digitalBush

I've posted in the past about my distaste for the slow drivers in the left lane.  I understand that gas is expensive and you are driving slower to increase mileage.  I get it because I'm doing it too.  Here's the thing though, I'm doing it without being a nuisance. I would love to just give these fools a piece of my mind.  If you are one of these idiots, then please take notice.

Photo courtesy of Burning Image

Apparently my tolerance for how slow I should be driving and your tolerance are different.  Other people have places to be and might want to drive faster than 10 under the speed limit.  When you drive slower, you belong in the right hand lanes.  Period.  The left hand lanes are meant for passing. It's more efficient that way, otherwise you are impeding traffic and keeping people behind you on the interstate longer.  This results in a larger traffic problem and is undoubtedly worse for the environment all because you were too inconsiderate to get out of the damn way.

That makes me feel better to be able to say this.  Since I spend about 2 hours of my day commuting, these types of issues have become a sore spot for me.  I loathe selfish people, and the road is full of them.  We're all just trying to get to where we need to be and do it safely.

Photo courtesy of gorriti

I'm not sure what it is, but bad email practices really make me angry.  I'm always amazed at the horrendous things that I see people do.  Email has been around for long enough now that business people should have no trouble using the medium.  After all, we are just talking about basic communication skills here.  Alas, some people that I work with have terrible email etiquette.  Here are a few of the things that get me rowdy:

1. USING ALL CAPS.  Damn, this is possibly the worst thing you could do.  Not only is it freaking hard to read, but it looks angry.  When I get one of these, I know the person is either really angry or really lazy.  Usually the latter is true.
2. writing in all lowercase and in one big run-on blob no punctuation to be seen anywhere.  You've seen these.  It's about half a screen of incoherent babble and a stream of random thoughts with no markers for when one idea stops and another starts. It starts off talking about the sales meeting and transitions to sports.  Next there is something about puppies and then finally back to the sales meeting.
3. Excessive use of "ASAP". This includes synonyms like "URGENT" and "IMMEDIATE" as well as using that damn importance flag that no one pays attentions to.  I'm sorry, but when you claim that everything is an emergency, I stop caring any more.  It's like the boy who cried wolf except it's the sales that cried ASAP.  I've just become numb to this type of email.  If something absolutely has to be done now I'll have gotten a phone call.
4. FUBAR Subjects.  I'm not even sure why this one is an issue, but it is.  Apparently it's extremely hard to craft a terse subject that sets a general tone of the email.  Instead, the subject contains the damn body of the email including the person's freaking name.  WTF?  My subject line can only show so many characters.  With a subject 3.73 miles long (that's approximately 6 kilometers for those of you metric folks), you would expect the email body to be a novel right?  Nope, usually it's a simple "see above".  Argh!  That's just laziness and impatience. 
5. The email then phone call email. "Hey, I just sent you an email.  Did you get it yet?"  It's okay if you just sent me something funny and you want to share the laugh with me.  It's okay if you follow up via phone because I didn't respond in a timely manner for the issue.  It's not okay if you hit send and pick up the phone to dial.  Computers are amazing things that deliver email with amazing reliability.  You can be fairly certain that clicking send and not getting an error means that I'll get the email.  I'll read it when I'm damn well ready to read it.
6. Poor spelling.  I'm not perfect and I spell things wrong on occasion. I'm no grammar Nazi, but spell check is built in to Outlook.  In fact, you don't even need to click something to perform the spell check as it puts a big red squiggly line under the damn word as you type it wrong.  Those people who make it a habit of having spelling mistakes are just being lazy.
7. "Reply All" all the time.  There's nothing like getting a broadcast message to announce something at work only to be bombarded by the onslaught of replies.  Here's the scenario, email #1 is an announcement along the lines of "Please welcome our new employee Salesy McSales."  Emails #2-8 are an email with "Glad to have you on board."  Email #9 is an email asking where we are going to lunch to celebrate the new hire.  Finally Emails #10-13 are a brief debate over the location of lunch.  All of this for a person who isn't even in my department.  Nice.

Hopefully none you, my dear readers, are described above.  If I've offended any of you, well good.  Someone had to tell you how bad you suck at the Internets.  If you know someone who does these things, send them a link here.  I'm sure they'll laugh because they're oblivious to the fact that they do these things.  At least you tried.

Photo courtesy of err_r

Attention all users of systems across the world: Note fields in applications are not a good place to put things that need to be indexed and parsed.  For whatever reason, the users at my company seem to love their note fields.  They love them so much that they begin to believe that just by the very nature of them sticking something in there that the server (a magic natural language processor, of course)  will make things happen just as they typed it. Damn, and to think: I spent 4 years in college and years later I'm still learning programming languages when all I had to do was just tell the freaking computer what I wanted to do in broken English.  Here, let me give this a go:

1. Open notepad
2. Type "Make a data export of our stuff and send it to these people via ftp with encryption.  Do this every month and call me before you send it out."
3. Save
4. ???
5. WTF?  Why isn't this freaking computer working!  POS!

