Tag Archives: work

Personal

RBSG: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

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After nine and a half years, it’s nearly over. One more week together, and that’s it. It’s an emotional moment.

I remember how it was in the beginning. After a whirlwind courtship (that aptitude test, the first interview, an overnight at the Apex Hotel in the Grassmarket, so little time to get to know one another!) there I was with pen in hand, signing myself into the relationship. I didn’t know how long it would last, but I went into it thinking of permanence.

I, Abi Sutherland, take thee, The Royal Bank of Scotland…

We’ve been through a lot since then. Better and worse, of course, as always in a job. I’ve wept with the stress of it, thrown a phone headset at the wall, but the Bank also allowed me to do things I did not believe I could.

Sickness and health…we’ve done that too. The Bank put up with me through the worst days of undiagnosed Seasonal Affective Disorder, but also benefitted from my manic hyper-efficient summertimes. Supported me during maternity leave, yet took my sleepless nights on projects for granted.

And richer or poorer? Well, it is a bank. We’ve had record profits, and I’ve benefitted from profit share, membership in the pension plan, and fairly good salaries. I can’t really complain.

The Bank’s gained a few pounds since we got together – bought NatWest, growing fivefold in one transaction. But it stayed attractive to me. There are benefits to a big partner. Lately, though, the strains have started to show, in ways I won’t discuss here. Still, something in me keeps thinking if I stuck it out things would get better. It’s what I do.

You see, I’m a permie girl. My contractor friends, who sign up for six-month knee-tremblers or year-long commitments, extol the virtues of their brief liaisons. But I like the stability, the deep familiarity, that comes of long association. That’s great, but now comes the cost: breaking up is so much harder to do.

And we’re almost to it now, to the division of property into mine and thine, to taking off the security pass like a ring no longer needed, to saying goodbye to a building that once was a home. We’re starting to be careful around each other, aware that things started now can’t necessarily be finished.

And I look at the meat market, look at putting myself back out there to see if someone else will want me the way the Bank wanted me, and it’s frightening. I primp and poke at my covering letters and wonder if this CV makes me look unattractive.

If Martin and I weren’t moving to the Netherlands, if this partnership were not about to be geographically impossible, would I be able to break it off? And yet, moving aside, I think that now is a good time to make the move. We were getting stale, and I don’t see things changing.

So goodbye, Royal Bank. I will miss you when I leave, and I hope we can still be friends, but it’s time for me to go.

I think I’m going to need some chocolate.

Personal, Testing

Akron and the Abi Field

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When the going gets tough at work (as it is now), I often wonder why I do what I do. This is one of the little stories that remind me why I am a software tester.

Martin works for SkyScanner, a flight pricing site. He was testing out some code one evening, a couple of months ago, and ran into the sort of frozen-brain feeling you get after too long at the keyboard. So he pushed his wheely chair back from his desk, into my line of sight.

“Bun,” he said, “Name me two destinations. Just any cities.”

“Düsseldorf,” I replied, “and Akron, Ohio.”

“Thanks,” he said, and wheeled back to his desk to fiddle with the new test data. taptaptap. “[insert curse word].” taptaptap. “[insert worse curse word].” taptaptap.

I looked up as he rolled back into my line of sight, looking exasperated. “How do you do that?”

Turns out that Akron, Ohio, USA, is served by two airports, Akron and Akron Canton. And some clever soul, somewhere in the ancestry of the data they were working with, had remapped Akron Canton to Guangzhou Province in China. That was giving him some…funny results.

So they had to go clean up their data. And I remembered why I’m a software tester.

Sonnets

Recording risks (Sonnet in a test completion report)

Recording risks is done in PlanView now.
The forms have changed from what we used in PRIME.
This briefing tells you what to say and how,
The basics, anyway, for when you’re short of time.
Use wording as sugested by this sheet
And in your action plan record details
Of what you’ll do, and when, and whom you’ll meet,
With fallbacks if your first intention fails.
Remember as you write that those who read
Your text may not be technical or see  
Details of your project. They will need
Plain terms, not TLAs. Be jargon-free.
In time these practices will be the norm.
Till then, this sheet will help you with the form.

Originally written for my office at the time.  Posted on Making Light.

Personal, Testing

Result!

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A couple of months ago, I took a somewhat less than fun exam on software testing.

So last week I got the results.

84%. A pass, with distinction.

So, dear people, what do you think my reaction was?

A. Yay! I passed!
B. Meh. It’s just an exam.
C. Where did I lose 16 whole marks?
D. All of the above, in turn.

Answers on a postcard, please.

