Anyone else pick up *really strong* opinions about stuff after having a job or something that kind of involved it?
For me, I'm never going to have stainless steel appliances. They're actually a pain in the ass to wipe down and get all the smudges off of, is something I learned from restaurant work. Like, it's a very minor thing, that's only going to come up maybe a dozen times in my life, but this a dealbreaker kind of opinion for me.
Just wondering if anyone else is the same!
post-work quirks
-
InspectorCaracal
- Posts: 3934
- Joined: Fri 10 Jul, 2020, 4:14 am
- Location: Narnia
- Contact:
Re: post-work quirks
This is incredibly maddening because I know I have LOADS of these kinds of opinions and I can't think of a single one!! Argh. I blame the sleep deprivation, it's completely fucking up what little memory I have. Well, that and that 90% of my current frustrated "Never Again"s are more, things I hate about renting a place to live. Boy, I could rant about home leasing and the things I hate about it for hours.
Well, let's see. I worked at a cafe/bakery/...food place, for a while, during which I learned how to be a barista and developed some very strong opinions about coffee and coffee-based drinks. Like... I'm not gonna go into a lengthy thing about it rn and hijack this thread and turn it into A Coffee Thread lmfao but trust me there's a lot.
I also have a lot of opinions about system administration which tbh are completely unrelated to my experiences being a sysadmin but instead having to work with one who was pretty terrible. Did I ever tell y'all about the time at my last job (fuck me, that was eight years ago now) where, I don't even know what the fuck she was TRYING to do, but the sysadmin somehow managed to accidentally mark Every Single Account in the ENTIRE system as "unpaid"??? Like, the db has a flag showing whether or not an account had purchased the software yet to grant access and she just. turn them all off. how do you even do that wtf.
Well, let's see. I worked at a cafe/bakery/...food place, for a while, during which I learned how to be a barista and developed some very strong opinions about coffee and coffee-based drinks. Like... I'm not gonna go into a lengthy thing about it rn and hijack this thread and turn it into A Coffee Thread lmfao but trust me there's a lot.
I also have a lot of opinions about system administration which tbh are completely unrelated to my experiences being a sysadmin but instead having to work with one who was pretty terrible. Did I ever tell y'all about the time at my last job (fuck me, that was eight years ago now) where, I don't even know what the fuck she was TRYING to do, but the sysadmin somehow managed to accidentally mark Every Single Account in the ENTIRE system as "unpaid"??? Like, the db has a flag showing whether or not an account had purchased the software yet to grant access and she just. turn them all off. how do you even do that wtf.
That's my secret, Cap. I'm always bad at computers.
Re: post-work quirks
Argh, I feel the 'I should have multiple examples but right now I can't think of one'.InspectorCaracal wrote: ↑Thu 16 Jul, 2020, 5:03 pmThis is incredibly maddening because I know I have LOADS of these kinds of opinions and I can't think of a single one!! Argh. I blame the sleep deprivation, it's completely fucking up what little memory I have. Well, that and that 90% of my current frustrated "Never Again"s are more, things I hate about renting a place to live. Boy, I could rant about home leasing and the things I hate about it for hours.
Well, let's see. I worked at a cafe/bakery/...food place, for a while, during which I learned how to be a barista and developed some very strong opinions about coffee and coffee-based drinks. Like... I'm not gonna go into a lengthy thing about it rn and hijack this thread and turn it into A Coffee Thread lmfao but trust me there's a lot.
I also have a lot of opinions about system administration which tbh are completely unrelated to my experiences being a sysadmin but instead having to work with one who was pretty terrible. Did I ever tell y'all about the time at my last job (fuck me, that was eight years ago now) where, I don't even know what the fuck she was TRYING to do, but the sysadmin somehow managed to accidentally mark Every Single Account in the ENTIRE system as "unpaid"??? Like, the db has a flag showing whether or not an account had purchased the software yet to grant access and she just. turn them all off. how do you even do that wtf.
Right now I can only remember proof reading stuff in Danish. Or bad translations.
Re: post-work quirks
Omg no but I would love deets.InspectorCaracal wrote: ↑Thu 16 Jul, 2020, 5:03 pmDid I ever tell y'all about the time at my last job (fuck me, that was eight years ago now) where, I don't even know what the fuck she was TRYING to do, but the sysadmin somehow managed to accidentally mark Every Single Account in the ENTIRE system as "unpaid"???
And yeah, the "here's a question, oh no what're my answers" feeling is so real lol. Only reason it didn't hit me here is I'm the one asking
-
InspectorCaracal
- Posts: 3934
- Joined: Fri 10 Jul, 2020, 4:14 am
- Location: Narnia
- Contact:
Re: post-work quirks
So okay, the software this company ran was college-level educational, so we ran on an academic schedule. It was Christmas break, so things were slow, and we were having our usual Christmas party day. (Unlike most offices, our office parties were basically "we order a bunch of pizzas and everyone brings some kinda dessert and you can wander in and out as you want", so they're pretty chill and stretch out over the whole afternoon.) And every year, one of the employees brought their eggnog. Yes, the boozy kind. You see where this is going lmaokatrani wrote: ↑Fri 17 Jul, 2020, 3:53 amOmg no but I would love deets.InspectorCaracal wrote: ↑Thu 16 Jul, 2020, 5:03 pmDid I ever tell y'all about the time at my last job (fuck me, that was eight years ago now) where, I don't even know what the fuck she was TRYING to do, but the sysadmin somehow managed to accidentally mark Every Single Account in the ENTIRE system as "unpaid"???
