the boss was standing there with tears streaming down his face, and i was offered a piece of a little yellow pepper to try.

it turned out to be a reaper that the boss had home grown. the first little piece i took hit me hard in the throat, but i barely noticed it in my mouth. the second piece was substantially thicker and full of seeds, and i made a point of chewing it thoroughly. it had a delayed action, and i ended up regretting it. it must have taken about an hour to completely stop burning...

i had a good sync with my manager, and on my way out made a suggestion to dx for the problem he was stuck with, which i hope helped.

i came home early, and walked with mr smear to the library to switch out a couple of his books. while there, i had a fun conversation with the librarian, who lit up when i talked about how we'd just finished the eighth season of the simpsons and the importance of monoculture especially with regards bridging the communication gap between parents and their children.

the walk there and back was full of interesting conversation, and by the time we got home i'd put in 17K steps in addition to the hour and a half of rollerblading the night before. i stretched a bit before dinner, after which i had a little too much dessert and some arak for good measure. i was ready to go to bed, but i still had to wait about an hour for mr smear to shower and brush his teeth 🤦‍♂️

...

well, the calm has been slowly seeping away and i'm feeling my "wry neck" again. oh, well.

the doing feeling

 today was tuesday. i honestly don't know where to begin, and i'm sure i'll miss something.

the second volume of my favorite thing is monsters is off to a good start.

gd and i had a very serious relationship talk this morning, which went very positively, but it was addressing something that's probably just a feature of our marriage and we'll have to manage it in a loop 🤷‍♂️

i spent most of my work day babysitting and troubleshooting the backfill, i'm still encountering small surprises. my manager informed my team that i'm in a notice period, but he did it in an uncomfortable way, and then he told me they were planning on making an announcement, but as far as i know the only person who's been told is dx, and he already knew. whatever they're doing, it's really weird.

my two teammates of the past eight months are now both members of my async game jam 🤘

my manager hasn't done anything about my auto-doc project, so i went over his head and sent a brief directly to the guy in charge of tech direction...

pioneer wanted me to sign an NDA before sharing an app design, i convinced her that she was being silly but once i saw what she wants to build i understand that it's way beyond "an app". i also posted this morning looking to see if there's interest in a hebrew language meetup, which it appears there is.

i left early, switched computers at home, and headed to a game dev meetup. i spent most of the non-talk time speaking to a coworker, i'm grateful for the advice and knowledge he shared but it did get a little awkward at some point, because he apparently isn't great with social cues. null sweat, though, because i learned a lot this evening, and all three talks were surprisingly entertaining!

- when to build infrastructure, when to hack

- how to identify and test good ideas

- tips on game dev collaboration / team building, and the basic idea behind building for steam

as i was leaving, my mom called to share how excited she was to be enjoying life of brian on her new television ^_^

i got home in time to eat some dinner, say good night to my mom with my family, and then decide to go rollerblading in spite of not feeling entirely up to it.

i don't know if my problem tonight was being out of shape, anaemic, or just lazy, but aside from some rather brutal uphills and leaving half an hour early and barely managed to get home without collapsing, i had a great time!

...

something's been happening these past few weeks, and i'm starting to feel like i'm getting back into a groove i haven't been in since before i left israel - i'm *doing* shit, and feeling progress, lots of different kinds of things but all somehow related and working together. i'm feeling *potential*. and it's nothing short of thrilling.

...

it took me a while to cool down enough to shower, i had a cold shower, and now i'm going to stretch a little bit more and go to bed.

nodding

 i guess the advantage of having a nerve pinched in the middle of my back is that it seems to be blocking my hip flexor discomfort. "conditioned pain modulation", huh? i'll take it.

i got up with my alarm, remembered (thanks to gd's note) not to drink anything but water, and walked to the lab, arriving early enough on a quiet day to be out of there within minutes. i went past my clinic on the way back, picked up my "not sleep" meds (i still haven't bothered to see what they are) at the pharmacy, went looking for mugs at the mall, didn't find any, and hopped on a bus home.

i was just getting off the bus when gd realized where i'd gone and called me to ask me to pick up her prescription 🙄

[i've seen the bloodwork results already, it looks like i might well be anaemic]

i had a quick breakfast, got in touch with another plumber, then headed to the office.

over the course of the day, the plumber and i exchanged messages and it looks like he's coming to install a much cheaper cistern than the other guy was interested in arranging. now the other guy's upset that we're going with the cheaper option. either way, we can't get a solution quickly enough, as the leak has escalated...

funny story: the plumber coming tomorrow is an arab who keeps saying "baruch hashem" and "be'ezrat hashem", and i don't know what to make of it :P

two things happened when i arrived at the office: the first, i agreed to schedule a meeting with the new potential client tomorrow evening, and was subsequently informed that it was to be this evening. the second, i had a chat with a doctor from the complementary medicine section at our clinic which resulted in appointments being scheduled for acupuncture and feldenkreis.

