Ah, the first day of work after a two week vacation—6,000 emails to catch up on, mutiple fires actively burning, and the whooshing of deadlines as they fly by breaking the sound barrier. I'm not sure what's worse—this, or the freezing temperatures we left behind in Brevard [1]. Aside from dealing with a week old request to reprovision our lab machines for the Oligarchic Cell Phone Companies, the most pressing fire was dealing with a possible change in “Project: Cleese [2].”
A proposed change in downstream processing with … oh … let's call it “Project: Waldo [3],” is stalled because the data needed for “Project: Cleese” to talk to “Project; Waldo” can't be generated fast enough. The data technically isn't needed for the proposed change in downstream processing, but to avoid changing “Project: Cleese” it was decided to generate fake data, and yes, said fake data can't be generated fast enough (seriously).
The fix is easy—it's just the removal of four lines of code (checking for the presence of the data, which now technically isn't needed), the modification of one other line (to deal with missing data), and it will just work. Alas, we're blocked by fellow cow-orker CZ (he works directly for the Corporate Overlords, and has been assigned to my team to make up for loss of employees in my department this past year) because of his extreme discomfort at changing any code outside of what has been planned. As was explained by several people, the changes won't affect the results at all, but CZ has yet to be fully convinced. It's definitely a culture clash between the Corporation and our Corporate Overlords
Yeah, my vacation was too short.
[1] https://www.cityofbrevard.com/