Be Careful, or Move Faster

I'm going to tell you a story about me.  Sit down, get comfortable, toss another log on the fire, and fill up your pint glasses.  I'll take a lager while you're at it.

Érase Una Vez, I was walking through a parking lot in the Metrowest district of Orlando, wending my way through impatient and lost tourists trying to find Universal Studios, located just two blocks behind the trees on the other side of the road.  We would call it a highway instead of a road up North, as it had 6 lanes and everyone drove well over the posted limit of 55mph, but it still had a sidewalk and the occasional traffic light, so the Floridians named it a state road and left it somewhere ambiguously in the middle.  I dodged a car pulling out of that prime parking place right next to the door of the liquor store who didn't realize that you still had to look while pulling out, even if you were on vacation, and I slipped in quickly behind the last customer before the door closed all the way.

Don't worry, no one else was coming, so it wasn't a prick move for not holding the door.

Nips!
(Credit to Real Tingley)

The liquor store had everything I was missing for between 4 and 8 house guests that were coming by my place later.  This was early in my Florida adventures, and that was about the largest gathering I'd have before meeting up with Kenneth and venturing into Natura, so the shopping was easy, even if the error bound on people was about 100% of the original 4.  I grabbed a case of something, and precariously balanced a bottle, a mixer, and a few limes on top of it, before heading the register and waiting in line.  I hate lines, but I chose to focus more on my balancing act than to rush for the register before the others lined up, and meditate upon my own unnecessary haste while waiting for them to ring up.  Besides, I almost lost one of the limes before finding the right motions to steady it without a hand.  The checkout attendant scoffed a bit, clearly of the opinion that I should have made two trips, but I would not let the chance at the single pass checkout trip of efficiency sneak by.

After an epoch, my turn came.  This line wasn't so bad, as at least some people had collected behind me, and lines always seem better to me when you're not last.  I tried to carefully place my stack upon the very small surface area of the counter, which was enclosed in a ring of last-minute-buy-crap that I never saw anyone actually buy.  Just as I was finishing the motion and steadying the miscreant lime while rotating the case to fit lengthwise, I knocked one of the nips over, which went hurtling to the ground.

It was a hard floor, and the attendant took on a visage of being even less pleased than he was before.

When I was growing up, I was no stranger to breaking things, as my mother would be quick to attest.  You don't really know how something works until you take it apart, but the real trouble came when you tried to put it back together (like say, a dishwashing machine) and ended up with a small cache of newly acquired spare parts.  I'm sure not all of those screws came from there.  My parents took to hiding all of the tools for a while, locking away screwdrivers and torque wrenches as most households would lock away government savings bonds (remember those?  They used to work, too!).  I began repurposing butter knives, letter openers, and the occasional sewing machine piece to the task, and stayed to the inorganic stuff, as I intuitively understood Adams' dictum; "If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat."

I also learned that I wasn't very good at fixing things that were in broken pieces.  Getting rid of all the spare parts came with practice and experience (and a few notes about where things came from on unfamiliar machines), but gluing and soldering were always a mystery to me, and in both cases, I frequently ended up with big goo balls instead of nice clean welds.

That led me to another strategy for dealing with my own penchant for accidental destruction.  Get faster.

I'd watched just enough Karate Kid and Bugs Bunny to think that people could do incredible things with quick reflexes.  I knew my hands were too tied up in keeping the case from falling to be of any use, so I quickly balanced on one foot, pulled my foot up to align its bottom with the counter front, and gently stalled my leg down to softly cradle the tiny bottle before bringing it to the floor.

The attendant had already decided that he was going to be angry, and screwed his face up into ever more uncomfortable expressions to prevent his mouth from expelling verbal vitriol at my stupidity and destruction of his property.  The tall black guy behind me in line shouted out a hearty "yeah!" before beginning an applause that was picked up by the two people behind him.  I finished the maneuver with the case, reached down, carefully placed the nip back in its perilous border-like existence, and asked the guy to finish ringing up my bill, after thanking the big guy behind me.  He gave me a bit more praise about having seen the whole thing while I closed the monetary transaction before me.