the morning was a bit messy, but included my client putting me on a claude subscription instead of the pay-as-you-go plan. i got a chance to burn through some tokens in the evening, and i used opus for some real planning, and i've gotten the feeling that not using opus might have been my biggest mistake since optimization for it a week or two ago 🤷‍♂️

my manager and i had agreed that they'd make an announcement about my contract ending tomorrow, and that i'd let dx know before the formal announcement, so after the two of us talked with the other contractor (who seems to be in a less certain situation than me) i asked him to join me on the balcony and i broke the news to him.

initially he was devastated, which was really heartbreaking, but we managed to put some positive spin on things and by the time we returned he seemed to be in better spirits. while he was talking, he happened to drop an interesting piece of information, and that was how i discovered that the interview i had scheduled for the evening was with his previous employer!

then i came inside and received an update from my manager that they'll make an announcement about me leaving some time next week.

i went home for lunch, then caught a bus to the office, surprised to discover that since they completed the work by sha'ul hamelech there's now a simple line switch instead of a ten minute walk in the heat 🤘

my interview simulation was comfortable and useful, after which i went to work on a design / planning session for my client team (we've all agreed on a set of compromises that seem to be coherent). by the time i decided that i wanted to do the introduction interview from home it was already deep rush hour, so i made myself a cup of tea and found myself a quiet space.

the interview went smoothly, rather well, in fact. the group lead called me afterwards to advise me against it on grounds that it seems boring, but in my estimation the real challenge will be leading / guiding them in process hygiene and AI adoption. she agreed that it was work a second interview, at least.

as i've said before, and i'll say it again, i'm extremely passionate about having food on the table and a roof over my head :P

i bussed home, marveled sadly at my son's new haircut, talked to gd, fired off a message to the guy who used to be the head of my study program, had an encouraging text chat with one of the educators i spoke to on monday night, then headed out with mr smear for a walk to the park. we stopped along the way to watch a worker throwing building debris out a third-story window, discussing all manner of things, and when we were almost home mr smear said something random that gave me some inspiration for my tarot game.

i described it to gd, and we got into the weeds a little bit, and i think it's the first time my wife has been as legitimately excited about an idea of mine as i am ^_^

we watched another couple of episodes of the wonder years over dinner, spoke to my mom between them, got ready for bed, completed a run of slay the spire 2 i've been doing in stages over the course of about a week now, rested a little, posted this, and now, i think, i'm just about ready to sleep.

upended

 there's this ridiculous idea that's conned most of the software industry, that human engineers can and will be replaced by AI. that AI is cheaper than the human labor that it replaces. that driving adoption means tokenmaxxing, that AI vendors will continually reduce costs and improve the models. that the playing field has been leveled and anyone with an AI agent at their disposal now has godlike powers.

these past couple of months, the chickens have started coming home to roost. all the prices have gone up, but the vendors aren't making any money because it's still costing them more compute per token than they're asking for. so they, in turn, are dialing down their models because the dumber they are, the more loops it takes to get stuff done.

very few companies can afford the burn.

my client is one of the many that can't. so, weeks after a town hall in which they explained how finances were tight, followed a short time later by explaining that autonomous agentic workflows are going to be the primary mechanism for software delivery and on-call resolution, followed by a week of costs going up while productivity tanks... i arrived at the office on wednesday morning to discover that everyone had been allocated a $12 per day AI budget.

average costs per day had been in the high double digits to low triple digits the whole week.

there was a massive uproar, and the budget was increased to $30 per day. barely enough to get anything done, and engineering is beginning to understand that this effectively means returning to the good old days of having to understand what you're doing and craft code like peasants. there's only one problem, though: last year the company fired half its staff, and rotated all the rest, so nobody actually has any experience with the software they're officially responsible for. hell, barely anybody even knows which software is under their ownership. at a guess, i'd say that the ratio of software engineers to software repositories is somewhere around 5:100, which is something i think about a lot since learning about conway's law and organizational scaling.

it'd be funny if it wasn't so sad. and the saddest part is that these blunders are hurting real people, with real families to provide for and real mortgages to pay off.

...

i spent a large chunk of my day fixing a deployment pipeline - some random devops guy had made a change a couple of months ago that literally did nothing but break it - while expensively asking the AI tough questions to ensure that it wasn't making shit up. i also had a lot of issues with the company-mandated claude code wreaking havoc with any and every plugin or skill i attempted to work with.

i did take a pleasant break to coach sailor on working with AI, and continuously snipe him for insisting on staying south africa instead of coming home.

...

i came home, took mr smear for a pleasant walk around the park, then returned for dinner, then took another walk with gd and my sister as well, for a tour of our old neighborhood and a good view of a particularly impressive moon.

after getting home and showering, we watched a little but more of redline, then put mr smear to bed and repeated the trick of me taking a puff before passing out and actually sleeping again.

gd says my snore is the most comfortable she's ever heard.

