Finally, a Post You Can Sink Your Teeth Into!

One can learn a lot of interesting things working at Google.

I was surprised to learn, for example, how easy it is to be turned into a werewolf.

I am not at liberty to disclose the exact nature of the project I’m working on, but I don’t think that I’m spilling any state secrets by revealing to you that it’s related to lycanthropy. You might have guessed as much, yes?

During the course of this project I’ve done a fair amount of research on werewolves. Most of the information I’ve come across is fairly banal: the werewolf’s vulnerability to silver, his aversion to bright light, his susceptibility to wolfsbane due to that plant’s origin as a weed that sprouted from a puddle of drool of the the demon dog Cerberus, etc.

Now I know I've been a little out of touch lately, but I think I still know my readership well enough to place all of you into one of two classes: (1) Those of you who are interested in becoming a werewolf, and (2) Those of you who are interested in avoiding becoming a werewolf.

To those ends, I have put together a brief, categorized list of Ways of Becoming (or Avoiding Becoming) a Werewolf. Those of you who are completely indifferent to the prospect of becoming a werewolf may skip this section.

Category 1: Congratulations / Condolences! You’re Already a Werewolf!
Lycanthropy is often an accident of birth. As such, there is a chance that you are already a werewolf. You are most likely a werewolf if:

1. You are the seventh-born son. (France, Portugal and Brazil only. Sorry, Argentina!) Sadly, lycanthropy is still a male-dominated profession, although in Brazil the seventh daughter has the opportunity to become a mule with fire in place of its head, known as “Mula-sem-cabeça" (Headless Mule). I swear I am not making this up.

2. You are the child of two warewolf parents. It’s not clear what happens if only one of your parents is a warewolf, but I bet it would make a good sitcom.

3. You were born on December 24 (Russia only). The upside to being a Christmas Eve baby in Russia is that people actually remember your birthday. The downside is that they celebrate it by chasing you through the village with torches.

Category 2: Curses and Enchantments
Many people become werewolves through some sort of magic. Usually an enchanted salve, potion or special beer is involved. Most experts agree that it was some combination of these elements that turned Billy Bob Thornton into a werewolf.



Wikipedia quotes one medieval authority who argued in a book he wrote that werewolves were actually sorcerers who voluntarily transformed themselves into wolves. The book’s diabolical nature is evident when one copies and pastes a passage into Microsoft Word, causing it to light up like a Christmas Tree of spelling and grammar errors:

The werewolves are certayne sorcerers, who having annoynted their bodies with an ointment which they make by the instinct of the devil, and putting on a certayne inchaunted girdle, does not only unto the view of others seem as wolves, but to their own thinking have both the shape and nature of wolves, so long as they wear the said girdle. And they do dispose themselves as very wolves, in worrying and killing, and most of humane creatures.

I can’t quite parse that last sentence, but I think it’s safe to say that those certayne sorcerers were mostly worrying about whether they look silly wearing an "inchaunted girdle."

Category 3: Lycanthropy for the Rest of Us
“But wait,” you say. “I wasn’t born a werewolf and I hardly know any sorcerers. Does that mean I’m safe?” Or alternately, “But wait, I wasn’t born a werewolf and I don’t know any sorcerers who are worth a damn. Does that mean I have no hope of ever becoming a werewolf?” The answer to both of those questions is an unqualified no. After all, if you wanted qualified advice, you wouldn’t be here, would you?

The fact is that there are still several ways in which you could accidentally or intentionally become a werewolf. For example, let’s suppose that you were walking through the woods one night, and you became extremely thirsty. You kneel down, as any normal person would, and drink some water from a shallow impression in the ground. Then you go home, thinking that you are still not a werewolf.

Wrong! You are a werewolf! That impression in the ground was actually the footprint of a wolf, and drinking water from it has transformed you into a werewolf. I know, right? That will make you think twice before drinking water from a puddle that strange animals have been tramping through.

Even if you want to become a werewolf, you should still be careful. I mean, imagine if that puddle wasn’t water. Now not only are you not a werewolf, but you’re still really thirsty, because wolf urine is not nearly as refreshing as you might think.

The point is that it behooves you to take proper precautions, whether your goal is to become a werewolf or to avoid becoming a werewolf. Above all, avoid taking the ‘easy route’ to becoming a werewolf.

According to Wikipedia, you can become a werewolf through “the removal of clothing and putting on a belt made of wolfskin.”

I know, it sounds great: Just put on your wolf-belt and you’re a werewolf. Take it off, and you’re human again. Win-win, right?

Wrong. How do you think the other werewolves, who became accursed creatures of the night by virtue of dark sorcery or some freak accident of birth are going to react when they find out that you’re a skin-wearer? Hardcore lycanthropes don’t take kindly to the “weekend werewolf” sort. You’ll be lucky if they don’t rip off your wolf-belt and leave you naked in the woods, with werewolf gang signs written on your chest in blood. They will probably give you a wolf-belt wedgie, too.


I hope this post was useful to you, whether you are interested in becoming a werewolf, or intent on remaining a non-werewolf. Lycanthropy is a personal matter, and we should be respectful of one another's lifestyle choices.

Watch for my next post, in which I will explain the best way to torture and kill werewolves for amusement.

If you enjoyed this post, may I also recommend: A Slurry of Monsters | All Hail Goat-Head Listed on humor-blogs.com.

38? But You Seem So Immature!

In two weeks I’ll be thirty-eight years old.

I like this age. You know what’s great about being almost thirty-eight? People stop expecting you to grow up. And you can stop pretending that you’re going to some day.

When you’re thirty-eight and you interrupt a meeting at work with a five minute puppet show starring a Cat5 cable and a laptop power cable, people don’t shake their heads and mutter something to each other about how immature you are. They still think you’re immature, but they accept it. They look at your receding hairline and salt-and-pepper beard and realize that this isn’t the first impromptu puppet show you’ve put on starring office equipment – and it most likely won’t be the last. They assume you know how inappropriate you’re being, and that bringing it to your attention isn’t going to change anything. In fact, now that I think about it, being in your late thirties is a lot like being retarded.

In a sense, I’ve been waiting to be thirty-eight all my life. I’ve always felt about thirty-eight. Even when I was in elementary school, I felt about thirty-eight. When the other kids were worried about getting picked last in softball, I was worried about what I was going to do with my life. I was a lot like Woody Allen’s character, Alvy Singer, in Annie Hall:

Alvy’s mother: He’s been depressed. All of a sudden, he can’t do anything.
Doctor: Why are you depressed, Alvy?
Alvy’s mother: Tell Dr. Flicker. (To the doctor) It’s something he read.
Doctor: Something he read, huh?
Alvy: The universe is expanding...Well, the universe is everything, and if it’s expanding, some day it will break apart and that will be the end of everything.
Alvy’s mother: What is that your business?

Grade school is a terrible place for a thirty-eight year old.

There were times in school when I was literally bored to tears. I used to fake illnesses so I could get out of doing math drills. School just dragged on, and on, and on, and there seemed to be no point to it. It was all just one colossal waste of time, and nobody felt the need to explain why I needed to be there. It was, in fact, solid real-world training for the quarterly all hands meetings at Galactic Invertebrates.

My strategy for dealing with this sort of tedium hasn’t changed much over thirty-eight years. It’s a two pronged strategy, consisting of (1) doodling pictures of Spider-Man in the margins of my “notes,” and (2) cracking inappropriate jokes.

