{"id":708,"date":"2002-10-20T22:07:53","date_gmt":"2002-10-20T22:07:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/?p=708"},"modified":"2020-08-19T22:08:33","modified_gmt":"2020-08-19T22:08:33","slug":"a-pretty-wretched-day-all-round","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/2002\/10\/20\/a-pretty-wretched-day-all-round\/","title":{"rendered":"A pretty wretched day all round"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The other members of our team were deploying our application into the production system today (Yes &#8211; on a Sunday) and several nasty bugs decided to expose themselves. It&#8217;s frustrating because it was my fault, mostly. More testing would have uncovered these at an earlier stage, but with these guys everything is always so last-minute, interspersed with periods of inactivity. So, it didn&#8217;t get the testing it should have. And there are other reasons for unnecessarily complicated and interrelated legacy code (that we didn&#8217;t write) which aren&#8217;t important except that they make our job harder than it needs to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Anyway, we were in the middle of a telephone conversation with the rest of the team when Toni-from-across-the-road knocked on the door, clutching her cell phone, babbling incoherently, obviously in need of assistance. She couldn&#8217;t understand where her house mate, Linda, was, yet I had heard from an earlier conversation Lisa had with her that Linda was in Philadelphia for a week and had in fact been away for several days already.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I ducked back into the house and told Lisa it was an emergency and that I had to go across the road and help Toni.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Toni was wandering in circles in her living room, calling people on her cellphone, repeating the same things over and over:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&#8220;I must have fallen off the ladder.&#8221;<br>&#8220;Are my pupils dilated?&#8221;<br>&#8220;Where&#8217;s Linda?&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If ever I needed to see a real example of someone having been &#8220;knocked into the middle of next week&#8221;, well, now I had one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>She was also bleeding all over the floor from a gash in her foot. I got her to lie on the floor with her leg on a chair and dumped some ice in a dish-towel and put it under the back of her head where an egg-size lump was forming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>At that point, one of the people she had been trying to get hold of on the phone turned up. I&#8217;d never met him before, but he seemed pretty level-headed and together we got Toni&#8217;s insurance card out, called her doctor, got advice about where to take her, and he bundled her into his pickup and drove off, with me assuring Toni that&#8217;d I&#8217;d look after the cats if she didn&#8217;t get back until late.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I found out later that the guy was Linda&#8217;s brother-in-law, who lives nearby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I went back to work on fixing the nasty bugs in our program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>*<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Toni returned to the house late in the afternoon, dosed up on some fairly strong painkillers &#8211; vicodin I think &#8211; and is resting up. We&#8217;ve promised not to tell Linda anything if she calls, so that she can continue to enjoy her trip away without worrying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The other members of our team were deploying our application into the production system today (Yes &#8211; on a Sunday) and several nasty bugs decided to expose themselves. It&#8217;s frustrating because it was my fault, mostly. More testing would have uncovered these at an earlier stage, but with these guys everything is always so last-minute, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diary","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/708\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}