And here we are once again.

July 9, 2004

Working here at…er…I guess I still can’t name the company but I don’t see the harm in linking to it so you can see for yourself…sure has given me an interesting perspective on corporate life. When I worked at Stream, I found Dilbert to be fabulously amusing because I lived and breathed in a cubicle. I still read Dilbert, but since I’m out of that lifestyle I don’t find it nearly as funny. But some of the punchlines and storylines still hit pretty close to home–that is, engineers and marketing bickering over what can and what can’t be in the product. I consider myself to be a little bit of both. Since I’m QA, that means that I have to use the products pretty extensively, and repeated usage means I notice things. I bring up said things with the programmers, and they inform me whether it’s possible, feasible, or desirable. But it always amazes me when something that I see as a valid point is simply dismissed by one person or another because they just simply don’t want to deal with it. I guess that’s pretty common from what I hear.

It’s been a long morning. I’ve had very little to do of substance, so I’ve spent much of the time working with the program that’s been written for a client, but when I hit a stopping point it was sort of a wall that I couldn’t do any more with. My boss is out of the country until Monday, so he’s not available to direct the project and point us (us, being myself and whoever is programming at the time) down the right path. To be honest, I was sort of confused why I got brought ion one both of the projects I’m working on now so early. My job doesn’t begin until something’s been written, but I was receiving emails about the project long before any code had been taped out. Granted, it didn’t take long since we just reused code from another project, but I certainly didn’t need to know about API changes and driver updates. I have a filter set up to filter messages from the two projects into different folders for organizational purposes, and one has close to 100 messages in it after less than a month. It seems like three or four times I day I’m getting back and forth emails on that project because I’m CC’d on everything, and meanwhile the company from the other project is wanting to know when they’ll have a deliverable.

At least I’m not a programmer. I’m glad that my job scope in these projects is fairly limited. Test, find bug, report bug, verify bugfix. Rinse, repeat.

I had a revelation about my car yesterday afternoon. I’d been posting messages in a forum dedicated to ZX2’s like my own regarding my annoying car alarm that’s frustrated me to no end, and with the help of a forum member I managed to track down at least aprt of the problem. I’ve never been able to figure out this alarm from day one, because the arm/disarm mechanism I have (called a “fob”) isn’t for an alrm, but rather for keyless entry—which I don’t have. I c\made sure I checked on that one. Anyway, it has the Ford emblem on it, seems all legit. The other fob isn’t a Ford fob at all, but IS an alarm fob, not a keyless entry one. My alarm doesn’t exhibit the same characteristics of the factory alarm in that it auto-arms after precisely 60 seconds, it has a shock sensor (which forces my car to honk if someone next to it sneezes), and of course, the mismatched fobs.

So yesterday I pulled back the carpet in the trunk and discovered not only was the factory anti-theft device’s console not where it should be, but there weren’t wires leading to it. A careful examination of under the front dash revealed aftermarket wiring and a fuse that shouldn’t be there. Pulling the fuse disabled the alarm. Seems that the previous owner had an aftermarket alarm installed and Ford neglected to pick this up and/or tell me. So I’m going to take my car back to dealerhsip and get their help in solving the problem. Ideally, I’d like to keep the alarm, but to do that I need to find out what brand it is so I can adjust it. Disabling the auto-arming is priority #1. It’s so frustrating to gas up the car and have it arm while you’re sitting int he frickin’ thing. I don’t mind arming it myself, but only when I say to arm it. I’m going to press to make sure that they don’t charge me, because after all, it’s not supposed to be there and they didn’t tell me. They basically gave me something the owner’s manual doesn’t cover and expected me to make the most out of it. So I might do that tomorrow.

It’s handy having a community of people to help you with things like that. I probably would have just gone on with the alarm in its current state until it REALLY frustrated me and then had to pay someone to help me. Of course, the dealer still might try and charge me, but I think that they owe me on this one.

Weekends are nice. I’m looking froward to sleeping off some of the fatigue that is dogging me. I haven’t been sleeping well, so hopefully I can get a fresh start this next week. Have a good Friday.

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