Not master of my domain
One of the reasons I consider myself a good tester is my uncanny ability to destroy everything I touch.
Or, if not destroy things, at least send them into chaos. When I get a new toy, I tend to try to exercise all of its functionality... it's the geek in me that makes me do it. I found a bug in my TiVo that's still there... if you open a program from a Wishlist and view upcoming episodes, when you hit the "back" button it brings you back to a different program than the one you had selected. I found one in my iPod that they fixed last year... if I pressed The Button too quickly, the UI would sometimes fall behind and improperly show the star ratings or timeline, and the clickwheel would then adjust the wrong thing.
What's really unfortunate is when this God-gifted Touch of Chaos interferes with getting work done. When I started at Microsoft, I was working in the Windows group, and instead of putting me in the REDMOND network domain, which is where most people go, I was placed in the NTDEV domain. The NTDEV domain is probably a holdover from the days when "NT" was a thing we were working on; it seems like about half the people I worked with were placed in that domain, probably as a built-in way to test how Windows behaved with users in different domains, permissions-wise and otherwise.
Of course, now that I've moved to work mobile devices, multiple domains aren't quite as interesting, and everybody here is a member of the REDMOND domain. Except me. I'm still in NTDEV. Which ordinarily isn't a problem... I can still check my e-mail and my paystub, and do all the other usual Microsoft-related things with no problem.
The rub is when some of our internal tools aren't configured to handle users in domains other than REDMOND. It was a problem when I had to enlist in our source code depot; it was a problem when my boss wanted to add me to the proper security group. Earlier this week, it was a problem when I wanted to send a review of some code changes I had made to my co-workers... the tool to do that wouldn't even start up, because it was only configured to handle REDMOND people.
One thing you learn as a tester is that software bugs are all about trade-offs. We can't fix absolutely everything that's wrong with everything, so we have to settle for fixing the important things... bugs that cause the biggest problems for the greatest numbers of people. And since I'm one of probably just a handful of non-REDMOND users of this tool, and it's just an internal tool that probably doesn't even have clear dev/test ownership any longer, it's harder to get problems fixed. I did find a workaround, but later ran into another problem with the tool that's still blocking me (it fails to send the code review e-mail with the helpful error message, "Failed to send e-mail." Thanks for that!).
So as you can see, after a while, the Touch of Chaos becomes a debilitating condition, and you just have to learn to live with it. There's no medical treatment for it, as far as I know. Which is a shame.