We all have a choice.  The preferred answer is probably to be more careful, as my parents harped on while growing up.  It might take a lot longer (and a lot more rounds of hackey sack than I now care to admit), but isn't it more fun to push it and fall occasionally?

Thanks for listening.

The Cost of Lunch in Kyrgyzstan

Recently, I pondered the question of how much an average but reasonable lunch might cost in Kyrgyzstan. The obvious web searches for "lunch in Kyrgyzstan" and similar bad terms didn't lead to anything with much relevance, aside from some interesting pointers about the average fare of Kyrgyz cuisine from the all-knowing^[1] wikipedia.

Good answers to this question could likely be found from some people who have actually been to and/or live in Kyrgyzstan, and they could probably tailor the answer to exactly what my loaded definition of "reasonable lunch" might mean, further adjusted for what I can probably quickly adapt to eating and what might take a bit more getting-used-to.

Knowing the power of the whiff, I decided to derive the number from some highly manipulated international measures and some very badly applied ratios that might match up with what a friend of mine might have told me was the approximate lunch value to expect in Kyrgyzstan.

Here's the derivation, dollar amounts in USD, much in the style I see Wall Street calculate figures (IE very non-scientifically). Do us all a favor and please don't quote this in a journal as the approximate cost of lunches in Kyrgyzstan.

Given the current GDP (PPP) per capita in Kyrgyzstan is about $2000, and the US for the same measured period is $46,000, let's assume a simple flat ratio for a food price (wildly inaccurate, but I don't want to dig any further), and a fairly inexpensive lunch in the US (Northeast) is around $6:

$2000 / $46,000 = x / $6

So we're looking at lunch for about 26 cents (a bit higher than my friend's figure).

Since I can't remember what he said, let's assume (probably need an inverse logarithmic filter to account for general human perception) that "a bit higher" ≈ 40% premium

(100% + 40%)*x = $0.26, so

18.57 cents, so 19.

19 cents for a lunch in Kyrgyzstan. By very reputable^[2] derivation.

Update: I talked to the aforementioned friend. He said that a large lunch is about 20 Kyrgyzstan som; at current market rates (it seems to trade by appointment), 1 USD = 41.0 KGS (as of yesterday). So a more realistic number is about 50 cents. Just goes to show how far off you can get with some mathematical derivation ;)


^[1] This occasionally means not-all-knowing. YMMV.
^[2] This means non-reputable, if you were wondering.

The Robot's Base Haiku

Friday afternoons are rife with the whiff potential.

There I was, mostly minding my own business, when the strike of TGIF smashed into the office, leaving tatters of the chances of productivity. Deftly I clung to my earphones and cranked up the music in my work mix, as I quickly marked where I needed to get by the end of the day, before succumbing to the bold demands of Fridayness.

Then they came, en masse, to my cube. The tribute of nonproductivity was demanded.

Not wanting to completely lose the mindset, and being inspired earlier in the week by the Haiku Error Messages, I took the fertile ground of the self-docking robot on which I work, and scribed a few lines, with which I will leave you:


We have all your base.
You can't dock anywhere, they
are belong to us.

Back in the world of Bugs

"John" did an amazing thing today; he finally restored my access to the Yahoo bug tracking system! You can imagine my shock and dismay after first seeing my access restored and second realizing that I had about a week worth of work that had to be checked in / merged / reconciled.

It always amazes me when companies talk about the "standard interval of time" to do something (or its shorter more telecom-centric version of it, the "standard interval"). The words "standard interval" recall to me the fun days of working at telecom companies, where no matter what task you were requesting of the incumbent (monopoly) phone company, there was always some lengthy "standard interval" attached to it, that tended to be missed anyway. It didn't matter that through the entire interval, practically nothing was done until the last 10% of the time remained, and from a certain philosophical perspective, that makes sense to me (having to guarantee work in a certain timeframe when you have lots of other jobs to do competing for your own limited resources to get them done, plus the wonderful notion of "all nighters" and deadlines), but I used to imagine that standard intervals were so formalized that a person at such a company would leave for a bathroom break and drop a "standard interval: 60 minutes, escalation available" sign somewhere in their cube.

