Silent Bish

You need to ride with me as we commute.

On days when I can't prevent attending work at the Sweatshop, the gallows humour can get funny. Well, I think it's funny. We have commentary. We have observations. We have radio plays.

Radio plays? Oh yes.

Friday we did Sausage Man. He's a super hero of spongey proportions. He saves us from situations where the lack of sausage could cause problems. He improves our daily lives. Basically he's a tin foil hat away from the nutter house. But I'll stop talking about the nuts; this is about the Sausage.

A typical act in the play sounds like this:

Young Boy Voice: Oh, I'm so hungry. Whatever will I do?
Superhero Voice: Never Fear. I'll save you!
Boy: Oh, wow! Sausage! Now I won't go hungry. Nom nom nom. Why, thanks, Mister!
Superhero: No thanks necessary: it's part of the job. For I am [pause] SAUSAGE. MAN-NNNNNNnnnnnn....... !!

Or:

Movie Producer. Oh no! I've given up smoking .. but I always smoke a cigar while going over my B-Movie Scripts. What will I do?
SuperHero: Sausage Man to save the Day!

[Whoosh!]

Producer: What's this? A cigar-shaped object I can hold in my hand and which won't rot my lungs? And [nom nom] it's delicious! Why, this is the best sausage I've ever gnawed upon!
Superhero: Why, I doubt that, Mr Producer!
Producer: Well, it's a turnabout for sure, in this business! ha ha!
SuperHero: Ho Ho Ho!

You get the idea.

Anyway, the commute's not that long, so it's easy to get a few acts (heh. sausage acts) off while on the ride there. And it almost puts me in a good mood, or at least makes the trip survivable until such time as I'm dumped off at the sweatshop and I watch J driving away and cackling maniacally. I claim it's got everything to do with me wanting to entertain myself, and nothing to do with being so tired and angry that I've lost all sense of holdback.

And it's completely unrelated to the fact that the clothing I wear is too clingy and makes me feel like I'm stuffed into a styrofoam package like at the meat market. (heh. Stuffed sausage). No no, the fact that I have Sausage Legs is completely irrelevant.

Labels: crazy, holism, self-censoring, zoobicle

I need to get off this thing.

I criticize Facebook a lot. A lot. I hate its continual problems where it steals your private information, gives it out to all kinds of people, and won't let you ever, ever delete it. Photos, too: they cannot be really deleted. They become hidden if one hits the Delete button, but it's been proved they will kick around on the site, forever.

I hate how it forces the people I know and love to log into this one site for their fix. I hate how it wraps all our activities into some kind of a 'poke' or some kind of a quick pointless quip. The semi-anonymous nature of the foaf (friend of a friend) relationship, the ability to see what your friends' friends write in response to your friends' comments, exposes a lesser proof of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory -- we'll say a bunch of crap on the Internet; mainly because we just can't grok in our minds that these are real people on the Internet .. and so are we.

These sites force a distancing, of sorts, between us and their compartmentalized versions of relationships, and reduce our ability to critically judge what we say and do. In turn, this causes us to learn far too much about one another as people mistakenly use a very public medium for the purposes of discussing normally near-private (clique-local, we could say) topics. Or worse: the excruciatingly boring twitter-like mundanity of everyday life becomes the spam we must wade through before we find things interesting.

I work with a guy who twitters.

Does that make him a twit? I fear that, since kids don't use twitter, it's got to be a tool abused by those hoping to recapture a lost youth by latching onto any faux-hip Internet fad, something like the beenz.com of this decade.

This guy, anyway, twitters about what time he goes to bed. No, really: I know how often he gets to bed before midnight, and what he watched for Television. The problem is, I don't want to know this, because it's not interesting to me. The problem is, we feel driven to post something, but unfortunately aren't so cool as to have so much to write about on a daily basis. But if it's not sheer mundanity, it's a steady stream of causes from Cause Girl: Tru-Vegans Hold Bake Sale to Support the Lesser Spotted Estuarial Marmot, or Yet another Video on how Eating Meat Makes the Baby Jesus' Farts Smell. Do I want to become a fan of Tofu? How About No?

I will be adjusting my FacePalm membership very soon. I will be opening a new account on a more Family-friendly name, and I will be associating all my family and old friends to this new account. I will then delete them - and one more - from the 'work' account. Thus, if prospective employers google me, they will not see "In the What Vegetable Are You Quiz, [I] Scored Radish!" Ideally, they will not see pictures of me in any kind of an employment-unfriendly pose or state.

That's the hope. And, if the spammy people - not you, of course - get lost in the shuffle, then it's not entirely a bad thing.

Labels: crazy, customer disservice, geek, Invisible isn't the same as available, spam, time savers

Friday was day Two at the sweatshop, the land of puny cubes and greenhouses, and it started out with my laptop misbehaving.

