#random workblogging

[neuxue]

The one and only downside to having been fortunate enough to take an extended amount of time off of work a while back is that now I know that simply not having to work for a living would fix like 99% of my problems. And I just have to carry that knowledge with me every day. Into work.

[girderednerve]

whining about work

it is wild to me how bad at their fuckin jobs everyone in our county communications department is. they literally never have alt text/image descriptions in their soc med posts, even if the image contains information not duplicated in the text of the post, they've posted a bunch of placeholder text & things with typos, & posts are often misscheduled. they also do not moderate comments at all, which means every library f/acebook post has some fuckin weirdos going on about how we're all p/edo gro/omers in the comments & they just let that go, even when the people doing it make accusations about other commenters (this is clearly harassing behavior! what the fuck is wrong with you! write a boilerplate policy about how you'll handle that, pin or link it somewhere, & then remove the comment!).

anyway the head of county comms won some award for being so so good at communications & i'm incredibly mad just thinking about it. she doesn't even communicate well with other county staff?? their department does not share any guidelines about readability or accessibility for online or printed content, but you best believe if the white space around the county logo on your storytime flyer is too small you will be receiving the most petty typo-laden email imaginable

i still haven't recovered from being told by the head of comms that while she never posts any government information from her personal account for her safety, we are allowed & encouraged to answer questions on county posts, including ones about covid etc., using our personal accounts. she had zero information about a) safety from online harassment; b) why anyone would want to do free customer service in their off time; or c) if that actually conformed with our social media policy (we had been separately told that it didn't). right now i am mostly mad about how county comms is just like 'well i'd hate to infringe the free speech of the public while they comment under pictures of your coworkers that they look like p/edophiles, so we'll just let them keep doing that, teehee.'

please someone tell me that there are comms people in the public sector who aren't big dummies because i have never met one in my working life

[tloguewarrentech]

May 1st 2020

Wow, the year’s coming to a close and it’s all just now starting to really set in. Either way nobody has joined the discord group call yet so I’m just going to work on the stuff that Olivia has listed out for me in the trello, which is primarily just making enemies spawn in at specified points and actually giving them certain behaviors.

I’ve got a script written that takes an array of gameobjects representing the enemies, and then selects a random one from that array and instantiates it at its position, so hopefully I should just be able to make a prefab of this enemy creator that I can pepper throughout the level wherever an enemy needs to be, I haven’t actually tried it out yet so I should probably do that.

it seems to be working, at first I forgot that it instantiates the objects using worldspace coordinates rather than relative coordinates so it was just creating the objects right in the world origin so I did a quick fix so that it creates them at the spawner’s position, I should also probably add code that destroys the spawner once it’s been used, but that can wait for a while until I get the basic enemy scripts finished at the least. I would update this with more information but it’s getting a bit close to the deadline for this workblog for my liking so I’m going to go ahead and leave it for now, but I’m definitely going to be doing some work over the weekend.

[neuxue]

Sunday evening after a week off: not burnt out anymore i want to be paid

Monday morning after one (1) meeting: burnt out again

[neuxue]

How to accomplish work tasks depending on what kind of bad they are:

[neuxue]

Just got taken out at the knees by a risk assessment document of all things, in which someone decided to be cute and replace the bog-standard red/ orange/ yellow/ green status flags with appropriately-coloured fruit emojis. There weren’t any items flagged as red, which is good for Work Things but bad for my sanity because it meant that - and if you’ve been in fandom long enough that you think you see where this is going you’re absolutely right - it was just a list of oranges, lemons, and limes.

anyway I guess the nature of humanity is such that every so often someone goes and invents the fucking citrus scale again

[neuxue]

one of those days where instead of doing anything productive I just re-run my When Can I Quit My Job script with increasingly unrealistic inputs until it answers ‘tomorrow’, before reverting it to its original realistic inputs and starting the cycle all over again. Like a kid shaking a magic 8 ball until it tells them their crush likes them back.

[neuxue]

on the one hand work motivation is at an all-time low and the grass on the other side of the proverbial fence is looking so green it could probably offset my entire carbon footprint. on the other hand is this the annual-timescale equivalent of ‘don’t make decisions at 2am’

[neuxue]

you ever have those meetings where you’re just finding increasingly elaborate and deferential ways to say 'no, i'm not saying it's a lot of work to do, i'm saying it literally cannot be done' and somehow what they hear is ‘it can be done we just don’t want to’ is this what gaslighting feels like

[neuxue]

some useful phrases in Exec-speak, and their accompanying translations to Tired Dev

execs: we don’t have any good in-house tooling for X translation: the graphs aren’t pretty enough

execs: so we’re going to integrate with this third-party provider :))) translation: you’re going to spend the next 6-8 weeks repeatedly hitting your head against a wall of useless webhooks, even more useless documentation, and tools that have been optimised to the lowest common denominator and thus generalised to the point of ultimate uselessness, as you try to squeeze even a fraction of your already-existing in-house tooling’s capabilities out of this new platform. you’re going to then spend the foreseeable eternity maintaining this integration that’s held together with duct tape and desperation. but hey at least the graphs are pretty

[neuxue]

do i have complicated feelings about the whole concept of ‘underpromise and overdeliver’ and the place it has come to occupy in work/career advice? yes

does the high from being praised for the thoroughness of something i said would take several days and then put together in the 15 minutes before a meeting carry me through an entire week? also yes

[neuxue]

the remit of my current project is almost literally “aren’t you tired of being nice best practice? don’t you just wanna go apeshit?” and this is probably the most fun i have ever had at my job

[neuxue]

me (relieved): *finally, finally books in some time off later this summer* my brain: oh nice! this is great! this means we stop working now, right? me (alarmed): no.... no that’s... not how this works...  my brain: *suitcase packed, productivity shoved into storage*  me (pleading): six weeks... you gotta work with me for six more weeks here... 

[neuxue]

just tried to look up a thing for work with the search ‘<function i’m looking for> CQL’ rather than ‘<function i’m looking for> SQL’ and i guess that tells you where my attention is at this particular moment

[neuxue]

this past year or so I’ve just been playtesting a fun little game I like to call ‘Pretending Burnout Isn’t Real By Setting It Aside To Deal With At A Later Unspecified Date And Just Grinding Through Work Instead’ (still workshopping the title) and I particularly like the bonus challenge feature where each time you set aside said feelings of burnout to deal with never later it adds an increasing penalty to your ‘ability to motivate yourself to do work tasks’ stat, and I especially like how it combines with the square on the gameboard called ‘meeting with the CEO tomorrow’, that’s a really nice touch.

[neuxue]

the entire concept of a ‘remote work social’ is already abhorrent to me but they just had to go and put it on the evening i could otherwise have spent finishing cql and that, i cannot forgive.