my last week at iqe
Jay and Alex were here this week. I’m exactly clear on the situation, but it’s something like this: they’re going to be doing development work, but not necessarily Perl stuff, so they’re just minding the shop until Perl people are brought in. Unless, that is, Perl is dropped and no Perl people are brought in. Time will tell!
Anyway, I’ve been braindumping all over them all week, which has been sort of fun. I’ve explained a number of things to them that I’ve never had to explain to anyone else, like the structure of class relationships in some projects, database schemata, and a number of the more obscure reasons for disliking J.D. Edwards OneWorld. I’ve also eaten quite a lot, especially since last night.
Last night, the three of us went to Ripper’s. We got carded, and Jay didn’t have his ID, so he had to run to the hotel and get it. Alex and Jay were both fairly mortified by their need to have ID to buy beer, but it didn’t end up being a major inconvenience. We had some burgers and beers, and I bought a round of bourbons, since all visitors to the states should try a little. We hung out at Ripper’s for about three hours, just chilling out. It was a good time, and to top it all off, I ran into Beck, whom I hadn’t seen since Katie’s Christmas party. This time, I made sure that /I/ got /his/ number, so I can definitely try contacting him again in the future.
This morning, we hit Billy’s, so that I could make the guys eat scrapple. Despite some really dubious looks, they both agreed that scrapple was “quite tasty.” When we got to work, I was pretty full, but I knew a big lunch was in the future, so I did my best to digest quickly.
Bad Andy (and Joe, Mike, and Tony) took me to Kim Chee Express. Our three tables were absolutely covered in food. We had a little table-top grill, a dozen little dishes, twelve dumplings, three bowls of soup, and a few entrees. It was actually not an insane amount. We all ate just about all of it, and none of us felt horribly full.
I got a decent amount of work done, today, strangely enough. Most of that work was just centralizing documentation, imparting a few last bits of information to the guys, and organizing all the data and paperwork I was leaving behind. I got a lot of handshakes, a couple phone calls, and some email. Most of these were very friendly, but a few were sort of strange and, frankly, irritating.
My “favorite” one requires a bit of explanation. When Duan quit, I took over maintenance of the giant, bizarre ERP system. Usually, when I got a problem report, I sent out a standard questionnaire that went something like this, “Let me know what menu you used, what program you ran, what options you used, and what went wrong.” That way, I could reproduce the problem and work on it alone. Frequently, users would get that questionnaire, and decide that their problem wasn’t worth the time required to explain things.
Today, I got an email that went roughly like this: “Rik, I hear you’re leaving the company. Congratulations, and when is your last day, and can you fix my ERP problem first? If it would help, maybe I could reply to those questions you sent me, or can you fix it without that?”
I had sent those questions about two weeks ago.
Oh, well! I’m done there, and I’m going to enjoy my weekend of unemployment. I started with dinner at St. Nick’s Greek bazaar. We headed over around six; I had a gyro and some fries, and Gloria had a spanikopita and a /really/ good tyropita. We got some desserts, hit Blockbuster (for Jeepers Creepers 2, a tolerable Dead Teen movie), and chilled out.