It was pretty simple: The docking station for the craptop installs its external Network port as a USB device. This is normally all well and good, but the Insecurity Policy put out by the new IT bunch mandates that USB connectivity is restricted to only keyboards and mice. Even though we can hook these things to ad-hoc wireless networks and swap data willy-nilly, we're apparently not permitted to use thumb drives, such as the ones on which we store every piece of emergency information for quick perusal.

Let me say that again:

The mandated emergency location for portable information on managing servers in times of emergency is not usable on company equipment, including laptops issued expressly for their portability.

You want to hope that nothing untoward happens before they get this conundrum fixed.

But back to the story. So because we can't use USB to communicate, the docking station Network Port can't install, which means my craptop can't use the docking station for .. I'm not sure what, now, since its 6 USB ports are useless. But IT people say to shut up and use the docking station.

So I report it doesn't. This guy comes by and looks at it, and it suggests I reboot. The craptop reboots and he confidently rushes off. But no dice: the USB device is still listed as bogus, and I'm not able to use the fancy docking station (which, if I misspell it one more time, will be known permanently as a Dicking Station) to get onto the locked-down company network. They tell me it's a Net Loss, so I'm trusting they mean a net loss without connectivity. After the second report, the same guy wanders by and mentions he'll work it over while I'm offsite.

I get back and he proudly announces he's replaced my laptop. Everything should work now. The drive-encryption module mandated by the insecurity policy was corrupted by the default sleep behaviour of a laptop with the lid closed, and it apparently was causing an improper shutdown. Instead of fixing it, a complete replacement was warranted. To restate:

If your company's insecurity policy orders you install a tool which encrypts the entire hard drive as a simple unit, and your hibernation file needs access to that drive before the encryption module is loaded, no hibernation recovery for you since it can't read the drive yet. In many cases that just means you reboot from scratch, but in this company it indicates irreparable damage.

Power management behaviour changes if you lose power: your laptop goes from Desk to Maximum savings, which, if you've been idle for 10 minutes or more, means you're probably hibernating.

If you use pointsec for drive encryption, change your power management settings, or the default hibernation will kick in if you lose power while it's idle, which to everyone else means you need to reboot from scratch and disable it. To my IT bunch, it means you've just lost your computer.

Still with me? Here's where it's relevant.

So the last thing I did, according to procedure before leaving the old site, was to back up all my shared-drive info and export my sent-box in email so I could mine the data. 90% of what we do is a hard slog towards a neat solution, which we then save and use about a million times. It enables my group to manage double the number of machines as any other group. We do not have access to this information once we have left the old site.

That data was on the 'irreparable' portion of the hard drive on my laptop, which seems easily destroyed through the default settings in windows.

There is no backup, since that plan is still in the works.

Thus, one week after my third anniversary at the Zoo, I start off on the wrong foot at the Sweatshop with absolutely nothing but a really short memory and a hot, sweaty cube.

Labels: computer repair, customer disservice, geek, getBackToWork, insecurity, legal, Meet my Friend Ed, Outlook, ugh, USB, where are the hidden cameras?, You paid money for this?

So anyway, I opined freely on Friday or so, and the Hat had a fireside chat with me, just me and him, and later decided it was an issue that we should raise and told my boss's boss and then the boss's boss's boss and then the boss's boss's boss's boss when I wasn't looking. Still with me?

I had my little chat with the .. fuck it. I'm calling him B3, for Boss's Boss's Boss, who is 3 levels above me in the Chain o' Command. So me and B3 go outside past the smokers, and sit and chat. He starts with the softball approach, but I immediately steer it over to a sniff of the crap that's invaded my life lately, and I finish it up with my fear that I just can't prove the sweatshop is anything but.

But I blew it. I didn't rattle off enough sound bites. I got:

• so when I talked to the Ears, I came away from there so pissed and offended that I wasn't gonna do this thing. Had I not talked to (B4), I woulda foregone the whole thing.
  
• the Ears basically told me that the guy who looked like he could work hard has more value over the guy who can work hard, even though I said
  

  Would we rather staff the shop with people who look good in a polo shirt, or those whose work keeps everything running?
  
  Yeah, the collar on this shirt really improves my IQ
  

• All the big old stuffy-shirt companies who've been around for a hundred years? The only thing they have got going for them is the fact they've been around a hundred years! It's not like they've changed since the time of the buggy-whip, and it's only mementum that keeps them from starving!
  

But I just didn't feel that I had as good a time as a week ago with the ex-IBM guy (who's B4's right hand man because he's that effective) in the heated debate I didn't write about (me ranting gets boring even to me, sometimes), despite the fun of me calling down the Blue Suits of Big Blue.

I didn't mention 'fucktard' at any time. Similarly, 'dime-store dictator with delusions of adequacy' was notoriously absent (thanks be to The Horton, whose quotes are quotable still), as was the money quote from my meeting with the Ears.

If and when I meet with B4, I really have to practice my timing, delivery and conversation steering. Otherwise, I'm just not gonna get the sound bites out. And I need to wear a wire for the youtubable parts.

