I wrote this in a hotel lobby in Alabama, laid it out in the Detroit airport, and I’m uploading it from Rochester. Just had a hell of a glorious weekend at DeepSouthCon performing with a bunch of my contemporaries and the legendary Dr. Demento. Balder was there as well, and I finally got to briefly meet Howard Taylor (Hi, Howard Taylor!) And this after the Kickstarter for my new Worm Quartet album ended up 369% funded. I am a happy tired Shoebox, full of linkable things.
I’m reasonably happy with the punchline on this strip, and hoping I still think so when I’ve had time to catch up on sleep. The buildup seems a tad iffy to me, but I couldn’t work out a better way to get where I was going. This story basically stems from two different lines of thought yanked from my own experiences. On one hand, it really sucks when somebody goes away on vacation and leaves error-filled crap behind for the poor non-vacationing schmucks to clean up. On the other hand, how glorious would it feel to smack the compile button, slap down an obnoxious satisfying post-it, and run off to parts warm and sunny?
The text of said post-it, incidentally, is inspired by a true story involving Balder, my bathroom, and a tiny vibrating psycho dog.
See you later this week!
-=ShoEboX=-
The tiny vibrating psycho dog says hi.
It didn’t quite work for me. But maybe the technobabble is part of the humor, but how would a check-in break the build? Is a check-in the same as signing in or logging in?
I’d like to think Anderson really did need that vacation and the others should be able to unbreak it. They should have more than one tech guy on available at all times anyway.
And what’s the story about the dog? Was it a real dog or a battery-operated toy? Thanks.
As a SW configuration manager, I can confirm that my job is made of this comic. Both in the “cleaning up other people’s messes” sense, and in the “getting called while on vacation to save everyone’s bacon” sense. I guess Scott Adams isn’t the only cartoonist with spies everywhere…
@jan: In this case, a “check-in” just refers to a specific change that this guy added to the SW that is shared by the whole team. The phrase “code change” would probably have worked better for the wider audience, and would have seemed only slightly less authentic to the SW development in-crowd.
Now, if the line had said “commit” instead, that would have been funny… ^_^
I know just enough about coding to understand this comic.. and I love it when that happens. Makes me feel smart but it also gives me the feeling that people around me aren’t all idiots.
Roommate ranted to me last night re “How could $SOFTWARE_APP [1] not have any way to uninstall itself?!” On reading this, I called him in and said “Read. This. Now.”
Got a jaw-drop and a great laugh, it did. Funny and educational to boot!
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[1] Perdition Tragic, or summat … comes in a yellow box.
Saints preserve me from people who want their Projects slammed into Production before: 1) A holiday, 2) A weekend or 3) Right before I go on Vacation. The only day software should be installed/implemented/upgraded is on a Tuesday, of a five day work week, where all key people are available for testing and correcting.
I keep laughing out loud (really) every time I read this comic. Did a software startup 20+ years ago, where (when we got far enough along) we’d do a software build each night. We soon implemented a rule that if anyone checked in code changes/additions that caused the build to break, s/he had to buy donuts for the entire engineering team. It was actually a pretty effective mechanism.
If I were still doing commercials software development, I’d buy a large print of this strip and post it in an obvious place somewhere. ..bruce..
PowerBuilder project?