Now, there's no solid evidence that our sysadmin could blame this misadventure on the eggnog, although she absolutely did blame it on the eggnog, but the fact of the matter was, there we were, having a chill afternoon, and suddenly one of the... i'll call her a client manager, part of the support team but more about managing the client accounts than the ground-level stuff, who was a real type A personality and absolutely the type to go right back to work after her usual break during an office party, discovered that all the students for one course were marked unpaid. And then we get an email from the sysadmin like whoops!
If I remember right, she was trying to switch the flag on one account and I guess forgot the WHERE clause to match to an ID and just. hit the entire database. For those of you unfamiliar with how a database query works: basically, you go like, "so on this table, I want to change the value in column Paid to 'no', but I only want to do it on the rows where column ID has a value of katrani", and that'd set katrani's account to unpaid. Except she just didn't do the second half at all.
So I was sitting there like I'M REAL GLAD NOBODY DOES WORK DURING CHRISTMAS BREAK OR WE'D BE FUCKED. (But of course, there were a couple clients at schools that don't celebrate Christmas so it was more like we were sitting there like "please fix this before anyone notices!!")
Me and a couple of other people up in the support building have a techy background, so I'm at my desk handling the fortunately small influx of "why can't I access the software??" messages while we're all like BOGGLING AT HOW IRRESPONSIBLE OUR SYSADMIN WAS. Like. Who does that! Who just decides on a whim to go in and manually screw around with the accounts database wtf
I mean, she paid for her irresponsibility by having to spend the next hour or two going through the database and cross-checking payment transaction statuses to find the accounts that had successfully paid and not been refunded in order to flag them, but whew.
Lesson is, proofread your damn queries, kids!
That's my secret, Cap. I'm always bad at computers.
Re: post-work quirks
Oh man, tons of little things.
So a lot of them are opinions on security and I will swear at any TV show that pretends it has a SKIF and it's like, a switch in a normal room. *eyeroll* (job with government contracts)
And confidentiality and notes, I feel like people don't note their files nearly well enough (Job at a preschool with developmentally disabled children; job at Social services) and I get really mad at bad confidentiality practices with files.
So a lot of them are opinions on security and I will swear at any TV show that pretends it has a SKIF and it's like, a switch in a normal room. *eyeroll* (job with government contracts)
And confidentiality and notes, I feel like people don't note their files nearly well enough (Job at a preschool with developmentally disabled children; job at Social services) and I get really mad at bad confidentiality practices with files.
Re: post-work quirks
Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility. It's a place to review and work on secret and top secret stuff with no web connection or really any connection. Looks like a bank vault
Re: post-work quirks
(Warning: All caps screaming a few paragraphs down.)
My post-work quirk goes back to my first real not-a-school-job job where I worked in a hospital kitchen. Which is that I actually find the smell of bleach reassuring. In my head bleach = clean. I didn't like it when I first started but it didn't take very long before I could see how a rag, bleach, and a little elbow grease could have a drain go from, 'ick!' to well nigh sparkling clean. Partway through my time there our manager even had us switch from the previous silverware cleaning process where we'd simply spray off any loose gunk, give a little scrub if there was stuck gunk, and then sort into holders and send through the scalding hot water-jets of the conveyor belt dish machine to get gunk off, soak in a sink filled with hot water and a bottle of bleach for several minutes, then run through the dish machine. It's the only food service job I ever held so I can't compare to your regular restaurant but this job instilled a good appreciation for sanitation (good thing too, because on the 100 point scale used locally, we'd get a stern warning at 95% and a fix in days or be shut down warning at 90% which is far stricter than regular places got scored).
That said, as much as I liked being able to clean burnt on gunk from pans with a brass scrub pad I like my non-stick pans too much to allow one of those near them. Thankfully mostly cook with the non-stick stuff these days so I usually don't have to deal with tough gunk (pauses to glare at a pan and scold myself for doing eggs in one of the two regular not-non-stick pans).
I got another post-work quirk from the same job. I've never been able to look at strawberries the same way since working there. I would occasionally get pulled over to help the cooks sort through the shipments of strawberries trim or toss depending on the condition. As one person put it to me about a decade ago, strawberries start going bad the moment you pick them. Ever since I've just haven't had the desire to eat stuff made with real strawberries. Maybe if you've got suppliers that are closer to you or have your own plants. But stuff that's been picked and shipped about, ugh, no.
