[Short one this week. What free time I had got tied up in gardening, and reading newspaper articles till the wee hours.]
July 3rd was a lazy Monday at the office. I only had the 4th off, and because my wife had patients to see all day, it was better for me to work now and take the vacation day in a couple weeks than sit around the house. But because I am working with a team that's split between three countries right now, and my Canadian coworkers got Monday off to observe July 1st, there was not a lot going on. A Lazy Monday is one of those days when everything goes right for me, and I actually advance through the my routine too fast. Normally, I look at 400 test results from the weekend check on two platforms, and then a daily regression run to confirm the code changes can be certified, which I work through as I go through two weekly meetings and a daily scrum meeting. The meetings were scrapped or moved to today, there were no changes of note in the code, and the weekend certification was cleared in an hour, because nobody snuck any thing in Friday afternoon. The rare “everyone was ahead of schedule.”
The real reason I expected it to be a Lazy Monday was that my new desktop machine had blown up the week before. I had been given a new machine and asked to transition the old one out of service in February, but I discovered I needed both to complete the software release, due to them having different point releases of Win10. With the release past my point of scrutiny, I had been setting up to switch machines. Then last week we had a power blip in the building, and it apparently caused the new machine to have a hardware failure. I was going into Monday with that expectation, that Dell service had been called, and that they would have a warranty call in 3-5 business days. So I was shocked to see IT show up for the machine on Monday. I had been planning to install the new release on the old machine and begin testing while the machine was out, but I was not prepared for the possibility of quick turnaround. Now the work I had planned for Monday, the arduous setup of things like docker and github connections on a computer not ready to handle these things, didn't need to be done. And Monday became even lazier.
I don't usually get these, a day where I'm unable to progress on at least something on my list, because the list is a mix of impossible and completely done, there’s usually something in the middle. It's weird to be ahead of everything like this. But it does give time to think about different problems.
If you don't deduct for being sick, tomorrow marks my 25th anniversary with Ansys. I started with them after my first engineering job was upended by fines by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission forced my employer to stop their contract with a power company to restart a plant in Connecticut. Because my company had about half of its employees on site at the plant, we had to move all of them back into the main office where I worked, and since I was the last hired, on a rolling three-month contract, I was the first fired to make space. I sent my resume in to Ansys while still in the office.
It took three months after that firing to get hired on, and that's really the only problem I've ever had with this job: that HR is deliberate to the point of slow in finding the right people for each position. I've gotten to be on a ride with the one really big business that ever started in my hometown. I got to test the last software changes the company's founder, John Swanson, added to the code. I've gotten to see our software solve a lot of problems, from how to recover the CSS Hunley, to how to make an Olympic medal winning swimsuit, to figuring out how a sneeze circulates around an airplane cabin. I've tested practically every product we offer, and that's part of the appeal, it's never the same old thing week after week. I'm blessed with one job that delivers more job satisfaction than my side hustle, and covers the fact that the side hustle isn't going to pay for itself. The other thing it offers is time to think about the problems, both interior to the job and exterior.
Ansys was founded when John Swanson had an idea to automate one part of his earlier job, having the computer do the calculation of finite element models. He did a lot of thought in those years working the hand calculations, but when presented with the idea, the company wanted no part of the process. So he left and ran his company out of a farmhouse. Some of those Lazy Mondays he had turned into something, and he made it into a company that lets us all take the time to think out problems.
As weird as it is these days to have been employed by the same business for even 5 years, 25 at two different places is unheard of. And I have to think that part of that longevity is that both of these jobs complement each other. Both are about testing and questions, and both are about giving ideas time to come together. And I’ve solved lots of problems by letting my brain think in one place, while my hands worked on the problem in the other.