REVIEW COMMENTS

More tension today. Today's tension came directly from review comments, which present a fine opportunity for people to review my work and tell me how far I've missed the mark.

Six pages into one highly annotated document and I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands, got up and made myself a glass of juice in the kitchen.

The kitchen is the place for mindless chit-chat. I expect a lot of work kitchens are like it: you can have the same conversations with the same people over and over again and no-one seems to notice. In fact, if anything they enjoy it.

"Alright?"

"I'll be glad when it's Friday."

[insert laugh]

"Yeah me too."

"See you later."

"See you later."

I really want to shake it up, throw in a little seasoning to make it different, but I've realised that this is a kind of religious ritual now. It can't be altered without someone thinking you're a bit strange. That did happen to a guy, Joseph, who used to work in our company. He was like a conversational quantum leaper - you'd think you were talking about the seaside, and then suddenly it's a discussion about Will Self's vocabulary and the best way to cook a chicken in twenty minutes. Before long he was ostracised and considered just a bit too wacky for most people's linear expectation of kitchen-chit-chat.

I really miss Joseph.

The review comments felt like volleys of criticism, scrawled across documents and lobbed into battle from all and sundry. It felt like people who knew what they were talking about had finally twigged that I know very little about what I'm writing about. I know that almost certainly isn't the case, but that is how it felt for a while. What a useless moron, I heard them say inside my head. He wouldn't know his LDAP from his NTLM if it came up and authenticated him on the Exchange Server!

A little later I got an email asking for some wording advice. Someone was trying to write an alarm that would be raised if something called the Transaction Log Export failed. Transaction Log Export (unsurprisingly) tries to export transaction logs. If it fails it writes a line to another log to inform you what might have happened. I was suddenly being asked whether it was OK to log that the transaction log export log had failed.

I looked outside the window at the guy blowing leaves with a back-strapped leaf-blower. He knows what he's doing, I sighed to myself.