Huh. This again.
Man, am I glad somebody reminded me it was Hallowe’en. I saw a helpdesk nerd go by my cubicle with CD’s taped all over his shirt and thought somebody’d slipped mescaline into the water cooler.
This’ll be short and pointless. My trip home was a cascading clusterfuck. There was some boring delay at every stage of the journey. By the time I got home, I’d been at it twenty four hours…an experience I would have laughed away in my youth (ha HA), but rough duty on an elderly weasel. Then a few hours sleep and in to Soulless Incorporated.
My mind is a perfect and absolute blank. Into which I shall now pour alcohol.
October 31, 2007 — 5:16 pm
Comments: 23
aaaaaahhhhhhhhh
HOLY FUCKING SHIT! That’s the most horrible place I’ve ever been, like, EVER! My worst nightmare! It’s one thing to go the home office to catch a meeting or deliver a package, it’s another to go walk into the giant cubicle farm hell upstairs knowing there’s a box with your name on it.
Ha! Kidding! THEY DON’T PUT NAMES ON CUBICLES. Just numbers. Say hello to T-95.
I’m at the end of the row, in the main corridor, across from the two busiest meeting rooms on the second floor. My partitions only come up to adam’s apple height, so people going by stop and rest their chins on my wall and say stupid stuff to me. My workday is going to be an endless succession of disembodied chattering heads.
I worked out a long time ago that none of my co-workers are psychic. You know how I know this? Because a psychic would see past the bland look on my face and hear me mentally screaming, “if you don’t SHUT THE FUCK UP with that droning, stupid story about your stupid dog or your stupid kid or whatever stupid morsel of your stupid life you’re inflicting on me in slow motion, I’m going to leap the six feet between us and poke your stupid eyes out with this exceedingly sharp #2 pencil I’ve been ramming in the electric sharpener for the last five minutes!”
My cube furniture is so new, the stink of fresh plastic makes me blink. I’m down to two monitors, and there is no arrangement that makes either of them invisible from every angle. Best I can do, the lower left corner of the monitor on my right seems to be pretty well hidden from view. I’m going to play South Parks in a little window there, with an emphasis on the ones with the most swear words.
With headphones. Huge, conspicuous headphones. Thanks for the headphones, Uncle B. And so much, much more…
October 12, 2007 — 6:35 pm
Comments: 62
Tales of the commute
For twenty-four-and-a-bit years, I’ve been driving the same 26 mile stretch of I-95 between Providence and Boston. Now I’ve driven it for the last time. Probably. Unless we have a meeting up here or something. Anyhow, I’ve seen some wild-ass stuff.
I just missed being part of a 100 car pileup — that was the trooper’s estimate, anyhow. I only saw the butt end of it, about five car-lengths ahead. Snowy conditions, so nobody was going fast enough to be much hurt. Those of us behind it got out of our cars and milled around and chatted for a few hours in the snow before the troopers turned us around and sent us the wrong way up the interstate to the nearest exit.
Then there was the woman who committed suicide by leaping into traffic. I missed the event, but investigators came along afterward and spray-painted a fluorescent orange circle around every gobbet of meat. For months driving past the spot I had the same poignant thought: “shit fire, that lady covered a lot of asphalt!”
Funny weather. Accidents. Car fires. Bumper stickers. Vanity plates. Road kill. It’s an adventure every day. An adventure in suckitude.
But it dawned on me — I’m going to be totally lost! I do all my shopping up here. My liquor store is here. The store where I buy my underpants. The restaurants I go to. Now everything familiar will be a pointless forty-minute drive North. This moving thing is like peeling off a bandaid slowly.
But hey, check out this delicious moonbatmobile I saw in the way in this morning. The Lieberman slogan is repeated on the side window.
Connecticut handicap plate. Nice touch.
October 11, 2007 — 10:46 am
Comments: 27
Is it sick if you know you’re doing it?
Meet my desk toys! They sit on my monitor stand, inches from my busy fingers, waiting to entertain me.
The toothpicks and the picture tacks work in similar ways: I can shove them under the edge of the monitor only so far, and then they stick. Then they can be shuffled and arranged in various ways. Sometimes, neatly in rows. Sometimes fanned out from an imaginary centerpoint. Sometimes — as pictured — quite randomly. I’m flexible like that. Not like some people and their tight-ass OCD; mine is a loose, free-wheelin’ sort of obsessing compulsion.
The foam ring came out of a package of CD’s. It fits over the knuckle of my little fingers — either one of them — but not the next biggest finger. Amazing! Naturally, I have to test this astonishing property frequently to make sure it still applies.
The push pin is for raking across my data CD’s to ruin them before I throw them away. No stealing my data, you wicked imaginary dumpster data bandits! The paperclip is for sticking in the little hole in the CD burner and rescuing CD’s that have become trapped. One of my CD burners is occasionally naughty like that. When not thus employed, it is bent just so and stuck under the edge of the monitor, much like the toothpicks and the picture tacks.
Stickstickstick; sticky stickity stickstick. Things that stick and unstick are so gratifying!