...

i began yesterday doing random shit on the balcony, including trying to help the ex-saffer i met a few weeks ago whose department has just been laid off. i caught up on quite a bit of reading, watching, and had a big breakfast before heading out to the office.

i started my day trying to work with haiku, but anthropic's cheapest, shittiest model is so useless it seemed to be trolling me and i immediately switched back to sonnet. work-wise, i spent most of my day planning and executing a task i had been expecting to get to on monday or tuesday, and thinking very, very hard about my personal AI usage and what a harness should look like. and trying and failing to get anything real done on that last score.

i hit my $30 limit shortly after lunch, but the software to track it hadn't been installed yet, so it seemed fitting that that was the point at which i voluntarily restarted my machine and synced with the rest of the organization :P

...

that was around the time i got a phone call out of the blue from my mentor, who informed me that my client has apparently decided to stop working with outsiders altogether and that the two of us currently embedded with them will be moving on in a month's time. apparently this is a money thing, because their feedback for both of us has been positive, so i guess my town-hall feelings from a few weeks ago weren't wrong...

i asked what i should be focusing on to make sure i get to my next client as quickly and smoothly as possible, and he informed me that between my auto-doc project and consistent publishing of articles he doesn't believe i'll have too much trouble. this is good.

i waited until my counterpart had been informed by his mentor, and the two of us sat on the balcony for half an hour strategizing. he'd been taking the whole thing a bit personally - his new manager has been behaving very strangely since the big reshuffle a couple of weeks ago - and i think it helped him when i put the pieces together and suggested that the manager probably knew this was coming and just isn't very subtle about trying to get ahead of it.

either way, we have a month to focus on up-skilling in AI and we're in a pretty good place to be doing so. i also told him about the up-skilling solution i pitched to the boss, and he's interested in helping me make that happen, so that's good.

...

by the end of the day, i'd installed codex with my personal subscription on my work computer, and delivered a first iteration that looked pretty good, and had an awkward encounter with my client who's pretending everything's cool until they break the news to us on sunday, and had a wild political debate with the AI guys that was actually quite fun.

and stopped myself from "just one last deployment" on a thursday evening :P

mr smear wasn't at home when i arrived, he'd gone off to a new friend's place for a swim. i quickly shared an update with gd (i thought my sister could hear me, so i had to re-tell over dinner), then headed to the hairdresser. crazy singing guy was outside again, harassing the nail salon next door, and i got a pretty decent haircut - i think? - and then came home to shower and do a little more AI work until mr smear got back and we could sit down for onigiri (to celebrate the girls finding a mold) and corn on the cob.

the AI work i did was validating. codex is simply better.

dinner was delicious, then i did a little more fiddling around with AI and unity, and then we all sat down to finish watching redline. redline is a phenomenal movie, with a bizarrely jarring ending (kind of like grease), but really the greatest pleasure in watching it is seeing it as an art delivery mechanism. it's gorgeous, and it's simply mind-blowing seeing how gorgeous it is knowing how it was made.

...

i took another puff last night, but it didn't seem to take. am i already developing a tolerance after two nights? last night was long, and my lower back hurt a bit, and i barely got any sleep between lying restless and uncomfortable, and then i finally had enough just over an hour ago and climbed out of bed and am now sitting on the balcony typing this with half an eye on the world waking up around me.

cross-ay-eyed

mr smear took the graphic novels back to the comics library yesterday, and i couldn't figure out what i wanted to read before my screen time and then... oh, yes, i wrote up my previous day's adventures, and got not-a-lot done before heading out (back) to the office.

i did not focus on my primary task today. i mean, i made some progress, but for the most part i was heavily invested in the distracting work of resurrecting a retired dependency so that i could fix a bug in it that i need to make the project i resurrected yesterday work properly.

and we had two important meetings yesterday. the first was an engineering all-hands that sounded eerily familiar, with zero irony. i had a little trouble with feeling sleepy, but i woke up to ask a question and had the VP come bouncing up to where i was sitting with the mic, and then very much not like my question about how metrics for velocity conflict with demanding accountability in terms of quality.

at least i managed to catch him for a positive chat immediately afterwards :P

i had a meeting in a fridge phone booth a few minutes later, and i realized just as i signed in that i couldn't find my hoodie. so, on the call but muted, i rushed around the office trying to find it, eventually guessing that it had fallen behind the stands where i'd been sitting, and managing (with enormous relief) to snatch it up and find a booth in time to follow everything.

my new manager is cool - i've worked with him before - but it's not clear how aligned we are on the mission so i had to be really careful to raise all my points in a way that didn't feel confrontational. i think i did alright, but i've now told everyone very clearly that i'm hoping to be able to start experimenting with integrating my hackathon solution by next week; both because it gives me a deadline i have to stick to, and because i'm nervously in a race against time to get *my* opinionated solution in before somebody comes and up with something irresponsible instead :P

when i left the office, i called gd back and we got into it about whether or not we can afford a dog, or will ever be able to afford a dog. that had to be put on hold while i travelled to my employer's office by light rail. there was a lot of tension, but we managed to move through it and had a heavy but important conversation about the challenges gd's been facing with language, community and work over the past few years, and how to approach them.

the meetup at the office was pretty good. not only were the talks not boring (i learned a few things about agentic ai and agentic memory), but i made small talk with a guy who turned out to be another ex-saffer (he went to school with one of my cousins' kids) and the conversation ended up going off the rails in our unique saffer way. it made the eavesdroppers (and there were a couple) a little happier about the hardships they're forced to endure :P

i had a good chat with the head of our group afterwards, though i said something in a clumsy way - i'm sure she doesn't remember, but it's bugging me - and then i bussed home just in time to say goodnight to mr smear and have a bit of a chat before he went to sleep, and watch most of another episode of ludwig with gd, and now...