In this case, "John", who was able to shut my account access off (with fairly poor justification) within the same business day, needed more than a week after the bosses had agreed to restore access due to the standard interval associated with activating Y! bugzilla accounts.

The bug that he took over was still there, but he had removed the word "please" from the subject; now it was a more direct message about how this bug shouldn't be touched as it had been repurposed to detect certain kinds of activity in the bug tracking system and tests would break if anything in it changed (and other bad things might crawl out and find you in the night).

I resisted the urge to open another ticket either about "finding a sense of humor" (P3, don't want to alert YNOC again) or "Please create your own bugs for system tests so that we don't break things when you steal bugs and apply bogus reasons to them" (P5), and file it as a blocker / dependency against the other. If he missed the humor in the first one, he'd probably miss the humor (and the passive aggression) in the second, and I don't really agree with passive aggression anyway (at least when it's not funny).

So, let the whiffing continue. And if you order a pizza for delivery, make sure you wait at least the standard interval of 1 hour before wondering where it might be (adjust for traffic, weather, locale, time of day, ingredient rarity, and doorbell ringability conditions as appropriate).

The Death of Corporate Culture at Yahoo

Takeover threats loom, poison pills are adopted, allies are found, and enemies are fought off.

This is pretty standard M&A stuff, as far as I can tell.

But what I want to tell you about is a guy that for the sake of this story, I'll call him a suitably common Western man's name, "John". John is not John's name, but John's name will not be terribly important as you learn a little more about him.

John might be your typical systems administrator at Yahoo; he's strict, rigid, and not overly endowed with a sense of humor. He is one of the administrators of the Yahoo internal bug tracking system (yes, we use bugzilla and are mentioned doing so on the bugzilla website), one of the central repositories for all that is wrong with the world of Yahoo.

(You might think that being in charge of a system of only what is wrong with your company's products may color your world view a tad; you wouldn't be far off the mark in such thinking according to some experts somewhere on the Internet)

Why, you may ask, am I telling you the story of John? After all, John is only the kind of minor character you find in a story that might attempt to block our protagonist from fending off the evils of the underworld, or whatever the current epic calls for s/he to be doing (ensuring the carrier pidgins carry their April Fool's jokes to the Sunday Post in time? Rescuing maidens from the narcissistic terrors of the nail salon during the last bastion of free time, the weekend? Finding new ways to restructure debts against the growing US credit crisis before the April 15th tax deadline?)

About a week ago, slightly ahead of the April Fool's holiday, I had what I thought was an interesting thought over a beer at Yahoo's de facto watering hole in Hong Kong. The thought ran that our bug tracking system didn't have its own unique user database of users with permission to receive and send bugs - it probably took the valid access information from our regular intranet, dubbed "backyard". Our CEO, Jerry Yang, has a backyard ID just like any other Yahoo. But wait, does that mean we can assign bugs to Jerry?!

Against the protestations of my coworkers who overheard my mad rantings, I raced upstairs to my corporate authenticated laptop to test this theory. I happened to know just exactly the perfect bug that should be assigned to Jerry, if one could ever hope to assign one's ultimate boss any bit of work; but this made sense, on the provision that our masters are ultimately the servants of all, fearlessly captaining our collective ship through the gloom of raging storms all around, competently vanquishing our foes and commanding by their austere presence the dedication and loyalty of the rank of file. "Oh captain my captain," I wished to cry, and share with our CEO what I thought was a good bit of fun.

The bugzilla new ticket entry screen stared back at me from my 15 inch LCD, awaiting my instructions. The mouse moved almost of its own accord as the "Assign To" blank seemed to illuminate itself, perfectly understanding my desires.

