Maius Intra Qua Extra

So as you probably are aware, I used to be employed by the company my husband still works at, doing software QA and project management work, but I was let go late last year and am currently unemployed (or really, semi-retired). My husband also does project management, so our skill sets overlap quite a bit.

About an hour ago, he called me for some help. He was trying to set up a new process in their task-management software (that's Jira, for those of you who care), and he didn't know how and was stuck. It's not something you do often in the first place, and this one was particularly tricky. (And Jira is a complicated piece of software, so it's difficult to learn to use well.) However, I'd done that particular task for him once, albeit nearly a year ago now, so he figured that I would be able to figure it out.

But, like I said, I'd done it a year ago and haven't been working with the software for nearly six months now, so no, I didn't remember how to do it. (Though I will say that I remembered and understood many things a lot better than he did.) We spent an hour going back and forth over the software, trying to find the right things to create and set to get it working. Even having the example of the previous process I'd set up only helped a small amount.

We finally got it working, and he turned to me and said, "Okay, now I'm going to write this down, because I'm going to have to do it again for this other project soon." I kind of grinned at him and said, "Do you guys still have the documentation archive? Because I think I might have already done that." He opened the docs and... yes, there it was, full, step-by-step instructions (as in, go here, click this, and this is why you're doing it that way -- that much detail). He just kinda stared.

I'm still laughing.

It's been an eventful week, and I really need to get my thoughts down. In the ongoing saga of work, my former company did another round of layoffs, due to the major client (the big company that keeps reorganizing and cutting departments) cutting even more people.

My husband has survived the latest round, but now it's almost guaranteed that he'll be cut at the beginning of the year. Basically, his project is for the minor client who is funded by the major client... or I should say was funded by the major client, who just cut them as well. They are able to pay for my husband and two other people, but not for very long.

So, my former company, which at one time employed over sixty people, is down to about a dozen, and over half of that is staff, meaning, people who are not paid for by clients. The company is not actively looking for new clients because it's the end of the year, and is planning to start searching in January. Honestly, if they do manage to land a client, I have no idea how they're going to staff the project, with no engineers left.

Anyway, that's been the major downer. The other news is that I quit the trad jazz band I've been playing with for the past year and a half.

(Long rant behind the cut...)

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The tl;dr of the cut is that things have been frustrating and stressful due to interpersonal stuff, not music stuff. I announced to the band that I was leaving after we finished our performance today, and I have to say, I felt really happy from that moment on. Not like a huge burden was lifted, but more like, hey, freedom from responsibility tastes really nice. Maybe I can get back to enjoying playing music again, without having to worry about band politics.

So it's Thursday already. I really wanted to post a review of "The Legend of Ruby Sunday", but I never got around to it and the second half comes out tomorrow, so I figured, why bother now? Also, it was going to be "just a few comments, but not a full review because I don't want to really say anything until we get the full story", so no loss there.

I will say that I really enjoyed the episode, and that I'm not sure it that it didn't open up more questions than it managed to answer. Omg, what is up with Mrs Flood? And I loved the listing of the pantheon! The Mara! Can't wait to meet Reprobate. Yes, I have theories, but it's not worth the time to discuss them now, when we'll have real answers in about eighteen hours.

As soon as the episode was over, we popped in "Pyramids of Mars", and that was enjoyable, too. I remember watching it very early on in my nascent obsession with DW and not finding it particularly interesting or good, but now, after many years and a lot more DW education, I really enjoyed it. And now I'm prepared for the new episode tomorrow.

But the real reason things have been a mess this week is because we got thrown another curveball at work. Without going into detail here, the client company, after finally revealing their new plan which cut their only productive division (the one we mostly work for) in half and causing us to lay off nearly half our people, decided not a month later to pivot again and cut the division entirely. They're shutting down the division's product - the only product they've created in over two years that actually works and is complete - and dismissing the workers. They're keeping the division that spent those two years squabbling with itself and failing to produce anything workable.

I highly suspect this is a political move, that the directors of the other division, who have more political clout and need to preserve their own jobs, convinced the C-level people that they could re-create our division's product cheaply and quickly, and using the tech that C-level people favor (which happens to be older, less powerful tech as well). Time will tell if that's the case, and if it is, it's not likely to succeed. After all, they were unable to produce their own working software; why should we expect them to be able to produce something that they have no knowledge about? And they're not even going to build on what already exists. They're actually getting rid of all the people who know how to do what they want to do.

But, this does mean that our company is in trouble. At this point, our C-levels are trying to find ways to occupy people so that we don't have to lay people off. They said that they're not laying people off immediately, that it'll be something like three months before that will have to happen, and they have some leads, so they're optimistic at least for some people.

It's very likely that I'll be first on the chopping block, since I'm not a dev, no one wants QA as the first people on a project, and there are other project managers that would be more qualified to manage any projects that come in (my husband being one of them). But I'm really not bovvered. I'm back to the state of "whatever happens happens, and I'll be glad to have some time to devote to my own life".

Apparently, my manager is now a Doctor Who fan. (His wife, also.)