... i dunno. i think i'm too tired to do anything productive, but also not tired enough to go to bed and actually sleep 🤷‍♂️

subversion

 i've just gotten up after a night with almost no sleep, my usual hip flexor discomfort has been amplified severely and i was unable to stretch it out.

the first thing i saw on my phone was a notification to say that my shared ride has started, and as frustrating (and expensive for no reason) as it is to realize that i forgot to cancel my booking for this evening, it's even more frustrating to learn that my booking was captured incorrectly. now i have to wait an hour to call them and try to get them to cancel it without charge...

yesterday was bizarre. i arrived at the office, walked around setting the air conditioners to a reasonable temperature, and then found a phone booth for my meeting with the guy who'd stood me up the previous afternoon. we spent the following two hours together tweaking things and running things, and my very clear takeaway was that anyone who wants to touch their systems needs to do a full team onboarding.

also, i was totally freezing in the phone booth, and it wasn't until i returned to my seat that i remembered that i'd brought a sweater to work 🤦‍♂️

my meeting with the client: before i went up, i commented to the guy next to me that i might well be on my way out. that was the vibe i felt when i sat down across from the client, and it lasted a couple of sentences. and then everything was on its head, as he explained to me what the past half a year has been about from a leadership / business perspective and how me and my team fit in, and what changes are incoming, and how perfectly aligned my team's new mandate is with my personal roadmap.

then we closed out with a pleasant, interesting conversation about the misaligned between architecture and organizational structure and what we could or should be doing.

then i walked out with the strange sensation that either we're exceptionally well-aligned, or i'm being pranked.

i went out to pick up lunch, and ate with the guy who sits next to me, and then grabbed another booth to have a meeting with my manager. it was a different conversation, but not that different. whereas the client had been unsurprised by some of my suggestions, some of them clearly caught my manager off-guard and that was validating.

as much as i hated having to put together and deliver monday's presentation, i learned a whole lot of really important stuff while doing so and it's completely changed the trajectory of my week and how i think about things.

i spent some more time trying to make an AI agent implement metrics responsibly, then came home. i took mr smear out for a short walk, and to draw cash and pick up beers for the evening. on the way i told him all about my day, and when i got to the end he let me know that he hadn't been paying attention and had no idea what i'd said to him. then he told me a story, and when he was done i asked him to repeat it because i hadn't been paying attention. i don't know if he really cared enough to get the message :/

i walked over to my ride's apartment, and away we went to hod hasharon.

half the evening was lovely, half of it was awkward. i had some really interesting, some even productive, conversations. i met some fascinating people. the vegan food only arrived at around 10.30pm, by which stage i didn't care any more. i went deep discussing the second lebanon war, i encountered an older soldier whose sister reminded me that my bnei akiva shevet was emunah. i didn't bother a couple of celebrity heroes of mine, though i did truly want to.

on the way back, i grilled my ride for his aliyah story and was blown away by how different it was from all the other mixed couple stories i've heard. i guess the law doesn't apply equally when you're rich and influential...

i showered, had a cup of tea, wound down and went to bed. i've just got my rental charges cancelled - thankfully - and i've finished my first coffee, and i'm not sure what this morning's going to bring. i'm feeling particularly proud of myself for having thought to shut mr smear's blinds when i got in last night; it's mighty peaceful this morning :P

trepidation

prior to leaving the apartment, we wanted to record a video for my freshly octogenarian cousin. this ended up in drama because mr smear and i had had a misunderstanding about screentime...

...

my mentor didn't get back to me until the evening, and i couldn't not say anything. after getting to the office, i spent an hour or so preparing a message for my client and manager, and ran it past my mother as a sanity check, and fired it off.

it wasn't until the middle of the night that i got a response, which was my client politely thanking me for my input and scheduling a face-to-face. so today's gonna be interesting.

because i'm generally bored, i got a phone call from my wife to inform me that my son, at the public toilets at the mall, had managed to drop his phone into the urinal. and because that wasn't enough, he'd decided to wash it thoroughly with soap and water 🤦‍♂️

then later she called again to inform me that she'd shorted the kitchen circuit by trying to "fix" the toaster while it was still plugged in. FML

for my afternoon meeting, i sat down in the phone booth and waited a few minutes for the guy to show up... he didn't. but while i was there anyway, and i didn't have a heck of a lot of productive stuff to do anyway, i randomly revisited a project i worked on a couple of months ago and got to work fixing memory leaks. i was so excited about doing something constructive that i ended up leaving the office much later than i'd planned...