"Je"

(my heart rate increased slightly)

"r"

(the pulse now perceptible in my fingertips above the nicely springy depression of the keys)

"r"

And then, auto-completion took over, and a list of five Yahoos appeared. Sure enough, "Jerry Yang" stood out with his backyard ID photo in stark relief against the flat white background of the web page.

I paused a second to consider the audacity of the act, but still, the reasoning seemed true. Jerry was more than our father; he was our founder, the maker, the visionary that built this company alongside Filo in a trailer somewhere in California, and at one point, he must have been coding with the best of them, and that meant he had to have some part of the hacker's sense of humor.

I tore through the remainder of the ticket entry form, heart rate now a bit accelerated in a most un-Jason-Bourne-esque fashion. My coworkers alternately switched between scandalized excitement and covering their eyes with hands (while leaving a crack to peek through) as they watched a train wreck move through towards its ultimate completion.

I marked it as a bug of type "Task", QA contact my own team, and priority 0 - Critical.

The words in the summary read "Please stop the Microsoft takeover".

The full text of the bug description read "Best of luck Jerry ;)".

And of course, the steps to verify were:
" * Review previous Microsoft acquisitions
* Review recent core Microsoft product releases (Vista)
* Review OS systems and semantics from Microsoft (Note the backslash in particular)
* Consider "Microhoo" is probably not a good name ;)"

With a last ditch thought for the sanity of the act, I clicked submit before my rational facilities could abort the action. The coffin was nailed shut, the bug was filed. Ticket #183XXXX was submitted and assigned P0 to Jerry Yang himself.

I'm not going to tell you much about what happened next, since it involves the actions of other Yahoos based on things I didn't come up with out of the office while sipping a Hoegaarden. In very general terms, I can tell you that I did miscalculate slightly; P0 tickets are a bit too important for them to wait for the assignee to respond. Yahoo is a good company, and the global network operations center which is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365.24 days a year YNOC was on that ticket before Jerry could ever have possibly seen it. P0 - Critical is not taken lightly here, as it shouldn't be.

The intervening travails aside, I eventually downgraded the priority, but left it in the hands of Jerry. Other Yahoos chimed in, spotting the good bit of satire in its unadulterated form and adding on the bits of intended-function-misuse which is the cornerstone of good hackery to make the whole bit even better.

Until we get to our friend, John.

John didn't close the ticket, make some comment about please not doing this, or even contact me directly to let me know while off the record this may be funny, we couldn't do this sort of thing, and everything would have ended. What a good sysadmin with a good sense of hacker world views and how to really effectively get things done at a company would do. That wasn't really enough for John.

John cleared out the bug summary. Actually deleted it. Cleared out the steps to verification. Cleared out absolutely every field that he could clear out, as a matter of fact. Then closed the ticket, CC'ed my boss, and wrote a rather insulting replacement to be shown for the rest of the bug's history in the system - basically saying that bugzilla is not a toy.

Now any hacker knows that just about anything is a toy, even more so if it has any kind of digital existence. The list of precedents for this type of use of a bug tracking system are actually far too numerous to contemplate. Needless to say, various people at the company did not agree with the actions of John, and now that he had made himself a target, began to express themselves (in non-offensive fashion) generally that this wasn't a toy use of a bug tracking system, in their minds.

This isn't the cultural revolution in China; the scholars were not asked for their comments and then summarily disappeared a few months later. Ok, maybe what I did wasn't strictly speaking what I should be doing with a bug system, but trust me from perusing the other bug reports, there are vastly less "corporate" uses of bugzilla going on regularly all over the system. And if Jerry really had a problem with what I said, no one doubts his authority to remove a peon like me with the barest flick of his hand as a small kid might stomp out the multitudes of ants storming out of an anthill; yeah, I banked on his sense of humor, but there are certainly far more career oriented productive things I could have done than to send this particular bug to our CEO.

