Sunday of my Life

Today in the Dragonhunt:

Our heroes visited Karlbotel, Renate’s home province, and went to meet her parents, the rulers of the region. Things got a bit tense for a moment when Renate dropped a bomb on Rien’s head. Turns out that Renate’s mother, Clara, has the same name as Rien’s long-lost love Klara. So when Rien was basically incapacitated with shock his other psyche — the one that does all the fighting for Rien — took over and get hi mthe hell outta there. It was tense becuase of his method of doing this. He pulls a sword out of nowhere and uses it to cut into another plane of reality. Drawing weapons in front of the Baron and Baorness, who have a Master-At-Arms who is well nigh unbeatable? Not a good idea. Good thing Rien got out of there before Aaron attacked him. When the others found him shortly afterwards he was up a peach tree in the orchard, scared. Once talked down he was given a home truth or two by Renate that basically amounted to ‘grow the fuck up’. So he did, a little. He wasn’t really given a choice.

Now, looking back over his past history, and considering that his relationship with Klara ended just over three years ago, one would think that Rien is being a little childish about it, and you know what? They’d be damn right. Rien is, technically, only ten or eleven years old, for all he’s got the body of a twenty-two year old. See, he woke up in his bedroom eleven years ago now with no memory of who he was or where he was. He’s had to relearn everything from that point, so he’s really on eleven years old. A bright eleven years old, but eleven nonetheless.

So Rien grew up a little, Renate struck a deal with him over something ans Aryk surprised us all by being all mature and wise. A good session all round. In the absence of Alan, Dorothea took over and GMed the session, and I think she did very well. As she puts it ‘it did not suck’.

Why indeed. Why, if they have a problem at work with the hours I’m claiming, concerns about if the hours I claim actually translate into my work output, if I am, actually, being honest about the whole thing; well why didn’t they ask me earlier? Why give me a weekend of wondering where my pay was? And really, if they’ve got a concern with paying me, why not take it up with me as soon as they recieve my timesheet? It’s just stupid really, it wastes my time and theirs.

I’m writing that at work right now, sitting here at yet another different desk, becuase I can’t seem to keep the one placement for two weeks running, my eyes burning and feeling muscle-twitchingly tired, wishing I could go and have some coffee, but knowing I can’t because I’m already feeling another attack creeping over the horizon.

“Boss,” say I, “did you recieve my timesheet last week?”

“Yes, we’ll have a talk about that.”

Oh lovely, more aprehension, just what I need to add to my already shakey grasp on control. I don’t think I should feel this way at work — I really don’t. Siting here at someone else’s desk, with my mouse cursor on top of the window behind me, ready to tap the touchpad of my laptop and make what I’m writing here dissapear into the background. Around me people are laughing and chatting, and I sit here wondering why exactly I came in here today. I really don’t feel up to it, to all of the things they want me to do. Maybe that’s why I’m here. Becuase I know that in my life I’m going to have to do a lot of things that I don’t feel up to doing, so I may as well get used to it now.

Damn eye — stop twitching.

The ‘talk’ between the boss and myself is going to take place at a time of her choosing, and she keeps walking past my office, back and forth, back and forth, doing various things. I wonder each time if now is when she’s going to do it, but it isn’t, so the suspense and aprehension builds. It’s going to come to a boil sometime soon. I think I need to take a break from all this, but I really can’t.

This will be posted after work, becuase I can’t get a hold of a network cable with which to hook into the network and access the internet. Imagine that — me, the network administrator of this business and I can’t even get into the network. It’s a lack of support that’s killing my credibility in this job, it really is. I get no support from the people I need it from. My requests for resources, denied. My requests for tools, ignored. My questions and concerns about the legality of the software on this network brushed aside. I’m told it’s none of my concern. Well it fuckin’ well is my concern thank you so very much! In the end it’s *my* arse on the line should we be audited! In the end it’s me who gets the fine and the jail time should we be found guilty of software piracy! There’s nothing you can say that will make this go away; you can’t subvert the law. The law says that I’m the one responsible for it and that’s that. Maybe that’s what they’re counting on — having a fall-guy for it. Maybe I’m being paranoid. Maybe a mixture of both? I don’t really know, and if I listen to the message from on high here it’s none of my concern.

