Plaidophile

(BTW, the formal definition of a Cecil is enough angry to launch a thousand quits. So 1mCecil = 1000μCecils = enough to make me quit. Sorry for not actually defining my scale earlier.)

Yesterday after finding it impossible to actually sit down with him for the (third) UI overhaul, we scheduled a meeting for 9:30 AM today, since he said he'd be here from 8:30 on. I got here at 9:00 and he, surprise surprise, wasn't in. At 9:45 he finally walked in the door, and I asked him, "Can we meet now?" and he said, "No, I'm walking in the door." Then he went into his office and closed the door and didn't emerge for another hour.

When we finally met, the "new" UI tree was pretty much exactly like my original tree (which he had dismissed as "requiring too many clicks"), only now since this was created based on user feedback it was sacred (and his), unlike my (meaning his) crappy convoluted one with context-based menus from before.

I've had exceptionally-shitty wrists lately, and a few weeks ago I found a silicone stress ball in a pile of computer crap in the basement. Figuring that he didn't even know about it, I comandeered it and put it in my book bag. A few days ago I had it out by my monitor, and he took it (without even asking if it was mine), and he's been playing with it ever since. Even though it conceivably could have been one which I had purchased at OfficeMax without even knowing about his missing detritus-pile one. Not that I did, but he never even asked to make sure.

Anyway, so today he's been yelling at Jennifer for a configuration problem he put into the PBX system, because for whatever reason, when people dial the "accounting" extension, it just gets dumped straight to voice mail, rather than ringing Jennifer's phone. So he's been giving her grief for the users going to the "accounting" extension when they want "accounting" (go figure). I politely asked why he doesn't make accounting ring through to Jennifer, and he said, "I don't want it to ring Jennifer."

So, okay, how the fuck is she supposed to answer calls which aren't coming in to her?

Anyway, I was telling her about the stressball thing, and she said, "Oh, is that the thing he threw at my head the other day? It hurt!"

Man, what an asshole.

Oh, and also, since we're in a "final design" stage for the website, I need a system running IE 5 to test it on, because the "I come from the print world, so I know what I'm doing" designer who he hired a few weeks ago put out this really glossy sales-brochure-esque layout which is, of course, a pain in the ass to do in pure CSS. (Except I did, without too much effort, even though he insisted I should just do a quick table hack which would have taken me longer and wouldn't have had things like accessibility or resolution-independence.)

Anyway, so like, the only browsers I have available to test with are Konqueror and Mozilla, which certainly aren't representative of what our customers will be running. So, I asked him if there was a system which I could run IE5 and IE6 on, and he said he'd get me one set up right away.

A week later, I asked him for an update on the system, and he said, "Oh, sorry, here, just use my laptop in the meantime." So I did, but since it's running XP it only has IE6 on it (and of course it's also the XP-only IE which uses native widgets for everything, meaning no CSS for form elements).

Today he asked how the laptop was working out for me, and I said, "Well, it's great, except I still have no idea how it'll run on anything pre-XP. Could you please get the Win2K system together for me?" and he kind of stared at me blankly.

I'd have just finished putting together the 2K system myself, except John insists on using removable drive sleds for everything, and this system didn't have the drive sled port in it for some reason, so I couldn't just finish plugging the wires together.

So, all I can work on right now is the fucking localization, which should have been a low priority (since we're only launching in the US for the forseeable future) but a couple weeks ago he decided that l10n was a huge, high priority. If it was such a high priority then why did he tell me not to bother with l10n when I was first programming this system and when it wouldn't have been such a chore to retrofit?!

Ugh.