during that time - after i'd returned to my desk, at least - two weird things happened. i missed the beginning of the first, so i have no idea if this literally happened or if everyone was in on some big joke: apparently one of the guys i've been working with pooped himself? and had to pick it up off the floor? or maybe they were kidding and a dog had left him a present? i don't know. it was very strange, and after i asked (and was told it actually was him) i felt really stupid for asking.

the second, i heard that another guy i've been working closely with just got fired. i hope that's not true.

the third, my client paying our section a visit. after my message. at no point did he attempt to converse with me, but he wasn't unfriendly when i walked past him and said hi, so 🤷‍♂️

...

mr smear was an asshole to me when i got home, which on top of everything else really sucked.

i spoke to my mentor, who used much more colorful language than me when i described the level of idiocy i'm dealing with.

over dinner, we watched half of fern gully, which is good, but upsetting to gd...

after mr smear's shower we had a massive fight over him being rude, but we did have a good conversation afterwards and bedtime was pleasant enough.

i went to bed a little earlier than usual, and i slept alright.

mr smear and i both woke up too early this morning. after reading and resting and stretching, i hunted down the old phones and began the friction-filled process of switching him back to his previous phone. also, learned that rescuing a phone with rice is an absolutely useless old wives' tale.

...

i'm trying to solve a big organizational problem in my head before my meeting with my client. my world is mad.

(trying to) be prepared

 what a bizarre start to my day: i slept alright (i had trouble in the middle of the night again, but i got up immediately and stretched hard), woke up a little before my alarm, and began my day by completing judge dredd: the small house (brilliant) and reading a little bit further into the thrilling adventures of lovelace and babbage which i started on friday evening.

i'm not sure how i feel about the fiction aspects of it*, which i guess is the whole point, but the non-fiction intro is really interesting.

* mr smear hates it

someone i work with just gave me a voucher for a game dev conference happening in a couple of weeks, and it turned out to be for the full amount! i wouldn't have been able to go otherwise, and now i'm trying to make sure that i can get there from an admin/client point of view.

yesterday:

the morning actually began with a visit from the building's plumber. did i mention my neck and shoulder have been giving me trouble since friday? well, i got plenty of exercise filling water buckets and cleaning the floors... the guy managed to clear the blockage though; turns out my mom called it when she was here (i don't remember this at all) - one of the inhabitants of the planter, long before our time, sent its roots all the way down to ground floor.

i spent about four hours yesterday - most of my work day - preparing my presentation for this afternoon. along the way i found my company handbook (my mentor directed me) and still couldn't get access to the presentation templates. i subsequently learned that nobody likes the platform, and nobody's maintaining it. lovely. fortunately, someone a while back made an AI-powered presentation builder, and it works really well so i'm sticking with that.

i really want to fix the platform though. i *despise* bad onboarding experiences.

i did do a little client work yesterday, but i'm kinda stuck waiting on a PR review, and in any event the research for my presentation has turned up a couple of interesting threads to pull for them as well - not least being how conway's law applies to a company post-reorg.

in the evening, i went out for a walk and to draw some money to pay mr smear's school book fine, and i was panicked about our financial situation the entire way there and back. when i returned, i sat down and did something i should've done ages ago - i revived an old budget spreadsheet and reconfigured it for our current lifestyle.

in theory, we should have some spare change every month. in practice, i think i'm missing something important. i was surprised to see how much insurance i'm paying each month once all the numbers are consolidated... according to my mom it's reasonable for it to be around 6-10% of one's gross salary, which if true means i'm actually paying less than could be expected *raised eyebrows*

i've also realized that i have to amortize big costs like summer day camps and spectacles if i'm to make sense of things.

we started watching zootopia 2 last night, the jokes are really good but i'm *so* over cash grabs and the writing is incoherent :(

...

hi ho, hi ho...

meditation marathon

thoughts for the day: everyone in the media is getting paid to keep everyone on edge, including themselves. i don't need to think about war with iran until it's actually happening. nobody does. STFU.

also, the global economy is full of shit, everything's being run by people who have as much understanding of how things work as small children. there aren't many adults around.

if i'm right, what's coming is AI weaning us off management bloat and enabling people to find and operate in tiny niches. kind of like pre-industrial societies.