At one of the first of the pointless all-day meetings at Galactic Invertebrates, the human resources director spent an hour explaining the organizational structure of the company. Which was amusing in itself, because G.I. had no organizational structure. She explained, to a room of blank faces, that G.I. was what was known as a “matrix organization.” She asked if any of us knew what a “matrix organization was.”

Up to this point I had been content with my drawing of Spidey dodging the many arms of Doctor Octopus, but when somebody feeds me a line like that, I can’t resist.

“Well,” I said. “I know that nobody can be told what the matrix is.”

The human resources director looked at me with the look that my mom has on her face while she’s reading this, but everybody else had a good laugh.

It’s not just business meetings where my involuntary boredom defense mechanism kicks in. The other day I was in a finance committee meeting at my church, where we were going over the budget for next year. As I am only the church’s treasurer because of some kind of divine joke, I never have anything useful to contribute at these meetings. I mean, unless you consider drawings of your friendly neighborhood web-slinger to be useful.

Eventually we got to the pastor’s salary, and someone was going through a book that listed the average salaries for employees in various church-related jobs.

“Hey,” I said. “Does that book break it down by denomination?”
“Yes,” he said. “Why?”
“I was wondering how much a couple of Baptists would run us.”

This little remark had the effect of completely derailing the meeting for ten minutes while we tried to ascertain what flavor of minister would give us the most bang for the buck. Very productive.

Just out of college I worked at a company that cataloged legal documents for class action lawsuits. It was the sort of mind-numbing job that computers do these days. A coworker and I used to amuse ourselves by making little adjustments to the letters on the outside of the bottles of Liquid Paper, so that the labels read “Squid Paint” or “Liquid Baby.” I even made one that read “Quid Pro Quo.”

When we ran out of unmolested bottles of Liquid Paper, I turned to writing lengthy missives for the company’s suggestion box. I once wrote a 500 word essay explaining why the company should get a trained monkey to go around the office refilling our coffee cups. I included a detailed cost-benefit analysis, in which I explained how much money the company would be saving through increased productivity. Then, at the very bottom I wrote in small letters:

P.S.: Please disregard my earlier request for a soda badger.

Paperwork bores me as well. I’m terrible at anything that requires attention to detail, and I suspect that only about 3% of the thousands of forms that I’ve filled out in my life have ever been read by anyone. Lately I’ve taken to hiding bizarre comments on any forms I have to fill out, in an effort to determine whether anyone is reading them. For example, on the application for my current job, this question appeared: “What was your reason for leaving your last job?”

They gave me a full line to respond, but I didn’t need it. I wrote a single word: RABIES.

Clearly it wasn’t a dealbreaker, as I got the job, and was never even asked to get any shots.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed a little more tolerance for tedium, but my patience for people who deliberately waste my time has eroded at about the same rate. The net effect is that I’m at least as big a smartass as I was in fifth grade, but I’m much more confident about it now.

Well, I’d better get going. I think I’ve got a meeting to get to.

If you enjoyed this post, may I also recommend: The Butt of My Own Joke | Human Inertia No one can be told what humor-blogs.com is.

Worst Boss Ever

Sorry for the delay in posting today; it's been another crazy day. I promised you the story of the worst boss I've ever had, so here it is. I'll warn you that it's a little long, and not so much funny as sad. There's no happy ending, except for the fact that I don't work for the ass-hat any more. Unfortunately, people don't always get what they deserve. Sometimes you just have to be content with the knowledge that stupidity is its own punishment.

In September of 2002, I took a job as the webmaster for the government of a nearby city.

My boss, the head of the city’s IT department, was a pony-tailed, marginally competent sad-sack, the kind of guy who spent his life trying to live up to his memories of Woodstock, even though he was only in 3^rd grade at the time. Stoner, as I’ll call him, was the worst boss I’ve ever had.

The day I started, I set out (with Stoner’s blessing) to radically revamp the city’s website. I met with various city managers and other key employees to gather requirements for the site, and then started building out the site.

Most of the project was what you would call a “back-end” redesign; that is, my job was primarily to fix the underlying structure of the site, not to make it pretty. But as you know, I’m also something of a graphics guy, and the site definitely needed a facelift as well. Like it or not, it’s a fundamental fact that people do judge books by their covers – you can tell people about all the wonderful improvements you’ve made to their web site, but they aren’t likely to be impressed unless it looks different. So as part of the project, I also redesigned the look of the site.

As I neared completion on the redesign, I did a demo for Stoner. He was thrilled with the back end changes, but seemed concerned about the look of the site. The problem, he said, was that any significant design changes would have to be approved by the city council.

Ok, I said. So do we have to present it to the council? I’ll be happy to go to the next meeting, if that’s what I need to do. He said he would try to get a demo on the agenda.

A few days later I asked if he had been able to get the web site demo on the agenda. Not this time, he said. Maybe next month. I was a little puzzled by his hesitancy to commit to taking any action, but I figured he just had a lot of other stuff going on.

Around this time I started to become aware of a lot of low grade grumbling about Stoner from the other employees in the IT department. I got the impression that he wasn’t well liked or respected by the people who reported to him. Still, I hadn’t experienced any serious problems myself, so I reserved judgment.

I moved on to another project, meanwhile continuing to occasionally ask Stoner about the status of the council meeting demo. Several weeks past, with city council approval of the design the only thing holding up the site redesign.

Then one day I was meeting with the city’s director of economic development when she asked what was going on with the web site redesign. When I told her about the holdup with the council, she laughed. “The city council has never had anything to do with approving changes to the web site,” she said.

I called another person who attended all the council meetings, and she confirmed what I had been told: it wasn’t the city council’s job to approve design changes, and Stoner knew it. What the hell? Why would he have made up something like that?

I went into Stoner’s office and told him what the economic development director had said. He hemmed and hawed for a bit, and then finally admitted the truth.

“I don’t like the design,” he said.

I was rendered nearly speechless. Stoner had stalled the entire web site project for six weeks with a ridiculous lie because he was afraid to tell me he didn’t like my design work. Now I know I look like a total badass on my blog template, but in real life I’m hardly intimidating. It’s pretty much inconceivable that someone (particularly my manager) would be afraid to give me some criticism on my design work. What did he think I would do? Burst into tears? Walk out? I can’t even imagine what was going through his head.

The thing is, design is inherently subjective. Anyone who has done design work has had the experience of creating what he or she thinks is a fantastic design only to have the client pooh-pooh it because they don’t like that shade of green. If Stoner had just said, “The back end is great, but the design blows,” I would have been disappointed for about 30 seconds and then scrapped the design and started over.

But not after six weeks of unnecessary delays. I don’t like being jerked around and lied to. You had your chance to give me your input on the design, I thought. Screw you. This is the design.

“Ok,” I said. “You don’t like the design. Obviously I do like it. But you and I aren’t the end users. We’re not the ones who really matter. Why don’t we send the design out to all the stakeholders in this project and ask for their feedback?”

He could hardly say no to that. So I wrote up a very diplomatic, even-handed email asking for feedback on the design. The response, as I expected, was overwhelmingly favorable. Everybody liked my design better than the old one. The new web site was launched, complete with my design.

Now a smart manager would have been happy with a win for his department, regardless of whose idea the design was. A particularly cagey manager might even have found a way to take credit for the design that he fought against. In retrospect, I don’t think either of those options even occurred to Stoner. He was too busy seething over the fact that I had made a fool out of him in front of his department. They already didn’t respect him, and now this.

