Home office / lockdown story

Last year, when the first lockdown happened, everyone in my office started working from home. Including myself of course.
I decided to use x11vnc for remotely accessing my PC cause it is super convenient.
A few days into the home office and suddenly the remote keyboard acts weird, with random keypresses that I didn't do, and then the letter L was written over and over like it was stuck.
Assuming a bug in x11vnc, I restart it several times, but no luck. Whenever I open a terminal it is full of "L"s within a matter of seconds.
So I restart my PC remotely and reconnect the x11vnc, which is a huge pain in the arse if you have ever done it. And can you believe it... Still the same problem!
So, finally I gave up and went to the office to see what the hell was going on with my PC. I entered my office room and could not believe my eyes.
What had happened? The room cleaner had wet-wiped my desk. To create enough free space for that, she had first cleaned up the mess, putting the scattered paper nicely on the side, but then also *putting the bloody mouse on the bloody keyboard*.

Yeah. Kinda late to the WK 227 party.

Thing is: I've read a lot of rants and honestly, some of the rants were ... touchy.

Like that weird emotional thingy you don't like but that just kind of happens cause I'm human too.... And have that shitty emotional feature integrated, which feels most of the time like a heisenbug.

Me and my parents. Specifically mom. Are like ... Matter and antimatter.

You don't want them in a room. Bad things happen TM. My mom is responsible for ... Let's say severe psychological trauma starting with age 4 to age 17.

In 17 I moved out and lived on "my own" (truth: on heavy support, cause I wasn't what you'd called "psychologically stable" at that time).

I fucked up university and - as shared before - thanks to an math teacher who made my life an even more living hell and my parents, I'd started in IT mostly out of "resisting" certain assertations being made over my life.

The support I got from my family can be put together in one sentence:
"I survived, I tolerated - but will never forgive".

Thing is: Be it IT support or anything else. If your gut feeling tells you that family / coworkers / friends are not good for you.

Stay the fuck away from them till you've sorted yourself out.

I can tolerate my parents nowadays. Took > 10 years and a lot of hardships to "achieve" that.

It's not peachy. It's not loving. It's tolerance. (Yeah. That bit is muey importante to me).

The thing is: I cannot deny the fact that my parents tried to support me by money. That's what they still do _nowadays_ even though my income is like 60 % of the income my father and mother has combined... It's a bothersome detail.

There's a certain thing in this rant that I would like "to pass on": Emotional support matters.

When you let someone feel like an empty shell, you cannot fix it with money.

It will - severely - destroy the person.

TLDR: We all have rough edges, can be hard to deal with and be a pain in the arse, but all of us need emotional support sometimes. That's what matters the most. ;)

The client wants the booking project to be all in JS Framework (not specifying any) and NO PHP since client hates PHP (and I don't know why) from the very beginning when the only dev was my former front-end partner (lead dev).
I was wondering why the client still continued the project, YET the file extensions were still on PHP. I asked the lead dev what happened and answered he didn't know know how to start migrating to JS framework and just started NATIVE PHP.
Still, as being a good dev and a supporter to lead dev, did accept and the project as lead dev's assistant. Fixed bugs, enhancement and responsive (DEMMIT, I FREAKING HATE RESPONSIVE) and later complained why am I doing front-end tasks, when it's not my task, supposedly. I EXPECTED MORE ON BACK-END TASKS!

(HERE'S THE EPIC ADVISE GOES AND CALLED OURSELVES MASTER)

Me: Master, why did you not started the project in JS Framework instead of native php?
Lead Dev : You know what master, this project has been already done if the client allows US to use WordPress for this project will still be migrated to JS. And now, WE are trapped to make every window size be responsive since there are already a standard for each window screen.
Me: (DO NOT INCLUDE ME IN YOUR FUCKING SORCERY! I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU DID THERE AND WHY D'YOU ACCEPT THIS PROJECT, SLAVE, WHEN YOU ALREADY KNOW YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW TO DO IT, IN THE FIRST PLACE. STOP BEING A DICKHEAD AND DO NOT WASTE CLIENT'S MONEY AND EFFORT FOR YOUR USELESS BUNCH OF SHIT!) Indeed, responsive is a such a pain in the arse.
Lead Dev: Maybe, let's just finish our tasks first and wait the project to be migrated to JS.

P.S. The project manager and client asked me if I do know how to migrate the project from native PHP to JS framework and sabotaged lead dev. OFCOURSE, YES! But, I did not respond that quickly, unless eerm, you know, I earn greater than lead dev. Truth be told and practically speaking, it's really unfair for me if I accept the back-job when the lead dev delivers inaccurate deliverables and earned greater than me. No way, Jose!