Personal, Testing

How To Break Things Real Good

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Martin has been absent because he’s been redesigning his side of the site. (Go check it out. It’s cool.) I’ve been absent for much less interesting* reasons.

Basically, I’ve been studying for a test. About testing. The Information Systems Examination Board (ISEB) Practitioner Certificate in Software Testing, or, as I think of it, How To Break Things Real Good.

After eight days of classroom instruction spread over two weeks, I had less than a month to cram the syllabus in between my ears (Only click on the link if you have persistent insomnia. Not suitable for reading whilst operating heavy machinery*). I did it – I can now go on at great length about the relative strengths of boundary value analysis and state transition testing in the design of functional tests, name 18 types of automated test tool, and describe three software development lifecycle models and how they relate to testing.

I wasn’t a very good classmate, I’m afraid. I got massively insecure early on in the instruction section, when I came in on the second week to find that someone extra had turned up and taken my seat and my course materials. The instructor was mortified, but I felt deeply unwelcome, and turned to the same obnoxious behaviour I used to get through high school. When I feel out of place, I become the most annoyingly, articulately intelligent pain in the posterior ever…trying to prove that separate does not equal inferior, I guess.

I did this throughout the second week of classes, and only got worse in the revision session. I even straightened the instructor out on his understanding of one area of the syllabus. Yes, I was right and he was wrong. But that doesn’t make it less obnoxious**. I hope I made up for it a little with some of the tutoring I did on the side.

The exam was a pig, but I knew it would be. I think I did OK, on balance, though I won’t know for a couple of months. The pass mark is 60%, and if I get over 80% I get a distinction. (Which is, in a small community, considered rather cool.) I’ll be content to pass.***

I promise, now that I’m done with that, I’ll post to the blog again. I’ll even go back and pick out the best photos I took over that time, tell you about the time Fionaberry did a face plant at full speed running downhill, and even update my cinnamon roll recipe. Promise.

* I don’t think it’s boring. But I know everyone else does.

** Peter, if you’re reading this, I am sorry.

*** This is a lie. I would be marginally content to hear that I got 100%. I’ll gnash my teeth over every missed point. I know I missed at least 7 marks, and it’s driving me nuts.

Edinburgh, a love letter, Photography

Frosty Day

Today was astonishingly cold. It was one of those days where I step outside the door in the morning, then duck back in to get my gloves on properly before venturing out for real. The sky was clear as crystal, and I watched a flock of fourteen blackbirds fly above me as I walked to the bus. The breath from my open-mouthed smile clouded in front of my eyes.

Things didn’t thaw as the morning progressed, either. I took a brief walk at lunchtime (after spending most of the hour indoors, with companions who object to frostbite and nicknames like Nine-Fingers and No-Ears), and the world was still frozen. Wow.

This is not an aerial shot of the antarctic desert from a high-flying airplaine, but part of the pattern of ice on a windscreen. The driver will have had an interesting time this evening.

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Taken 30 January 2006

Frost-rimmed leaves, a pattern shot.

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Taken 30 January 2006

This evening the fog descended like cotton wool. It was as dramatic as the ice, but a lot less photogenic.

Photography

The good part of a bad day

I was on a course on Tuesday and Wednesday, on leadership and the bank’s culture. And things did not go well – one of my colleagues did not demonstrate the skills or values around which the workshop was built. (Actually, he did not demonstrate the basic manners that we expect from adults, nor the courage and grace to apologise when he sobered up. But I digress.)

While I was outside in the hotel’s extremely sparse grounds, cooling off, I took a few pictures. Most came out badly, but these two are the best of the lot.

These trees with the dangling seed heads are pretty common, but it takes a lot of luck to catch one not waving in the wind.

Dsc00494

Taken 25 January 2006

The spiral growth of seed heads on an ornamental shrub. This photo has been cropped.

Taken 25 January 2006

Actually, the best part of the day was the way that my other colleagues supported me in that difficult situation. I found one jerk, yes, but eight or ten trustworthy people. They even joked about taking him out into the car park, with sundry West Side Story references, but I didn’t want to damage the plants. 😉

Personal

Feminism again

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I’ve been thinking further about some of the issues I touched on in Degrees of Feminism. In particular, what do I think should be private and what public about women’s monthy cycles.

The current status, in my workplace, is that it is all private, but that some people feel that it is an acceptable topic for speculation. By that, I mean that I do not announce where I am in my cycle, and simply ensure that there is a pocket somewhere about me as I go to the ladies’ room when I have something to carry there. But my colleagues often say things about other women – even to me – like “Maybe she’s stroppy because it’s that time of the month.”

