Hello friends!
Well, we finally got the new Farrier out and he did a pretty good job. I was really worried because so many people in the horse world can grow callous and harsh and my girls so look forward to Farrier day that I really didn’t want to ruin that. But they needed trims and I just can’t get my trailer pulled together safely enough to haul up to our regular Farrier for now. He totally understood too and was such a sweetheart about the whole thing. I’m really hoping to keep him as my friend l even if for now I can’t keep him as my farrier.
The girls have sore feet now, which worries me, but it makes sense when you think about how long their hooves had grown in the time it took me to sort out this Farrier stuff, and how much trimming he really had to do. I worry though the soreness is due to the angles being potentially off, or nerves being accidentally hit, which are very unfun for the horse and also can cause longer standing issues if not addressed. I’m definitely keeping my eye on it, because if that’s the case I need to chat with the new Farrier and give him a chance to make it right at the next trim. But it could all be general soreness too, and I’m sure it’s that, so let’s keep our fingers crossed.
We’ve changed up the way on-call works at my company, and it’s become a bit of a thing now. Whereas it used to be much more casual, there’s a lot more structure, rules and consequences now. Makes it much more complicated.
Used to be, you were expected to hang around if you put out new code. And that’s just the general etiquette. But a lot of people don’t follow through on that, or others will push your code out for you if they think it’s done enough, so, couple that with the volatility of an online real time system, and we have to have an on call system. Unfortunately we weren’t so much asked as told and weren’t so much rewarded for participating as punished for asking for grace while we worked it out. It was a bad launch for sure. And, it meant modifying a lot of my life because I had to make sure I had someone out with me when I worked the girls because we are supposed to have a 5-10 minute max response time and we are never supposed to be away from wifi. This also essentially houselocked me as in rural communities finding business wifi that’s shared is highly unusual. Needless to say, I’ve had to get creative. Luckily it’s only about a week a month. So hopefully we will get used to it.
It made me super nervous this time with the Farrier because technically I am not supposed to make any appointments while on call (and my boss specifically called me and one other dev out because we have hobbies, like horses, that require some extra “teardown” and sometimes specialty appointments midday, so I knew I couldn’t ask someone to cover.) But the girls needed their feet done so I made the closest appointment I could, my on call week, and crossed my fingers. Luckily I also have a super supportive family who offered to jump in if I got a call. Luckily, we managed to sneak through with no issues. I actually got extremely lucky and only had 1 major and 1 minor incident, so I can’t complain too much at all.
It was also kinda funny, as I have a unique ringtone set up for our on call numbers, the animals on the farm learned pretty quickly what that means. The horses pretty much just stand down on whatever we were doing and wait for my dad to come get them untacked and cooled out (I make sure they are at a safe point, or I wait for someone to come grab them for me, they aren’t left alone saddled or tied or blazing hot or anything like that, and i’ve shown my dad exactly what to do in various situations to make sure they are cooled out enough) and the dogs all just make the pilgrimage to my office and lay there patiently until they’ve decided I’m not anxious anymore. It’s actually a cute little system they devised.
Anyways, I’m done complaining about work, unfortunately I don’t have much to share otherwise because I was a little chained to my desk and I haven’t quite worked out how far I can push the boundaries on this on-call thing. But hopefully it’ll get to be routine and won’t be such a thing always.
Until we chat again my friends.
The Farmer's Blogger 