Which really made me wonder why John had even gotten involved.

Ok, perhaps it had been mistakenly assigned to him, or maybe this was at the insistence of Jerry unbeknownst to me. Fair enough, but leaving the bug in that state just seemed patently inappropriate.

I reassigned it to me, reopened it, made a comment to try to smooth things over with John, and removed him from the CC so that we would stop bothering him and his department. I also mentioned that anyone who wants to play with the bug, fair game, but please don't change the assignee or the product so that we don't bother people who don't view this as a good statement of what many Yahoos would agree on as an important task, and have many more important things to be doing with their time.

The people agreed, the bug went on in its muted semi-censored form, with Jerry no longer the assignee. And the story probably should have ended there.

But it didn't.

John came back with a vengeance soon after. Once again, he cleared out all the fields that he possibly could. Once again he reset the display titles and summaries. And once again he left his mildly insulting message about toy use of bugzilla. But that wasn't enough for this keeper of the company's problems (er.. bug reports).

He wrote to my boss again. And then he escalated to his own boss the contents / nature of which I'm not aware. But what I am aware of is that his boss then went to my boss and my boss' boss, claiming somehow that (in other words) I was the root of all evil for this sort of thing.

That really was unnecessary.

I had already ceased and desisted and closed the bug the first time my boss brought it to me. I would have even apologized at the time to John, because while I didn't agree with him, administrating that system was his job, and nobody needs extra work - the fun was done, and now it was time to make up and move on in my mind.

But John or someone in the escalation path felt that that wasn't punitive enough. I came in to work the next day and attempted to check in some of the programming code that I had written into the Yahoo code repository, as befits my job as a senior programmer. We have some auditing requirements on code submissions / changes as any large company probably has, as told to me, in conformance with our Sarbanes-Oxley compliance guidelines. In order to submit new code or a change, you need to document what you did and attach a bug ID from bugzilla indicating the problem / enhancement / change you were solving.

They had removed my access from the bug tracking system.

Now I'd like you to note at this point, I haven't been fired, I've already written a soft apology and gloss-over that our bug admin was copied on, and stated the intent of the bug (before the last John edits) of just being an expression of internal desire to the guy who can do something about it that at least some of us are not big fans of the takeover attempt.

And now, per corporate policy, he (or whoever removed the access) was blocking me from doing my job.

Territorial pissing match aside, at no point did I somehow make it impossible for our friend John to do his job. At most, he looked at a bug he (in his own opinion) deemed irrelevant (which he was never assigned anyway) and initiated a lot of extra effort instead of just closing it and quietly requesting that we don't do that anymore. Any extra work he did with this was wasted effort that he decided was justified, plain and simple.

I've been batching up my work submissions now through coworkers and a shadow bugzilla / code repository system that I was able to set up in less than an hour, since I don't find those types of tasks particularly challenging from a workload perspective, to keep in compliance with corporate policy. And it has now been 3 days, and I still don't have access. Thank you for embracing the spirit of One Yahoo, John, one of Yahoo's big bets.

And you want to know the sad corollary? For all the trouble, I never heard a word from Jerry :(


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* By the way, these are my own views, certainly not Yahoo's

Virtually Laid Off and Tonight

Corporate actions frequently go in the whiffing category, and so I moved over here from my usual Plan Wander blog. Here is a repost from an email I issued about 20 minutes ago which has something to do with my plan on getting blitzed tonight to not think any more about the Microsoft / Yahoo takeover bid actions on my company (yes, I work for Yahoo though don't speak in any official capacity for them), life there during the layoffs, and how much I'm going to rock open mic tonight over at Joyce is not Here (and maybe later at Peel Fresco Music Lounge where the soundproofing is a bit better and there's more G-strings to break):

Reprint:
I'm going to coin a new phrase, "virtually laid off".

FAQ:
Q: Guy, were you laid off today?
A: No.

Q: Guy, what are you going to be drinking?
A: I hear 151 is pretty good, though have no express plans in any particular direction.

