:-) Anthropologists love the mundane. They study the way people live day-to-day, the things we take for granted. So, here’s a snapshot of my typical Monday:
4:54 am: Wake up and realize it’s almost time to get up, but fall back asleep anyway, entering the depths of REM just in time for…
5am: Alarm goes off. Hit snooze bar for 9 minutes.
5:06am: Inexplicably wake-up, turn off alarm and arise from bed.
5:07am: Do what most people do immediately after getting up
5:10am: eat breakfast, watch the poor Lexington morning news anchors who’ve been up since 3am try to sound funny
5:30am: Spend next hour getting ready for work.
6:45: Banzai run to get to my 7am meeting. Pass carnage on I75 N.
7am meeting:
- Them: “Oh, we signed off the beta”
- Me: “Aren’t there two gating issues still?”
- Them: “Oh, yes, but we signed-off the beta on time”.
7:20am: Find out that our stability test from the past weekend blew up. Yep, it’s Monday.
7:30am: Make coffee for entire floor.
8:30am: Officemate if I know if there are any doughnuts around. I reply: “If I knew where some doughnuts were, do you think I’d still be sitting here !?!”
9am: Receive surprisingly ironic phone call. Retrieve doughnut from the latest AYPT-cum-regular-employee. Mmm…doughnut.
9:30am: Daily stand-up meeting where programmers agree (like the cult that we are) that we have no idea why the stability test failed on Sunday. Agree that current project will never die. Coffee soothes the pain.
10:00am: Another daily stand-up meeting with different group of programmers, where we agree (like the cult that we are) that the best thing about their project is that it’s not the other project that I work on. Manage to convince high ranking programmer on loan that overhauling our entire build process 2 weeks from Release Candidate is “A Bad Thing”, because it has no upside other than “it ought to be that way”.
10:30am -> 11:30 am: Monitor the email barrage between team and test group about why the stability test failed this weekend. Summary:
- Developers: “Testers, your methodology sucks”.
- Testers: “Developers, your code sucks.”
Ah, the checks-and-balances of Software development.