Gold stars and dorky outfits

YOU KNOW THOSE DAYS…when you’re sitting there…in a meeting…and someone says “we want you to do this absolutely ridiculous thing that is totally unnecessary and will have such a high cost in resources that we might as well just give up and go back to carving hieroglyphs onto rocks because it probably would be faster”…and you look at them and go:

…and then you go, “blah blah blah resources etc. etc. performance yadda yadda seriously, man, that’d be, like, ‘can’t even USE the thing anymore’ levels of bad…

And then they go, welllll i mean i doan wanna tell u wat u biz-niz iz, dawg, BUT…!

…and proceed to tell you that they “tested” this hypothesis by comparing something totally different from what you’re talking about (includes Ridiculous Thing, but not most of the whackity-gazillion OTHER things the newer system does) vs. what you are talking about sorta-kinda…in an environment with two users / almost-zero data, aaaaaaaaand…they can prove that there is exactly no performance impact from doing the twelve-pass crazy-cake of repeated-calling-to-the-server-over-and-over-again that they totally NEED to do.

And then they’re all like this because they are so sure they just checkmated you…

…and you’re all like this because up close you it really looks like The Stupids here are EPIC in size, which clearly can’t be true because you know that these are not stupid people…

…and the rest of your team are all like this…

…because they know you’re about to tilt another windmill?

{…puts pot on head, picks up ruler and charges into battle…}

Yeah. Three times this week.

In related news, I feel I deserve a damned medal for not losing my temper OR my patience, and for not laying a verbal smack down on the offender that would have had his ancestors back to seven or eight generations nursing a headache.

It would have been counterproductive…team-destroying-instead-of-team-building…widening the rift between Business and Tech when we’ve all worked so hard to bring us closer to each other…

…BUT STILL, IT WOULD HAVE MOMENTARILY FELT AWESOME.

But, no. I resisted. I minded my manners. I remained cheerful and helpful and go team! as I went about shutting THAT noise down.

Because I…am an adult.

Also because I was successfully Adulting this week, every single day this week, I went straight from work-work into house-work, even though I could totally have played some Warcraft or something instead and nobody would have been around to call me on it.

My kitchen actually looks…not scary. The bathrooms aren’t completely disgusting. There is less dust on things. The carpets got vacuumed. Dinners were made and served before, like, 9:30 at night.

I am so awesome I don’t even know how to describe it right now.

{puts eight gold stars on Adulting chart from Creatively Katherine, who apparently actually does all kinds of creative home-making things that I think about doing, but then never actually do because it requires things like ‘creativity’ and ‘effort’ – and also because my decorating theme these last few years has apparently been “unkempt barn populated entirely by feral animals”}

AND THEN, I went to the husband’s company party and did Social Things, and I even stayed in the room and did social-stuff instead of sneaking out to hide somewhere like I usually do.

{puts another three dozen gold stars on chart}

Which reminds me, this is the outfit I put together for the husband’s company party last night…because I hate shopping for dresses but can spend any amount of time oogling “cool” and “interesting” fashion choices. All of it came from Amazon except that little leather pouch, which I got about ten thousand years ago from the Oberon Design booth at Ren Faire. The husband already had the tophat and coat from his Dickens Fair days, so we got him a pair of goggles to put on the hat, a white vest and cravat, and a new pants and shoes. I think he looked rather dashing.

Yeah. We’re a pair of dorks. But we have an awful lot of fun with it. Also, I suck at doing “solemn” pictures. I just can’t seem to not get the giggles, every time I try. Sigh.

ANYWAY…I figure at this point I have done all the Adulting necessary to completely fill up three of those charts, and therefore I get three rewards, all of which involve loafing, goofing off and otherwise not Adulting.

YAY, ADULTING!

(The outfit is actually very simple and not terribly expensive to put together: One steampunk-ish bodice, a ruffly-shirt, one long black skirt and one long white one, a tie-on “bustle” thing [“…does this make my butt look big…?”], a clip-on hat, and a pair of  “Victorian-ish” boots…the total cost was around $160, which wasn’t too bad for “semi-formal” eventwear. It certainly isn’t “authentic” steampunk, but this wasn’t an “authentic” steampunk event, so, whatever) (I also had a big black lace shawl I knit a few years ago from a delicious wool yarn a very sweet coworker bought for me as a going away present when my contract with the company was up…but I’d shed it by the time we were taking these pictures because it got warm in there.)