Mphph. Yes, I know exactly what you mean. Though even if I were alone, I would pretend a bank's competence doesn't *really* get to me, because I'm calm and collected, until it mounts up and REALLY gets to me, when I'll break down and scream at it.

This post should, presumably, alert Becky to not panic if you sound cross, and only come running if you sound in pain. Not that that helps with the other neighbour, or with just not wanting to expose them to all of it.

So when I really need to shout about something private like woman-trouble, that's generally where I do it. That seems thoroughly silly, but it's the best I've got.

It sounds over-engineered, but I believe is traditional.

Actually, it's funny. Come to think of it, I only ever scream about things that are frustrating but feel as if they should be easy. Personal brouhouhas might very very occasionally produce tears or alchohol or orgies of books or summoning of shoulders to cry on, but it's banks, telephones, debugging, and things falling over that let out the cries :)

I'm intrigued that debugging feels to you as if it ought to be easy. It doesn't feel like that to me in many situations; I would go so far as to say it can often be one of the very hardest parts of being a good software engineer. Of course that's mostly due to phenomena like unrepeatable circumstances (in, say, complicated distributed systems), uncertainty-principle effects (where trying to get extra diagnostics out of the program perturbs the bug away), and so on; so some kinds of debugging (notably a lot of what I do at work, which runs on an emulated CPU and hence really is utterly deterministic and completely inspectable from the outside without altering its internal logic) are nice and easy. But debugging in general? Not nearly so convinced. I don't know what this says about our relative levels of geek-cred :-)

(The absolute hardest part of software engineering, I currently think, is anticipating all the tricky corner cases in advance, which I think many people don't even try to do any more, preferring to rely on writing "exhaustive" – or at least extensive – test suites after the fact and trusting that any code which gets through them will also not fail too badly in the field. Or just expecting to get bug reports from users and fix them later. Or not even noticing there were potential problems to begin with, and being surprised when they start to show up.)

I think debugging mostly falls into two classes: "easy" (the bulk of it; only one step up from fixing those pesky compiler warnings), and "hard" (the ones that can take a week to track down). The trick is to program in a way that avoids the hard bugs in the first place :-)
I don't find debugging per se very frustrating. Trying to debug (or do anything else) with lousy tools gets frustrating very quickly, though.

Hm. In retrospect, I think I wasn't thinking about debugging in general, but more "getting something to work". If I've written a system, understand it well, but there's some obscure case, then tracking that down can be interesting and challenging, or at least necessary drudgework[1]. (And of course the majority of errors are fairly mechanical.)

But if I'm handed or have written this thing, and it's *supposed* to work, but it *doesn't*, then I feel like I'm a complete failure for not understanding it. There's not obvious bugs like compiler errors or assertions (or they'd be fixed) and there's not some specific obscure bug (or it would work most of the time, and I know what I have to do) but lots of "doesn't work because you didn't call foo function" and "the make command line should be [lots of algebra], ok?" and so on. And it's supposed to be build, compile, start using, but in fact takes two weeks of blundering about; hence screaming.

[1] FWIW, I'm still no good at dealing with it, because my scheduling paradigm, such as it is, breaks down completely for "2 hours to 2 weeks" tasks :(

I just expect it to take 2 weeks every time, because every time I write something and make it work I then go off and do things that aren't programming for a few months, and forget all my good practice.

I only ever scream about things that are frustrating but feel as if they should be easy.

I think I'd generally tend to agree with this, but love-life difficulties do often seem to count in that category for me. Not because having a functioning love life has ever been easy for me, but because so much of the rest of the world seems to have so much less trouble with it than I do – and in particular feels free to organise delivery companies, utility companies, food packaging etc in the assumption that people without a (sometimes stay-at-home) partner aren't worth worrying about – that I do tend to see it as something that ought to be easy, or at least something whose failure to be easy for me is an injustice or unfairness of some sort.

Many people for whom it is easy to achieve a partner also find it very difficult to understand, for example, why they never have any money despite going to every sale they can find, and why you shouldn't use gaffer tape as the sole means of holding your bathroom together.

But... using gaffer tape to hold your bathroom together is supported by a star wars pun. Nothing supported by a star wars pun could ever be ill-considered!

Yeah. If it feels like people are assuming something automatically, it feels like it must be really obvious. Else wouldn't they have considered it a bit more carefully? Rather than being the first idea to come to mind and not re-examined (which is understandable, you can't examine *everything* in detail, but unhelpful).

And I find my major frustrations (rather than, say, true pain, of which I have little) is the clash between those assumptions...

But this always makes me annoyed at the delivery people, rather than the dating. Which generally involves someone I care enough about that the emotions are serious, good or bad, but not frustrating... :)

(Um, or maybe that didn't make any sense. I'm not sure if I was talking about frustration or dating.)