Oblivious to Stoner’s fragile mental state, I continued to work on other projects. I had been meeting with the economic development director about the creation of an interactive web-based map that businesses could use to find office space within the city. This project had languished for over a year with little progress because no one involved had the technical expertise to make it work. Now, after three weeks on the project, I had built a rough prototype of the application. I sent an email to Stoner apprising him of the progress, and included a link to the development copy of the application so that he could see for himself.

Unknown to me, Stoner set up a demo of the application with his manager, a bigwig with a title like manager of city services or something. Now demo-ing a development copy of an application is iffy at best. Demo-ing a development copy of an application without telling the developer what you’re doing is like driving a random car off the blocks at your mechanic’s shop without telling the mechanic. You’d have to be borderline retarded.

Predictably, the application broke during this unplanned demo, and Stoner ended up looking like an idiot in front of his manager. After the meeting, Mr. I’m Afraid to Tell You I Don’t Like The Design stomped up to my desk in a rage, telling me that I had just made a fool of him. “Do you even bother to test your work?” He demanded.

This time I really was speechless. Was he serious? Was it possible for someone to be that stupid? I just sat there, dumbfounded. What did he expect me to do, test the code before I wrote it?

Soon after this outburst, he left for the day. Now as it happened, this was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, so the office would be closed until Monday. I stayed at my desk late that evening, fuming about Stoner’s absurd tirade. I should have let it go, but I knew that Stoner’s words would be echoing through my head for the next five days if I didn’t do something.

So I shot off an email to him, noting that I had specifically told him that what I had sent him was a link to a development copy of the application, and that it was unrealistic to expect an early prototype to work perfectly, especially considering that I was working on the code while he was doing the demo. I brought up the fact that under his leadership the project had gone exactly nowhere for over a year, whereas I had made significant progress in only three weeks. I closed the email with the observation that every failure related to this project had a single point of commonality: him.

In hindsight, it should have been clear to me that Stoner was a psychologically unstable individual. I should have known that my email would set him off. I mean, hell, even a well adjusted person doesn’t like being told he’s an idiot. But I foolishly believed that he was, at some level, a rational individual who would act in his own self-interest. With the amount of recognition that Stoner was getting for my efforts, it would have been insane for him to fire me, no matter how much he personally disliked me. I thought he would read the email and think, “Damn, I’ve pissed this guy off. I need to back off or he’s going to quit.”

But here’s the lesson: Stupidity trumps self-interest. If you have a choice between working for a stupid person or an evil person, pick evil. Evil people are predictable. They won’t screw you unless it does them some good to screw you. Stupid people will screw you because they couldn’t figure out what else to do. And stupid people who are paranoid from smoking way too much pot are even worse.

I came in the Monday after the Thanksgiving weekend to find that I had been locked out of my computer. That’s how I discovered I had been fired. Stoner’s door was closed, and he wouldn’t answer when I knocked. Finally, after an hour of sitting at my desk wondering if I should just pack up and go home, he called me into his office.

“I have to let you go,” he said.

“Why?” I said.

“The official reason is ‘no reason,’” he replied. I was still on a probation period, so he could fire me for ‘no reason.’ Presumably firing me for a reason would have caused all sorts of havoc.

“Would this have anything to do with a certain email I sent last Wednesday?”

“It might,” he admitted.

I eventually gathered from his comments that he thought there was a “conspiracy” against him in his department. He couldn’t easily fire any of the other conspirators, but he could get rid of me.

The sad thing is that he was right: There was a conspiracy against him. Unfortunately for him, the conspiracy consisted of everyone who worked for him. His employees had long since tired of his unstable behavior and capricious management style, and had been plotting to get him replaced. As a conscientious employee who did my best to stay out of office politics, I was actually the closest thing that he had to an ally. And he had just fired me.

I’d like to report that Stoner eventually became a victim of his own delusions and got fired. I would have wagered that he’d have been out on his ass within six months. Unfortunately, a Google search reveals that he’s still there, five years later.

So I suppose the real moral of this story is that paranoia and rampant stupidity are no barrier to a long and prosperous career in local government. Go figure.

If you enjoyed this post, may I also recommend: Human Inertia | Hasta La Vista, Monkeyhands! Humor-blogs.com thinks that all bloggers are out to get it.

Alternating Between Love and Hate

Sorry about yesterday's little rant. I don’t think Grûndir realized that many of you are newer readers, and therefore are not familiar with his terrifying visage. For those who don’t know, Grûndir the Implacable is one of the nine Nazgûl, or ring-wraiths, who once served the dark lord Sauron. Grûndir fell on hard times after Sauron’s fall, taking on various odd jobs until eventually being hired by the Mattress Police to dispatch troublesome memes that I don’t feel like dealing with. He’s also good at rooting out the gophers and hobbits that continuously tear up my lawn.

(See, so now that I’ve explained it, it’s really quite funny, isn’t it? I mean, scrap-booking? Come on!)

And if dealing with the inconsolable Grûndir wasn’t enough, I woke up this morning feeling as if I were in a thick fog. I think it’s because of the translucent plastic sheets that the painters put over the windows yesterday. Still, it’s kind of creepy. I feel like I’m on the wrong side of a Camus novel.

On top of all that, I continue to have car troubles. I picked up my car from the shop yesterday, drove a mile and a half in the direction of Mountain View, and then stalled by the side of the road. Evidently my alternator is bad – which is precisely what, despite having the mechanical aptitude of a seven year old girl, I suspected the last time my car stalled, on the way to work last Thursday. The mechanic supposedly checked the alternator when I brought it in before, but it tested ok. So it works fine as long as the car is in the shop, but quits as soon as I get on the road. I guess that’s why they call it an alternator.

As a result, I haven’t actually been to work since last Thursday, which is pushing it (ha!) even for me. Thankfully my boss is very understanding, and is also quite aware that I’m a complete idiot as far as doing anything concrete and practical like fixing a car or getting somewhere on time. I’m trying to cultivate a sort of rock star image at work, so that people assume that I must be the most phenomenal programmer ever, since I sure as hell can’t do anything else right. Phase one of that plan is right on track.

Did I mention how cool my boss is? She's so cool that she even reads this blog sometimes. Isn't that awesome? I just sent her an email telling her that I won't be in until after 1pm today, because my alternator is in the process of being fixed, and I bet she won't even fire me. Isn't she the coolest?

Okay, so this ended up being kind of a pointless post, but I'll make it up to you tomorrow. In the past I've regaled you with stories of the second and third worst bosses ever, His Excellency Lord Monkeyhands and Human Inertia. And now that I've told you about the best boss ever, I think you're finally ready to hear the story of the worst boss I've ever had.

I'll see you tomorrow, if I'm not stuck on the side of I-580 in Livermore.

If you enjoyed this post, may I also recommend: You Shall Tremble Before the Meme-Wraith! | Human Inertia | Hasta La Vista, Monkeyhands! Humor-blogs.com thinks that thing on top of the hill in the picture looks like some kind of creepy ghost-cow, but it's probably just a bush.

Hasta la Vista, Monkeyhands (part 2)

For those of you too lazy to read part 1, a brief recap of what has happened up to this point: His Excellency Lord Monkeyhands, CEO of Galactic Invertebrates, failed to tell our most important client about a project that I had been working on for THREE YEARS, and which was going to be rolled out to all of our clients in SEVEN DAYS. As a result, an emergency meeting was convened with Asshole, the president of our most important client, BeeStings Unlimited. At this meeting, Asshole dictated a list of brand new requirements which would be virtually impossible to implement by the scheduled launch date.

