The Angry Geek

There’s a sign just gone up in my office building advertising a chocolate sale. It looks like this:

CHOCOHOLICS

Come and try free samples and buy gifts for friends and family, 12pm-2pm today.

Now… imagine the outrage if that had read “Alcoholics” instead… Why are chocolate addicts treated so badly that we don’t care about this kind of insensitive taking of advantage?

Programmers are good at writing step by step instructions. After all, that’s all a computer program ever is – a set of very simple step by step instructions. Of course, modern programming languages try and make it more complicated, by adding objects and events, but in the end, everything comes down to a set of instructions.
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I have a very nice Vodafone v1615 mobile which runs the Windows Mobile 6 (WM6) operating system. On Saturday, I lent it to my wonderful Fiancée while she was in the shops and I had to run back to the flat to solve a crisis at work. I’d like to say that ever since then it’s been running slowly; but the truth is it was giving me grief even before that… I just noticed it more after using her sleek, shiny (but tragically pink) Samsung Tocco.

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The worst thing about being the most technically competent person in a company is that all too often, the buck stops at my desk.  I can’t complain – it’s a problem of my own making; I’m too lazy to pass on knowledge in a usable format, so I end up having to do a lot of the work.

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I work in a so-called “Managed Office”. This is where my company leases a number of rooms in a large office building, and gets use of the communal spaces, reception, car-park etc. – the idea is to get all the facilities of a large corporate office without the overhead.  I say so-called, becaues I’ve never actually seen these people manage the place at all!

There are some huge disadvantages to working in a place like this.  One of them is dress codes – some companies in the building may have a different code than others, which can sometimes look unprofessional when you have visitors…

Another disadvantage is that you’re sharing the communal areas – kitchen, break room, post room etc. – with maybe 100 people over whom you have absolutely no authority.  In fact, you don’t even have a way to raise issues.  Without futher ado, here are the 10 worst abuses of the communal areas in my office…
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Today did not start out well.  Possibly due to this cold (which I just can’t seem to shake) – or possibly due to staying up a little too late watching Spiderman (the animated series) – I completely slept through my first alarm, and therefore shut off and ignored my second alarm, assuming I’d be awoken again in half an hour…

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I manage the Support & Development department for the UK division of a fairly large multi-national corporation that provides Supply Chain solutions.  That’s not where I started though – I was originally hired as a code monkey, nothing more, and spent my first few years working for one particular customer developing customisations to our product to match their legacy requirements.

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