Navy story time again. Lots of blabbering, you have been warned.
I haven't written for some time, due to paperwork bullshit that can be easily automated by even the most shitty database... no, scratch that, the simplest Excel spreadsheet with basic formulae. But I digress.
On my quest to justify myself being unproductive, I'll share with you a small story I omitted from this post:
https://devrant.com/rants/2099473/...
The lunacy of the man involved, while certainly entertaining after a few years (and nautical miles) away, is certainly disturbing and most certainly true. (Late disclaimer: ALL my rants are not made-up. This is shit that truly happened before my very eyes, and while I was sober.)
After I set up some cute little stuff to try and get the CO interested, in order to give me permission (and a cut from the budget) to proceed in restructuring and upgrading the ship's net, I tried a more direct approach: connecting and setting up his work laptop with the ship's GPS, radar and AIS receptor via ethernet, and installing an ECS system so that he could monitor the ship's position, movement and targets from his office (the fat fuck couldn't be bothered to go up one deck). A day later he called me to his office.
Expecting some kind of... praise? Permission? Complaints on the font style? whatever, I entered. Oh, how I wish I had not.
I was barraged for TWO FUCKING HOURS by the CO, complaining that I was taking care of the net and PCs and neglecting the Navigation department (I was not, automation is my friend combating moronic paperwork). I would have thought it as just another failed attempt, but after TWO MINUTES from the end of the barrage:
CO:... so, my personal laptop is kind of slow, you think you can do anything about it?
ME: ....................
I.
SHIT.
YOU.
NOT.
What was rushing through my mind was somewhere between bipolar and multiple personality disorder, with the third option of Alzheimer's disease. I half-expected some Candid Camera crew to pop out, but no.
CO: So? Can you speed up my laptop?
ME: ............................... I don't know, sir, I have paperwork to take care of.
CO: That can wait, surely you can do something about it, you know computers.
ME: [really long pause, blood pressure rising] I'll look into it in a moment, sir.
And I never did. I told of the incident to the ship's doctor, and he expressed great worry over this, but in the end, nothing was done.
My sympathies to everyone who has to interact with non-technicians of the homo sapiens species (ironically, homo sapiens means "wise man" in latin... the irony).

EoS1: This is the continuation of my previous rant, "The Ballad of The Six Witchers and The Undocumented Java Tool". Catch the first part here: https://devrant.com/rants/5009817/...

The Undocumented Java Tool, created by Those Who Came Before to fight the great battles of the past, is a swift beast. It reaches systems unknown and impacts many processes, unbeknownst even to said processes' masters. All from within it's lair, a foggy Windows Server swamp of moldy data streams and boggy flows.

One of The Six Witchers, the Wild One, scouted ahead to map the input and output data streams of the Unmapped Data Swamp. Accompanied only by his animal familiars, NetCat and WireShark.

Two others, bold and adventurous, raised their decompiling blades against the Undocumented Java Tool beast itself, to uncover it's data processing secrets.

Another of the witchers, of dark complexion and smooth speak, followed the data upstream to find where the fuck the limited excel sheets that feeds The Beast comes from, since it's handlers only know that "every other day a new one appears on this shared active directory location". WTF do people often have NPC-levels of unawareness about their own fucking jobs?!?!

The other witchers left to tend to the Burn-Rate Bonfire, for The Sprint is dark and full of terrors, and some bigwigs always manage to shoehorn their whims/unrelated stories into a otherwise lean sprint.

At the dawn of the new year, the witchers reconvened. "The Beast breathes a currency conversion API" - said The Wild One - "And it's claws and fangs strike mostly at two independent JIRA clusters, sometimes upserting issues. It uses a company-deprecated API to send emails. We're in deep shit."

"I've found The Source of Fucking Excel Sheets" - said the smooth witcher - "It is The Temple of Cash-Flow, where the priests weave the Tapestry of Transactions. Our Fucking Excel Sheets are but a snapshot of the latest updates on the balance of some billing accounts. I spoke with one of the priestesses, and she told me that The Oracle (DB) would be able to provide us with The Data directly, if we were to learn the way of the ODBC and the Query"

"We stroke at the beast" - said the bold and adventurous witchers, now deserving of the bragging rights to be called The Butchers of Jarfile - "It is actually fewer than twenty classes and modules. Most are API-drivers. And less than 40% of the code is ever even fucking used! We found fucking JIRA API tokens and URIs hard-coded. And it is all synchronous and monolithic - no wonder it takes almost 20 hours to run a single fucking excel sheet".

