Lexmark

What follows is me whining about my job. You’ve been warned. I am so bored with my job. It has a crushing sameness that I cannot escape, and when I do, it seems like the inertia of this corporate black-hole pulls me right back. I’ve done exactly the same job for 3+ years, without much variation nor change in skill set. Got a new machine yesterday, and tried to go against the grain and install SuSE Linux 9.1 on it. Well, because genius me ordered it with a windows-only hard drive controller (Promise FastTrack…don’t go anywhere near it, people!) I couldn’t get it to work. ...

There’s nothing wrong with being at work at 5 o’clock in the morning, per se. However, it does feel a bit weird: It’s 4pm in India It’s 5 hours before most of the othe programmers on this floor arrive It’s 7 hours until lunch. Robin asked me if I could get her to the airport for her 6:15 flight, so that req’d me picking-her-up at 4:15am. I’m usually not through my first REM cycle by 4:15 am. ...

Folks, here’s an example of how not to be: I beat myself up when I don’t know something at work. No matter how obscure, minute, weird, odd, or undocumented a factoid there is, I feel like I should know it. It’s just frickin’ impossible. Just as an architect need not know every bolt in the building, I don’t need to know every line of my server. I realize that on an intellectual level. Just can’t internalize it at all…. ...