Hat on Top, Coat Below
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I’ve Been Working on the SQL
December 22, 2004
I spent most of the day typing things like this:
select
a.account_no,
cast(e.opening_bal as decimal(18,2))
from external.dbo.tb_upload as e with (nolock)
left outer join dbo.account as a with (nolock)
on a.customer_no = 48582
and a.account_no = e.account_no
If you worked where I worked, you’d say “hey Karen, that doesn’t follow our standard for capitalization”. Well, no, it doesn’t, because this code isn’t going into production. (Yes, it would be ideal if I always followed the standards even for things I don’t intend to deploy, but I don’t.) Pretty much everything I’ve done today has been non-deployable, which means I’ve not exactly made a positive contribution to the future of the company. To the present of the company, sure, since it’s all been one-off stuff for a particular implementation that an actual customer asked for. In theory, I should turn this code into a feature that can be reused, but that takes time I don’t have. My customer wanted their information uploaded today, and I couldn’t accomplish that if I waited until I finished developing an interface.
So I wrote my non-standard code and uploaded all twelve months of the customer’s data and wrote a detailed e-mail about what they’ll see in their system and before I even got a chance to take a deep breath I got another request from them for something else they want right away. It’s quite unfortunate that this new request is quite impossible given current conditions. If I had a magic wand, I could add a checkbox to a report to exclude non-NAFTA customers but I don’t have a wand so I’m stuck writing queries against the database, which does not store whether a customer is in a NAFTA country or not because at no time in the last year and a half that this project has been going on did anyone ever mention that this was important. Silly me, I thought when they said last month that the report looks good that meant they had checked it over, but I guess they were just dazzled by the formatting. Ah well, at least I’m not going to run out of things to do at work any time soon.
One year ago, I was stressing out about my new office. I’m mostly happy with it now, though the commute does bite sometimes, and I still don’t have a keyboard and mouse tray I can use. I do have a fluorescent torchiere with a dimmer switch and a stained glass desk lamp and a curtain I can draw across the window by the door (though I never do–just having it makes me feel better).
Two years ago, I wrote about day planners. Given that in my current planner, the monthly page marker is still on April and I haven’t written anything on the weekly pages since September, I think maybe I don’t need to rush out and get 2005 supplies.