Some of them also seem to think that I actually read the crap they type in there too.  It seems that my brain is somehow physically connected to all things technology at my company.  By that very nature, it seems that anything that is typed into any application anywhere is immediately known to me.  Sweet.

I recently had a nice situation come up where some data was loaded with a note that said those records were part of a larger group.  Forget that we have tags for this type of thing or heaven forbid the group name field.  I get the call "Josh, when we're giving this data out to XYZ company, they need to know about these records that I marked with a specially crafted note field.  They need to know that they are members of ABC group."  It seems no one understands that notes are for evaluation by humans after one has already pulled that particular record up.  Crap, here I go creating a massive temporary index on this text field so that I can make this happen in under a year.

Once I identify these records and create data in the places they were supposed to be based upon these magical identifiers in the note field then I'm feeling pretty good about myself. I think that I'm done.  Wrong again.  I get the next call: "Josh, some of the records are not being identified correctly.  I'm emailing them to you so you can see why."  Oh great, how did I mess this up?  I used the magic identifier you told me: "Strategic Hospitals Incorporated of Tulsa" (FYI: This is made up for the sole purpose of comedic value) .  Once I get the email and start checking the notes of the records in question, it becomes obvious what happened.  I forgot to check all possible combinations of that magic phrase.  Apparently, it would have been too hard to use the same identifier, instead  they chose to shorten it to: "Strategic Hosp. Inc. of Tulsa", "Str. Hosp. Inc. of Tulsa", and even "S.H.I.T."!  "S.H.I.T.", can you believe that?  How in the hell am I supposed to know about this "S.H.I.T."?  Seriously.

What's the moral of the story?  Note fields are a necessary evil.  People want to store things that we (the developers) don't need to know about.  The only way to do that is to provide them a free form field where they can type anything in.  Some people (usually the same ones every time) will continue to put important pieces of data here that belong elsewhere.  I think it's just a fact of life.

The holidays really bum me out.  I really just dislike what people become around this time of year.  I'm not sure if my change in feelings is due to my getting older or if it is just our modern age which makes things suck so bad.  The commercialism of these special times just sickens me. 

I work near a mall which makes me a near expert on the observation of the holiday human.  Bumper to bumper cars line the parking lots and mall entrance roads filled with angry people and screaming kids.  Once the joyful family enters the mall, the kids begin screaming for their favorite toys, candy, and whatever else suits their fancy.  If the parents do not comply, the child will fall to the floor in a fit of rage complete with punching and kicking.  The general masses won't tolerate public discipline of the child, but will still sneer at the behavior. They themselves are oblivious that their own children act the same way; well, that is without their daily dose of Ritalin.

After the children are calmed down with a wad of french fries and chicken nuggets, it's on to the shopping.  Lines of shipping carts fill the aisles of overzealous advertising.  Busy lifestyles and stress breed impatience and impatience doesn't mix well with lines.  Shortages of lead painted toys make adults fight in order to satisfy their kid's "needs" on Christmas day.  Common courtesy started fading sometime around Easter and is now non-existent.  People will cut line and bump into one another without a word of apology.

It's a very dreary and selfish picture I painted, isn't it?  Sadly, this is truth.  This is not the same holiday season I remember growing up.  The holidays are about friends and family and spending time with them.  I wish people would buy less things for others and spend those wasted mall hours doing something more meaningful.  Write a note in a Christmas card or bake some cookies and send that instead.  It will mean just as much, I promise.

Plan some together time with friends and enjoy a night out.  Make a tradition of it!  Traditions are what make holidays special.  It's something that is concrete and dependable in this craziness.  You can always count on that dinner at Granny's with all of the family. Every year it's just like you remember it and that is what is special about it.  I've always gone driving around on Christmas Eve to look at the lights on people's homes, and my wife and I have continued that tradition.

I would like to wish you, dear reader, a Happy Thanksgiving and a Merry Christmas.  Please be safe and remember what is important.

All you need to do is show up at my house, and you are basically guaranteed to not sell me something.  I don't like loathe door to door salespeople.  This is especially true if said salesperson talks slang and refers to me as "daddy".  Thanks, but no thanks.  Please go find some other sucker to buy your universal cleaning product.  If I believed that shit, then I'd buy the junk that Billy Mays sells on TV.

The exception to this rule is, of course, the girls scouts. Mmmmm, I love me some Samoas.