At this point, I had a decision to make. I could say, "Screw it. Serves these idiots right if this application doesn't launch on time." I could make a big stink about why the application didn't launch on time, and all the executive directors would get to explain to their clients that the CEO of Galactic Invertebrates is a retard and that while each and every one of our clients is super-duper important to us, all of them stacked in a pile don't mean shit compared to BeeStings Unlimited. Hell, I could take the next three weeks off and just pull up a lawn chair to watch as a barrage of countless gigantic clods of shit hit the proverbial fan.

But nooooooooooooooooo, I'm too nice a guy to do that. I won't trouble you with the horrific details of what happened over the next week; suffice it to say that I worked nearly a hundred hours over the next seven days (the week of my anniversary and my daughter's birthday) to make last minute changes to the Interstellar Portal, catering to Asshole's idiotic whims. I tried to get ahold of Monkeyhands to communicate my displeasure at this turn of events, but -- surprise! -- he was unavailable, vacationing somewhere in Europe.

So I buckled down and got the thing done. It wasn't perfect, but it launched without major incident, on time. I walked out of the building that day to the sound of trumpets heralding my accomplishment, because I was hallucinating from lack of sleep.

The next day I fired off an email to Monkeyhands letting him know that I was extremely upset about the situation, and that this was going to be the LAST time I would ever be working 100 hours in one week because of someone else's screwup. He responded -- several days later -- with some noncommittal reassurances.

By the time Monkeyhands finally got back from vacation, my anger level had dropped from White Hot Seething Rage to Barely Controlled Fury. I stopped by Monkeyhands' office a couple of times, but he was always in a meeting or about to leave for a meeting or trying to squeeze his upper torso into his colon. Eventually I gave up.

Now as you'll know if you've read pretty much anything else I've written, I'm completely full of myself. But you're just going to have to trust me when I tell you that I'm a damn good programmer.* I built GI's entire application infrastructure from the ground up, in roughly a quarter of the time it would have taken a typical programmer. "How is that possible?" you ask. Well, it's all about leveraging your work.

Let's say, by way of illustration, that you need to mow a lawn, and all you have is an old hand-powered mower like that one they used on the Brady Bunch. A typical programmer will look at that problem and say, "I could build a gas-powered lawn mower for you and save you a lot of time and trouble." Which, of course, is a good idea. When I look at that problem, however, I think, "I could build a lawn mower for you and save you a lot of time and trouble. But frankly building lawn mowers sounds like a pain in the ass, and I don't want to have to be building a lawn mower for every poor sap who needs to mow his lawn. So how about if I spend an extra three weeks and build a machine that builds lawn mowers?" So it costs me an additional three weeks up front, but after that I can crank out lawn mowers in my sleep. And once I get bored with building lawn mower building machines, I might build a lawn mower building machine building machine. You see where this is going. One time I inherited a project that a subcontractor had been working on for 6 months with minimal results. I told the subcontractor he was done and rewrote the entire application myself in a week. If you want some software built, I'm a good guy to have on your team. Or instead of your team.

Thus it's fair to say that in this company of 35 people, I was one of the three or four key people that kept GI afloat. A smart CEO would do everything he could to keep those three or four people happy. So if one of those key people was oscillating between Barely Controlled Fury and Cynical Resignation, he might want to make a point of meeting with that employee to at least hear his concerns. His Excellency Lord Monkeyhands was not a smart CEO.

Eventually a coworker, who had only been with the company for a few weeks and therefore had not yet had his spirit crushed, set up a meeting with the CEO to express our concerns. At this point I had no real interest in expressing my concerns, because Monkeyhands clearly couldn't give a shit about my concerns, but I went along because I thought it was cute how my coworker thought he was going to accomplish something at this meeting. My coworker laid out a very compelling case that some drastic changes were in order, and I did my best to back him up.

The CEO was clearly displeased with this attempt by the serfs to tell him how to run the castle, and he sat in stony silence while we laid out our case. When we were finished, he suggested that we "write up a proposal" and submit it to him, and if it was one of the best proposals he got that year he would see what he could do about it.

Keep in mind that we weren't asking for raises. We weren't asking for more more autonomy for our department. We weren't, in fact, asking for anything. We were simply telling him what, in our opinion, absolutely had to change about his company in order for it to succeed and make him the millions of dollars he clearly felt he was entitled to. As low as my expectations had been going into this meeting, Monkeyhands had managed to limbo a good 26 inches under them. I was rendered almost speechless by his unprecedented obtuseness.

Having just spearheaded the launch of our flagship product under near impossible circumstances, I felt emboldened to speak up. I said, "You know, I don't really have time to be writing proposals. I think we've told you everything you need to know. My job is to write applications."

He glared at me with his beady little extraterrestrial eyes and said, essentially, "Your job is whatever the f---- I tell you it is."

That's when I went to my happy place, because the alternative was to punch Monkeyhands in his fugly little alien face until he stopped wasting oxygen. I coasted through the rest of the meeting in a sort of dreamlike state, nodding and smiling and thinking about how I wasn't going to work for this ass-hat one second longer than I needed to in order to make sure my family didn't starve to death. That night I went home and started researching my options for refinancing my house. We have ten acres of valuable land in California, so I had some equity at my disposal. It took me a few weeks, but I managed to negotiate a loan that would give me enough money to take a year off and finish building my house. As soon as the papers were signed, I put in my notice.

And wouldn't you know it, Monkeyhands immediately made time in his Euro-touring, rectum-examining schedule for the two of us to go out for a beer, like the two best buds that I had always suspected we were. He used this outing as an opportunity to dispense fatherly advice while I nodded and continually swallowed little bits of vomit that came up in my throat. After establishing that he was my mentor and quite possibly my NBFF, he asked me why I was leaving.

"I feel like it's time to move on," I said.

He pressed for more information, and I kept giving non-answers. Is it Human Inertia? "No, Human Inertia is a manageable idiot." Is it The Snake?** "No, The Snake is just a symptom of a bigger problem." Ok, so what is it?

"Just time to move on. That's all."

I was determined not to give him the benefit of my opinion of him and his company, because after ignoring me for three years he could go f--- himself. Besides, if I told him what I actually thought, it would be really hard to keep working for him for another three weeks. I would have been fine with speaking my mind and walking out, but that would have left a lot of my coworkers in the lurch. So I gave him nothing. I could tell he wanted to lash out at me like a spoiled child again, but he was at least smart enough to know that he desperately needed to hold on to me for as long as he could, even if it was only three weeks. He couldn't afford to piss me off at this point. In fact, he began to offer me everything he could think of to keep me. He even told me I could work from home pretty much all day every day if I wanted, even though I had been specifically told on prior occasions that I wasn't allowed to work from home even two days a week (which I did anyway, of course). Funny how a little perspective changes things.

But I was past the point of being mollified by anything they had to offer. I simply couldn't stomach working for that petty little sphincter nugget any longer.

I wrapped things up as best I could over the next few weeks, but when it was clear that a lot of important projects were not going to get done after I left, they asked if I'd be willing to do some work as a consultant. "Sure," I said. "At an hourly rate of [fill in exorbitant rate here]." I added that every time I picked up the phone, there would be a one hour minimum charge.

I was actually kind of hoping they'd say no, but I made the offer because I still felt a little bad about my coworkers who were already overworked without having to pick the pieces of my unfinished projects. Monkeyhands spat and sputtered, but eventually agreed to it, because what else could he do? Thanks to the official GI policy of "F--- Documentation"***, I had three years worth of exclusive knowledge of GI's systems tucked away in my little brain. No one else at the company had a clue how anything I had built worked. If something broke, God help them.

