I am easily amused. It helps to be absentminded. Seriously, you can tell me the same joke over and over again and I will find it hilarious every time. Ask anybody.

You know how it feels when you find something unexpected?  Something good.  Like last year’s $10 in your winter coat pocket.  (That one in particular hasn’t happened to me, but you know what I mean.)  It doesn’t have to be big.  It just has to be nice.  A couple of weeks ago I was writing test scripts for work, and I needed a fake name to fill in a particular field.  I picked a fairly innocuous name, familiar to me and many of you, but not to most people.  I moved on.  Today, I was helping out on that project again, setting up the test data and tweaking some of the scripts.  I got to that field and asked the guy who took it over from me what name to use (having completely forgotten what I’d chosen weeks ago).  He told me, and I laughed, thrilled with myself for setting it up that way so I could have a private little geeky giggle.  Yay me!  The name?  Harriet Jones.  (No room in the application for a title, sadly.)

It went a long way towards making my 4:15 wake-up call (to get to Baltimore today) bearable.  Not all the way bearable, but closer.

7 Comments

  1. Melvin?

    OK, I don’t get it. I found $50 in the lining of a goodwill coat once. Had to accidentally rip it on a dorm chair to find it. Weird.
    Is this a firefly reference? Or Dr. who? I don’t care.

  2. mama mama

    You get that laughing at the same jokes from me. I never remember them until the punch line. It makes for a happy marriage.

  3. It’s Dr. Who. I have the same thing happen to me with test data and comments at work. I once caught someone with some of my comments in their code and called them out on it, and they admitted to using my code as a basis for their code. Not that I mind. They say imitation is the highest form of flattery, but in the digital age it’s IP theft.

  4. Zannah

    Well, of course it’s Doctor Who. 🙂 I’d consider it theft if I were helping out on a different project. In this case, I wrote the majority of the test scripts and handed them over to someone else to finish and execute them. So he was using my work with permission. Your example is still theft. Unless you work in open source… Do you copyright? That’s not really a sentence, but you know what I mean.

  5. We, as a company, copyright. Anything we do individually (technically, even anything I develop in my off hours, so don’t tell them about Toddler Tantrum) is property of the company. So they’re not really stealing, they’re just utilizing company resources. Eric at least had the foresight to bring a sharpie with him when he signed his contract, and he just marked through the parts he didn’t like and no one said anything to him about it. Wish I had thought of that.

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