Now, I am not working with him because I'm super done with him and later did I know, lead dev is looking for Drupal dev to be working for the booking project.

When I was 6yo I was playing next to my dad with his old PC on a good old CRT a game called “Sperms” where you catch sperm with condoms and every time you do it made a really loud “YIPPIE” sound. I was playing this game for 4 years.

Somewhere around when I was 10 my dad told me we should build a PC and I was asking “Why does everyone has to make their own PC?”, I didn’t yet know what an cheap ass my dad is, so we did. Had a lot of fun and was very scared of the PSU, like really scared.

It blew up a few months later because I switched the toggle on the back from 220v to 110v, and got even more scared of PSU’s until I started an electricians apprentice.

Anyways, one day my dad and I where at a friends place and I played Tux Racer on his super loud Maschine that would crash if you kept the side door of the table closed, it ran some kind of Linux and I was fascinated how “simple and clean” it looks. I got a mini-cd to install it at home and immediately was hooked because the windows installation was such a pain in the arse those years. I did that all by myself just because I also wanted to play Tux Racer at home.

Anyways, somewhere right before GTA IV came out I started with VB.Net and ever since I was totally hooked and spend more time doing that than actually going to school.

My dad didn’t care and just let me do this, my mum just made sure I would have been up at least after the first lession, I don’t miss the bus and that I went to bed in a timely manner, which never happened because the PC was in my room and my mum slept downstairs and couldn’t notice that I was doing script kiddie things after an hour or so of “sleeping”.

So yeah, they didn’t care and were happy I didn’t annoy them.

Actually I didn’t wanted to become a developer because I always wanted to have it be a hobby or something and I liked woodwork more, but then people more qualified than me were more stupid than this script kiddie that still just wanted to play Tux Racer. That’s it.

Why is installing the C/C++ compiler and build tools such a pain in the arse on windows? Just wanted to use the spacy package which uses CPython now I have to install gigabytes of shit and move some dlls and exes around just so I can install the fucking package. What the fuck is wrong with this shit.

The universe has taken a cactus.

It proceeded to gift the cactus with a toxin that greatly enhances the stimulus of pain.

After the universe watched it's miraculous creation it decided to shove it up so far my arse that my gag reflex turned on and I puked a lot of cactus.

Didn't sleep well, weekend hardware migration finish, today an old server got moved.

Some part, most likely the redundant PSU, had a short circuit - decided to take the switches out... Which are the only non redundant hardware...

There was only one critical system in the whole rack, that was one redundant firewall.

Guess what happened..... Naaaa?

*drum roll*

For whatever reason, the second firewall didn't kick in, so large part of internal network unreachable as VPN was on the firewall.

:thumbsup:

That's not cactus level yet.

Spontaneously a large part of the work at home crew decided to call, cause getting an email wasn't enough.

So while all the phones were ringing and we had the joyful fun to carefully take apart a whole rack to check for possible faulty wiring / electric burns / hardware damage and getting firewall up and running again...

Some dev decided to run a deployment (doable as one of the few working at the company at the moment -.-).

I work from home, but we had a conference phone call running the whole time so I could "deescalate" and keep others up-to-date. So me on headphone with conference call, regular phone for calls, while typing mails / sms for de-escalation.

Now we're reaching cactus level, cause being tortured by being annoyed out of hell by all telephone ringing, the beeping of UPS (uninterruptible power supplies), the screaming of admins from the server room and the roaring of air coolers…

Suddenly said dev must have stood in the midst of the chaos… and asked for help cause "the deployment broke, project XY is offline"...

I think it was the first time since years that I screamed at the top of my lungs.

Bad idea (health issues)… but oh boy was it a pleasure to hear my own voice echo through the conference speaker and creating an echoic sound effect.

It was definitely worth coughing out my loungs for the next hour and I think it was the best emotional outburst ever.

I feel a bit sorry for the dev, but only a tiny bit.

After the whole rack thing, the broken deployment fixing and the "my ears are bleeding and I think I will never be able to talk again" action...

We had to roll out several emergency deployments to fix CVEs (eg libexpat).

This day was a marvelous shit show.

I will now cry myself to sleep with some codein.

Damn java 9 is such a pain in the arse. First there isn't official support for NetBeans which used to be my primary java development ide. Had to move to intelliJ for that jdk 9 support. Then came xamarin and visual studio. And guess what they don't support jdk 9. So now I need to have two sets of jdk to keep my work going. I don't understand the point of having a stable release if there is no widespread support. I mean sure visual studio is Microsoft problem but NetBeans is available from official oracle website. At least they should be able to integrate support for it.