This is the kind of shit I have to look at everyday:
<% if request("company") <> "" then %>
value="<%=Request("company")%>">
<% else %>
value="<%=Request("company")%>">
<% end if %>
Whenever I look at stuff like this, I think that tiny blood vessels in my eye pop and I slowly give up.
09:27 PM part of techI got called to jury duty today - not here, but where I used to live. I called up the woman, the court clerk and told her, and she looked up my name and then said "You were my grand juror, and you moved" with the same tone as when you call up to cancel a vacation and the woman on the other line says "Sorry about your sick goat". Now suddenly I am very sad that I will not be having jury duty, because this is the third time that I have been called and I have never actually gone yet. Always a bridesmaid... My mother was on a jury of a very violent crime and she never talks about it, so I doubt that it is an pleasant experience, but it must be an experience, and that is, I am beginning to realize, the entire point.
09:27 PM part of personalI entered my time into our system at work today, which adds up the amount of time you are working on different projects and sees where you are billing your hours. I printed out a report and was a little shocked to see a small field at the bottom that reported the amount of money that could have been invoiced if all my time had been billable to clients. This amount - little of which I see, little of which my boss or his boss will see directly - is from working little over a month. This amount is more than my wife will make in a year working at her job, which can most easily be described as helping people who are victimized, dying, or in pain. My job can most easily be described as typing and making common-sense decisions. My reaction to seeing this amount is more similar to sadness than any other emotion, sadness and a little shame - not just at being overvalued - but of living in and supporting a world with priorities that cause this sort of unequality.
09:25 PM part of personal-Is the strange paradox that occurs when I want to leave work early so that I can get home, and then when I get home and get over the initial relief of sitting down and relaxing, find myself bored to the point of utter frustration, and I want to go back to work.
-Is reading books in crowded coffee shops because it feels good to be around people.
-Is the look on the checkout clerk's face when they see my grocery items:
-frozen pizza
-ice cream
-lots of beer
-hot sauce
-a magazine
-doughnuts
because somehow they know, in their 15 years of life experience, that I will consume these items alone.
-Is the fact that I set out to the grocery store in search of these particular items because I knew that they would fill up my belly in a way that would make me feel better for awhile, and that they didn't.
-Is the little sound that the TV makes when you cut it off at 11:30 because you have to go to sleep and hear nothing.
-Is watching a lot of TV where there are groups of people and laughing, and then one day reading an email from a friend and laughing so hard that you cry, and realizing that it is because you haven't laughed out loud at anything that you have watched on TV in weeks, and that your body is making up for it now.
-Is designing my entire day, my entire life, around small pleasure-seeking activities in a quest for something that feels like a warm blanket.
-Is suddenly feeling a little more doubt, and little more shame, at small things that I do because there is no one who is around that I know respects me.
-Is talking to someone at work when you go to lunch and realizing that the last time you talked to someone was yesterday at lunch.
-Is realizing that you are meaner to the people that love you than you should be.
-Is a silence that seems to follow you into crowded rooms.
-Ends tonight at 9:10.
11:24 AM part of personalI feel like a sniper when I get into work. I walk into the quiet office and cut on the lights, which give a low hum in return as they heat up. I take off my watch and cellphone and place both of them on my desk. The overhead light mixes with the beginnings of sunlight outside and they both reflect back with a high silver gloss. I take my machine out of its case, plug it in, and fire it up. I spend the rest of the day picking off problems from afar, one by one.
07:40 PM part of workAs I have said before I have recently moved to Atlanta, GA from Columbia, SC. I grew up in a smallish town in Georgia, went to school in a smallish town in Georgia, and then lived a year in a smallish town in South Carolina, so Atlanta is huge and scary to me despite the fact that I consider myself to be an urbanite. Well, a suburbanite.
In moving to Atlanta I am quietly challenging myself in a way that I have never done before, and the results so far are interesting. For example, I have taken a job that is outside of my comfort zone. I am a computer programmer, and this job occurs within a team of "consultants" so there are many small changes in my normal work environment such as business trips, expense reports, golf games, rampant politics, etc. This new job involves some business travel, regular grooming, public speaking, rabid accountability, and lots of work.
Having no business training, no social skills, and no regular grooming patterns to speak of, this job so far has been very interesting. After being here a month I am happy to report that it seems to be an expanding experience. Having never really lived anywhere far away or done a huge amount of traveling, I am looking forward to going to different places and meeting with people who basically do what I do but in a different city, different environment.
07:39 PM part of techWhilst watching a b-class Alec Baldwin movie in which he tries his best not to sound like a pervert with that strange baritone of his, I heard a cool quote, which I will now massacre:
Doing the right thing is easy, it is figuring out what the right thing is that is hard, and then once you do it is hard not to do it.
Speaking of pumping yourself up for something, check out this story (a picture on this site may not be work safe) at the excellent Other People's Stories.
