The week started inauspiciously at work when an application started reporting continuous errors from a problem with the API that it uses to synchronise messages with an email inbox.

My initial guess, that its credentials had expired and needed to be updated, turned out to be correct, but it still took a day and a half and fifteen people to fix it.

It’s the kind of thing that I’d have been able to fix myself in minutes in previous jobs, but a mixture of government bureaucracy and a complicated deployment system designed by people who have since left (a common story: the kind of people who assuage their boredom by developing complicated architectures soon grow bored and seek new places to complicate) made it a long, difficult, tedious process, not helped by someone telling us that the credentials didn’t expire until next summer, when they had expired last Saturday.

At one point, I was on a call with ten people while trying to fix it. As time ticked on with no solution in sight, someone sensibly suggested a pause for lunch, to which someone else replied, “You’ll be in danger of breaching your SLA.”

In response, I said, “Well, I’m going for lunch. I’m starving, I can’t concentrate, and I don’t care about someone else’s SLA.” After all, what’s the worst that can happen? Someone terminates my contract and I don’t have to worry about fixing it? Everyone got a much-needed break, and several of the people on the call later expressed their support, so I think it was the right thing to say!

At work, everyone has taken to calling it The Incident.

As a result of this week, Microsoft Azure and Office 365 are going onto my contract-vetting shitlist. It’s not just that they’re bad or painful to use, it’s that the choice and enforced use of them is a symptom of a deeper, incurable institutional malaise.

On Monday night we went carolling at the old folks’ home (I should probably say retirement housing) and around the area. I took a torch to be able to read the words and music in the dark, but I needed both hands to stop the pages blowing around, so I must remember to get a head torch for next year.

(Note for US American readers: a torch is what you call a flashlight. We did not descend on the elderly with flaming brands.)

As if The Incident wasn’t enough, I also had to prepare for a presentation and assessment for another team at work. Due to the aforementioned event, I didn’t have enough time to prepare everything I wanted to do, but it went OK.

The time leading up to Christmas can be stressful on its own, but working on two teams at the same time, with multiple managers, competing priorities, firefighting, and a deadline makes sure it is.

I’ve switched from Gnome Terminal to Ptyxis. As someone who spends a lot of their working time in the terminal, I’m very invested in how well it works. Ptyxis came to my notice a few weeks ago at exactly the moment that I was suffering from unbearable input lag in Gnome Terminal. I gave it a try and I’ve been very happy since.

They recommend installing Ptyxis via Flatpak, but I don’t, because I don’t have infinite disk space and memory and it’s already in the Debian repositories.

It looks good, works well, and the performance is much better than the old Gnome Terminal. Terrible name, though.

I have come down with a cold. Amazing timing, isn’t it?

Things I’ve bookmarked this week: