It turns out that when you start at a place of "sometimes tech support does the Wrong Thing" and go through "Internet Explorer lets you do the cool but unsafe things you want to do, but also lets the bad guys do them too", you can wind up posting a poll on Twitter about frequency of naked/bare-assed (towel-less, for the courteous nudists amongst us) couch-sitting.

It all started with Ms. Antisocialest Butterfly's terrible customer service moment at work. She is naturally terse in her communications, and doesn't really bother with saying things which should be self-evident. Her workplace has these coats (some variety of lab coat for hardware geeks) and a service that they pay rather a lot of money to clean and maintain these things.

She noticed that hers was getting variously ratty -- missing button, a torn pocket -- and wrote a note: "Please replace." She signed it, and stapled it to the coat so it wouldn't get lost.

When the laundry came back, she found her coat. Same button missing. Same torn pocket. She was baffled -- until she found the name tag. They had replaced the name tag.

This prompted tales of some of the shenanigans that can ensue when least-good tech support and customer service ensues, including my epic fight with tech support over some java. The relevant bits were about trying it in IE and messing about with the settings.

Purple pondered about IE, with the general concepts that sure! IE is great for doing a lot of things that you want to do -- and letting the bad guys do it too. (Oops.)

"Yeah, you can shove that website straight in your trusted zone," I snarked.

Purple debated me on this: he wasn't entirely sure that the buttockal regions should be the "trusted zone"; didn't most people distrust things emanating-- ?

The discussion skipped into the topic of couches.

"Doesn't everybody?" Purple asked, meaning, sit on the couch butt-ass naked, or at least, well. Minus towel.

I facepalmed extensively. "I've SAT on your COUCH!" I said to Purple, in (entirely put on) tones of Great Betrayal.

His response was very much a sorry-not-sorry. I undermined my Performative Woe very shortly after, asking after his weekend plans in a way such to announce my intent to invade his couch if that was all right with him. ("That's what clothes are for..." I said in response to Ms. Antisocialest Butterfly's wish for some form of barrier to put between her and places where anyone else's butt has been.)

We went through the bestworst method of dyeing Y-fronts to disturb the TSA (even-ish tea underdye, with a second round to add more splatter, vs. the red tie-dye effect...) (passing the broccoli test by simultaneously saying "red" is ... maybe not the best way to pass the broccoli test). From Ms. Antisocialest Butterfly's dawning horror, it was clearly time for a subject change. We looked at her. "So how about that weather?" we asked in perfect stereo. She remarked upon it.

It turns out that key lime pie gets harder to share when you have two people stabbing into it tines-down from two different directions. At a certain point the inertia of the rest of the piece of pie is no longer sufficient to keep it in one place. Cooperation ensued, with one person holding the pie still with their fork while the other one pulled a bite away. We split the last bite amiably.

"That Weather" made for a short farewell. It was raining fairly firmly. Purple hugged me and we chatted a little, then we split.

I do so love rainy nights.

I am trying to get caught up on housework, in addition to work-work and applying for jobs. A little bit at a time, go me. Today I dug out the stepstool and a 9v battery and replaced the battery in the smoke detector before it started chirping at me. Go, me. (Stretching to reach it was painful and terrifying, but I did it.)

My impostor syndrome around guerrilla QA is pretty well faded. I used to be surprised when I found myself engaged in chasing down a random bug for a thing that I was using. I'd genuinely thought that the only system I'd ever have that kind of expertise on was LiveJournal. Purple met me when I was still regularly surprised by it. This time, I found myself explaining to Purple that really, the only thing I found surprising about the bug documentation I was sending to Slack was the universally friendly and helpful attitude of the Slack customer care people.

You could perhaps see the lightbulb emoji flickering into yellow above my head. Not quite an hour later I found myself additionally going:

04:30 PM azurelunatic: I think any job application where you can point to "and this is where I've interacted with your technical support" as an additional reason to hire you is possibly a good one
04:35 PM azurelunatic: my answer to "what is the importance of manual qa testing?" includes "it's really hard to annoy an automated test suite"

This weekend will involve waking up much earlier than I'd like to be up, viewing the Computer History Museum event space, and doing other work stuff on Sunday. After that's over, I'll poke Purple and see what he's up to. I hope to then invade his couch. ^_^