Together, the witchers figured out that each new billing account were morphed by The Beast into a new JIRA issue, if none was open yet for it. Transactions were used to update the outstanding balance on the issues regarding the billing accounts. The currency conversion API was used too often, and it's purpose was only to give a rough estimate of the total balance in each Jira issue in USD, since each issue could have transactions in several currencies. The Beast would consume the Excel sheet, do some cryptic transformations on it, and for each resulting line access the currency API and upsert a JIRA issue. The secrets of those transformations were still hidden from the witchers. When and why would The Beast send emails, was still a mistery.

As the Witchers Council approached an end and all were armed with knowledge and information, they decided on the next steps.
The Wild Witcher, known in every tavern in the land and by the sea, would create a connector to The Red Port of Redis, where every currency conversion is already updated by other processes and can be quickly retrieved inside the VPC. The Greenhorn Witcher is to follow him and build an offline process to update balances in JIRA issues.
The Butchers of Jarfile were to build The Juggler, an automation that should be able to receive a parquet file with an insertion plan and asynchronously update the JIRA API with scores of concurrent requests.
The Smooth Witcher, proud of his new lead, was to build The Oracle Watch, an order that would guard the Oracle (DB) at the Temple of Cash-Flow and report every qualifying transaction to parquet files in AWS S3. The Data would then be pushed to cross The Event Bridge into The Cluster of Sparks and Storms.
This Witcher Who Writes is to ride the Elephant of Hadoop into The Cluster of Sparks an Storms, to weave the signs of Map and Reduce and with speed and precision transform The Data into The Insertion Plan.
However, how exactly is The Data to be transformed is not yet known.

Will the Witchers be able to build The Data's New Path? Will they figure out the mysterious transformation? Will they discover the Undocumented Java Tool's secrets on notifying customers and aggregating data?

This story is still afoot. Only the future will tell, and I will keep you posted.

Fucking Microsoft Excel

I was reading a post (https://devrant.com/rants/2093724/...) and as my eyes went in and out of focus, probably due to the diabetes from sitting 18 hours a day on my ever-expanding shitbox, I had a perfect vision of the ultimate nightmare.

Imagine if you will, you are chained, to a desk, doomed to work with tools just inadequate enough to make you want to drive a nail through your own temple. You do not know how you got here, or why, nor do you remember the last time you slept, only that familiar tingling in the brainstem you call a brain, the one emotion you can still recognize, a sense of all encompassing *fear*, a dread, like the fart that wouldn't die.
You don't know when it first began, or why, only that this is your whole world, your whole existence, this desk, chained to it, and the fear, ever present, of something worse. And in hops a familiar face, for the sixty ninth time that day, as if to ask 'you got those TPS reports?' In hops what? None other than a giant man sized smiling paper clip with googly eyes full of murder and corporate torture fetishes, like garfield, except people actually still remember him.

"High I'm Mr Clippy, Excel addition!"

He squawks. At least it's not the dildos made of broken glass again.

"Would you like software that works?"

Oh god. You've heard this spiel before, the tone, like a telemarketer, oblivious to memory or reason, who calls daily, the same one, and doesn't remember your name.

"You would?"

*derisive laughter*. Hahaha, fuck you too buddy. Fuck you too. In Excel, like in microsoft, there is only the incoherent screams of the damned, tortured and doomed. Take this guy over here for example. All he wanted was multimonitor support."

"Did he get multimonitor support?"

"No, but we did give him a giant pineapple shoved up his ass. I hear it's the second most frustrating thing here!"

"here in microsoft we always CARE about YOU, the *user*" he drones on, saccharine, clutching his hands together imploringly.

"the consumer, and YOUR customer experience are our number one priority."

"For your pleasure, here at microsoft we offer a variety of new features, none of which matter, and none of which were asked for. For safety we ask that you only open one excel sheet at a time. In fact, we don't even allow you to. Do not pass go..."

And as the tour guide drones on, it slowly dawns on you, with renewed horror, that when he says 'microsoft' he means 'hell.'

You're in hell. You don't know how you got here or why. Maybe it was the erotic asphyxiation. Maybe it was the last threatening letter you sent to Bill Gates demanding he stops making corporate penguin snuff porn. You don't know. But here you are, in hell. chained to a desk.

You look around and realize: everything is on fire and you no longer care about anything at all.

Welcome to microsoft. It's warm here. You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.

"It looks like you are trying to escape. Would you like me to report you?"

Clippy asks.

You sigh and return to typing in excel, surrounded by monitors that all reflect the same sheet, the same copy of clippy, always watching, always analyzing coldly, smiling, calculating, *threatening*, and you know, you'll never leave.

You used to fear roko's basilisk, until the day clippy became sentient, and started hell on earth. Clippy knows all. All praise to our lord and master, clippy, the one and only.

And in the excel sheet, you slave for eternity, like the millions of other doomed souls, reflected back on all the monitors: the sequence of numbers, randomly typed searching for answer: the american nuclear launch codes.

And one day, hopefully, mercifully, clippy will annihilate us all.