I worked from home this morning, and dialed into a conference call from 12:00 to 1:00, which was lame. It was a “Professional Vitality Session” about Embedded User Help, but it was neither embedded nor helpful—discuss.
The last ten minutes particularly sucked as they were doing Q&As, and you couldn’t hear half the questions and most of the answers. I hung up with about eight minutes left on the call.
I have hunted down a Phi Kappa Phi honor cord to borrow for graduation. Yay!
On the way into my IBM office, I stopped by Triangle Visions to pick up my new glasses.
During the drive it occurred to me, “Why didn’t I just keep my old frames? That wasn’t even an option offered to me. And they’re so damned expensive. My current frames are perfectly fine, and I am so not a person that needs to change them to keep up with any kind of fashion. I’m definitely asking about this option the next time my prescription changes.”
Things certainly were crystal clear when I walked outside with my new glasses on. Yay!
Every time—and it’s very, very rare—that I have hot tea instead of a cup of coffee, as I did while in the office this afternoon, I can’t help but think of an incident that happened many years ago in a code review here at IBM.
The reviewers were tearing up this particular programmer’s code, and she was becoming more and more visibly upset as the review progressed. Right in the middle of the hour, when it looked like she would explode if it went on for another minute, she pushed back her chair, pressed her white-knuckled hands on the table as she stood up, walked to the door, turned around, and said to the group, “I think I’ll go get some tea.”
She gave an edge to the “t” in tea; her teeth were clenched, and her lips remained as pursed as they could without precluding her utterance of the final sound of the word.
That’s all she said and then walked out of the conference room. OMG. I still laugh out loud thinking about it so many years later.
I stayed in the office until midnight, where I did a mixture of editing and homework throughout the night.