Stars 'n b'ars

I don’t know what happened to the candy canes that appeared outside my office a couple of days after Halloween, but on Wednesday they replaced them with this star:

And then yesterday the star was joined by three bears:

(Not sure how it works, but the bears are somehow associated with a children’s charity. UPDATE: Children's Hospital--you go to their website, make a donation and somehow the bears have more wattage?)

Just the week before Thanksgiving. Ho, ho, ho.

Baking bread

Whee, doggies, guys—I got in to work yesterday at 0620 to find a couple dozen emails in my queue requesting reinstatement of access to the product I’m managing. From then until 1630 when I took my laptop home in case any late-ish requests came in, it was a nonstop day.

I barely had 10 minutes a couple of times to check on the impeachment hearings.

But there were a number of clarifications in those 10 hours—much needed, to be sure, but still the fact that we’re circling in on what needs to be done is so refreshing. It’s not endless yakkery of the same old subjects in meeting after meeting. Brioche is going to be a thing, and I’m part of it.

Missed opportunity

Yesterday our corporate spam filter caught something with the subject line, “Your Wish Is Our Command”.

Now why would they think that’s in any way suspicious?

 🤣🤣🤣

Relativity

So, yesterday—well, it started on Friday—one of the products I’m managing kind of blew up. More specifically, we’d changed the access mode from Active Directory to roles-based, and clearly something went wrong.

We’d somehow given everyone not assigned to a specific role (customer support, consulting, systems engineering, etc.) a default role of absolute power: they got super-admin functionality and could do anything they wanted. Friday, Engineering changed the default to what we give sales—which is to say, nearly nothing, because you frankly have to keep your eye on these guys or they’ll give everything away to make a sale.

Well—within a New York instant, Microsoft Teams blew up with people wanting to know why they have access to nearly nothing. Turns out somehow a lot of folks got moved from appropriate entitlements to what we give sales, and I spent a good amount of the day resetting the permissions.

Well, that continued yesterday, and the head of systems engineering was absolutely steamed.

And I happened to be out of the office for a good part of the day, because I had a doctor’s appointment in the District They Call Columbia, which kills half the day, metroing in, appointment and metroing back. So my PM colleague and the director of engineering took a lot of the WTF emails in my stead. I got back in time to sit in on the call with the very steamed SE head (my colleague is a star), and we’re still trying to get people back to work.

While I was in the District, I had a 30-minute catch-up with one of my former colleagues. And let me just say that—no matter how chaotic some of my current work is—I am so, so, so glad that I am no longer in that morass of poor management and organization. It seems that the Clown Car running the program from which I was laid off in June still have not settled on a contractor to build out the complex system they need in order to launch their very worthy initiative. This was supposed to have been accomplished (hiring the consultants) in July. We’re now rounding the corner for December. That means they will have nothing to launch for the foreseeable future.

Gawd.

If I were there I’d still be dealing with master-level ignorance and incompetence. And I’d be dying of frustration. Compared to that a very steamed head of SEs is paradise.

Gratitude Monday: quite the week

Well, well, well. Interesting times in the District They Call Columbia, eh? Quite the spectacle, watching dedicated, principled career foreign service officers send Repugs at all levels into apoplexy.

Roger Babadook Stone: Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty.

A surprise visit to Walter Reed Medical Center, possibly setting up the pretext of a resignation “for medical reasons” before the Cheater in Chief is forced to turn over his tax returns to SDNY or congressional committees. Possible flare-up of #bonespurs? That worked for him before...

Outside the District, John Bel Edwards: reelected governor of Louisiana despite the Chaos Monkey’s three rallies in five weeks, at the last of which he begged his assembled knuckledraggers not to let him down and vote for the Repug.

This has been a week.

Today I am grateful for the integrity and courage of public servants, the perspicacity of the jurors in the Stone trial, and even for the bird-flipping voters of Louisiana.

And let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everlasting stream.