The twist ties…don’t do anything. But I save them all in that spot. Because, hey! You never know when you might need a twist tie. In that spot.
The piece of artwork turned up recently. It’s a 35mm slide (remember them?) of a fish on a platter with big red lips and white teeth. It’s the second drawing I ever did on a computer, some time long about 1985. The first drawing I ever did was an elegant, understated graphical treatment of a fountain pen. I remember it distinctly. Does that turn up? No. All I got is this stupid toothy fish. Some legacy!
Look, I watch progress bars for a living. A bunch of my day is spent waiting for programs to compile or CD’s to burn or images to render; awkward, fiddly little chunks of time that aren’t quite enough to do some other productive thing but a tad too long to do nothing at all. Perfect for arranging toothpicks and slipping foam rings over your finger bones.
It’s a caged animal thing. Back and forth, back and forth.
But, you know, I can’t actually see myself moving these objects and setting them up in the new office. That seems a bit eccentric, even for me. I’ve put out hand several times with the intention of throwing them away. I haven’t quite made it yet.
Can you see why moving is a bit of a chore?
October 10, 2007 — 12:41 pm
Comments: 10
The incredible shrinking weasel
I’m not really an atheist. That’s just shorthand. It’s easier than explaining that inexplicable things happen to me, but they don’t seem to emanate from something grand and mighty like the God of Abraham. More like something small and relatively weak. With a rotten sense of humor.
Every turning point in my life bristles with weird coincidence. Like so: I’ve worked for the same company in the same location for almost 25 years. We moved office once in all that time — from one side of the parking lot to the other. So I could reasonably expect to serve out my last few months in a comfortable, familiar environment and stick the next poor bastard with clearing out my junk.
But no. Boss lady has decided we have to pick up stakes and move operations to the home office right now. Exactly one week before I fly to England to help Uncle B move the London house to the new place.
So everywhere I turn there are cardboard boxes and and bags of trash and huge hairy dust bunnies and the painful throwing away of things. I don’t throw away things good. I collect things real good, but every time I throw an object away it nibbles off a little piece of my happiness.
But a twenty year old computer graphics program is worth exactly nothing. Those barrels? Full of them. And the manuals that came with. Thousands and thousands of dollars worth of stuff…back in the day. Now, begone! Geroff! Vamoose!
Ow! Owowow! Boohoo. Shit. Woe is Weasel. Make it stop!
October 9, 2007 — 2:19 pm
Comments: 53
People come and go so quickly here
This blog has become one of my favorite daily reads. So I shall show my gratitude by swiping his stuff.
Like this map. The one up top there. Guess what the dots mean. No, guess. Seriously, I’m not typing anything else until you do.
Wrong! It’s a list of all 160 cities in 1900 that had a population greater than 25,000.
Holy smokes! Can you believe it? Granted, some of those cities had a lot more than 25,000 citizens. The top twenty ranged from New York City, at 3,437,202 to Providence, RI at 175,597. (Poor little Rhode Island. Providence has slid to 124th with a current population of approximately 176,862. We’re leaking people!).
It’s so easy to forget that Superpower America is a 20th Century invention. Before that, we were a few happy rubes with cowshit on our boots. One of my favorite displays at the Smithsonian was in the Castle: they preserved intact the 1876 centennial exhibition, showing all our proudest accomplishments at the end of the Victorian era. Tennessee’s entire display is a coon skin and some pieces of wood. With bark on.
Somehow, that map links up in my head with this datum what I also nicked: as of 2006, service industries accounted for 42% of the world’s employment in 2006, agriculture 36.1%. Listen up — we got more peeps driving desks than driving ploughs!
He says (and I agree) that this is a huge milestone: the point at which the majority of our species is no longer in the business of grubbing up food.
Why do these two ideas go together? I…hmm. Well, history moves very fast. And, despite everything, pretty much in the right direction.
Get me! I’m an optimist!
October 4, 2007 — 6:07 pm
Comments: 19
The Museum of Swingline
“Why do I have so many staplers?” I asked no-one in particular when they just kept turning up in every drawer and cabinet today.
“Because the last time we moved, you wouldn’t let anybody throw one away,” said a voice from the opposite cube, “don’t you remember?”
No. But I believe it. My boss usually waited until I took a day off to throw things out; it was so much less painful than prying my fists open and listening to my ululating wails.
Look at these beauties! Big and heavy and streamlined, like some mighty diesel engine of stapling. They streamlined everything back then, as if the efficacy of simple office supplies was determined by their coefficient of drag. Is your desk holding you back? Get the sleek, modern, aerodynamic model, new for 1952! Now with wind-tunnelocity!
This company is both old and parsimonious; stuff hangs around until it flat out disintegrates. Do you know how long it takes furniture of the mid-twentieth century to fall apart? And since we were the art department and got shit on everything we touched, we got the leftover’s leftovers.
My old desk was a heavy, grossly overengineered slab of a barge of a piece of furniture, something like the QEII on legs. Blaaaaart ding ding! Out of the way, you little fishing vessels! Weasel doing paperwork!