I spoke just before of destroying credibility, and earlier than that about concerns with the honesty of my time reporting; and that’s part of what’s happening here. They don’t seem to think, as far as I can tell, that the time I’m claiming for the design work I have done for their website is accurate. Honestly — who are they to tell me that? They don’t know the first thing about doing this kind of work, so why do they think they’re at all qualified to tell me how much time it should take? For every design they see, there’s 3 or 4 that didn’t work out, that didn’t fit the company image, that didn’t come up to my standards. For every design there is 50 - 60 minutes of work that goes into planning and designing the designs, if that makes sense. Then there’s the extensive coding I’ve done for the backend of the website. The scripted PHP data interpreters, the careful design of the database. The work on making sure the site is secure and as carefully controlled as I can make it. And then on top of that there’s the time spent modelling and texturing and animating various things for their products, so I can put them into a flash animation as vectors and allow them to have on their website an interactive guide showing how to setup the various units they have and how to hook them into the three types of TV available in Australia. Really, though, all that work means nothing without a front-end for the site, which is what I’ve spent so much time doing so many designs for, but they won’t choose something. They won’t listen when I tell them I can’t move forward any more with that section until they select what they want from the various designs and allow me to put something together so I can photoshop it, get it looking good, get it approved and convert it to HTML and CSS, ready to stick it onto my backend and get something going here.

I’m doing alot of work for them, but until I have that front end it reallylooks like nothing. But they don’t seem to understand this, not for a second. They seem to have some arbitrary figure in their heads that says “If you claim for this much time, we expect to see this much work.” Well…you are, it just doesn’t look like it. To you it looks like page after page of nonsense code, like page after page of pencil drawn designs, like file after file of things which don’t look like much, but which took hours to create. I have stored on this laptop, and in my visual diary, and on my computer at home almost 100 hours of work. But it doesn’t look like it unless you understand it. And to understand it you have to *want* to understand it. And it seems to me that they don’t want to, despite how carefully I explain things. I could take them step by step through the code creation process, from initial requirements, to Input/Process/Output through Algorithms to Variable Lists to the final point of actually making the code, then debugging, changing, debugging, changing, debugging and hopefully getting it right. Meanwhile this has taken 20 hours or so, and you really haven’t got anything presentable to show for it.

OK…calm down boy. You’re just getting yourself worked up again, and you know that’s not going to be good for you. I haven’t had a panic-attack or even come close to one for a good two weeks now. I’m proud of that, and I want to keep it going. Today is not going to let me I fear. All this, and it’s only 10:30 AM. Seven and a half hours to go.

And Counting.

12:00 PM

OK, yes…so I am slightly paranoid. We just had ‘the talk’, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought. They’re still debating whether or not they actually want me to do the website, which is their decision of course. Doesn’t mean I’ll be happy if they choose to have another company do the website after all the work I’ve put into it. Meanwhile though, I still am not getting the support I need out of them in regards to their network. They want it to do all these things that, yes, one day it may be capable of doing, but only if I can work it into the network I want it to be. We are, for some bizarre reason, running Windows XP Home Edition on most of the terminals, and I need to upgrade them to XP Professional before I can do anything else to the network of any significant nature. XP Home is, quite frankly, an operating system made to be used in a home, not a business. Especially not in this kind of business.

I’d love to know who chose the operating system here. Meet them, shake them by the hand, then kill them of course for not taking into consideration any kind of scope for the network, any kind of basic security concerns and for not doing it with legitimate software. I can’t seem to get it across to the bosses that we need to change the operating system before the network can go any further, becuase they see the only opera
ting system that affects the network as being the one on the server. Perhaps one day I’ll convince them to see things my way. And perhaps one day several monkies will fly out of…well, anyway…

Hopefully I’ll be able to convince them soon of the several things they need
to be convinced of to improve my quality of work. You never know…it might happen.