A Blog about Work

Work has been getting me down lately. And not for the generic reasons you might expect. No, this is for a bizarre little reason that probably is something that would bother only Me, CherkyB.

Yes, you guessed it. I have found myself repeatedly quoting Cavitation at work. No like once or twice, but every single day for over a week. And this annoys me because he's an even bigger yahoo than I am, and yet I am using him as an authority in arguments. Plus, lest anyone think that I am just riffing, I always feel compelled to start out by crediting him:

Me, CherkyB: "It really is what Cavitation said - they only check they have in place to say if the computation was done right was whether the result came out to what they wanted it to be."

Sadly, this is a true characterization of the state of things. Though it's actually somewhat worse than that - the calculation has a tendency to oscillate between something like 1.5x-2x what the target is and a number very close to or actually zero. And every time it produces a number greater than expectations, we say, "It is trending badly, and we need to take immediate action to absorb that much growth," and every time it comes in lower than expected we say, "well, that's obviously wrong, so we'll continue planning to the previous, really big value."

This week, the oscillations occurred daily, as this is the week we decided to scrutinize the overall results that include this particular input. And we had to fight a lot about which number we were going to believe - the big, obviously wrong one, or the small, obviously wrong one. Except we couldn't agree that the big one was obviously wrong because the people swore up and down it was right even though the very next day, once they updated their exact same calculations with recent data, it dropped to zero. We had to assume it was right, and we spun it as, "This is the lowest number they've quoted us so far, so it's really good bad news" something which was true only if you bought in to the hypothesis that anything below target was wrong, but anything above was right.

Grrr...

But enough about work. Nice weather we're having these days.