He's no stranger to fandom: his favorite TV show is Firefly, to the point where they named their daughter Inara. ("They named her after the prostitute?" I hear you cry. Well, it turns out that their best friends' daughter came out first and they named her Kaylee, so they had to go with their second choice. Personally, I would have chosen Zoe over Inara.) He's also gone to cons in Star Trek cosplay. But he'd never really watched DW.

Since my husband (who works at the same company and is a manager as well, so they're in meetings together all the time) and I talk about DW all the time and take off for Gallifrey One regularly in February, he decided to give it a try. I think they started watching late last year (I remember trying to not talk about the specials so as not to pollute his first-time viewing of Series 1), and now they are at the end of series 6. And today, in our weekly 1:1, he said that he thinks DW is now his favorite TV show, beating out Firefly.

He's not quite sure, since it's so hard to compare to Firefly, a show that had a single season that was perfect in every way (and I'm not arguing that at all; I pretty much agree). But, he says, DW is simply so fun. He loves the characters and the stories, and it's just enjoyable to watch. Sure, DW isn't perfect the way Firefly is, but it's has held up well over six series so far, with few, if any, terrible episodes. (His opinion. I wasn't about to point out Series 2's Trifecta of Suck, though I was tempted to talk about "Kill the Moon" and "In the Forest of the Night", but I didn't since he isn't there yet.)

He's enjoying Matt Smith a lot, but misses Tennant. He thought Series 5 was a lot of fun, and is looking forward to seeing how River's arc in Series 6 turns out. He's also dipping into the classic show and has watched "An Unearthly Child", "The Daleks", and I think at least one Second Doctor adventure. And he is already planning to go to Gallifrey One with us next year. (Which I have to admit, sounds okay but I'm not entirely excited about. I am, at my very core, an introvert - there's a reason I don't actually have friends. I enjoy Gallifrey One because I'm there only with my husband and don't need to actually socialize with anyone else. So, it'll be interesting how this plays out.)

So this is a weird thing - a friend actually becoming a fan of something I'm excited about. I mean, I've had friends watch DW and enjoy it, but not this excitedly. It's also weird that I didn't actually encourage him to watch it - I never suggested it to him; he just did it on his own. I'm interested in seeing his opinions on Series 8-10 (I've been keeping my opinions on all of the series to myself, so that he can form his own opinions, but been keeping especially mum on those, so as not to bias him; I expect he'll like them, because he enjoys Moffat's style), and also how a person who's watching the series for the first time as a whole reacts to the more recent things (the Timeless Child, "The Power of the Doctor", and the 60th). Oo, as I think about it, he hasn't seen the 50th either. He's going to love it.

So, it's been interesting. Also, it means that a good ten minutes of our weekly half-hour 1:1 is talking about DW, which is a lot more interesting than talking about "how's your week going", "do you have any concerns", "what can we do improve your environment", etc. :P

This is not exactly the Sunday afternoon I had in mind for this weekend. I got my covid booster shot yesterday, and while I'm not feeling much effect from it, I really just kind of ache, so I'm sitting here doing not much of anything. I am definitely glad to have gotten it, though. My husband scheduled me for it. He's not happy that I'm going to band rehearsal once a week and am planning to join the concert band in the fall, so making sure that I get the booster shot is easing his worries a bit. He'd like to get one as well, but he's below the minimum age to qualify for the booster. Punk. I'm not sure if I'm happy that I could get the booster or mortified that I'm above the age restriction.

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So when we last left our heroes, Mother-in-Law had asked my husband for a suggestion for a birthday present for me. He suggested a jigsaw puzzle, and after I expressed how much I loved the DW puzzle she sent me, she spoke to my husband later and said how pleased she was that she thought of getting a jigsaw puzzle, ticking him off to no end.

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It's been a while since my last life post. Since then, at work, I've done the last bit of time on the project I've been on since last August, taken a week's vacation, and now joined the team of an existing in-house project.

The old project

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The vacation

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The new project

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Answer: Read this post and do everything exactly opposite.

I mentioned earlier that once I got back from Gallifrey One, everything at work jumped off a cliff and that I'd write about it later. It's later.

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You know, I really like my main project at work. It's a little game and it actually works pretty well. It's nothing revolutionary or anything. An alpha version has been released so that we can watch how the players use it, and that's pretty cool. Thing is, I'm getting really fed up with working on this project. The processes and people are a complete mess.

Whining cut below...
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Work's been a mess lately. The client company spent a year arguing with itself over what it wanted, then said, "Okay, this is what we want" - without a design, mind you - "and you have two months to make it." So we've spent the last seven weeks trying to beat a design out of them and implementing things as facts dribble in. Deadline is next week and they're still making changes. We've been working 10-12 hour days the past week, and I'll be heading in to work in an hour for another one.

I'd like to say it's the nature of the industry, to have crunch times like this, but honestly, if our own company had better processes and could set expectations for the clients better, it wouldn't be this bad. But that's not something that's going to happen - we've had this argument before and it's fallen on deaf ears.

Meanwhile, it doesn't mean I can't take the free 15 minutes I have during the day to do something fun.

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