2008-02-11 fighting crocodiles

Word of the day: fighting crocodiles. As in "sorry, I haven't gotten around to answering your mail. I've been fighting crocodiles here." In spite of the heroic/macho sound of it, it's just another way to say that you've been busy.

I had this appointment with our bosses new boss (we call him the boss boss), and he used the phrase. We're both new, but he asked first, so I told him about my previous job. I can't go into very much details here, but when I told him about the typical use case of the things I've been working on, his face lit up. It turned out that he's been dealing with exactly that same technology in what he called an earlier life. What are the chances?!?

(This bothers me now, so let's do the math. He was in sales/distribution in the UK. Let's assume they have ten distributors there. "To deal with" could mean everything, so let's assume he knew a guy who knew a guy. Let's further assume that every guy knows exactly 10 other guys. That would account for 1,110 guys. There are 60 million people in the UK. That makes 1.85E-5, or 0.0000185, or 0.00185 percent. So the chances were rather slim...)

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Other than that, there's nothing to blog about. I have a new exciting task (and I don't mean that in a sarcastic way), so I'll be busy this week. Yay! (that wasn't sarcastic, either)