Reports Of My Castration Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

So yeah, no slices for what seems like an eternity. I feel the pain just as much as you do brothers and sisters, except that I have to experience mind-numbing verbal discourse at the hands of my clients, as opposed to staring at lovely titty pictures.

Take my current client, for example. A very highly respected and very well-known institution has asked for some web based automation software. Fine and dandy, as long as they pay me an arm and a leg. The problem is that of course, as always, a monkey has burrowed its way into the works. And not your cute, cuddly pirate ninja monkeys. Nossir. This monkey has unfortunately taken corporeal form in the body of a 400-lb. refridgerator of a woman, who’s voice is unsettlingly similar to Buffalo Bill from Silence Of The Lambs.

Now up until a few days ago, this woman and I were compatriots, fighting a war against a horrendously mismanaged system of information. I had my suspicions that these people didn’t know how the system was supposed to work, and of course I was correct. But since these folks are paying me so damned much, its in my job description to hold their hands and get this software finished. So for a solid month, I’ve been talking to this woman constantly. We’ve been exchanging ideas and questions about a system so fucking complicated that she, the expert in the situation, is often baffled by its labyrinthine nature. Take, for example, the other day when she asked me to add a field to the database to track every two years. Fine, I stated, but what was this field for? She responded that it was just a simple yes/no question as to whether or not they’d done something, and it wasn’t really worth my time worrying about what it did. Yeah, alright. Just one more mystery to clog up the process. So of course, today, we have the following conversation:

Her: “OK, so I need some clarification as to what this field does, and how it is populated.”
Me: “You uh… you mean the field that you didn’t explain the purpose of?”
Her: “I’m not sure. It’s the second from the top on this screen.”
Me: “Yeah, that’s the one. You didn’t explain to me how it worked, just how you wanted it populated.”
Her: “Well, it’s not updating when I select yes or no, so I’m imagining that it is populated by cumulative data collected from the corresponding field in the antecedent record. Now I’m wondering if you’re right, and this is a better solution than we have now.”
Me: “Uh….whatever it is that you just said, no. Actually that’s my mistake, your user doesn’t have access to change it. There you go, all fixed now. You see, it’s changed right here, on this screen.”
Her: “Well you see, I think that you’re right in this instance. It would have to be populated in the prior recordset because we wouldn’t have the information as to how this is populated without information regarding the credentials and data from the previous 2-year timeframe.”
Me: *rubs temples* “Great. But that’s not what I did. This is just a yes/no field. You hit yes or no. It fills a little bubble. Simple. If you want it to do something else, we can go ahead and do that.”
Her: “Well why would you do that? Don’t you think that the data will more benefit from populating pending information from the previous record?”
Me: “Look, I already told you. I have no idea what this thing is for, so I have no opinion on how it would be best used. For all I know it tracks whether or not a leprechaun came into your office and stole the nickels out of your change purse on the day you filled this form out, it’s that much of a mystery to me. So why don’t we sit down, discuss what it’s for, and then we can figure out how to populate it?”
Her: “I don’t think you’re understanding me. You see…”

I cut the conversation off at the point where she went right back to the beginning. It took a half hour before she finally spilled the beans about why the fucking thing exists. What really sucked was that she was absolutely correct, it just took an hour of convincing her that I wasn’t arguing a counterpoint. In fact, by the 15th minute or so, I wasn’t even talking anymore. It was more of a quiet whimpering while she droned on.

Pretty much every day has been like this. She’ll add something, forget why she added it, and then question me as to why I put it there. And then, after all this bullshit, she decides that I’ve been taking too much time getting this system together. After constant (CONSTANT) bombardment with revisions, new data to import, new features to add, and the obvious spelling checks, this bitch has the gall to say that I’m taking too much fucking time. I tried explaining to her that if you give me a ten-hour long request on Tuesday and ask why it wasn’t finished last Monday, you’re not going to get the best results, but what can you do. Customers are customers, no matter how much they pay you.

Anyway, so take that project, make two of them, and you have my current reason for not posting any slices. I’m lucky I have time to remember porn, let alone surf for it. But thankfully these projects should wrap up in the next few days, or at the very least die down a bit. So expect a barrage of makeup slices real soon.

I feel much better about being at work at 12AM now that I’ve ranted. Thanks for paying attention, if you did.