The Monday before my last day, Monkeyhands called me into his office and tried, once again, to get me to tell him why I was leaving and what it would take to get me to stay. I once again politely refused to tell him shit. I could see that he was fuming behind his beady little alien eyes, but he still couldn't afford to aggravate me.

When I continued to refuse to cooperate, he resorted to trying to make me feel guilty, launching into a big speech about loyalty and some such bullshit. He seemed to be trying to tell me how valuable I was to the company, but somehow his monologue degenerated into a self-aggrandizing account of how he had continued to fund application development (read: Diesel's salary) even when everybody told him he was crazy. Rather than, "You're extremely valuable to this company," it was "I'm such an amazing visionary to have recognized how valuable you are to this company, and if a lesser man were in charge you'd have been out on your ass a long time ago." I began to literally feel sick to my stomach. Whatever germ of a notion that I might have had about sticking around was completely obliterated by that pathologically egomaniacal speech.

I continued to give him only the vaguest of answers about why I was leaving.

Finally he came out and said, "Diesel, you've been working here for three years. I think you owe me a little more than that."

What happened next is one of my happiest memories. I replay it in my head, over and over, the way you might revisit a day of riding around on your dad's shoulders at the fair, getting your cotton candy stuck in his hair. It's a memory that always makes me smile. Sometimes when it's cold at night, I think about it and a sort of ineffable warmth radiates out from my heart to my toes and fingertips, making me feel all snuggly and cozy. If I ever have to get a root canal without anesthetic, I will just think about that day when I was sitting across from Monkeyhands in his office.

"So, you think I owe you more than that," I said, gazing thoughtfully out the window. "Well."

I thought of all the empty assurances that Monkeyhands had given me in the past. I thought of the times I had seen him demonstrate "leadership" by belittling employees who had failed to meet impossible goals. I thought of his transparent gestures of magnanimity and his condescending paternal advice.

Then I looked him straight in the eye and said, in my most patronizing tone:

"You know, sometimes we don't get what we feel we're owed."

And I smiled.

*Yes, I know I told you that I don't like being called a "programmer," but that was mostly for effect.

**The biggest jerk at GI, who is tolerated because "the clients like him." He shares my first name, which explains, incidentally, why I started going by "Diesel."

***Seriously. Monkeyhands actually said this to me once. Possibly the dumbest thing ever said about software development.

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Hasta la Vista, Monkeyhands

Note: This story, concerning my final days at Galactic Invertebrates, is long overdue. I only waited this long because until recently I was still doing consulting work for them, and I didn't want to needlessly antagonize the little asswipes. Also, it's generally not a good idea to badmouth a former employer on the internet when you've just started a new job. Suffice it to say that my current employer is about as far from Galactic Invertebrates as could be. In fact, my current boss -- as well as her boss -- are both former GI employees who got fed up with the idiots running that place around the same time I did.

I had to break it into two posts because it's a little long, but I think you'll enjoy it.

The second worst boss I ever had was the CEO of Galactic Invertebrates.

Galactic Invertebrates, as you recall, is a small interstellar firm that specializes in bending over. The owner and CEO is a diminutive extraterrestrial being who is known as His Excellency Lord Monkeyhands. Monkeyhands wasn't technically my boss; I reported to Human Inertia, who reported to Monkeyhands. But as Human Inertia spent most of his time trying to remember which pipe was for breathing and which one was for swallowing, Monkeyhands was effectively my boss.

Monkeyhands came from a planet that is known for raising snooty little wankers who think they're better than everyone else. He was the kind of guy who would take you out to lunch in his Mercedes and bitch almost under his breath how much he despised his imported luxury car. This is a proven technique for a person of Monkeyhands' imagined stature to indicate that he is not only "one of the common people," but also a little too good for German luxury cars. Do you remember the episode of The Office where they do a Christmas gift exchange with a price limit of like $20 and Steve Carell throws in a $200 iPod just to show how magnanimous he is? This guy did that exact thing at one of our Christmas parties. No joke. It was enough to make you want to crush his little baby monkeyhands with a ball peen hammer.

Monkeyhands had the habit of starting some exciting new initiative to revamp the company and then leaving for Europe for three months, with Human Inertia in charge of overseeing the details. Every time he returned from one of these trips, it was like a retelling of the Parable of the Talents:

Monkeyhands: Now, my servant, what have you done with the talents I have entrusted to you?
Human Inertia: Lord, have mercy on me! I know that you are a cruel master, and I have therefore developed these sixteen PowerPoint slides to demonstrate what I plan to do with the talents.
Monkeyhands: You lazy and worthless servant! I entrusted you with... ok, let's see the slides.

After the presentation, Monkeyhands would cruelly berate Human Inertia for half an hour. But Human Inertia could take a berating like no man I've ever seen, and when it was over he would go back to his desk and make more slides. Monkeyhands would launch another ill-thought-out company-revamping initiative and then jet off to the home of shoddy luxury vehicles.

GI was a typical tech startup: Lots of excitement, long hours, almost no documented processes.... The only problem was that this company had been in startup mode for fourteen years. That's like having your wedding night last for three weeks. I know, it sounds great, but eventually getting no sleep and banging your head against the wall just to demonstrate your commitment gets a little old.

By the fall of 2006, I had worked at this company for three years. Much of that time I was working on a product that I'll call the Interstellar Portal. The Interstellar Portal was going to be our flagship product, and I was determined -- despite obstacles like Human Inertia and the general dysfunction of Galactic Invertebrates -- to get it done. I worked my ass off on the Interstellar Portal, all the while playing the requisite political games so that I wouldn't be blindsided by some new requirement that I hadn't planned on.

I kept all the key people at GI informed of the Interstellar Portal's progress by sending emails and holding regular meetings. I wanted to make sure that there were no surprises when this thing rolled out. I even held a number of special pre-rollout meetings to make sure I had addressed everyone's concerns.

As a final step before launching this mammoth application for all of our clients, I sent out an email to our entire client base regarding training that would be available for using the Interstellar Portal. It wasn't even my job to set up training for the clients, but I thought it was important to do, and nobody else was going to do it.

The email went out to 7,000 people. I received exactly one negative client response.

Unfortunately, the response was from the president of our most important client, BeeStings Unlimited. The president of BeeStings Unlimited was such an asshole that I don't even have a nickname for him. I'll just have to call him Asshole. One little anecdote to illustrate what an asshole Asshole really was:

One time Asshole demanded that we remove all "cookies" from one of our applications. It's not important for you to know what cookies are; just know that it is VERY common for web applications to use cookies. Amazon uses them. eBay uses them. Hell, Asshole's own company used cookies on their website. But for some reason it was vital that I immediately drop everything and spend 3 weeks rewriting our applications to eliminate cookies. Whatever. I do what I'm told. But if I'm going to be fixing a problem, I need to know what the problem is. So I sent Asshole a very nice email saying, essentially, "What is it about cookies that you have a problem with exactly? Because I have to replace the cookies with something, and I don't want to replace them with something that you like even less than cookies."

His response was, and I quote, "READ MY LIPS. GET RID OF THEM."

Hence the name Asshole. Anyway, the point of this little digression is that you do NOT want to get on this guy's bad side if you can avoid it. BeeStings Unlimited was a very important client for GI, and Asshole knew it. Asshole would make your life hell just for giggles if he didn't think you were taking him seriously enough.

So ordinarily one client complaint about a product rollout wouldn't be a big deal, but you do not want to get a complaint from the president of BeeStings Unlimited one week before the rollout. And you definitely don't want to get one from him that says:

"That is very brave of you, rolling this out when I have never heard of it."

