You hear that, Mr Andersen?

That burns a building down...

Okay, remember what I said yesterday about the hypothetical GM, injecting complications into my life to make it more "interesting"? I now officially hate that guy.

Severe stress today, caused by a series of events that are almost classical in its shape. I haven't had enough time for perspective to kick in, which will no doubt allow me to find the funny, but the basics are: it turns out something that I thought had to happen by, say, Monday, had to happen today for me to meet the requirements of my lender. And I'd got the forms to apply for this thing this morning, and it's already nearly midday when I find out the correct deadline. Much hurried consultation, pulling out of hair, stress - and then I'm told that it probably won't be ready until tomorrow morning. So more stress, more imagining of horror scenarios, and I try to get hold of the lender - who tells me that it should all be fine, call my lawyers and get them to phone the lender's head office to confirm. I do that, and the lawyers say they'll do that, and everything is as dealt with as I can make it.

And then I get a call about 3pm (which is about quarter of an hour after I organized to work around the no-show) confirming that my application has been approved, and it's been faxed to my lawyers and my lender.

...

I am never, ever buying a house ever again. Ever. Unless someone gives me a house, or I somehow win a house somewhere, this is the house in which I will die. And I will be happy when I die, for I will not have had to buy a house again, ever.

And if, when I die, I find out you need houses in heaven, I will buy a tent.

Maybe giving up the soothing powers of tea for Lent wasn't such a great choice after all.

***

Very little else to say, really. People at work are being pretty understanding about me taking longer lunchbreaks when sudden crises arise and need to be dealt with. I'm really, really glad that nothing catastrophically bad has happened - both because I don't like it when catastrophically bad things happen, and because I would hate to be put in a position where I had to chose between getting into a morass of trouble with my house, or causing the facility to grind to a halt and being fired.

(Note to sadistic GM of my life - notice the knocking on the wood? See the holding of the thumbs and crossing of fingers? Give one of the other characters some damn spotlight time, and leave me alone for a while!)

We're about to cram another body into the office, which will involve a mighty shifting of desks. I've not been booted down to the Production floor just yet, but I suspect it's only a matter of time.

According to one of the artists, at Weta Digital there are ~80 women and 290+ men. I find that weird, since it feels like the ratio is a lot more even; however, there are a large number of women in highly visible roles (like 16 of the 21 in Production), and there are a large, large number of unsociable men, so that may account for my skewed perception. (For comparison's sake, there are two woman in the 26 person-strong IT department.)

***

The newest member of the IT department is currently bewailing the fact that there are no decent open-source shared-calendar applications, as she's meant to manage the head of IT's appointment book. She talked at one point about using ical, which I found a blast from the past - but it turns out there's a Mac program with the same name as the fairly primitive Unix app I was thinking of. (And it wouldn't have solved her problems anyway, since using iCal would have meant having two calendars, one that the CTO could modify, and one that she could modify.)

I'm glad that I have the bare minimum of meetings to deal with, and so don't have to care; still, it's a weird feeling, knowing that there's something that Outlook does better than any open-source solution that the fairly savvy set of sysadmins we have can think of.

***

Five days to go. Nothing more to do, except movers and power/gas, and maybe find out what my phone number will be.

Posted by svend at February 10, 2005 5:26 PM