...

 today began with disappointment, but it was less disappointing than if it had come tomorrow: mr smear woke up and decided that he didn't want to go to the trance party, he'd rather just stay home and read all weekend ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i've been reading richard currier's unbound: how eight technologies made us human and brought our world to the brink, and while it's taken me forever to get into it, it's fascinating stuff.

mr smear had been waiting for the bus for a while before we realized that it was the tel aviv marathon today...

gd and i had a quiet morning, napping, mostly, and then we headed out to return the frying pan and find a solution for the ugly cables that were just installed. but, the marathon. so we walked around trying to get on a bus, then got on the bus which literally went in a circle and took us back one stop, and then we split up because i realized i'd have to walk all the way to the center and back.

returning the frying pan would have been less emotional had the woman not decided to try 'splain to me how the non-stick pan wasn't non-sticking properly because i was obviously cooking wrong 😠

at least i found cable hole covers. i'll try them sometime, i guess.

i finally found a decent-looking replacement frying pan on sale at a different store, i hope it's good. then i picked up garbage bags, and then i began my trek home.

picking up a coffee along the way, and syncing with sailor for a bit.

i had issues getting mr smear home today, again, and i realized (after we had a fight about it) that he and his friends are using whatsapp as social media. so there goes whatsapp - i've blocked it and he's down to actual phone calls and sms'es now.

at least he didn't lose more privileges this week - i mean, his screen time privileges have been pushed back another week now, but we were both excited about him getting his reading privileges back this evening.

i never in my life thought i would ever write a sentence like the above, but here we are. you gotta do what you gotta do.

i spent most of the afternoon upgrading my encryption package and updating my website, and then had a long chat with urchin, and now i've showered, and taken the garbage out, and shabbat has started, and gd's cooking a delicious dinner, and for a moment the world is just fine.

schmooze

i was really tired before i left for the house party, and anticipating awkwardness and feeling very out of place. but while there were a couple of awkward moments, i met some incredible people and had some very interesting conversations.

i'm really glad i went.

...

on my way to the bus stop i ran into one of my now-ex co-workers. it was good to see him, but when i asked how he's doing his face fell. they really messed up when they fired us, they broke everyone's spirit. if you want to follow netflix's model (which you shouldn't), you don't onboard people without telling them what to expect, you give regular feedback, you don't surprise-fire, and you compensate (with extended severance) accordingly.

otherwise you're just being a shit employer building a toxic workplace that nobody wants to work in.

reflection

 yesterday was.

in the morning, i went out to the hardware store and picked up (amongst other things) a silicon tube and a proper handle for it. then i cleaned enough sideways bat shit off our windows (they're big windows, it's hard work) to take photos and ask for help with getting them fixed...

...

i wiped my company laptop, and went to the office to return it. i had initially planned to avoid the floor - i called it "a round of unpleasantness" - but ended up being taking aside for multiple talks, two of which being people who i'd been pivotal in convincing to join and who are now very concerned and unhappy. and then there was the security contractor, who i was worried was actually going to cry.

and then there was my boss, who made it clear that he wants to talk to me next week sometime, off the record, and it looks like he has something to say that he's not allowed to say.

and then there were the two backstabbing team leads. the first was just awkward. the second, i shook his dirty hand and looked him in his teenager eyes while he tried to assure me that i'd be okay, and i told him that there are recruiters that won't even look at my resume now.

i doubt they'll feel guilty, though.

finally, one of the founders shook me by the hand and thanked me for being one of the big reasons the company is succeeding.

i know.

...

after setting the silicon around the sink, i spent the afternoon bouncing between doing a little homework for my 5pm interview with the company whose offer i didn't accept, and jumping on and off calls with recruiters.

the 5pm interview was supposed to be a re-sync for culture fit, but the two-months'-new VP R&D had other ideas, and it was effectively from scratch, and included a technical component that i simply wasn't ready for. it wouldn't have been the end of the world, but i plumb forgot the word "instrument" for telemetry and that put him off, and i didn't have a coherent answer for how i've handled disagreements over the past few months, and i clearly said more about this week's drama than i should have, so my overall feeling by the end of the session was "nuh, uh".

but maybe that's okay. he made me a bit uncomfortable, and i'm now wondering if i didn't dodge a bullet when i declined to sign.

...

mr smear's homework session was positive, dinner (leftovers because the silicon hasn't cured yet) was good, and the evening was fine except for bedtime, which was going great until mr smear did his usual pre-sleep routine and made for some very sour feelings.

otherwise, i went to bed early last night, completely buggered.

this morning so far:

i woke up tired, did some emergency dishes so that gd could make breakfast, and sat with mr smear to discuss the bedtime story. then i accompanied him to school, which was a really nice opportunity for a bunch of conversations on a beautiful morning, and now i'm home and trying to balance relaxing, getting important stuff done, and figuring out next steps.

spikes

 the past two days were really hard, and i've told this story twice this evening so i don't really feel like getting it all down. can't i just upload my thoughts already?

yesterday:

i woke up with the same headache i'd went to sleep with, plus intense fatigue. it was a very tough day, the headache didn't go away, and then in the middle of it the snaky manager interrupted a perfectly positive discussion with her team to aggressively and unpleasantly interrogate me. it took everything i had to keep my responses even and then reset the vibe to continue and finish the discussion.

i kinda meant to call her aside to discuss it, but i didn't get a chance, and in retrospect it was probably for the best. but the cost of that was carrying that shit experience with me out the door, where it directly tied into my experience back when* because the more i thought about it, the less comfortable i was approaching her and the less comfortable i was approaching my boss.

