that's the big city...

Well, things are as I expected in Houston. The trip started out insane when my fucking GPS gave me the worst directions ever to my customer site. Then my customer, who is furious at my company and at his sales person, started yelling (yes, yelling) at me the second I walk in the door. All I could think of is the episode on Southpark when the aliens are talking to the cows and the cows are like "but you ripped this other cow's ass out" and the aliens were like "oh, that was Carl, he's new" and the Carl alien goes "my bad!"

Anyway, I've managed to fix some problems, but my ability to fix problems is directly related to how much information the customer gives me. Which is little to none. Until today I couldn't even see what they were doing. He dumped a 40 page pile of the worst code written ever in my lap and I'm supposed to "fix it". On top of what ever other crisis happens. And my customer keeps saying "I think I'm confusing you" and I'm like "maybe if you gave me an actual example of what you're trying to do I could help". Ech. Also, he wants me to write code to fix problems in the release he's using (and yelled at me as if I personally released a version with bugs). He says he can't upgrade until he tests shit, and he won't let me do the testing, so that testing will probably happen next never. When I pointed out to him that if he had used such rigorous "testing" for the previous release he never would have installed it he promptly declared it was lunch time and left the meeting. Why introduce logic into an argument?

The office smells like farts, or maybe it's just that my cube mate farts non-stop. I've lost my rental car twice now in different parking garages. Yesterday I wandered around for over an hour before I found it (I remembered the floor and the area where I was parked, but it's a three part garage spread out over two city blocks and the garages aren't connected, so I went up one side and then had to walk down and go to the next side, etc.). Today I parked in a space I was sure would be easy to find. The problem was the door I came out was locked and I couldn't use it to go back in. I had to go to the bowels of the garage, take an elevator, and then try to re-orient myself. I was only lost for 10 minutes today.

The good news is I have a quart of blue berries and I plan on eating the whole thing for dinner. Tomorrow, as they say, is another day. I just have to keep reminding myself to be like Special Agent Dale Cooper...