inquiry

Seems there've been a lot of postings to nowhere on read.write.as of late: all choking on the “atlaswoke.com” domain.

> Notifications, though. They're good. Convenient.

There are times I'm convinced I enter a mental harm zone when being helped to remember more than I naturally do/can, some low-grade hysteria that easily blossoms unto not-always-so-well-disguised madness....

<later>

A great example of why I consider communication with other human beings mostly a waste of time.

At work, I've some code that creates and password-protects .xlsx files.

But there are two cases.

In the first, the password is the concatenation of some things a user interested in opening their file would know.

In the second, well... I see how I create the password, but it's neither a direct nor a calculated value from someone a user interested in opening such would know.

So I asked my manager to remind me how our users know passwords in that second case.

Instead of answering that, he gave me a spiel about why we password protect the files, as though I were too stupid to know that....

So... I could reply back something like “Um... I get why we do it. I just needed to re-understand how users would know said values without our telling them.”

But knowing what I do about inter-human communication and ego, I'd bet everything I own that he'd come back with some smart-assed combination of argument and additional belittling, as though there were something wrong with me for not remembering a tiny detail was probably run past me once 18 months ago, that I honestly don't need to perpetually know to do my job, and which of course I forgot whilst drowning in the sea of other special-case details this fucking moronic job requires a developer to know because there's not even a whiff of a quark of direction from management insisting employees ever do anything in “automation friendly” ways... which means everyone does whatever the fuck they want in filenames, file content, consistent letter casing, white space or not in the names of things, etc., etc., etc.

Guess who gets to make up the difference in that nightmare via code becoming unboundedly “spaghetti”-like to address certainly-mutually-exclusive-someday exceptions what were once portrayed as rules?