* which i didn't understand at the time was the beginning of me being steered into a trap

i met up with gd and mr smear at home, began writing the message to my boss that had been burrowing into my brain, suddenly realized with horror that i'd been writing it into a message box that i could have easily sent accidentally, so i cut and pasted it somewhere else, and then we all left to catch a bus to meet up with kibbutz cousin's sister and brother-in-law for dinner.

the bus took us most of the way there, and we would have arrived at their hotel on time if i hadn't made a wrong turn... but we made it there not too late, and what followed was generally a very nice and interesting evening. and mr smear mostly behaved quite well, especially considering the fact that he was bored out of his skull and has lost all his screen privileges for the week**...

* he did lose an additional day later in the evening, though, which kinda sucked

the ride home was complicated by the tlv night run locking down most of the city, but we got home in the end. bedtime was a bit rough, though i kinda managed to rescue it a bit.

...

my cousin was found dead from a stroke / heart-attack in his car yesterday morning. after years of struggling, he was literally a couple of weeks into the process of finally turning his life around right before his 60th birthday. i remember stories of his shenanigans (he was notoriously a getaway driver from a botched bank job when he was younger), and a well-known clubbing personality (bar owner) in cape town, and it was partially thanks to him that i could never go down the cocaine rabbithole (when you see what it can do to some like that, you think more than twice). what a fucking crazy thing.

today:

i was tired enough to get some sleep, but i did spend a good chunk of the night lying awake running through scenarios with my boss and the snake manager. i woke up feeling shit, but definitely better than yesterday, and i'm still feeling quite weak and a bit faint. anyway, today was definitely better than the day before.

after handling some chores i walked to the post office to pick up another parcel for gd (another 70 NIS for customs for another item that we just learned needs to be returned :/) and then caught a bus to work.

i arrived at the building just in time for a meeting i hadn't been aware of, and just as two others from my company were discovering that the elevators were out of order. we spent the next few minutes arguing with unhelpful security guards, following directions to nowhere, and eventually jumping on an elevator in the hopes we'd get close enough to our floor to walk.

the two floors up was looooong. in my present state, i was completely buggered halfway up and felt faint at the top, but it took a while for a rescue mission to arrive.

the meeting turned out to be the two guys who displaced me teaching my teammate to use their magic new tools. one thing i couldn't shake was the new manager's bored affect with his chewing gum, very much reminiscint of megaman.

unfortunately for them, the new tools aren't really working, but more unfortunately for them my new manager came in and had to explain to them all the things they've been dismissing when i've tried to help them onboard and understand what we're doing. and then he found out that what they've been promising is very different to what they're delivering...

... i found out later that there was a very intense dressing-down from the boss that took place after, and i have a feeling that they're doing a little of the FOing after their FAing. as it is, i later found out that they've somehow managed to block most of the team's work for about three days already due to their lack of understanding of what they're working with, and i re-bonded a little with one of the other captains over our happiness at not being on their side of the complaints table :P

before lunch, i managed to catch my boss for a couple of minutes, but i didn't have a script and i had no idea what i was going to say until i said it; i just knew i needed to make sure that he understood that something untoward was happening and that i was trying to deal with it. and in a way that didn't project whining.

ultimately, things went awkwardly but - i think - well. unfortunately, during the conversation i learned that our tech ops guy has been fired, which really strung. we knew he was a junior when we hired him, and this dude has been working his ass off and grabbing every opportunity with both hands. he's also been a really fun person to work alongside.

i had lunch with the brit, who i'm sad to say may well be incapable of keeping his head down until everything sorts itself out. i've warned him with what the boss said, but he's really struggling and i totally understand him. i really hope he doesn't get himself shunted out, because he's professionally amazing both in technical terms and in bigger-picture wisdom.

the afternoon was constructive, and i eventually got a chance to take the snake manager aside.

now, i don't know how much of her behavior was performant, or real, but she claimed she had no idea what she'd done and that she hadn't intended any malice, and she apologized profusely for speaking to me like that.

whether it's honest or not, i accepted it graciously and i hope that's the end of it.

the end of the day was good. just good.

i came home, realizing on my way that i'd forgotten our obligation to the class picnic tomorrow. i quickly dropped of a plate of happy hour "leftovers" for mr smear along with my bag, caught another bus to the nature store, found what i was looking for and receiving embarassingly condescending responses from the teller, jumped another bus home, ate a little with my family, got mr smear through some more of his history homework, saw him brush his teeth and shower and get into bed in record time, and read a little to him until my eyes started shutting.

we spoke to my mom for a bit, and then i went hunting for a story that i saw on facebook (which means i have no way of finding it), and now i've done what i was kinda dreading doing and gotten all this down. and now it's late, and i'm beyond tired, and i'm going to be going to bed very soon.

the relief pt i

i didn't get any more sleep, my stomach gave me trouble all morning, and i had to switch my morning coffee for chamomile i was feeling so messed up.

distraught, and faint.

