Let's just make shit up

Over the weekend my laptop had crashed and after booting it up this morning it smugly told me that some of it's files had become corrupted.* With this week's assignment due for completion by Wednesday I needed this like I needed a hole in the head.

I was pondering my assignment when Golfy, fully refreshed from his week away, pinged me. I did my best to dispel his post-vacation vigour by telling him tales of working woe, the shite assignment I need to complete and my hard disk issues. He then got his own back by insisting that I complete a CHKDSK with absolute urgency. Apparently if I failed to do this immediately the entire internet would dissolve or something like that.

I stupidly followed his instructions and learnt the following a) a CHKDSK takes the best part of ninety minutes on my laptop and I can do nothing while this is happening and b) a "percent" is a variable unit of measurement...

... as I was frantically watching my laptop's hour and a half of introspection and self examination my mind was considering the huge amount of work I had to do and how removing two hours from my working day was really not helping move things along. It was during my vigil that I did what any Estimator would do and tried to determine the duration of the CHKDSK by gauging the duration of each percentage increment. This is when I noticed that the seventh percentage increment appeared to take 4 minutes and the ninth appeared to take 30 seconds.

Now I know from my maths O-Level that a percentage increment is a non variable so I just wondered what on earth my laptop is actually displaying because a cheerful "This is going to take forever" message would have far more value than some new form of maths where there are 100 percentage units but they are all different sizes.**

I finally took back ownership of my laptop a little before eleven o'clock and made a start on the task. Over the weekend I had mulled it over and had a few ideas about how to rough out some estimated costs. The bulk of the day was filled with this and St Golfy the Pale was my salvation by providing some much needed and very welcome assistance with summarising baselines and estimating virtual server environment costs.

By the end of the working day I was able to chuck a 60% complete estimate over to the Sales Team for them to ponder***.

After a day like that I don't tend to do much after work but the dogs did get walked and more paint did get removed from the woodwork in the Dining Room.

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* I don't understand how this happened as I never browse porn on the work laptop.
** This suggests that Microsoft Programmers belong to the "I'll split this pie in half and I will have the big half" school of mathematics
*** imagine a very low wattage light bulb flickering as it's 4 volt power source dies.