detail-oriented.

Mike is training me. He's not in charge of training me, and he doesn't even do the same work that I'm being trained to do. Mike is a tester, and I'm the new Build Master (we considered calling me the Build Mistress, but that sounds like I'm just sleeping with the Build behind the Build's wife's back). I do work with Mike, because when I make a build, it has to be tested, and sometimes Mike is the one that tests it.

So he isn't training me to make builds. He's training me to make builds his way. Mike likes his builds to be burned to a CD. Yesterday, I finished a build for Mike that fixed a couple problems the previous one had. I told him that I finished it, and I put it up on the public company hard drive where he would be able to get it. This morning, Mike came in and asked if I had fixed the problem. I was confused, because I thought I had told him I fixed it. Then he said, "Well, I didn't know if you did, since I didn't get a disc." Ah. Point taken.

Technically, that was my fault. I knew he likes to have a disc. He likes to have them labelled. He likes to follow SOP (standard operating procedures). The first disc I ever made for Mike was sometime last week, and I didn't label it. The guy who is actually training me, the previous Build Master, didn't tell me to. So Mike trotted back to my office and asked me to label it. Mike could have easily labelled the thing himself. He knew what it would say. But I needed to be trained to do it. It's SOP. So I labelled it, and I've labelled the two discs I've given to Mike since then. I even went to the office manager and specifically asked for a Sharpie so that I could label Mike's discs. It's green.

Two days ago, I revised a build for Mike. Builds are supposed to restart the computer when they fiddle with the registry, more as a precaution than anything else. The previous versions of this build did not restart, though they did change the registry. I fixed it so it did restart, because that's SOP. Mike came to my office and asked why this build restarted when the others did not. I told him it was because the build changed the registry, and the others should have done that. Mike said, "Oh, good, so we're going to follow SOP?" It was really hard not to laugh.

I could be irritated. I'm not. I'm the new guy here, and since all this stuff is new to me, I don't mind learning it this way if it's what keeps people happy. Besides, being anal-retentive (or "detail-oriented," as we call it) is what makes a lot of computer scientists good at what they do, even if it sometimes makes them a little obnoxious in social situations. So I'll burn the disc, and I'll label it with my green Sharpie. And I'll follow SOP, but not for Mike. That just makes good sense.