At this point I should tell you that Galactic Invertebrates has a number of Executive Directors, each of whom is responsible for one or more clients. Now BeeStings Unlimited was SO gosh-darn important that the ED* for his account was none other than His Excellency Lord Monkeyhands himself. That meant that it was his responsibility to communicate any important developments to BeeStings Unlimited.

So, to sum up, the CEO of our company had failed to tell our most important client about a project that I had been working on for THREE YEARS, and which was going to be rolled out to all of our clients in SEVEN DAYS.

I had a special meeting with Asshole, in which he rattled off a whole new list of requirements for the application. Monkeyhands wasn't around, and all Human Inertia would do is say things like, "Don't worry, we'll figure this out." Which meant, "I'm not going to stand up to Asshole, so you'd better do what he tells you."

To give you an idea what that means, imagine telling Steven Spielberg that he needs to reshoot the ending of his latest movie to make it more "uplifting" a week before the premiere. It's borderline insane. You just can't do it.

So at this point I had a decision to make: Try to do the impossible, or tell 7,000 people that I couldn't do what I had promised I would do. What would you do?



I'll post Part 2 on Wednesday. Make sure you come back tomorrow to vote in the caption contest.

*A co-worker of mine was known to joke that 'ED' also meant 'dysfunctional prick.'


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World's Foremost Authority on Sarcasm

Lately I've hinted -- not very subtly -- that I'm now working for Google. I'm technically not a Google employee, but I'm working onsite at the Google headquarters on some internal projects for them. I didn't want to say too much at first because I wasn't sure how much I could tell you without getting in trouble. In fact, now that I think about it, I'm tempting fate with this post, as I was once fired from a job over an email that I sent the day before the Thanksgiving weekend. I won't go into detail on that now, but let's just say that I came into work the next Monday and couldn't log in to my computer. Some people just don't appreciate the fact that I'm the World's Foremost Authority on Sarcasm.

Presumably, though, Google knows this about me, as they are the ones who gave me the title. If you look up "sarcasm" on Google, you'll see my picture. Well, ok, not my picture, but a picture I made. Seriously. Go to Google Image Search and type in "sarcasm." The number one result is a fake motivational poster that I made. Pretty cool, huh?



Google did a background check on me before they hired me, and I have to assume that the background check included, well, Googling me. You can find out just about every interesting thing about me by looking at the first page of results on Google: I'm a software developer, the author of Antisocial Commentary, the mastermind behind MattressPolice.com and Humor-Blogs.com, the treasurer of my church, and a finalist in the 2006 Wildfowl Carving Competition, Division F (Decorative Lifesize Wildfowl).

Er, that last one might be someone else with the same name. I don't recall carving any wildfowl in 2006, although in 1991 I did sculpt an uncanny ceramic replica of my college roommate watching TV. See? His name is George.

Anyway, I'll avoid saying anything bad about Google while using Google's blogging platform to talk about working at Google. I'm smart that way.

To be honest, I have nothing bad to say at this point. Working at Google is surreal. First of all, the campus is HUGE. I have a terrible sense of direction, which has resulted in me wasting about a day and a half over the past few weeks looking for my car. You wouldn't think that a company whose flagship product is an empty web page with a textbox in it would need fifteen buildings and ten thousand employees, but I guess someone has to run and fetch all those search results. ("Yes sir, I think we have 'donkey sex.' Let me just run over to the Donkey-Donut building a minute.")

It's like a small city, except that the city is populated by the people that you used to make fun of in high school. (I can say that because I'm one of those people, so suck it.) And now they're running the world and getting paid very well for it. When the movers and shakers are in Northern California, they don't go to Sacramento, they go to Mountain View. Last week Barack Obama was there. The week before that, Tony Bennett and the guy who run the human genome project swung by (not together, but wouldn't you love to be a roadie on that tour?). And then there was that little surprise show by a band you may have heard of called Matchbox 20. And that's just since I started working there, in October. The campus is just down the street from Shoreline Amphitheater, and there's some question as to which venue has better concerts.

There are 16 gourmet restaurants on campus, and they're all free. That's right, if you work there (or even if you're a contractor like me), you can eat lunch and dinner for free. There's a hardware depot in every building where you can pick up an ergonomic keyboard if the standard issue one you have isn't cutting it. Oh, and maybe a new mouse. And a mouse pad. And a webcam. And some noise-canceling headphones. And a remote control. And a paddle game. And this chair. And that's all I need.

It's like working at one of those dot com companies in 1999, before everything went to hell. Massage chairs, a dry-cleaning dropoff, lounges with arcade games and fridges stocked full of soda... It's like heaven with cubicles. I know, it doesn't sound right, but now you're getting an idea of how weird it is.

I could go on, but I've probably said too much already. I should probably try to avoid upsetting the bigwigs -- at least until they've gotten to know me a little better. I mean, for all I know they don't realize that I'm also the World's Foremost Authority on "Harry Potter Satanism" and "Crack Whore Barbie."





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Human Inertia

The third worst boss I ever had was a guy I called Human Inertia. This is when I worked for Galactic Invertebrates, which was an innovator in the field of bending over to a**holes with money. As I once wrote regarding GI,

The very name of the company heralds its commitment to going to unprecedented lengths to seek out new life forms and bend over for them. You remember when scientists found water on Mars and there was a buzz about how Mars might once have supported life? Well, GI immediately put together an expedition which traveled to Mars, went back in time ten million years, scoured the surface of the planet until they found a small patch of primitive lichens, and bent over for them. That's how good they are.

Human Inertia was paid six figures to prevent anything upsetting from happening at Galactic Invertebrates, such as "work" or "productivity." His motto was that if you haven't done anything, then you haven't done anything wrong. Human Inertia was a WMD (Well Meaning Dufus) who, like George W. Bush, had an MBA. (That should be good for a few Google searches).

Human Inertia was my direct supervisor, which meant that I spent a lot of time explaining my job to him and walking around him. Every week we would have a team meeting at which I would tell him what he had failed to prevent me from doing over the course of the previous week. He would throw some additional obstacles at me, which I would ridicule or ignore, depending on my mood. One time he told me that I wasn't really allowed to work from home two days a week, to which I responded, "Okay, but I'm going to keep doing it." I smiled to indicate that it had been a good talk.

At the end of the meeting we'd review the Action Items that had been assigned. Occasionally Human Inertia would take an Action Item, just for laughs, like that time I pretended to be lifting an 80' tall bronze statue of a horse.

If productivity was measured in PowerPoint presentations, Human Inertia would have single-handedly skewed the GDP. He had slides for every possible made-up statistic or unlikely hypothetical situation. There was virtually no correlation between anything on the slides and anything that actually existed. There were slides for profitability, customer satisfaction, gnomes, unicorns.... Eventually the presentation would devolve into a impenetrable Mobius strip of self-reference: "Here's a graph showing the ratio of time I spend doing PowerPoint Presentations to time time spent doing actual work; here's one showing the percentage of graphs in this presentation containing pure fabricated nonsense; here's a graph showing the alarming escalation of the the pointlessness of these graphs...."

At one point there was a plan under discussion that involved getting approval from Human Inertia before starting any projects. I was astounded that they would consider such a plan, because it would essentially prevent any work from ever being done. Every proposal would languish in limbo forever, collecting dust on Human Inertia's desk. I was all ready to raise a big fuss about this new process being completely unworkable when I remembered a crucial fact: Before it could be enacted, the approval process itself would have to be approved by Human Inertia. Needless to say, that was another horse that didn't get lifted. This would not be the last time that I would be spared by the H.I.P. (Human Inertia Paradox), in which the prevention of work is prevented by the prevention of work.

