Following well earned time off work, Sunny comes back to disarray, and a friend.

~850 words

Previous Entry

To quote a friend of mine, "Made me go 'teehee' for Sunny"
Had this idea for awhile, and it was initially going to include a picture like the first one did, but I haven't made it yet. Oops.

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Sunny’s Diary - Prototype
By: Cheese

16/07/24
Dear Diary:
Today has been very interesting. I’ll start with the bad since I’d hate to end the day feeling awful. Returning to work has reminded me why I don’t take days off if I can help it. It doesn’t matter how much I tell my boss that trying to replace me when I’m away will only prolong the work, but it happens every time. Basically, my replacement broke the entire code. And it seems that they let him work at my desk, because I had to reorganize everything. He moved every monitor and one of the PCs to the other side of my room, for who knows why. I like to keep my desk organized, but he clearly doesn’t, because he left a ton of notes by the test arm I was using, and he filled the garbage bin with a ton more. Makes me wonder if this was actually my replacement’s doing or if someone just decided that I was going to have a bad day when I got back. Maybe I’ll ask for the security footage tomorrow. It only took me about an hour to get everything back as I preferred, but I would rather it had taken no time at all.

I seriously don’t know how he did it, but not a single piece of the code seems to work. I was maybe one or two workdays away from the first test of the new prototype arm, but now I’d say I have a few weeks of debugging and smashing my head against the keyboard until it works. Can’t say I’m too surprised; that’s sort of the theme with this project. I tried to do one of the test motions with the arm — a simple hand wave and then thumbs-up — but I had to stop it immediately because the angle limiters were being bypassed. This resulted in one of the worst metallic screeches I’ve ever heard. I had built that part of the code to be extremely robust since I knew it would cause a lot of issues if it went wrong, but it seems it wasn’t robust enough.

One of the engineers noticed a fatal flaw in a part as well, so I might have to wait for that to be fixed. I don’t really understand all of what there is when it comes to the parts themselves — at least the one that has an issue — but it’s with the power generation. From my dumbed-down understanding, I think what is happening is that about half of the fuel is just being cycled instead of used as intended. There’s probably a lot more to it, but that’s what I understood from the email. They gave me an estimate of about a week to fix it, but literally every estimate I’ve been given has been very optimistic. I have to assume this is another management issue, where they know they need more time than that, but are being told to do it in less.

I’m thinking with all the setbacks in making this arm, how is the final version ever going to be affordable or worth it? I feel like my job is on the ropes with this project. Oh well, it pays well enough. Though, not sure it’s worth it if I don’t have time to enjoy the extra money that isn’t burned up by the house and other stuff. I have been considering starting the search for a new place with how uncertain this project seems, but as long as the company doesn’t go under before we finish it, I get to keep the final arm. And I would awfully like to have an arm that feels like it was a part of me. This one is fine, don’t get me wrong, but the gears and the fuel tank sticking out aren’t exactly pleasant. We’re not really using the recent debug information I’ve been recording with it either, but it’s helpful to see that the data is staying consistent.

Anyway, this is looking to be a lot longer than my usual entries, so I want to wrap this up ‌soon. During break I had texted Jack about the mess I had returned to, and I guess that worried him, because about half an hour after I got home, he showed up at my door. It was the first surprise of the day that was welcome, especially since it’s a two-hour drive from his place. I’ll be honest that I locked up for a few seconds, wasn’t expecting him to come all this way for me. I asked if he wanted to stay the night, and he clearly knows me too well because he brought clothes for the morning.

We’ve pretty much just been watching movies since he got here. Every time I look at him, I feel so happy. Right now he’s on the couch, but I feel terrible making him sleep there. I might invite him to sleep with me. Anyway, I’m exhausted, so I’m done writing for tonight.

- Sunny