Worst Day  Ever

Today is offically, the worst day ever.

I have spent close to 2 weeks developing a set of services.

I went through the usual steps from sloppiness to prettified, organized classes and everything was running great.

I made my final changes last night, nothing major, minor defensive messures, renaming methods, recasing fields and variables, etc

Deployed the changes and WHAM!, caught me right in the kisser.

Everything is broken, well not everything, but a major part of the system is busted like a ravioli in the hands of a 3 year old.

The part that broke is an interop assembly I generated from a 3rd party program (MatLab).

I get bizarre cryptic error messages from the interop asssembly.

And now all of a sudden VS.NET doesn't want to let me regenerate a new interop assembly from the tlb (for the love of lollipops, why!?!?).

I'm running on about 2.5 hours of sleep and am frustrated, angry and general just really irked off, and on such a beautiful day

I created a new project and am pasting large chunks of code over, strangely, VS.NEt did let me generate the interop assembly in the new project.

Ever have one of these days? Any practices to help me shake this bad mood?

My head is pounding, I can barely stay awake, and I really am not very friendly today.  Even the coffee tastes bad...

*comfort*

Today is the tommorow you where looking forward to yesterday.

Behind the clowds is always sunshine!

There, feel any better?

And yes, I have had those days. Opening a project from a college and descovering that an ASP.Net webservice responds to my requests (from my ASP.Net website) with ASP.Net in the response evelope.

Or writing a windows service that fires DTS-Packages and descover after 2 weeks of production that you have a serious memory leak.

Should I continue?

My advice is to have a sit down meeting with your pregnant wife.

Tell her that John says Whiskey is medicine and you need curing.

She should understand that your belly is flat from lack of beer; and she should relent.

__And next time, Phreaks, and I am serious about this, don't set yourself up for frustration! To enter into the sympatico with your pregnant wife is a fine sentiment, but it is a fully unnecessary burden you shoulder for pride's sake. That is just foolish. I, for one, have learned this the HARD way.

cut your hair, get a job... Have a great day, friend!

Go to sleep NOW.

We had a thread about this recently when I was stupid to try a 28 hr session to see if I still could in order to sate my ego (I couldn't).

Right about now pretty much every decision you make is going to be a bad one and you are going to be adding more bugs than fixes.

So, go sleep. Nothing IT related is worth the damage to your health (with the possible exception of Surface).

I second the motion to go to sleep. I've had moments like these, and there's nothing more satisfying than being able to say "sod it," tossing the whole thing to the side, and sleeping for nine or ten hours. When you get up, don't dive right in. Take it slow and do something amusing. Then get back to it a little later.

It also helps if you use an expletive rather than "sod". At least, it made me feel better.

Thanks guys...

Unfortunately, this is my first high profile project here and I am already a few days behind schedule.

I am almost done now, and I ended up making some good design changes, so I guess it worked out (err, maybe I shouldn't jinx myself until I have it deployed and working).

I should be able to get out of here in another hour or two, then it's bed-time.

I third (or fourth) the motion to go to sleep. It's a paradox...but I've found that if you actually get a reasonable night's sleep (routinely) you end up being more productive in the long run. When you get overtired, it actually takes about twice as long to get anything done...even if you think staying up that one extra hour will help you solve the problem.

And no, chugging more pots of coffee does not help. I've tried it.

Like, several times.

If you dont force yoruself to nap you will make the problem worse. SERIOUSLY. You need to explain what is happening in laymans terms to whoever and get some rest before returning to the problem.

Everytime you run on no sleep more often than not you introduce new issues that would not exist with a clear head.

Good luck! I know most if not all serious 9ers here have been in your shoes.

phreaks wrote:



Ever have one of these days? Any practices to help me shake this bad mood?

My head is pounding, I can barely stay awake, and I really am not very friendly today.  Even the coffee tastes bad...

I remember waking up one day last year after a not very successful day and looking forward to another probably not successful day and I was in a stinking mood ... Then on the train to work I read in the paper a article about a Wing Commander in the RAF who had been killed when his helicopter had been shot down in Iraq.  This Wing Commander had been a good friend of mine a few years back, I knew his then girlfriend, now widow.  He was a top bloke, no airs and graces about him, an honest guy.  He didn't deserve to die then and his wife and family didn't deserve to be widowed and fatherless.

Since then I've when things turn sour at work, I take a few deep breaths and remember my friend John and his family, and suddenly, it just doesn't become that important anymore: it doesn't stop me trying my hardest to do the best job I can, but it does stop me wallowing in self-pity ...

blowdart wrote:

If I have to make myself happy to deal with customers or whatever I slap on the Polyphonic Spree

Assuming that the Polyphonic Spree is a new narcotic, does your dealer travel?

When I'm depressed, I put on If, by Telly Savalas.

davemc wrote:



Since then I've when things turn sour at work, I take a few deep breaths and remember my friend John and his family, and suddenly, it just doesn't become that important anymore: it doesn't stop me trying my hardest to do the best job I can, but it does stop me wallowing in self-pity

That is the truth. I had a very similar experience. One of those times where, sh*t happens and no matter how good are you from removing yourself from your code, you still take it personally. Much like a lot of professional people, I identify heavily with my work. I don't take peer review personally of course, but when my work fails; I feel like I failed.

I thought it was the worst work week ever once until the phone rang and it was one of my good friends calling from a German hospital after being hit by an IED in Iraq.

Things can be bad and can even be bad frequently, but ITS NOT THE END OF THE WORLD. Regroup and come back to your problem with the right perspective!

matlab interop *shudders*i thoguht i was the only one dealing with that stuff :Owe also generate a .net wrapper assembly (from a matlab dll w/ .h file) man that matlab runtime is a moody little (I need to watch my language).. one day for some reason it no longer wanted to initialize a second time (we have an automated measurment tool, measurement call the matlab assemblies, the software whould only run one measurement and then crash when calling the second one)and then all of a sudden it just stared working again..also, have you noticed that the matlab runtime sometimes crashes out of the blue bringing the whole app with it? lovely aint it?

Sleep is your best friend.

There are studies they've done that show the diminishing returns on productivity by those that keep working without any sleep.

btw, that Telly Savalas clip on YouTube is AWESOME!!!

Mark Brown wrote:

btw, that Telly Savalas clip on YouTube is AWESOME!!!

It never, ever fails to make me laugh.