The only thing that really worried me about Human Inertia was that he was technically in charge of the company's finances. I tried not to think about it, but every once in a while he'd say something so dumb that I'd have to immediately run to the bank and cash my paycheck, just to make sure they had real money in their account.

He was the kind of guy who used to repeat idiotic urban legends like the one about how the average person swallows four spiders a year in their sleep. I can't fathom what, if anything, is going on in the head of someone who repeats something like that. Did he imagine that there was a university somewhere that had greenlit a study in which people were observed for 8 hours every night to find out how many spiders they swallowed? I tried to envision what the log book for that study would look like:

Day 1: No spiders
Day 2: No spiders
Day 3: No spiders
Day 4: No spiders
Day 5: No spiders
Day 6: No spiders
Day 7: No spiders
Day 8: No spiders
Day 9: No spiders
Day 10: No spiders
Day 11: No spiders
Day 12: No spiders
Day 13: No spiders
Day 14: No spiders
Day 15: No spiders
Day 16: No spiders
Day 17: SPIDER!!!!
Day 18: No spiders
Day 19: No spiders
Day 20: No spiders
...

What would the interpersonal dynamics of such a study be? Would the observer tell the subject if they swallowed a spider on a given night?

"So, how'd you sleep last night, Bob?"
"Umm, pretty good. Why?"
"Oh, no reason. No reason." (Stifles laughter)
"Did I... I swallowed a spider last night, didn't I?!"
"Nooooo.... I mean, I'm not really supposed to say either way, but no, you didn't."
"Really?"
"Really. No spiders. None. I haven't even seen any spiders, to be honest."
"You promise?"
"I promise."
"Okay, good. But you would tell me if I did, right?"
"Well, I'm not supposed to, but yeah, I would."
"Good, thanks. Whew. I feel better."
"Hey, that's what I'm here for. So... any weird dreams last night? Like maybe about something crawling into your mouth?"

It was bad enough when Human Inertia would blather on about swallowed spiders or string theory, but what really worried me was when he would pontificate on something business-related. For example, he once predicted, a few days before its release, that The DaVinci Code was going to be the top grossing movie of all time. Now I don't pretend to be a business expert or a movie expert (ok, sometimes I pretend to be a movie expert), but I could give you about 28 reasons off the top of my head why The DaVinci Code wasn't going to even going to outgross Forrest Gump, let alone Titanic. First, it's not a "family-friendly movie." Second, it got lousy reviews. Third, a lot of people planned on boycotting it because of its subject matter. Fourth, people want to see Tom Hanks playing a retard, not playing a smart guy with retarded hair. I could go on.

Human Inertia ranks only third on my list of Worst Bosses Ever because once you got used to him, he was pretty manageable. He had almost no attention span. I used to send him long, boring emails with some crucial information that I didn't want him to know buried in the third paragraph. He'd find out about whatever it was too late to stop it, and I would just shrug and say, "I sent you an email...."

If you really wanted him to know something, you had to break it into three bullet points, each no longer than this sentence. He could, on a good day, digest up to five bullet points, or 1 2/3 emails. He would copy and paste these bullet points onto a slide, which he would then present at the next quarterly meeting, along with a graph indicating that he fully understood roughly 14% of the bullet points he had been sent that quarter. I once joked that I was going to draw a cartoon of him as Moses receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. He would be saying to God, "This is great, but can you boil it down to three bullet points?"

He left Galactic Invertebrates shortly after I retired. I hear he's working for a big Silicon Valley company now. I won't tell you the name, but according to my thesaurus, it's a synonym for ignoramus and buffoon.

I hope they like PowerPoint presentations.



Did you enjoy this post? There's plenty more like it in my book, Antisocial Commentary. Order your copy and help me to not have to get a real job, so I can keep writing this crap. Thanks!

Humor-blogs.com has prevented more work from being done than any other website. Also, it has swallowed at least six spiders this year alone.

Is Anyone Here a Widgetologist?

"I sell air."

- Mitch Robbins (Billy Crystal) in City Slickers

Since my recent post regarding my retirement, many of you have asked what it is that Galactic Invertebrates does exactly.

That's a lie. Nobody asked. Nobody cares what Galactic Invertebrates does. I don't even care, and I worked there for three years.

You know what GI does? In a word, nothing.

You know how most companies make widgets or widget holders or widget accessories or anti-widget cream? Well, those companies need someone to market those widgets and widget-related products, right? And they need somebody to ship them to far-away widget-deprived (or widget-infested, as the case may be) regions of the globe. And they need someone to assist them with meeting the federal guidelines for widget calibration, of course. In short, there is a lot more to widget-related product manufacture than just making the widget-related products.

Unfortunately, GI doesn't do any of those things either.

So what do they do? Well, let's say Company A and Company C both make widgets.

"Wait," you say. "What happened to Company B?"

Exactly! That's exactly my point. What did happen to company B? Nobody really knows for sure, because the only place companies line up in alphabetical order besides the phone book is Red China, and they don't even use the same friggin' alphabet, so good luck sorting that out.

So you've got Company A and Company C, not necessarily in that order, each doing their own thing. Except they both coincidentally decide to make widgets, and not just because every fictitious company makes widgets. In this example it's very important that they are both making widgets. Why? Well, because with all those widgets you're going to need a widget holder, right? Right. But now you're screwed, because the widget holder made by Company Q only holds widgets made by Company A, but you've got both kinds of widgets. And you have to buy a special cable from Company H and an adapter from Company 7 just to get your A and C widgets to talk to each other, not to mention the fact that the anti-widget cream you just bought apparently only works on widgets made by company Epsilon, and you don't even have any of those and you lost the receipt and you don't think the store will take back a half-used tube of anti-widget cream anyway, because ewww.

Now wouldn't it be nice if all those companies could get along and talk to each other so that all your widgets and widget-related products would work together? No, because that's how things work in Red China, you big Commie. I thought we covered that.

So short of that, wouldn't it be great if these companies could get together in a friendly non-monopolistic sort of way, you know, just over coffee or whatever, and agree that all widgets and widget-related products should use the 3428b interface, so that Sally Widget Consumer (not her real name) wouldn't have to get a PhD. in Widgetology just to get her friggin' widgets to work together? Yes, that would be nice. You could call it the Widget Consortium (W.C.). And the W.C. would have big member meetings in Prague and send out press releases about how just yesterday they came really close to agreeing on something and have a website where people with nothing better to do could learn fascinating facts about the W.C.

But wait a minute. Who is going to do all this stuff? Who is going to organize the meeting in Prague and send out the press release about almost agreeing and build the scintillating website? Oh, sure, Company C would love to do it, but then the meeting would be in Trenton, New Jersey and the press release would be all about how unreasonable those bastards at Company A are, and the website would be in the shape of a giant letter C. No, you need someone who can claim with a straight face to be impartial, while at the same time kowtowing to the demands of Company C, because everybody knows that if Company C leaves, the W.C. is going straight down the toilet.

That's where Galactic Invertebrates comes in. The very name of the company heralds its commitment to going to unprecedented lengths to seek out new life forms and civilizations and bend over for them. You remember when scientists found water on Mars and there was a buzz about how Mars might once have supported life? Well, GI immediately put together an expedition which traveled to Mars, went back in time ten million years, scoured the surface of the planet until they found a small patch of primitive lichens, and bent over for them. That's how good they are.

