knickknackz

I just can’t bring myself to buy lunch at work.  A good hearty meal is about 7 or 8 dollars, a really nice sandwich is 4, but I could just bring a (kind of boring) sandwich for less than $1.  So if we say I work 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year, saving $6 a day … that’s actually closer to $1500 in savings! Sometimes, though, I get kind of wistful when I see what other people are eating.

At least now I have a dishwasher.  Taking lunch every day last year was tough for the tupperware alone.

This also hasn’t happened to me yet.

(The being discovered part, not the bit about talking to my computer - that’s not even new to this job.)

I feel compelled to mention that, once again, this comic was inspired by events not related to me.  I have never fallen asleep in a meeting.

Yet.

We’ve learned a lot about the history of computers and software.  Unfortunately, we don’t seem to remember very much of it.  Sure, we’ve heard this guy’s name before, now what was it that guy did?  Work for Xerox?  Invent the modern operating system?  Plunder sea vessels without respect for the law?

So my sister and I didn’t have video games while we were growing up, and as adults I think we’ve still had trouble breaking into the world of serious video gaming and its lingo.  So Fable, for example, is a game that has a lot of real-life components stuck in. Things like, you can get married. Have kids. Kill villagers. And conversations about the game can sound really bizarre out of context. 

Exhibit A:  “I had kids but I left without saving them.”

Exhibit B:

The silverware in the cafeteria at work is biodegradeable.  It’s great and you feel good about using them, but it also means that the forks get soft when you eat hot food. In fact, even at room temperature you can mold the silverware into creative shapes. Like this:

This actually happened.

Sadly, this type of blatant rephrase answer is pretty effective in my training course.  Often our instructor will even help you fill in the blanks if you trail off as if lost in thought.

So this field is full of lingo that doesn’t always make sense to outsiders.  For example: “no repro” which roughly translates to “could not reproduce the error.”  This is a lovely for both developers and testers. When approached with a bug that is most likely their fault, if they can’t get the bug to happen again following the same steps, then it can be sort of dismissed with the note “no repro.”  After all, how can you fix a problem that doesn’t seem to exist?

A second comic in the bizarre world where medicine is more like software development.  This is based on the way that sometimes when you discover a problem with a program - you don’t fix the problem, you just change the specifications (”the spec”) to say that the program is supposed to do that.  It’s way easier!

So there was an off-hand remark during my all-day training that I’m doing this week about how a particular coding mistake was a lot like when a doctor says “whoops” during surgery.  And then I thought, huh, I’m really glad that the field of medicine has so many careful safeguards and immediately thought of a couple of bizarre scenarios.

Unfortunately, it was pointed out to me that people that AREN’T in the software testing field probably won’t get the joke. Sigh. Was that an appropriate place to use the word “ain’t”?  Anyway, the point is that developers might often fix a bug, as well as something totally unrelated, at the same time (which actually does make sense for being efficient).  Then it often falls to the software tester to make sure that nothing is broken really quickly.