Had this interesting hack today, where my supervisor gave me a mbox file filled with (a few thousand) mail from conference participants and I needed to tag who had replied to him and who (out of a list) hadn't.
He expected me to sit down and compile a spreadsheet with neat tick marks. I was given the rest of the week to do it. *cough* I did a quickie search on CPAN and found Net::IMAP::Simple. Of course, there is also the wonderful Spreadsheet::WriteExcel. 30 minutes later ...
Done.
No cookie ? Ok. More work ? *loong pause* Ok.
Re:Ugh! Why did you give him the result today?
tinman on 2004-08-19T15:16:20
*grin* I know, I know. A couple of other people who heard the story didn't put it as nicely as you did either. Quite naive of me.
At least he still doesn't "get" the concept of CPAN, so I will have an opportunity to put the Scotty Principle into action soon enough
I was given the job of generating one-shot reports that weren't in the standard existing daily/weekly/monthly report cycle. Things like "find all of the customers in these 5 region codes which match these criteria, and report these characteristics". After I'd done 2 of these and was starting on the third, I got the operators to add a new program to the online library, which had all the basic common elements required for this sort of program. Then, the job deck I submitted for this consisted simply of a patch to that module, adding specific details to the selection code (putting in the right include statements for the record structure(s) needed for the report and the logic to decide whether a record matched or not) and the formatting code (report layout and inserting the desired record elements into the report).
After that job was finished, I was given 3 more of them to do late one afternoon. The next morning I walked into my boss' office. "Oh, John" he said, I just got a call from the VP - he really needs report 2 by Friday, the other 2 can wait til next week." (This was Wednesday.) My answer was "Well, here's report 1 finished. Report 2 and 3 will be coming back on the next delivery trolley - they each had a minor glitch in the output formatting." (Punch card decks were collected around the building 3 times a day, with the printed output coming back from the previous pickup at the same time.)
I did get a cookie - I spent more time reading science fiction than programming that summer despite being 4 times more productive than they'd budgeted for. My boss kept running out of jobs for me to do.