Q: How drunk are you thinking of getting?
A: At present, I know my name and where I live. I intend to give both of these pieces of information up later on in the evening / tomorrow morning.

Q: Are you going out Friday night?
A: No, I will be in Shenzhen.

Q: What are you going to be doing in Shenzhen?
A: Visiting the 5th floor of Lo Wo shopping center, where I am known for being a spanish guitarista, since most people there's command of English is not very good (it's not the most common language there) yet they hear me sing Cancion de Mariachi, Mi Corazon Espinado, and La Bamba, and drew their own conclusions.

Q: Do you have a long term plan? What is "Virtually Laid Off"?
A: I wasn't actually laid off. Virtually laid off means that while the office wasn't told to specifically lose anybody at present, if they needed to, I would be first in line.

Q: Do you want to comment on that?
A: Not particularly.

Q: Do you write FAQs frequently?
A: Not at the moment, but I have been thinking of writing "Space: An idiot's guide to navigating the densest city in the world" including such features as "Don't speed up to cut people off and then slow down", "The 100% sidewalk width rule and bidirectional traffic flow", "The me first you second philosophy and how applying it might get you body checked in crowded situations", "why old people and mom's with children get special dispensations from general pedestrian traffic rules", and last but not least, "Kids: Chaotic movement attractors and general collisions". When I'm done with that, I may write "Why Yahoo is going to kill itself", though that'll be better either as a post mortem or after I am actually laid off.

Q: Are you going to happy valley tonight?
A: No, though I do support such initiatives as dreadlock combing with vivacity and vigor. I intend to sit on my computer and muse about various ideas at home until said trek on highway to hell commences.

Q: Are you sad?
A: Not particularly. More like shell shocked at confirmation of perceived future issues and not particularly in the mood to focus at the moment and look at my usual workload. I would rather write potentially useless code that examines the inside of my intestines with the Infrared Transceiver located on the side of your laptop; my boss knew that the kind of news I was getting was not exactly motivational, and granted me the dispensation of trading a half day of work today for a half day this weekend.

Whiffing and People-See-What-They-Expect

So after quite a break, the whiffing blog popped into my head the other day (a term of time I've been heavily criticized for "overloading" a bit.. the other day has referred to 6 years ago in one rather gross example, but this time really like "yesterday"), and I figured I'd jot down one or two things that happened along the way.

So there's this theory, whose origins I'm not too certain of at the moment, though it seems something appropriate in the world of the Hitchhiker's Guide or the likes of Discworld. It says that People-See-More-Or-Less-What-They-Expect-To-See, though I can't remember the exact wording. Hmm, maybe it was Terry Goodkind, now that I think about it. Well, wherever it came from (and yes, some part of me is probably going to be annoyed with that problem for the rest of this blog), this theory has some truly great applications.

The best part is that people generally don't think they'll fall for it, which is probably the biggest reason that this works. I'll give you an example:

So not too long ago, I was a temp working for this publishing company in downtown Boston (no, I don't want to give away the name, but that one). Nothing really relates to the life of a temp like being a temp, and temps get pretty much the low end of everything there is to be had or do around the office.

One day, there was pizza in the office. I don't want to quite say "free pizza" in the office, because it was made somewhat clear through implication that this pizza was for the regular staff, as it was put in the regular staff area of the office, and the full time staff were near to falling over themselves to avoid contact whenever you noticed them all eating a bite of pizza (as if somehow you were supposed to forget that most of them wouldn't be caught dead eating lunch together normally, let alone they're all now eating the same thing at the same time).

Some quick inductive reasoning and a sly look passed among the row of temps (and a few things that I hope they weren't reading the Instant Messenger conversations at the time about), divined the situation.