10:00 PM part of inspirationI try to stay away from the personal here, because I wish to have a place to dump out anything that I want here without having to worry about consequences. But in doing this, I have found that instead I am not really talking about anything - this site was supposed to be a creative outlet for me - not some sort of todo list or list of stupid little fucking observations. (although if they were observations about fucking then they wouldn't be stupid, and if the observations themselves were fucking (amoungst themselves) then that wouldn't be stupid) Anyway, more revelation coming.
09:11 PM part of personalNo matter how many imaginary castles I build up in my head, no matter how elegant and simple my designs are, no matter how well they solve the problems they go up against, no matter how long they last, no matter how complex I think they are - they will never even approach the beauty, complexity, and simple effectiveness of the small tree outside my window.
09:10 PM part of workI clearly violated the cubicle protocol today by having a conversation over my cubicle wall at the wrong time. The cubicle protocol is simple, and is implicity known by most cube-dwellers. Its basic idea is: Let's all pretend that we have offices.
1. Do not talk about things overheard from cubicles near you. Sure, you may heard every word of your neighbor's fight with his wife on his cellphone, and you may know about his daughter's play by listening over the wall, but do not discuss these things. The entire purpose of this rule is to pretend as if a roofless, wall-less, doorless little box can provide excellent soundproofing.
2. Do not talk over your cubicle wall very much. Instead, get up and go over to your buddy and talk face to face after knocking on their door before speaking. This gives everyone the idea that they have minimal privacy when in fact they live most of their sad little lives in a sound-attracting box that prevents them from doing any real work.
3. Never, ever use your speakerphone to check your voicemail. And if you forget, do not complain when feces in thrown over the cubicle wall in your general direction.
4. Do not entertain guests outside your cubicle. Despite the fact that the walls are very low, allowing easy lean-access, you should not allow your stupid friends to describe their weekend in two-hour monologues. Do this shit in the break room, or hide under your desk while your friend's monologue is cut short by a sudden barrage of feces.
10:37 PM part of workThe company is small, the resources few, you have to keep track of everything that you do and worry about cash flow, the code is shitty - not in the way that all old code has aged to the point of shittiness, and not just because it is new and hard to deal with; it is shitty because it was written by amateurs at various stages of self-delusion and arrogance - and I still love the job.
06:48 PM part of workAccording to our software schedule, I have done 14 hours of work today since I came in at 11 this morning. (Sound of me shaking my ass in my cubicle to a primal rhythm only I can hear).
06:47 PM part of workWhen you work at a place that admires the kind of ambition that causes you to work very long hours, there are always some people in the company that are known as 'family men' (or women) because they normally work normalish hours compared to everyone else, but it is seen as ok because their family's are very important and that takes priority. While I agree with this viewpoint, I think that it is stupid to think of this kind of devotion as an exclusive right of those with children. If I were to avoid working long hours with the excuse that I wanted to spend more time with my wife, it wouldn't make any sense based on these unwritten rules, but when we have kids it would be ok. So, no working on the garden until after something sprouts.
06:47 PM part of personalAt my new job I am near a very large window that is tinted so that you can't see in very well from the outside. My desk is in the back of the building and so the window looks out on the back side of a small series of office buildings. There are many more people milling around during the day - making deliveries - than I would expect since it looks like the back of a grocery store. Yesterday one of the delivery men took a very long smoke break right outside the window; he was obviously avoiding work and didn't think that anybody could see him out there. Today he has taken a two hour nap in his truck, again I should hope thinking that nobody is watching him from only ten feet away, and then posting it on the web.
06:46 PM part of a balanced breakfastAt a place I used to work, our mission statement included the following phrase: "to do the job right the first time and to continually improve our quality". So, we wanted to be perfect each time out but still improve. Gotta love the attitude.
06:46 PM part of workNo, you see the difference between me and you is that while you have the 2002 Camry, I rock the 96. You prefer Starbucks while I like Caribou Coffee. You like to work on your house, and I like to work on my stereo equipment. Your wife is blonde while mine is not, but neither of them like to have sex with us. We both live in the suburbs, but you live in a nicer house while I have nicer cars. We are as different as night and day in our suburban world.
06:44 PM part of atlantaNow that I have turned my life upside down and change jobs and moved, I can look back on the paths not taken with a very different perspective. For example, I chose where to live based on about a week's worth of research over the web and word of mouth from friends in the area. If I had talked to a few less people, or researched in a slightly different way, I would have lived in a different suburb, met different people, had a different commute, lived a slightly transformation of my life right now.
This different angle haunts me, and I don't really know why since I love it here; I just feel as if I made some important decisions without all the information. But the more I think about this pretty much every decision you make is like this, and important decisions even more so. The more important the decision, the more things are affected by it, and therefore there is simply more things that you don't know about when you make it. It is amazing to me how you can make the right decision for the wrong reasons.
06:44 PM part of personalThere are things that you talk about to everyone because they are on your mind and you have to work them out. There are other things that you keep to yourself and only tell a few people in certain calm situations. There are other things that you tell no one, sometimes including yourself, because they are so fragile and important that merely suggesting of their existence can break them. I am afraid now I have done just that.
06:44 PM part of personal