2002-03-20 - 2:52 p.m.
Butting My Head Against a Brick Wall

Spring began this morning. Not that you can tell by looking out the window. Reminds me of when I was in the bookstore Monday. When I came to the checkout the lady behind the register asked me if I had trade credit. I said "Yes, but I don't want to use it." She's all, "You're saving it?" Then Cute Book Guy walked by and said, "Yeah, she says she's saving it for a rainy day." (See, he remembers who I am). Then, register lady looked out the window and said, "Well, they're pretty much all rainy days in Oregon." Smile, smile, I agreed. Cute Book Guy then said, "Well, maybe you're saving it for a sunny day."

I laughed. But it's true. All except for a couple of months during the summer. Which means that about this time of year I am really, really, really sick of clouds.

No new fanfic comments today. Sigh. No ego food for me. No matter! I'll probably have the story wrapped up by this weekend. Then maybe I can get around to posting some of my old stuff, as my friend Timethian did a couple of days ago. He said he stole the idea from me. Heh. The funny part is, I would never have thought to post my older stories until I saw his entries.

*rubbing wrist* I did a stupid thing this weekend. I helped my dad lift a very heavy desk up a ladder to his shop loft, about ten or eleven feet off the floor. No big; I'm strong, I could do that ... except that I forgot my wrist brace, and got my weak wrist twisted funny while it was holding all the weight, and now it's acting up again. Which means I have to wear the brace while I'm typing now. Damnit. And it still aches.

Plus my supervisor has sent out a crackdown message to the whole company. No unauthorized use of any software permitted on any company computer, all the way down to accessing a Yahoo Mail account. WTF? Playing around on the 'Net on breaks/lunch is all that keeps me sane, some days. And I always think of things while I'm sitting here bored at work, that I never do at home.

And one better? There's a huge, major database project that I've been working on for the company for several weeks now. I went to my supervisor today to update her on my progress and all of a sudden she was like, "What? What do you mean, data entry's a pain? There's just one big table, right?"

I said, "Ummm ..." What I thought was, Good God. She set me on a project she knows nothing about? Then I started trying to explain to her about all the myriad small linked tables. She got upset and insisted that the redesign person messed up, it should have stayed one big table. So then I start trying to explain database theory to her, and how lots of linked tables save space and work better than one big table. If, and it's a big if, you get the forms right.

So, she asked what happened to the forms that were already there, that pulled all the information in, she'd seen those. I said, You mean those summary things? Hah. People aren't doing data entry there, it doesn't have all the information on it by a long shot. People are printing those as summary reports, which look like garbage, so I scrapped them and redesigned them as actual summary reports. Now I'm making a new data entry form system, whereupon I will hide the table structure.

By this time it was clear that my boss and I were on entirely different wavelengths. She also said, somewhere in there, that when people come to me for database help on their own littler databases, she doesn't want me doing the work, I'm supposed to just give them pointers. Well, that's all well and good, but NONE of these people know much about Access, at all. They end up constructing these little poorly structured things and then asking me how to make their queries and reports work right, and all I can think of when I see them, is Give me the damned thing and let me build it correctly, and THEN I will show you how to pull the information you want.

Ahem. Sorry. It's just that with a company this big, they really do need a dedicated database manager. And they hired me, a person who can DO that job, and I'm not even allowed to really use what I know, because according to theory here, people should be self-sufficient in their own jobs. *rolling eyes*

Okay. I feel better now. =)