floods, bugs, emotional hugs

Early this morning I was at my customer site, and I went into the mess to get some hot water for my tea. The water thing was out of water, so I decided I would change the barrel thing by myself.

I removed the empty barrel, ripped the seal off of a new barrel, picked it up, and started walking towards the water thing. I had somehow failed to notice there was a power cord coming out of the water thing (presumably to make the water hot). Anyway, I tripped over the cord right as I was aiming the barrel downward to put it on the water thing, lost my balance and accidentally dropped the water barrel.

Five gallons of water spewed all over the floor. It was A LOT of water. I was like fuck fuck fuck. Then I realized, hey, it's 630 in the morning, no one is in yet, so I left the mess in the mess, and went back to my cube, where I kept laughing hysterically every time I thought about tripping (I would pay so much money to have the whole incident on tape). I am kind of embarrassed I did that, and I would have cleaned up the mess but there aren't even paper towels in the mess.

Luckily, when my customer got in, he immediately wanted to go over to a conference room in the other building. We were there all day, and when we got back to my cube it was 530 in the evening and the flood in the mess was gone.

Then, I realized I had caused yet another problem. I'm working in a SCIF, and no one told me we had to pack out our own trash. I ate two bananas, an apple, and two clementines on monday. I threw the peels and core away in the trash can under a desk in an empty cube. The trash was never taken out so I guess the peels and core started rotting or something. Plus, it's been raining like crazy here. Anyway, there is now an infestation of what the customer called "stink bugs" in the SCIF. They were literally jumping off the wall onto my keyboard when I was trying to go through my email and crawling on the cube walls. And they've even crawled into the honey comb space in the blinds, so all the blinds have dead stink bugs in them.

I don't think anyone has figured out the peels and core were mine. Or maybe my customer knows and he's being polite.

Because, he's really a great customer. Every night when I leave he says "thanks for everything you did today". I've never had a customer do that and it's like getting a little emotional hug at the end of every day. He also is getting really excited about all the architecture products we're creating. And the other day, when I pissed off a commander by saying, in response to a stupid comment, meant to suggest the stuff I was working on had no value, "That would be a great idea if you were presenting it in an insane asylum" (the commander ripped my head off), my customer told the commander "She knows what she's talking about. And if you don't get it, you're fucking stupid". The comment was a suggestion that, rather than research interfaces to a system that's going to be replaced, we just "unplug it and see what happens".

BTW, to get that commander back for being a dick, I devised a bunch of SQL queries to show, on a daily basis, how much work his team is getting done (next to nothing the past few days) vs. how much work my team is getting done (a lot!). The suck thing about that is our stuff is relying on theirs, and the longer they take, the less time we have to get our stuff done. When I showed the program manager what I did he got a smile the size of Texas on his face. He's going to present the reports at the next technical interchange meeting.

As for me, I am going to try to get through tomorrow without fucking anything else up in the office.