02/28/2025 - All Peaches and Cream

Today's Rating: 7/10

Song of the Day: Telescope - Cage the Elephant

Current Book: Secrets of the Stoics - Jason Hemlock

Friday was an eventful day to be sure, but like most Fridays, regardless of what actually happens in the day, it's going to be rated higher than most of the standard weekdays. I was even able to get a full 8 hours of sleep!

I woke up, got my shareholder-value juice, and got to work on yesterday's post (which was the longest I had written to date). After wrapping that up, I didn't really have anything major items to do at work, so I took a look through our service queue (how clients can submit any issues they are having to our team). I assigned on of the tickets to myself and began working on it. The client was wondering why their metrics were reporting so strangely (showing 1000% utilization for various metrics on their dashboards). The issue was related to how they were querying those metrics; I pointed out the mistake and provided steps to fixing it.

Right after I finished that ticket, my least favorite client, which I will refer to as "LFC" from now on (thanks for the suggestion Mom!), reached out for help on another issue.

The plus this time was that they did need my help with something that was something I should be a helping with (there's a first for everything!). The downside was it was kind of a "dirty fix" that would be better implemented on the application side but due to their schedule, they would have to do that at a later date.

Another great thing about Friday's is that my team does virtual standup on Friday, so we put our updates in chat instead of having the meeting. On a monthly basis, we also meet up as a team for "knowledge transfer sessions" where one or more team members would give a presentation on a topic of their choice related to our job. These meetings are always pretty awkward because all of us are overworked, and no one has time to think about what to present on. We chatted for the first ten or so minutes before the leads asked if anyone had something they wanted to present on.

As expected, no one had anything and there was an overwhelming silence. I do believe that there are two kinds of people in this world: the people that will let a silence come to its natural conclusion or the people that feel the need to fill that silence at any cost. I would say most of the engineers on the team fall into that first group and would have happily allowed the silence to end the meeting. Our scrum master is definitely in the latter group though (I like him but he is a talker). He proceeded to talk about some JIRA topics for a little while before eventually dropping the bomb that some people were being laid off from the program.

My project consists of many teams (around 20 in total), and my specific team was not going to be affected at this time. However, several other teams were losing some members and Friday was going to be their last day. We were not told specific names at this time though, but we were informed a second batch would also be leaving the following Friday. My brain immediately jumped to:

Now, you may be thinking "Austin, don't be ridiculous; you need that job!", but let me give some additional background that might help you out. If I lost my position on my current project, that does not mean that I would immediately lose my job. I would go to what my company calls "The Bench" where I would still be employed but would not have any work to be done. While on "The Bench", your job becomes to find a new project within a given time frame. If after that time frame, you still have not found a new project then the conversation would be started about being let go. That buffer combined with the disdain that I have for my project (I've been trying to get off of it for 2+ years at this point) lead me to these thoughts.

After that meeting, I had a broader meeting with the entire account (a collection of project categorized under the same leadership) where the impact to the business was explained. I joked with Maddie that this was a meeting that was scheduled that morning and only had me, my boss, and HR. She was not a fan of that joke.

The most horrifying thing that can happen to a remote employee happened to me in this meeting though. I had left my mic unmuted by mistake in a 100+ person meeting. I didn't realize this until the head of our entire account mentioned that someone needed to go on mute. When I realized it was me, my heart jumped out of my chest.

Fortunately, I probably said the single best thing I could have said in that situation. Maddie was talking to me about something she wanted me to look at so what I said (and everyone in the meeting heard) was: "Not right now, I'm trying to listen to this". I would count this as extremely lucky as I will say something truly horrible things in these large meetings that are usually pointless. Things that would likely get me fired (the real fired that I don't want; not the fake fired that I would volunteer for)

After that, I left for an abbreviated walk since I had another meeting in an hour. In total, I walked for 2.8.2 miles in 49 minutes to be sure I made it back in time. This meeting was my biweekly one-on-one with my boss. These typically consist of what's going on, how I'm feeling, and if there was anything I wanted to talk about. We joked about me talking off mute in that big meeting an hour ago . He had realized it was me and was about to send me a message before I realized my mistake and had already muted myself. After that, the big topic of the layoffs came off, so I got to ask him more details about that. Right now, they are avoiding laying off any engineers, and my team is definitely the safest of all the teams. He did give me a few names of the people whose last day would be today. Among those were some people that I rarely interacted with and somebody that I used to "work" closely with that deserved the axe long, long ago. I say "work" because I truly do not have even an inkling of what she did. She was the scrum master for my old team but shoved all of those tasks to the engineers. The only reason I'm sad that I'm not still on my old team is that I couldn't be there to see her leave:

After that meeting, I had taken the latter half of the day off, and Maddie had worked from home that day. We decided to go out to lunch. We got cheeseburgers, fries, and some fried chicken from a local restaurant called Darrell's and then went for dessert at a local bakery Atwood's.

We headed home for their day where she continued to work, and I decided to fill my time with a personal project (trying to repurpose an old Raspberry Pi; more details on this will probably come in future posts). I then received the call that every son knows will eventually come but dreads it nonetheless...... my mom needed tech support.

I had swapped all of her passwords to Bitwarden a while back and had been anticipating her having issues while she got used to using it. She called me in panic mode as she couldn't log in to one of the critical services for her job.

I decided to go to her to help her out as I thought the fix would be fairly easy (just showing her how to copy/paste on her iPhone). When I got there, I had her show me what she was doing and to my absolute surprise, she was doing it perfectly. I then had the "oh shit" moment where I thought I had messed something up. We ended up trying to reset her password on that account, but it was saying the account was invalid. At this point, I did not know what to do, so we called their support line. My mom proceeded to tell the help desk agent her full life story before finally getting to the issue at hand.

The issue ended up being that we were using the wrong email. After we changed to the right email, everything was right as rain. I then hung out with my mom for another thirty or so minutes where we both got to recount the annoying things about our jobs. This was also when she recommended I start referring to my least favorite client as LFC which is a great suggestion.

I headed home, and Maddie and I went out to run a couple of errands: Walmart and the grocery store. We decided to stop at the Peach Cobbler Factory for dessert where I got a belgian waffle, and she got a large cookie. While we were there, we got to experience an old man lecture one of the workers about why education (college) is great investment in yourself. Later, it came out that he had a PhD but was looking for a job at the moment.

We then headed home for the day and watched some more "Keith Eats the Menu" before heading to bed. I read a few more pages of my book (my interest is waning but I'm close to finishing)

Thanks for reading and see you tomorrow!