Fun at Work

Yes, you read that right. Here's the setup:

A new developer here, we'll call him Carlos for that is his name, asked to give a presentation on UML and the benefits it would have for us as developers. Being a veteran developer, the concepts presented were nothing really new... it's flowcharts for the object-oriented crowd.

Anyway, the idea is that with UML you can describe and design anything and everything about a system. The first demonstration was about a logger ... not the kind that involves chopping down trees but the kind that logs activity like events, input, output, exceptions, etc. Pretty dry stuff. Almost put me to sleep.

Then they switched to the animal kingdom. Danger Will Robinson. The choices made were a bit too pure and I fell for the whole setup.

They talked about having a dog object that would inherit from a general animal object. Then also on a deeper level to describe the dog object, one would desribe properties like legs. So there would also be a leg object which would also have ties to other objects like cats, etc.

About that time was when Carlos said it... "and using UML we can then describe the natural relationship between a dog and a leg." That was enough for me. I lost it. I couldn't contain myself. I blurted out with laughter in the middle of the conference room, prompting my co-worker Jose to do the same thing. As I looked around the room I saw everyone but my boss got the joke. Later I found out that my boss had gotten the joke but apparently was a little irritated that I blew up in the middle of the conference.

I couldn't help it! The images got the better of me and that's all she wrote!

Since my other co-worker informed me of my boss's displeasure, I've had mixed feelings about the event now. I guess I should have "maintained my composure" but good God... no amount of money and no job in the world is worth not being able to laugh.

I really wish the world could lighten up. It would be a much better place, really.

Peace,
Jenna