I shared a theory with the others, relating to this, trying to take the idea out for a spin and see if any of the overqualified temp minds could spot some glaring problem with the theory (whoever came up with peer review was pretty damn clever). The theory went: temps are invisible. The proof went: temps are below the regular notice of full time staff, as long as they appear to be doing what they should be doing (temply kinds of things, like copying, making coffee, walking around with a stack of papers, filing papers, repeating the same sequence of 10 things forever, etc). Temps are periodically sent on tasks around the office by higher level staff who can't be bothered. Therefore, to gain invisibility, a temp merely has to look like they're not lost or otherwise unoccupied in some task.

Skylah was particularly amused by this theory and immediately wrote me back. Ok hotshot. Prove it.

I walked into the main area, without the usual lost look an unassigned temp carries with them the world over. I was on assignment, moving just a tad faster than my usual meandering pace. I made straight for the break room. Many of the regular staff were crowded in around the slices. I gave a nod, and a small gap opened around the boxes, regular staff at a subscious level clearly not wanting to give any interference to a temp clearly assigned to task. I placed two slices of pizza rather professionally on a paper plate, and walked back out to the other office room.

Buried in the mini "proof" was an application of people having some expectation of what a temp doing temp work is supposed to look like, and then they only see what they expect. People didn't give me that look like, "I see you, I know you're up to a little mischief, but it's cool cause I'm cool, and cool people give you the 'I'm being cool about this' kind of permissive look" kind of look, instead they gave if anything only the briefest glance as they carried on in unbreaking unpausing conversation as some low level brain function told them a temp was near by, and appeared to be doing some temply thing. Then *poof*, instant invisibility.

So, fast forward, it's a couple years later. Under totally different circumstances, I began a series of smaller whiffs that in aggregate probably serve a whole other type of whiffing. I'm in this class that meets Thursday nights on some far away campus from where I live. Trying to judge the rush hour, the amount of time finding the classroom and getting parking, I leave enough time to be a little bit early for the 7PM start. Traffic and bad directions smite me, so I show up about 5 minutes late.

I walk in the first day, and there's what looks like probably the whole class sitting down in the classroom. The teacher gives me a slightly odd look, to which I nod, not wishing to interrupt the lecture. He returns the nod, and I quickly take the nearest seat to the door. The white board is covered with diagrams and small notes, something I find a bit odd about a class that just started, but it's a new school, so I don't know the rules here, perhaps professors all show up early here and make sure the first set of lesson notes is already on the board for you so that at class start you can jump right in. This guy couldn't possibly have written all that stuff on the boards in 5 minutes, but I'll just have to pay more attention and collect what I missed. Nothing else out of the ordinary happens that class.

So next week, I aim for it again, but this time I pad even more to make sure that I'm a little early. 6:45 in the parking lot, awesome. I collect my stuff and walk over to the classroom. To my surprise, the door is closed. 'Perhaps the class before is running over and hasn't gotten out yet'. I wait a few more minutes.

Now it's 6:50. No one. The class is still going full force. I choose to go for the interruption, everyone can't get out of the room in enough time for it to be ready for the next class now. In I walk...

...and there it is, same teacher, he gives me a quick nod. Around the room, everyone seated, taking notes. Several White Boards already filled. Now this is definitely odd.

I check the registrars roster again at the break; the time seems mysteriously gone. So I look at the class web page and syllabus. There it is: classes meet Thursday night, 6PM - 9PM.

ugh.

The odd look suddenly makes sense.

The non-notice suddenly makes more sense.

I, having no idea, didn't give off any indication I thought I was late. And so people immediately formed theories to explain it. I can only imagine some internal monologues, if the thought ever rose up that high:

Well, he doesn't look the least bit concerned. Perhaps he has another class that runs over.

Well, he doesn't look late, so it must be that his boss won't let him out any earlier than 7.

He doesn't offer any odd responses to interrupting the lesson, but he seems to not wish to give interruption. He must not be able to get here earlier than 7.

I guess.. I don't want to know ;) Let's just say that I had been whiffing hard enough that it seemed to cross back into the realm of plain normal operations. And keep your eyes on seeing only what you expect to see.