Labels: Meet my Friend Ed, where are the hidden cameras?

Today was my first day at the new site. As always with moving somewhere new, some things don't work. The first thing that didn't work was, apparently, the cooling: it was 90 degrees in that place, which is completely uncool when one has to be in BestBuy garb. In fact, it's 10 degrees hotter than 10 degrees too much (which means it's way too freakin' hot for those who failed math).

But it didn't stop there.

Did I mention the 3 hour policy course I had to do? Yeah, so, since the craptops all work on wireless, and a flaky VPN goes on top of that - and our traffic travels 6000 miles round-trip just to go about 20 miles across town and into the woods - the connection went down a few times from here to the web-based course on "Why The Company (which bought the company of which the outsourcer sweatshop is a division) Is So Freakin' Great, Because We Do Everything Right! Now You Can Too!" . Every time the VPN connection bailed, we had to start over. The 3-hour course took 5 hours, and would have taken more if I didn't get all Rain Man on the last run through and click lightning fast without consciously knowing what I was answering but answering it right so I could go on. I re-did the entire course in 15 minutes, after taking all day. It's like that bullet-maker guy in Schindler's List, I was that frantic. I don't think I blinked.

Okay, so I got the course done. The Boss's boss's boss comes by today and says, "Hey, did you get that course done? It was supposed to be done by now, you know," to which I replied I'd done it. Not 20 minutes later, I the Boss's boss's boss's boss's assistant comes by and asks, "Hey, did you do that course? It's way overdue now, you know, and I see your name was on the Not Done list" to which I replied that yeah, I'd done it. I forget who the third person was, but I'm sure he was punking me for the hidden cameras I know this place has: "Didja get that course done? Huh?" and since he wasn't in the chain o' command I said "Look, buddy, you're like the third guy to ask me. You've seen Office Space, right? With the TPS reports? This is totally like that. I'm freakin' out, here!" and we all had a good laugh.

Maybe just me. It seems no one has seen that movie. I get the weirdest looks.

Labels: I'm really a happy guy, Meet my Friend Ed, unionCrybabies, where are the hidden cameras?, zoobicle

The wisdom of the day:

People are always afraid of getting fired. Some companies like to remind their staff that they can be fired for this, fired for that, it's all in the policies and stated as often as possible. You can be fired, after all.

But as soon as they do that, they become completely impotent. They can't do much more, really, other than show you the door, and once you walk out that door, they lose the power to decide the fate of an entire person. Then they have to find someone else, and that takes decisions and, most importantly, time (which is money).

Really, they can only fire you once, and it's not actually in their best interest to do so. And that's if you don't quit, first.

You know, that made sense to me. Hell, it actually sounded pretty profound at the time:

I know you want that TPS report in soon, because the boss wants it. But, really, what's gonna happen if it's late? Ultimately, they can only fire me, and, really, they can only do it once. Then they lose any power over us, and, really, what fun is that? Really, they can't really fire us, can they? And lose that power?

I have to take a break because the stupid TPS report is driving me batty. If I'm still working here at 1 I'll see about getting that report in.

What? What'd I say?

I don't know. So I had to have a heart-to-heart chat with The Hat, who, while not my boss, likes managing people and was covering for my boss. Maybe I suggested I haven't been sleeping well, which was the truth, and maybe I said I was kinda torn up because of this outsourcing bullshit and some of the stressful stuff going on right now. I mean, really, I'm so freakin' tired right now, I'm dizzy; constantly. He told my boss, my boss's boss and my boss's boss's boss. I admit I kinda laid into him with the amount of mistrust I have at the ability of this company to, well, be a company.

They all apparently expressed shock and surprise that a cog would be so willing to give up All This at a moment's notice, and indeed could be described as Less Than Joyful.

Guess who gets to have a meeting with everyone now. I didn't know being so profound got one so many followers and demands for speaking engagements. Being a prophet's hard freakin' work, I tell ya.

Labels: crazy, I'm really a happy guy, insomniac, Meet my Friend Ed, oops, unionCrybabies, You paid money for this?

The first wave of migrating employees left for their new digs today. Rumour has it, almost everything worked, which was awesome.

The news came in quickly, though: less than an hour after he sat his normal-sized frame into the dime-store fire-sale chairs the overlords at the farm got us, my office-mate's chair was already broken. That's really a picture of the cheapest all-day-use chair I've ever seen.

The most cruel part of it all, though, is the fact that it's over 80 degrees in there, which is about 10 degrees too hot for a well-dressed geek; put the hapless sap into the company-mandated clown suit and into the smallest cubicle size allowable under the contract, pack him in tight with a few dozen of his friends some of the most annoying people ever, and you've got an untenable position.

The Ichabod Cranes and J Jonah Jamesons can always throw on a shirt if they feel a bit chilly; they do not want some of us shucking the only remaining piece of clothing left.

Labels: Meet my Friend Ed, unionCrybabies