Living over the wall from somebody equally as geaky (yes, I misspelled that, deal with it 🐸) as I am can get pretty hilarious sometimes.

We have spent the last two days beating our heads against a complex piece of functionality that our team ham-handedly moved over from our now defunct legacy system to our web app a couple years ago. “We” wrote the worst spec on earth — I had a hand in it so I can only beat myself up. Now faced with documenting what actually happens, I could not make heads or tails of it. It didn’t help that someone not paid for their writing skills wrote up the original problem, which means I was dealing with a word salad brain dump. It was a lot like trying to parse the Orange Baboon’s tweets except this person is intelligent and was actually trying to make sense.

Anyway, my work buddy bridges the gap between legacy and web (I am web only) and he was able to put together a document that *I* was able to understand and subsequently pretty up. The funny part was that he used the terms “Single Tweak” and “Double Tweak” to describe this crapola. I formalized these terms in the spec by defining and using them, which made my work buddy crack up when he reviewed my revised document. In this particular case, I couldn’t think of a better word than “tweak” so I guess it is now part of our lexicon.

This reminds me of a story my small-town yooperland banker dad used to tell about a trip he took (as a child) with *his* small-town yooperland banker dad. Their mission was to collect a cow. They parked at the Sugar Island ferry dock and walked onto the ferry. They disembarked on the other side of the St. Marys (no, there is no apostrophe) River, walked up the hill, collected the cow, and walked the cow back to the ferry. The punchline was, “When you are in the banking business you can get into all kinds of shit.”

I am the apple that didn’t fall all that far from the tree although I am a systems analyst, not a bank prez, and my biz is the *online* banking business. But after what I went through the last couple days, yes, when you are in the banking business you can get into all kinds of shit. At least I didn’t have to clean my shoes at the end of all that!

The pic? 🐭/🦝 are spending a couple days at this camp cabin somewhere in SW lower Michigan. It’s Mouse’s pic, posted with permission.

And that is all except that we are participating in a birthday of porterization over at Weber’s so we’ll have to get cracking soon.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 30th, 2020 at 6:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.