Zero Day is NOT Upon Me I got a brief reprieve today, I guess.

Neither of my two deployments are going through tomorrow, so I have two more weeks to go until another opportunity to screw something up. ;)

Speaking of which...
I watch SpongeBob Squarepants quite a lot with a 5 year old boy in the house. I was watching this episode the other day where Patrick (the starfish and best buddy to SpongeBob) found out his parents were coming over to visit him.

He was not very happy as his parents treated him like he was stupid. SpongeBob told him that he would help out by acting even dumber than Patrick thus making Patrick actually look smart. The act worked, but too well. Patrick, even out of earshot of his parents, kept cracking stupid jokes at the expense of SpongeBob. This resulted in SpongeBob getting mad and reminding Patrick that he was only acting stupid to help him out.

Since I put my sign up (not counting my counter up top, no one here gives me a hard time) everyone has consistently beat me up over it. Today was it for me. Yes, I brought it on myself with the sign and all that, but I'm through with it. My boss mentioned that if I had to reset my sign that I wouldn't really be there to do so as I would have been escorted out the door (he didn't say this in a mean-spirited way...he might be right next to me) and unable to reset.

I started practicing how I would answer questions about my firing in my next interview.

Interviewer: "So, why did you get fired?"
Me: "Well, I screwed up production a couple of times."
Interviewer: "How did you do that?"
Me: "The first time I deployed code from development to production."
Interviewer: "Really?! Why did you have access to production?"
Me: "..."
Me: "On the second occurence, I deployed a bug into production; I changed a non-requirement driven piece of code"
Interviewer: "What about QA? Didn't they do regression testing?"
Me: "..."

I felt a little better.

I've have never been happy about my mistakes, I tried to "man-up" and own them; perspective and context are good things though. I should learn from my mistakes and correct the behavior that led to them, that's all I can really do.

Labels: discipline, humility, work

  ¶ 9/18/2007 11:39:00 PM