Talking myself down off the ledge.
Oh, not *that* ledge. The proverbial ledge! I have been using that phrase forever to describe a certain situation I frequently get into at work. It’s when I am in the middle of a complex analysis / design problem and I have been plodding along slowly in the zen of picking through all of the issues: how did it work before, how do we need it to work now, what changes do we need to make, and how will those changes affect this page and that report, etc., etc., etc. All of a sudden I go into a full-fledged panic, thinking that I have forgotten to think through something IMPORTANT!!! But then… Okay, slow down, KW… Almost *always*, I find that I *have* already thought through whatever issue it is and simply forgot. Whew!
I am not on any kind of ledge right now. I’ve just been noticing that more and more people are starting to pick up on my expression and use it. Including folks who are not cube neighbors and therefore don’t hear me talking out loud when I get out on one of those ledges.
What else do we have? There is an infamous visio diagram that will go down in history as “that Star of David diagram”. (You do not want to know.) There’s a whole team that “looks alike”. Er, not… Every shape, size, color. “It’s a frog” is used to indicate that we don’t want to over-engineer a design to cover every last little possible scenario. If you pick some weird combination of settings, you “frog yourself”, i.e., you get what you get. I did not coin this terminology but as it became a regular part of our work lexicon and Froggy began accompanying me to work on weird holly-days, he has become a part of our culture too. A small part, because I *cannot* do anything constructive with Froggy grokking around hopping all over my laptop and inviting all of Broosie’s aminals over to party in my cube.
I am skating on the edge here (that’s different than the ledge) by blahgging some stuff from work that might be googleable, although I have no idea why anyone from work would try to google “frog yourself”. If they do, and come here, I guess my main concern is they would be bored to tears reading all of this blather.