Aaron's Status

6:39 am

Brakes and knees

Yesterday I dropped my car off with my local mechanic down the street. I prefer to use him because he’s honest and fair, and I can walk home from his garage. He wasn’t able to clear the “brake system” error previously and wanted to have a look at the brake pad sensor.

He asked me to check in around 2pm. Around that time I stepped onto the porch to grab the mail out of the mailbox and was hit flat in the face by the a sunny 80-degree day and decided I’d walk down to the garage just to enjoy it.

I got down there and he said he got the car up on the lift, tugged the sensor wire, and the thing just fell apart! So he replaced the sensor and it’s good to go, no more warnings!

This is great news because we’re going to drive down to Connecticut on Saturday to see my folks and it would be nice not to have a brake warning going off the entire time.

My left knee, meanwhile, still hurts. It’s definitely improved from yesterday, which is great, but I can’t climb today unfortunately. One thing I have internalized from my lower back problems and weeks of physical therapy is to know when I need to back off and do so definitively and confidently.

I don’t think the sprain was terribly bad, though. I once twisted my ankle badly falling off my OneWheel and it puffed up and took weeks to heal, but the knee hasn’t visibly inflamed, I think I just pulled something and it’ll be good to go by the weekend. At least, one can hope.

Work stress

The only thing that stresses me out at my current job is when I make a plan to do a simple and straightforward thing, and this one particular other engineer makes it his full-time job to get paranoid about how it will turn out.

I welcome feedback, and honestly believe that critique and collaboration are the best ways to end up with the optimal final product, but something about how this guy approaches these conversations is so off-putting to me. It puts me into a very defensive mode, and I think it must boil down to the “slippery slope” way that he presents this concerns.

I told him yesterday that I’m not concerned about suddenly adding, let’s say, millions of rows to a PostgreSQL table. His response: “I am.”

Fortunately for me, I was not hired to allay this engineer’s concerns, but rather to build the best products for our customers. So now it’s a matter of navigating this conversation in a way that I can live with. I guess that’s why they call it “work.”