Christmas Eve
I just arrived at work. I was planning to get in at 8:00, but that extra hour of sleep was just delicious. It’s Christmas Eve, but so far I’m just not feeling it. NPR’s Morning Edition played a bit of David Sedaris’ “Holidays on Ice”, which is always funny. On the other hand, it only contributes to the subversive aspect of my holiday spirit.
Unfortunately, this turned out to be a bad day to come in late. First, I logged in to the Unix system and it sat there thinking about whether to let me in or not. I tried again on three other terminals, with the same result. I sat here waiting for one of them to let me in, not able to clock in until one did. After a few minutes I let my paranoia get the best of me and called our eccentric programmer. He noticed that the system had been a little sluggish, and revealed that he was running a special program that needed to be run if we were to clean up after last week’s disaster. While I was on the phone to him, the logins finally decided to let me in - but I had set off a chain of uncertainty, and I had to wait until I was sure we would not attempt a 9:15 reboot - with one store and mail order already embroiled in their tasks.
So he halted the important cleanup program to resume later tonight, and I waited for the all clear before running the sales analysis programs (‘Recommended Purchases Report’ and the automatically chained ‘Sales Batch Update’). I can’t do much else until those programs finish, so I went over to the tape drive to switch backup tapes. The truck driver brought his son along today, so they were in the kitchen raiding the party leftovers. I strolled back into my office to wait for the programs to finish, and their Telnet sessions had been closed(!) …So I was back on the phone to the programmer. No, wait - he called ME to give me a progress report on his cleanup program. That was when I asked him about my sales analysis programs getting clobbered.
Well we are getting to that point of discomfort - where buyers are going to get upset that they can’t work on their RPRs (that’ll be the first obstacle out of our way), where stores will start wondering where their morning printouts are, and where the used book buyer will start wondering where his weekly sales figures are. Everything else I do today will be delayed by two hours - although happily, it will not be slowed to a crawl by system cleanup.
I’ve realized recently - what I could have known all along - that multi-tasking is driving me crazy. The sense of all the other tasks that need doing impinges on the task that I actually am doing at any given moment. You have to be able to visualize the big picture while you examine one little detail with a magnifying glass, but not to the extent that you can’t concentrate on anything. No matter how important anything is - or how much unimportant miscellaneous stuff you can take care of while waiting for something along the ‘critical path’ to finish so you can keep going - it always feels like I’m going to find out I was wrong to think I had to wait to start something else more important. Especially right now, when I’m consciously staggering out those ‘critical path’ tasks because I got stung already today by trying to pack them all in to the least possible time.
I was thinking some more about the ‘graph theory lite’ we studied in my Project Management class last summer. I call it ‘lite’ because I was the only one in the room who seemed to have the math background to manipulate directed graphs. Everybody else thought it was hard work, and I wondered what planet they were all from. The example graphs never got big enough to need algorithms or proofs (or how about some simulated annealing, or some heuristic satisficing? - oh, never mind…) It seemed like nobody else really got anything out of that knowledge. Later when it might have been of use in the group projects, people instinctively knew that it was irrelevant. So why did we bother? If people aren’t learning it anyway, and not using it, why is anybody upset (you know, aside from ME) that nobody know it? Why is the time wasted teaching it?
…As an afterthought, I stuck in these pictures, for no real reason other than to decorate. They are from the park about a week ago, and I noticed a lot of red and green together in the photos I took. That might make up for my streak of ‘subversive’ Christmas spirit, should anybody else be keeping track of such things. Enjoy.
Posted by Evan Bittner Mon, 24 Dec 2007 14:58:00 GMT