cancelling our plans to bake challah-peño for the office, i accompanied mr smear to school and then headed to the office early, which have me an opportunity to sit with the brit and understand that i'm not alone in my understanding of the situation. it gave me an opportunity to offer him some support and advise him according to what our boss had recommended.

from his side it sounds like the boss has heard us, at least.

i enjoyed joining my new team because we all already know and like each other. in our first one-on-one, i told my new lead what i'd practiced for my boss, and thanked him for taking me, and he corrected me saying that he wanted me on the team. we've worked together quite a lot before, but he then proceeded to explain the new role to me and it honestly feels like a *much* better fit. i was really nervous before learning what my first project would be, but now that i know what i'm tasked with i'm legitimately excited for it.

a bit later, i managed to corner the boss and we sat down for a very somber discussion, but he heard me out, reflected deeply and appreciated the feedback on the feedback*. i managed to communicate my concerns without explicitly calling out anyone or any specific incident, and i feel heard.

* seemed to. but.

my nerves immediately relaxed, and the rest of the work day was smooth and positive.

a dramatic start to the weekend

i've got two days to process everything that happened today (also, this last week, and possibly month or two) before starting to deal with a bunch of things that make me nervous.

...

this morning started off alright. mr smear went to school, i did the dishes and took gd's wrong-sized shoes to the post office for return. then i caught the bus to work, and immediately got caught in a web of onboarding stuff. otherwise i worked straight until lunchtime.

the good news is, i got my primary job done. and, while i was out talking with my mom on the way to and from getting lunch*, bigtalk stopped in at the office to say hi and report that he's got a new job in the building, which is a relief (i really hope his new job is actually good for his career, and not just another employer blowing smoke up his bum).

* omfg. my niece is three months' pregnant and hadn't told my sister, and when confronted she said "she didn't think she'd be interested". my sister and her son have been living with her and doing all the heavy lifting in the parenting of her kid as it is, whose father (the ex-husband) is a known paedo. the boyfriend is sweet, but useless. all the fucking drama.

the bad news is that just before going to get lunch, the new captain shared his "roadmap" with the team and my british coworker responded (in our team chat) that it looked like it was ai-generated and that it was "mental" to devise an 18 month roadmap for a devops team**.

** it's pretty crazy in general, ignoring the fact that we're a new startup and the captain doesn't understand how anything works yet.

after lunch, i took him aside to explain to him that whether he's right or not (he's totally right) it doesn't help him or anyone to be so tactless.

immediately afterwards, we returned to our desks, at which point the new captain - in front of everyone, because it's an open-plan office - climbed into him, resulting in him telling him "i'm in charge, i tell you what to do, and you do it. if you don't like it, go speak to the boss".

i just kept my eyes fixed on my monitor while this took place. the feeling of the two of them hating each other was palpable.

half an hour later, i had a meeting with the boss. he asked how i'm doing, to which i responded that he'd need to start as he was the one who'd called the meeting. he informed me a) that i was off the devops team and b) that he wanted me back "home" and programming, but that "neither of the r&d dev captains were particularly excited about me joining their teams".

now, i don't know if he was reporting accurately, or if he was being polite and saying that they'd refused to take me, but either way i'm very unhappy about the fact that two people i've been working with for eight months don't want to work with me. even if i do have some idea of why not (each of them for different reasons, but mostly in approach). so a huge part of my processing anxiety right now is trying to figure out how to approach them on sunday and try to find a way to achieve some kind of feelings reset.

so i've officially - with immediate effect - been moved to the system team. this is a fine outcome in my book, at least, but knowing it's my boss's third choice does leave me with a bit of an aftertaste.

of course, that happened right before we all walked out to a special happy hour. which i spent most of talking to the guy i used to serve with. although it was an interesting conversation, i kept seeing my boss and the new captain and a bunch of others out of the corner of my eye and i had a strong feeling that i should have been there instead...

...

gd was supposed to finally be getting her tooth sorted out this evening, and i was expecting her to be done by the time i left the not-so-happy hour. she didn't answer her phone, so i called mr smear and learned that the dentist had been forty minutes late, and that gd had been on the chair for twenty minutes already, and he was sitting in the waiting room bored out of his skull.

so i talked to him until i caught a bus to join them, unlocked a couple of games on his phone for him, and then sat quietly stewing all the way there.

i met up with the two of them just after gd had finally finished, with the unfortunate result that the new tooth didn't fit properly, so she's now got to wait another two weeks. we headed to our usual post-dentist hummusia, had an enjoyable dinner (the food, not the feelings surrounding our respective days), and then caught a bus home.

...

while we ate, i asked mr smear if he'd apologized properly to the girl from yesterday. he informed us - and we double- and triple-checked - that she'd merely giggled as a response, and that aside from that they hadn't had any interactions.

hmmm.

...

mr smear went to bed relatively smoothly, and now i've posted this perhaps i'll have energy to shadowrun a little. last night i clicked through a whole lot of dialog, but by the time i was ready for a mission i was done.