Debriefing from Drink Water: I expected it to be hard, but found myself chugging water during late night gaming to try and make it to eight glasses, and let me tell you, that's not a good idea. LoL doesn't take kindly to bathroom breaks!
All totaled, I drank about 5 cups. I might come back to this one and try it again.
Today, I'm going to Pre-Emptively Update people.
This is in the same vein as Speak Accurately and Use Topic Statements that we've already discussed (see other posts).
Wait, let me talk about the Meyers-Briggs classification system a bit, first. I'm an INTP, which someone dubbed the "Architect" archetype. (Someone who does not know any actual architects, and was only using it as a semantic term, because trust me, I know real people who have jobs as architects, and NONE of them are.... entirely sane...). One of the stranger things I found while reading about my archetype was a description of how everyone like me (and I guess there aren't that many of us?) doesn't like to "repeat statements that INTPs think are already obvious, for fear of sounding condescending or, worse, redundant and inefficient." This seemed to me to be both very true, and creepily specific. I do hate doing that. I do assume things are already obvious, so I don't waste time on them, assuming everyone else already knows and understands 'obvious' things and we can all move on. This is the source of our Speak Accurately and Use Topic Statements problems. And it may be the source of my current woe: Updates.
I cannot assume my boss and co-workers know what I'm doing. And one of my co-workers seems to have an annoying habit of updating my boss on everything "we" are supposedly doing, except "we" do not do anything together. I do all the work, God knows what he does all day. But I just fielded a call from my boss (he's not in the office much) that seems to indicate that he thinks that the other guy understands and is doing the work, whereas I'm some kind of dumb statue who couldn't code in a straight line if my life depended on it? I'm not precisely sure what happened, but the conversation left a sour taste in my mouth.
So today (maybe this week), I'm going to pre-emptively update my boss (and whoever else needs it) on whatever it is I'm doing, even if it seems redundant and pointless to me. It's better than trying to explain a big situation to him later when I can keep him up to date on what's going on now. I don't like it - I'd prefer just handing him results that I've already tested, fixed and perfected on my own, like my last boss - but the current environs clearly demand some change of plans.
