Too Far Afield

Allotting floating files was my last duty today. It’s done. Another stage in life is over.

Just got around to install the latest security update of WordPress. If you’ve got an old WordPress version running, you should upgrade now. Seriously. Should I mention, that it was the usual seamless two-minute process again? No, you already knew that, I think.

I have just uploaded a new photo to my home page. It was taken by Timo at Maxime’s birthday party with the cam of Ferdi and is therefore courtesy of all. We do now have pictures online from 3 different years at 3 different places made by 3 different people. Enjoy the new one and thanks again to all of you for providing me with your great photos.

Friday afternoon, a customer called in and asked, if it was possible to show a random home page to the visitors of his online presence. I said, yes, he could do it with PHP and it would be just like those random image scripts you get by once in a while when surfing the web. However, I was a bit courious, why he wanted to do this. He told me that he surfed by his Postbank online banking site that morning and got something, that could have been a 503 Service Unavailable HTTP status code. Postbank politely apologized that they were unable to serve him, because an unusually high number of customers already used their services. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to occasionally serve such a page to visitors of my personal home page?, my customer asked laughing. I couldn’t agree more ;).

Attached to the door of our office we have a yellow sheet with 10 rules. Deduced from the bible. It was once hung up by a trainee. Rule number 9 is headed Delegate.

[...] What you are doing is not good. You and the people with you will wear yourselves out, for the thing is too heavy for you; you are not able to perform it alone.

For your reference: This is Exodus 18:17,18.

John is a janitor. He tells his boss that a water tap on the second floor is not functioning properly and has to be replaced by a plumber. His boss asks Bill to check, if that water tap on the second floor is really not alright. Bill tells the boss that the tap truely needs to be replaced. The boss now asks Mike to have a look at the water tap on the second floor. Something seems to be wrong with that. Maybe it can be repaired in-house. Mike orders John to go up to the second floor and check, if the water tap is alright – so that Mike can report back to the boss.

The water tap is not replaced for a week, because so many people are involved. But finally the boss of the boss complains, that the water tap on the second floor is not ok. A plumber is called asap. Everyone is happy. Except for John… Wonna bet why?

A few weeks ago, I got a call from our human resources department.

She: Herr Fey, you’re really ahead of your time, don’t ya think?
Me: Well, why do you think so?
She: Today I got a time sheet for September that is presumably from you.
Me: Yes, that’s all right. I just handed it to my department manager.
She: But according to the time sheet, you won’t be working in September.
Me: Yes, you’re right. I’ve still got 1 and 1/2 months overtime. I won’t even be working half of August.
She: But … well, I just wanted to check back with you, in case … seems you’ll have a nice September…
Me: I hope so.