What to Wear in a Long Meeting

Stripes and Florals AGAIN -- Wednesday, 1/14/15

OK, the meeting was only 3 hours, but that's still quite a bit of time.  I was warm enough and quite comfy in an outfit that's basically jeans, T, and cardigan.  (The warmth factor was helped significantly by the fact that it got up to 20 degrees F!  Yes, 20 degrees above zero.  The Festivus miracles just don't stop.)

I had an unexpected bonding moment with a co-worker over how much we both hate wearing turtlenecks, although he doesn't mind ties and I like scarves -- the critical aspect being that both of these can be adjusted and loosened.

Oh, a funny thing.  We spent quite a bit of time in the meeting convincing our project manager that we could have an emergency around the data to our new visualization software project that could require an immediate intervention from our IT department.  The project manager also updated us that one of the IT people supporting the project was deeply unhappy with the SQL written by our consultant because it was very vulnerable to hiccups.

Then we tried looking at one of our visualizations and the data didn't appear, which was weird because my officemate and I had just been working with it the previous afternoon and it was working fine.  Turns out that due to a combination of a 3 minute interruption in server connectivity overnight while the SQL was running to update our data and the poorly written/vulnerable code supplied by our consultant, two variables were not written to our dataset, which broke the visualization.  Have I mentioned our go-live date is tomorrow??

So how's that for a great example of the shoddy work from our consultant creating an emergency which the IT department needs to immediately step in and fix.  And kudos to them, they did.

I don't know whether I've mentioned that the visualizations developed by the consultant were so crappy that we (most of whom have had no training or experience in the software) have been developing our own from scratch rather than try to salvage their junk.  I kid you not when I say that several of the consultant's visualizations are one circle representing the percentage of our population who are Whatever and another circle representing the percentage who are Not Whatever.  Yep, just two circles sitting next to each other.  ARGH!

That's pretty much what they look like, for reals

So it's now become clear that both the visualization side and the data side of this consultant's work has been sub-par.  Sad.

But I'm not sad to have worn stripes and floral print together to work again.  If it ain't broke....wait and the overnight data refresh will break it.  Until then, pattern mix to your heart's content.

*White/grey floral T (Kohls)
Grey/black striped cardigan (Kohls)
Grey 5 pocket pants (Rafaella)
Black scarf (Target)
Grey ankle boots by Seychelles