We shed most of that stuff when we moved here, across the street from our old offices. But I managed to rescue these few small time travelers. And some rather nice scissors. And a magnifying glass. And all the X-Acto knives and pica rulers. A french curve set. Two excellent multi-hole paper punches. A six foot tall motorized photographic enlarger. And a Bernoulli box.
Ambassadors from another era.
Come, my pets. Would you like to visit England?
October 3, 2007 — 5:52 pm
Comments: 42
A Wiper for Every Need
You know, I started this blog to talk about news and politics. I wasn’t prepared for rude poetry and potty humor. Still, I’m on a roll!
Badump-tsssssss.
Yeah, look what I found in the back of a drawer today. Kimwipes! We used to buy these by the crate; now this sad, mustly little guy is probably the last of his kind in captivity.
I’ll bet you didn’t know there were different wiping needs, let alone that someone prided himself on being the standard for his particular wiping duty.
Kimwipes were a designer’s essential; they’re hard, lint-free wipes primarily used for mopping excess wax off galley using powerful, braincell-eating film cleaning solvents. If you don’t know what the hell activity I just described, don’t bother learning — the old way of preparing publications for print is never, ever coming back.
Not even after the apocalypse, when we’re running around with mullets and shoulder pads popping caps in each other’s asses.
See, the old photographic processes were extraodinarily complex, sophisticated and expensive. Assembling a magazine required several gigantic specialty cameras, many different kinds of film and papers, all sorts of amusingly lethal chemicals and a thousand little specialty items of no use to anyone else ever again under any circumstances. We had burnishers, waxers, rollers, wipers, technical pens, non-repro pens, markers, swatches, specialty knives of all sorts, registration marks, tracing overlay, illustration board, foamcore in an assortment of colors, lead holders, lead pointers and leads. We had rubylith and amberlith (which we called rubylips and amberlips), the Leroy lettering system, and something we called a Blue Thing, which was a burnishing tool that came inside tubes of 3M photo mounting adhesive but was the best darned all-around essential paste-up burnisher ever.
I can remember six different kinds of tape I couldn’t get through the day without.
Man, sitting here thinking about it, more and more stuff is coming back to me. The specialty furniture, the lighting, the drafting tools, the calculators, the stencils, the Letraset thingies and the Pantone dinguses. And we haven’t even touched on the darkroom stuff yet.
Huh. Not all earth’s vanishing languages are in Siberia or New Guinea.
October 2, 2007 — 6:26 pm
Comments: 29
Give us your nerds, your geeks, your poindexters
The head of our Research division gave a talk the other day. He’s having a hard time getting our labs fully staffed because of a shortage of H-1B visas. That’s the one they call the “highly qualified” visa, though that isn’t exactly accurate; it’s technically a “specialty occupations” visa. Congress has recently throttled back on them, from a cap of 190K down to 65K.
To which I can only say — you have GOT to be fucking KIDDING me! They’re trying to jam twenty million sullen agripeasants down our throats but can’t be arsed to poach a hundred thousand of the world’s smartest people?
Our laboratories are like the U-freaking-N up in there; I assume it’s that way in research labs across the country. Lots of Indians and Chinese, but we’ve nicked a fair number of Europeans and other exotics, too. I’ve worked with dozens of them over the years. I don’t care where they come from, these people make fantastic Americans! They’re smart, enthused and grateful.
I know, I know…IT types scream bloody murder about H-1B visas. Screw ’em. Apologies if any of you are corporate IT types, but in my two-decades-and-a-bit driving a desk, I never met one that wasn’t grossly overpaid and underperforming. And arrogant about it. Bill Gates is not proof God wants half-assed incompetent computer geeks to rule the world, okay?
Brain drain on the rest of the world? Fucking A! That’s the beauty of it! Continued American hegemony by absorption. We build a country smart people want to live in and then invite them to come live in it.
So what say we propose no cap on H-1B visas. None. Send them all — we’ll take them! And make it a path to citizenship (the current visa is six years and you’re out). I think it’s a winning antidote to the racism charge that got hung ’round our necks after that stupid immigration bill fiasco. Shoot, send in the Mexican PhDs, too!
Slogans? How about, “we judge no man by the color of his skin, but of the quality of his resume”? Hm.
We’re elitists, not bigots. Hm.
Not racists — snobs!
September 27, 2007 — 9:44 am
Comments: 20
Oh. Goodie.
So I stayed up too late and drank too much last night in an orgy of weaselly exuberance. Yeah, I know…not exactly “stop the presses” stuff. But then I remembered I have my annual performance evaluation this morning.
Swell.
Eh. We’re talking “job” not “career” at this point. And my boss is pretty cool. I think it’ll go okay. I’ve been practicing:
How’m I…am I…doing good? Am I doing good? How’m I doing, good? You okay? We okay? You okay with me? Okay? Good. I’m good. Really good.
Yeah. This’ll go fine.
Pray for me.
September 25, 2007 — 8:51 am
Comments: 33