This morning I was pretty grumpy. I woke up late, burnt my coffee, and had to deal with a variety of family drama. Worse of all, though, was the state of the bathroom sink, with puddles of water and globs of toothpaste everywhere I tried to clean my hands. It made me very grumpy. I drove that way all the way to work, and I’m sure I stalked ito the building grumpily, too. I threw my bag into the corner, spilling my (burnt) coffee, and sat rather heavily onto the chair, though thankfully nothing broke off it. At this point, my whole cubicle was trying its damndest to budge itself away from wrath, and I can only imagine what would have happened to someone trying to intercept me this morning.
Thankfully, no one noticed me until I remembered a special perk that comes with working at Intel: free coffee. Now I know what you’re thinking, but they didn’t skimp on this stuff. Decidedly lightened, I walked downstairs making quite a bit less noise, and as I was walking back upstairs with my (free) coffee, I noticed just how awesomely professional expensive dress shoes sound in stairwells. This left me with such a smile, that when I went to the bathroom, and seeing my favorite sign, bust out laughing. Other people looked at me, but this didn’t bother me one bit. After finishing my business, I started to wash my hands, only to see a new sign, this one asking you to “wipe up any mess you leave for the courtesy of others.” Imagine my surprise.
I’m sure that you might be able to look into this and find a special cosmological meaning in this circle, but I found something better. After realizing all this, things became easier. I solved a problem in minutes whereas before I had been working on it all morning. I wrote this gem in perl, which finds and isolates a specific file, but unfortunately comes under two different names and two different flavors.
find(sub { push(@vsvars, $File::Find::name) if m/^v[sc]vars(?:32|64)\.bat$/}, $vs_dir);
Dealing with Microsoft is always such a pain, but after this single line and bit of noise, the rest was just easier; find the little things that give you the confidence to know that things do occasionally go right. So I’m not advocating never being grumpy, not at all. I do want you to remember, though, to look out for those little things that can turn a frown upside down.