These comments are unanswerable without being marked down as a humourless bitch. I try to dismiss them by asking what a given bloke’s excuse is then, but often get “Maybe it’s his wife.” It goes without saying that none of this raises the speaker in my esteem. I am also fairly sure that several of my colleagues could make a shrewd guess about where I am in my cycle, and that they probably say similar things about me behind my back that they do about other women in front of me. It’s a humiliating thought.

The problem is that there is no reciprocity. Men are as prone to hormone-driven irrationality as women, but the consequences are very different. A man who gets aggressive because of testosterone poisoning is seen as competitive and strong, and gets promotions, company cars, and a seat in the executive dining room. A woman who gets aggressive because of oestrogen poisoning is seen as stroppy and unreliable and gets a glass ceiling and sneers behind her back.

But the masculine flavour of hormone poisoning is just as destructive as the feminine variety. The (overwhelmingly male) management team of the company I work for seems to spend all its time and energy in an endless struggle for position. Important decisions are chronically deferred, priority calls are made poorly and later reversed, and status is counted more than quality. The few women who make it to that level are as vicious as the men (that’s how they make it there). It’s a waste, and an infuriating one, to the people whose work lives it affects. I often suspect that that’s half-deliberate, that these men’s feelings of power are enhanced by their ability to waste so many people’s time. It’s a form of conspicuous consumption.

So if that’s the problem, what is the desired solution?

Well, to horribly misquote Martin Luthor King, I have a dream that my children will one day live in a world where they will not be judged by the shape of their genitals but by the content of their character. I want Alex and Fiona to work in an environment where women’s PMT and men’s overcompetitiveness are both grounds for apology. It should be acknowledged that these things occur, but that they are not the norm, not rewarded behaviour.

Chances? Low, since the power structures are populated by people who have got where they are by using their testosterone-fuelled aggression. But men elected to office ended up sharing the vote, so perhaps it is not impossible.

Personal, Politics

Degrees of feminism

I was recently reading a conversation online between some very committed Democrats and some very committed Republicans. Like many of the readers, I was floored when one of the Republican women called one of the Democrat women an “overemotional, angry, thick-skulled feminist”.

Huh? This educated, enfranchised and employed woman was using feminist as an insult. How does this creature think she got where she is today, if not through the efforts of overemotional, angry, thick-skulled feminists1 like Abigail Adams, Emily Parkhurst, Susan B. Anthony and Eleanor Roosevelt?

I got to feel smugly superior about my comparative enlightenment for exactly one day. Then I found this basket in the ladies’ room of the Capita conference centre, and it made me squirm.

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It took me a while to realise why it got at me. It’s not the fact that sanitary products are set out for women to use – though the dynamic of being given them as opposed to buying them one’s self (even from a vending machine) is already a move from the intense privacy with which we deal with these matters.

It’s the fact that they are offered with corporate compliments. If they just left them out for customers to filch, I think I’d be a little easier about it. The implicit attention to menstruation that the sign conveys is, well, embarrassing. (And this blog entry is an attempt to get over that embarassment.)

I hope Fiona is that bit more relaxed about these things when she grows up.

  1. Note that “feminist” in this context means one who believes that women should have equal rights to men. The use of “feminist” to mean “man hating freak” is a semantic hijacking.
Edinburgh, a love letter

The Gum Fence

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Someone has stuck a piece of chewing gum on top of each spike on a fence near my office.

The fence runs along Fettes Row, separating the road from the slope down to my employer’s car park (or, more properly, the piece of waste ground on which my employer permits its employees to park their cars; it’s a tax distinction). The pavement here is narrow and uneven, made up of old cobblestones, imperfectly pointed. Shrubs grow through the railings, and cars park close beside, making it an awkward side of the road to walk on.

The chewing gum starts beside a long-disused gate. Taken 12 January 2005

Whoever is doing it missed a spike, buried deep in the ivy. Taken 12 January 2005

They put dabs of gum on the stubs of broken-off spikes, too. Taken 12 January 2005

Even when the uprights were broken off quite low down. Taken 12 January 2005

The gum continues over 17 fence divisions. Each fence division has 20 spikes, so even allowing for the 5% or so spikes that are missing altogether, someone has put over 320 tiny dabs of chewing gum on pointy bits of iron. Assuming that each dab represents a third of a stick of gum, someone has chewed over a hundred of them before methodically sticking a piece on each spike.

It makes me wonder. How long did this take? Did they walk by, one day at a time, sticking dabs of gum on spikes? When did they stop, and why?
(Have they stopped, or will I find two or three extra spikes covered the next time I walk that way?) Do they now have such well-exercised jaw muscles that they can bite through a walnut?

And, most importantly, Why?