Prompt 21: A Photo of Something That Makes Me Happy

Today is a good day to write this post because it was not the happiest day at work I've ever had.  Sometimes Caleb takes on contract assembly work for me (that is, other companies hire us [me] to assemble small numbers of products for them) especially when work for me is thin on the ground as it has been for the last month.  Unfortunately, the latest contract job he got me didn't come together until this week...aka the week when we finally did get actual work of our own to do.  Suffice it to say, this has been a crazy week, made doubly so coming straight on the heels of all my previous down time.  I worked over 40 hours in what was supposed to be a short week.  I detail all of this simply to set the stage for my day today, which was the day I finally started this contract project.  Or rather, tried to start it.

See, the core of my job is PCB assembly.  That means that I build these:

quite literally, actually.  That's one of the sensors we sell, the GP9, which I assembled last year (and, incidentally, it is the picture I took for the website).  I don't know how well you can see, but each of those little parts has a little label next to it, like C1 or U9 or whatever.  Those labels tell me which part goes where by way of what we call a BOM (Bill Of Materials).  I go through the BOM one component at a time to populate a board.

In a perfect world the BOM lists each type of part together--all the capacitors, resistors, ICs, etc together.  It's easy to read, it's clear, and it absolutely does not inspire within me the urge to rip my hair out of my head.  The world was not perfect today as I looked at the BOM for our contract project.

The most ridiculous part of this entire story is the fact that, after spending literally 8 hours going over this BOM, sorting out all the parts, asking poor Caleb all the questions, repeatedly bashing my head into the desk, and otherwise cursing every single person who might have even glanced at this BOM and not fixed the one billion problems I was having...there actually only ended up being 2 real concrete mistakes.  Just a lot of technically benign stupidity.  Which was awesome because it meant that all of the stress I'd passed on to Caleb had really been mostly my own fault.  Bless him, he did such a good job of not slapping my face when we finally settled on the two mistake conclusion.  He's such a good boss...

Briefly, my problems involved incredibly unhelpful product descriptions, missing parts, part descriptions which didn't match part numbers, and part numbers which didn't match actual parts.  The same part was listed multiple times as a new part.  And I refuse to feel guilty about my struggles in the face of the ultimate two mistake total.  I maintain that anyone would have been confused by the mess that was that BOM.

All of this is to say that my day was deeply frustrating.  Frustrations with other people, frustrations with myself, and, of course, dealing with Caleb's frustrations about the whole thing (not least being the fact that I spent an entire day dealing with this madness).

And yet.

In the midst of this I decided I must needs listen to something happy or truly my brain was going to start pinging.

this is where I would put the video of Rory complaining about her brain pinging if I could find it.  But I couldn't...which is incredibly lame and causes me to question the state of the internet

So I decided to listen to a song that I discovered yesterday by creepily stalking my friend Jarom on Spotify.  And by stalking I mean that it showed up on my player that Jarom had listened to this song and for reasons I do not understand, I thought "huh, that looks good...I'll listen to it!"  Understand, the thumbnail they give you of any given album is literally the size the north face of a sugar cube.  And the song was called "Ala Barfi" by Mohit Chauhan.  Which is fine, I'm just saying that, as the title was in a foreign language I had exactly none connection with it.

All that being said, I did listen to it for some reason and discovered perhaps the happiest song I've ever heard.  I proceeded to listen to the entire album (technically, a soundtrack to a movie somewhat unfortunately named "Barfi") as I struggled through the annoyances of the day.  And somehow, magically, it was exactly the right thing.  My mood picked up and I was able to simply find the entire experience amusing rather than hair-rippingly frustrating.

Which is to say, I am not posting a photo of something that makes me happy, but rather posting that song.  If you have the interest I heartily suggest going and listening to the entire album.  But that first song was really the best one.  So, without further ado, here it is

also, for the first time I find that I want to watch a Bollywood movie...like a lot...