Matching Tracksuits

Yesterday we had our MS Project training downtown. It was actually rather well done, I thought. I know I learned a lot of things and I’m fairly sure everyone else did too. I think that since most of the project managers had been playing with Project before, they were familiar with some of the basics but I think yesterday’s class probably helped make some of their basic knowledge a little more grounded. I don’t know even if that makes any sense . . .

The truly interesting part of the day, though, came at the end when most all of us (excluding Mitch, the new religion project manager, and Teresa, the new American History project manager) went for drinks. The conversation turned, among other things, to Kali and how everyone felt when they found out she was leaving. Sonny said, “I was thrilled. Matt [Maslin] and I started dancing.” It turns out that Kali was quite disliked (or even hated) by a several of the project managers, including Armando. Sonny said that she was very harsh on all of the editors, especially Matt — and that she was even getting Matt set up to be fired. And that before Kali announced that she was leaving, Matt told Sonny, “After this upload, I’m out of here.” And that Sonny had interviewed at two other places and even had a job offer because she was sick of dealing with Kali. In Sonny’s opinion, Kali was an awful editor, a terrible manager, just generally power-hungry, and so on. She especially took exception to Kali’s tendency to re-write whole chunks of chapters. And I think Sonny was probably a little annoyed with how Kali would make CD’s sit down with her and help her as she re-wrote their stuff.

I believe Rob and I were the only ones who really had anything positive to say about her. He pointed out how she had stood up to Adam during the W-Civ1 upload a few months back concerning broadening the scope of things. And I said that I never really had any problems with her and that I felt as an editor she looked out for my interests. To which everyone responded, “Well, you were one of her favorites.” I guess I always knew that — she was always calling me over to fix her computer and such, but I never really thought of me being a favorite. I’ve never really been anyone’s “favorite,” at least not to my knowledge. I guess I don’t know what the signs of favoritism are when I’m the object of it.

The real surprise was to hear Sonny talk about how Matt was catching so much hell with Kali. According to Sonny, when he was called over to Kali’s cube he referred to it as his “bi-weekly dressing down.” I never really heard what was being said in those “meetings” but she had them with a lot of editors and I think that’s what she was referring to as “training.” She wanted everyone to be like her as far as editing goes.

Yesterday was as stressful a day as I have ever experienced. It started out fine — I knew what I had to do and I really didn’t expect I would have much trouble doing it. A simple task really: add email functionality to the new professor demo account pages. Simple. In fact, I looked in some of Allan’s ASP books and they all basically said, “In ASP it’s a snap to send email!” All you have to do is have a function SMTP¹ site. Fine.

I went onto the live server and, lo and behold, there’s an SMTP site set up. So I made a little ASP page the consisted of nothing but an attempted email. I got a permissions-related error. I did a search on Google for this error and found it. The first hit was to Microsoft’s support page, and it even included instructions for a fix. Simple enough — just change a few settings on some folders in the “mailroot” directory and it should be fine and dandy. I talked to Luis before fiddling with this on the live site (the staging server doesn’t have SMTP). He said the proposed changes would have no security problems, so I made them. With great anticipation I re-uploaded my little “testemail.asp” file and loaded it. Same error. I double checked the folder permissions and found that some of the changes didn’t take. Odd. So I made them again, re-uploaded yet again, tested again, received the same error message again, and muttered, “Fuck” again.

Before any of this happened, though, I talked to Kevin about it. He told me there should be no SMTP configuring necessary, and that I should throw it on the staging server. “If it doesn’t work there, it doesn’t work. I don’t want to spend a lot of time and resources on this.” He said something about using Kiki’s mailto functionality and asked how that was going. I told him I didn’t really know but that I thought she had it working more or less. “Is the mail getting sent to sales reps?” Potential trick question. I should have simply said, “I don’t know.” I should have lied in other words. Well, no — that’s not a lie. I don’t really know whether or not sales reps are getting it, but I don’t think they are. At any rate, I told him that she was and that she had set up her Exchange account to route the stuff to them. Stupid thing to say — he called Kiki and told her he didn’t want it done that way. So now she’s working on that same damn mailto functionality problem that Kevin seems to think would be a snap. In fact it should be a snap if SMTP were working, but it’s not.

I really don’t like my job now simply because I don’t feel comfortable going to anyone for help. Kiki either is not there or has her own stuff to do, and I almost always feel I’m intruding — that my questions are an annoyance to her. I can’t go to Kevin because he’ll just tell me to go out to such and such site and grab some script and throw it in.

If Peter were still the CTO, he’d have been there yesterday helping me with this damn SMTP problem. He would have called his dad; he would have talked to Microsoft (or give me the ability to do so). I see now what Brian meant when he said Peter seemed much more knowledgeable about the actual technical minutiae than Kevin. With Peter I could ask, “How do I do this?” With Kevin I feel uncomfortable even saying, “I can’t do this.” And that’s really quite ridiculous. I have no formal technical training whatsoever, and I’ve been working with ASP stuff for just a few weeks now. I’ve done everything I could to get this stupid thing working, but I just can’t get this function to work, no matter how easy Kevin tells me it should be.

I was walking home last night — terrible night not to have a ride because it was freezing. In the morning it was warm enough that I took off my hat and muff on the way to work; by the time I left at 7:30 last night, it was frigid. Anyway, I was walking home thinking about this and I realized one of the reasons I loved my job in Lipnica: it’s the only job I’ve ever had in which I was 100% confident in my ability to fulfill my responsibilities. Nothing about my job there intimidated me. I never woke up thinking about what I had to accomplish that day and thinking, “God, I hope I can figure out how to do that.” The closest I came was the first time I was in charge of the Strasbourg trip, but that wasn’t really work-related. It had nothing to do with my ability as a teacher — it was a test of my resourcefulness as a person, of course.

1 I’ve been tossing that acronym around all week now and I don’t even know what it means.

My current project at work is rather large in scope: I’m creating a series of new ASP pages for professors so they can get a two-week demo without having to talk to a sales rep beforehand. I ended up creating four pages for the job, including one that is entirely in VBScript, run at the server, which then dynamically creates the HTML page. In other words, all HTML is done with “response.write(“<B>Blah</b>”).”

I had an interesting discussion with Kevin Friday. Some dolt had given out the office username and password for the live site (both of which were “proftext”) and Kevin sent me an email about it, asking me to disable that user name and create a new one for office use. Later I was filling him in on the situation, explaining it was a fairly simple task but it took a little while longer because I had to look for some stuff in the code.

“Tell me this isn’t hard coded in,” he said, shaking his head.¹

“Well, yeah, it is,” I responded, somewhat hesitantly at first.

He went off on a little tangent about the stupidity of such coding practices, then paused to say, “I’m not criticizing you, of course — just giving some advice for the future. If DLI folds up and you end up slinging code somewhere else, don’t do that — it’s poor coding practice.”

“I honesty doubt that I’ll be doing this for any indefinite time,” I said. “I’m just learning all this stuff while I have the opportunity, but it’s not my first love. I just find — well, I wouldn’t say that I’m gifted at it, but I find that it’s very easy for me to understand. It’s very logical.” To which Kevin responded, somewhat surprisingly, “I think you’re fairly gifted at it.” A nice, affirming moment.

1 All of this, of course, is a very rough paraphrase of what we actually said to each other.