Then after getting a job in the vicinity of tech support I went from reading tech support jokes and going, "Right, someone asked about how to find the 'Any Key', right, haha." to basically assuming any tech support joke is, or is based on, a true story unless told otherwise. The stuff I've run into. Ugh. The stuff I've run into. Look, when you have to deal with tech support? It's probably not personal. Unless you are one of Those Users. It's just we've run into too many of Those Users for too many categories of such. From the users who start wildly clicking to dispel any pop up that appears (no, seriously, I sat next to that person, something like fifteen to twenty+ clicks any time a pop up appeared and then they couldn't understand why third-party toolbars and plugins kept appearing on their browser until the window was 4/5ths toolbars and took five minutes to load a simple page) to those who thought they could scan a document by holding the page to their screen and clicking on the copy button, to those who required five minutes of help to understand that, "press the insert key on your keyboard," meant pressing a key on the keyboard and not a button or menu entry on the screen (that call required eventually telling them to turn off the monitor and look down at the keyboard because they ¡BLEEPING WELL WOULD NOT STOP LOOKING AT THE SCREEN NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES THEY WERE TOLD IN COUNTLESS VARIATIONS TO LOOK AT THE KEYBOARD, THE THING WITH KEYS YOU PRESS WITH YOUR FINGERS, THE TYPEWRITER LIKE PART OF YOUR COMPUTER! What, no, why would you think I still get worked up over that one, it's been almost a decade.
That reminds me of Tom Scott's video, The Worst Typo I Ever Made, in which he defines the Onosecond, "The second after you make a terrible mistake. The second when you realize what you just did and that there's nothing you can do about it. The second when all the now-inevitable consequences flash through your mind." And tells of his experience with the onosecond that also involved a database.
My post-work quirk goes back to my first real not-a-school-job job where I worked in a hospital kitchen. Which is that I actually find the smell of bleach reassuring. In my head bleach = clean. I didn't like it when I first started but it didn't take very long before I could see how a rag, bleach, and a little elbow grease could have a drain go from, 'ick!' to well nigh sparkling clean. Partway through my time there our manager even had us switch from the previous silverware cleaning process where we'd simply spray off any loose gunk, give a little scrub if there was stuck gunk, and then sort into holders and send through the scalding hot water-jets of the conveyor belt dish machine to get gunk off, soak in a sink filled with hot water and a bottle of bleach for several minutes, then run through the dish machine. It's the only food service job I ever held so I can't compare to your regular restaurant but this job instilled a good appreciation for sanitation (good thing too, because on the 100 point scale used locally, we'd get a stern warning at 95% and a fix in days or be shut down warning at 90% which is far stricter than regular places got scored).
That said, as much as I liked being able to clean burnt on gunk from pans with a brass scrub pad I like my non-stick pans too much to allow one of those near them. Thankfully mostly cook with the non-stick stuff these days so I usually don't have to deal with tough gunk (pauses to glare at a pan and scold myself for doing eggs in one of the two regular not-non-stick pans).
I got another post-work quirk from the same job. I've never been able to look at strawberries the same way since working there. I would occasionally get pulled over to help the cooks sort through the shipments of strawberries trim or toss depending on the condition. As one person put it to me about a decade ago, strawberries start going bad the moment you pick them. Ever since I've just haven't had the desire to eat stuff made with real strawberries. Maybe if you've got suppliers that are closer to you or have your own plants. But stuff that's been picked and shipped about, ugh, no.
Then after getting a job in the vicinity of tech support I went from reading tech support jokes and going, "Right, someone asked about how to find the 'Any Key', right, haha." to basically assuming any tech support joke is, or is based on, a true story unless told otherwise. The stuff I've run into. Ugh. The stuff I've run into. Look, when you have to deal with tech support? It's probably not personal. Unless you are one of Those Users. It's just we've run into too many of Those Users for too many categories of such. From the users who start wildly clicking to dispel any pop up that appears (no, seriously, I sat next to that person, something like fifteen to twenty+ clicks any time a pop up appeared and then they couldn't understand why third-party toolbars and plugins kept appearing on their browser until the window was 4/5ths toolbars and took five minutes to load a simple page) to those who thought they could scan a document by holding the page to their screen and clicking on the copy button, to those who required five minutes of help to understand that, "press the insert key on your keyboard," meant pressing a key on the keyboard and not a button or menu entry on the screen (that call required eventually telling them to turn off the monitor and look down at the keyboard because they ¡BLEEPING WELL WOULD NOT STOP LOOKING AT THE SCREEN NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES THEY WERE TOLD IN COUNTLESS VARIATIONS TO LOOK AT THE KEYBOARD, THE THING WITH KEYS YOU PRESS WITH YOUR FINGERS, THE TYPEWRITER LIKE PART OF YOUR COMPUTER! What, no, why would you think I still get worked up over that one, it's been almost a decade.
Oh! Em! Gee!InspectorCaracal wrote: ↑Fri 17 Jul, 2020, 4:41 pmI mean, she paid for her irresponsibility by having to spend the next hour or two going through the database and cross-checking payment transaction statuses to find the accounts that had successfully paid and not been refunded in order to flag them, but whew.
Lesson is, proofread your damn queries, kids!
That reminds me of Tom Scott's video, The Worst Typo I Ever Made, in which he defines the Onosecond, "The second after you make a terrible mistake. The second when you realize what you just did and that there's nothing you can do about it. The second when all the now-inevitable consequences flash through your mind." And tells of his experience with the onosecond that also involved a database.