Saturday, December 05, 2009

Strange Days Indeed

In my dreams I'd want to crash through the end of the decade sideways in a race car with bald tires, an empty tank and the brakes on fire shouting "BEGGAR ME ! WHAT A RIDE!"

What's actually happening is that I'm driving up a snow-covered hill in a 1966 Hillman Imp. My rusty 874cc engine is spluttering and my wheels are spinning as I slowly slide back into a ditch.

The run-up to the Christmas break has been so weird and warped. Stanetta has gone down with yet another ailment. Work has gotten strange in a way I'm neither enjoying nor understanding. I've got some Magistrate training and sittings to fit in. I'm tired, confused and short of patience and good humour. I've also acquired a Urologist.

Ho, ho flipping ho.

One recent task at work was to calculate the number of working days between two dates. Easy enough to say in English - actually quite difficult to write in an efficient piece of SQL. I found I kept testing it by calculating the number of working days between now and Christmas. I'd then run it again and again to see if I could get the number to fall.

Are we nearly there yet ?

And another thing ... why does "The Guardian" think I'd be interested in some free wrapping paper designed by Lily Allen ??? What's next - carpet tiles designed by Bamber Gascoigne ? Michael Palin's tiffin recipe ?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dude, create a table and populate it with every working day. Then you can do bank holidays and arbitrary exceptions too.

Stan said...

Ben,

That's what we do - but the bank holidays depend on which of these great and united kingdoms you are living in. So you need to build a bank holiday table with entries for all the countries - and when you're seeing how many working days it took to fix a fault, you need to take number of days minus number of weekend days minus number of entries in the bank holiday table for the country the customer is living in.

Easy to say in English, but with large volumes it takes some time.