Moving Out

I intended to post about this on Friday, but really didn't have the will or the energy. I still don't really, so it'll probably end up a little undirected and rambly.

The completely pointless office move, that I was promised wouldn't be happening, is. I found out about it in the best way possible - a new seating arrangement on my keyboard when I got to work on Friday, effective Monday. The fact is, this makes things worse for me in every possible way (with the exception that the new office is about a minute closer to the station that the old one). I'll be further away from my team (I'm the only permanent member of staff being moved), I'll be further away from the chief architect of my project, and I'll be a lot closer to the people who make it hard for me to do my job, without the protection of my line manager (which, I think, is part of the whole point... apparently there was a huge amount of pressure to move me, enough for both B and R to be completely overruled and told it basically wasn't up to them any more. I think that’s partially because the annoying project-people don't feel they have any control over me - they don't - but I'm not going to start pandering to their misconceptions and headless-chicken panic attacks just because they've told me I have to sit somewhere else. I'm going to try to avoid being rude - but I'm not going to change anything about the way I work. It's currently delivering quite a complicated project on time, and with no substantial bugs, so "if it's not broke, don't fix it")

The whole thing is hugely political, which I think it what annoys me. If there was a valid, work-based reason I could see, or even one they'd told me (nobody has given me a good reason for why this is happening yet), if everyone I needed access to was going to be there, if I thought there was even a small chance I could deliver the work, quicker, better or whatever with this new arrangement, I would accept it, despite the fact it moves me away from all my friends and my team for a while. (I still wouldn't like it, not least because I feel it's important for me to be around at the moment, while the team has a couple of new starters who need supporting by people like me with a little experience of how things work, and ideas on how to improve them in the future). But it's all stupid power games and political manoeuvring, which just makes things difficult, and I've never been a fan of "projectitics", which often boils down to lots of people getting in my way while trying to grab some power or glory for themselves.


So Monday morning I'll be in the office to clear my desk and make sure I've uploaded stuff from my hard-drive, then I'll be "out of the office" for a couple of months.

Return of the Rant

It's been a while since I did a proper "rant" post. The reposted ones from a couple of weeks back don't count. So here's one: Improper use of "more".

Now I know my grammar (and spelling too really) isn't up there with the BBC newscasters of old, but something about the increasing misuse of "more" seems to just jarr.

Things like "I feel more better now" More better?! Well I'm pleased for you, really. I'm sure just "better" would have been enough though.

"More better" is a common one I seem to hear a lot. But the other day I saw on the news (the BBC news of all places, once the high pinnacle of the Queens English) an officer in the armed response unit trying to reassure someone that their job was "to make people feel more safer". "Safer" is a relative term in its own right, it means, "to feel more safe" You don't need the addition of "more" there to get the meaning across. Am I being unreasonable to expect a police officer to know the proper use of words like "more" and "safer", and the fact that they don't need to be used in conjunction to indicate an increased level of security? Say “to make people feel more safe” or “to make people feel safer” NOT “to make people feel more safer” because it just makes me twitch (although that could be the caffeine).

Other examples I seem to remember (or maybe just imagine I remember, it's always hard to tell which) include "more richer" (not, I hasten to add, the quality of being more like Lint, although on his Actuary salary he probably is "more richer" than I am.) "More quicker" and a number of other 'er' type ... whatever they are (I'm sure there must be a grammatical term for them, besides the obvious adverb and adjective classification, but I’ve no idea what it is)

Another interesting point... MS Word's green squiggle system (which technically highlights grammatical errors, but in my experience seems to just highlight random words, and all the instances of "which") doesn't appear to see anything wrong with all the above "more" sentences. I guess they need a more better grammar checker. It didn’t like that last one though.

Online Again

Well, I'm back, after a hardware-failure induced absence of a couple of days, and a general laziness induced absence of all of the previous week.

My almost fresh-out-of-the-box fancy router with inbuilt firewall etc has apparently given up on the internet (lets hope it doesn't start a trend) and while it happily enables my PC to talk to my Bro's PC, it don't seem very interested in letting either of us talk to the wider world. However with a little help from the ever useful Lint and his USB ADSL modem that reminds me of a frog, I'm back online long enough to send a detailed complaint to the manufacturers of the guilty silver box. Hooray!

Unfortunately my hardware woes seem to be the limit of my memory of vaguely interesting news for the last week or so. Work is pretty much unchanged, so read some previous rant about "projectitics" and suchlike to get a feel for what is going on there. On the bright side, I might be out of a job by the end of November... things are extremely up in the air at the moment, but my cynical-sense is tingling, and suggests at the very least my slim pay packet is going to take a cut to "very little indeed". As much as I'm determined to deliver Chip's project in a blaze of amazing programming and nay-sayer hat eating (if the nay-sayers don't have their own hats to eat I'll buy them some, because I very much want to see it), pay cuts and pointless reshuffles may not encourage me to stay around much longer than that. We'll have to see. My Cynical-Sense may be out of joint due to TCP/IP packet withdrawal symptoms, and I may end up getting a payrise or something equally unexpected.

Yesterday’s remarkably upbeat horoscope on the company intranet site (which suggested some stunning specimen of the female species would knock at my door and by impressed by my amazing wit and charm) proved to be untrue. Nobody knocked at the door, never mind an attractive young woman, and I was in a decidedly un-witty and charming mood anyway, so it's probably just as well.