So basically GI runs a set of fictitious companies that don't earn any profits and don't make any products. And, of course, it's very difficult to do that kind of volume of nothing without some special software that makes nothing easier to do. And that, my friends, is where I came in. Yes, I was the guy who wrote the software that was used by nonexistent companies to share vast amounts of misinformation that might some day be used in generating a specification that could conceivably be released in the distant future, at which time there would be a genuine possibility that actual companies making actual products would accuse each other of not complying with it.

Now I dig trenches.

10 Things That Suck Less Than Working at Galactic Invertebrates

If I weren't retired, I'd be on my way to work at Galactic Invertebrates* right now rather than sitting at home watching my kids watch Dora the Explorer. I love the part where you have to say "Swiper no swiping!" to keep Swiper from swiping. Then when Dora says, "Gracias!", I say"De Nada, baby. I got your back!" Man, if I was 30 years younger....

Anyway, it occurred to me that today would be a good day to post an IM conversation I had a few weeks back with a fellow ex-Galactic Invertebrates employee. You know her as "Not Karen," a pseudonym that cleverly hints that her real name could be virtually anything. We were chatting on a day that I took off from work to sign papers for refinancing my property, and we came up with the idea of listing all the horrible things we'd rather do than work at Galactic Invertebrates. The list was pretty funny, but I think the conversation about the list was even better.

not karen: any new news?
diesel: nope
diesel: signing papers at 4:30
diesel: took a PTO today
not karen: sa-weeeeet.
diesel: you want to know how sick of that place I am?
diesel: I've spent most of the day shoveling dirt in the rain, and all I can think of is how happy I am that I don't have to see Human Inertia** today
not karen: dang
diesel: I'm actually happy to be out in the cold, working in the mud
not karen: wonder if that comes before or after "I'd rather chew broken glass."
not karen: "would rather shovel dirt in the rain."
not karen: Top 10 list of things that suck, but suck less than working at Galactic Invertebrates...
diesel: exactly
not karen: Shoveling mud/dirt in the rain
diesel: Having your face swell up to twice its size because of a scorpion sting
not karen: lol
not karen: Do your taxes
not karen: in Spanish
diesel: lol
diesel: I like that one
not karen: thanks!
diesel: it should be German though
not karen: even better.
diesel: taking a transatlantic flight seated between Mickey Rourke and Courtney Love
not karen: oh [expletive]
not karen: that's HORRIBLE
diesel: :)
diesel: thanks
not karen: moonlighting as a bunny in an animal test lab
diesel: nice
not karen: doing the Macarena
diesel: lol
diesel: French kissing Janet Reno
not karen: (puke)
diesel: :D
not karen: Dry heaving
diesel: sorry, that one may actually be worse
not karen: that shit's painful
not karen: i think we have a good list going. how many is that?
diesel: 100?
diesel: Gotta be close to 100
not karen: i'm retyping into Word. This is a good exercise.
diesel: how about playing rock-paper-scissors for real, and being paper
diesel: paper covers rock...rock breaks knuckles
not karen: i know you're not used to hearing constructive criticism from all your worshipping readers,
not karen: but that's not funny
diesel: ;(
diesel: it will hit you in about 3 hours
diesel: you'll just bust up for no reason
diesel: and you'll be like, "Dammit, Kroese!"
not karen: LOL shut up
not karen: and i KNOW you didn't bust out the Crocodile Tear smiley
diesel: how about having to write a master's thesis on the use of double entendres in Who's The Boss?
diesel: too subtle?
not karen: good in theory, but not very punchy
diesel: lol
diesel: ok
not karen: Watching back-to-back episodes of Who's the Boss would be pretty horrible in and of itself
not karen: and would qualify in my book
diesel: yeah, but not quite bad enough
not karen: Hmmmm.
not karen: gimme another show
diesel: how about having to watch every episode of Who's the Boss with a retarded kid who pauses the show every time he doesn't get a joke and makes you explain it to him.
diesel: I'm getting a little abstract now
diesel: still, you have to admit that would be pretty bad
not karen: oooh!
not karen: i know
not karen: Waiting for Godot
diesel: lol
not karen: again, to simplify
diesel: not watching Waiting for Godot, you mean actually waiting for Godot
not karen: i think hanging out with a retarded kid would be a bad time by itself
not karen: right.
not karen: it works on a number of levels
diesel: it's the combination of retarded kid and Who's the Boss that makes it work
diesel: or not
not karen: please hold
diesel: W
not karen: DUDE, i was simply typing them up
diesel: ok
not karen: you're pretty fussy now that you're a man of leisure.
diesel: I've always been fussy
diesel: leisure just hasn't helped
not karen: Diving for dead bodies after a plane crash.
diesel: uhhh
diesel: how about wool underwear?
not karen: i still need a show for "watching back-to-back episodes of ..."
not karen: yes. good
diesel: or better yet, steel wool underwear
diesel: 7th Heaven?
not karen: PERFECT!
diesel: how many do we have now?
diesel: and when can we stop?
not karen: We have 10
diesel: are they all good?
not karen: i'll send them to your supersecret e-mail address
not karen: i think so
diesel: ok
diesel: cool, I'll post them to my blog when I get braver
not karen: i took some editorial license in weeding out your rock, paper, sissors and retard Who's the Boss ideas
diesel: man, that Who's the Boss one was genius
diesel: you have to picture yourself sitting on the couch next to the retarded kid who won't press Play until he understands why Tony and Angela aren't married
not karen: you're letting the blog feedback go to your head
not karen: takes too much "thinking".
diesel: lol
not karen: Dave would never approve.
diesel: you're never going to convince me that's not funny
not karen: Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go learn myself how to layout a newsletter in Publisher.
diesel: it's high-brow humor
diesel: not your sort of thing
not karen: LOL.
not karen: asshole.

*I have changed the name of the company to cover my ass.
**Surprisingly, also not his/her real name.

Self-Consciousness

Note: I was a little under the weather yesterday, and too foggy to come up with a Thursday Shout-Out. So I'm posting this little gem instead. I wrote it a couple of weeks ago, before The Lamest Contest Ever started. I tell you this so that you won't scold me for straying from my Reading List. Rest assured that I'm still slogging through Eragon.

So today my boss cancels the lunch we were supposed to have together, and I decide to take a long lunch by myself. I figure I'll grab a bite at a fast food place and read the newspaper. Except I have no newspaper, so I stop at a used book store near where I work. I find a book called Fierce Pajamas, an anthology of humor from The New Yorker. I sit and page through it for long enough that I will feel vaguely guilty if I walk out without buying anything. I satisfy myself that I am buying the book for that reason and because it is only $7.95, and not because I like the idea of being seen buying, carrying and/or reading an anthology of essays from The New Yorker.

I take my book to lunch at Taco Bell, not because I enjoy the irony of reading high-brow humor at the lowest-brow eating establishment yet invented by man, but because it is nearby, I am hungry, and you can get lunch there for $6.22 with tax. I order a #5 and am given a slip with the number 314 on it. I sit and read most of one of the essays, refusing to accept the fact that either it isn't funny or I just don't get it. Someone behind the counter calls out "Number 166!" I check my slip, which still says 314. I read some more, and still don't understand why the essay is funny. They call number 166 again, and I check my slip again. Still 314. More reading, more not getting it. 166 again. I check my slip a third time, wondering if 166 is hidden on it somewhere. It isn't. I wonder if everyone else who doesn't have number 166 is obsessively checking their slip, or if I am a particularly troubled individual.

They finally call 314, and I almost miss it because I am admiring the jawline of a rugged looking young man who resembles that guy who played the DJ on Northern Exposure. I wonder if that makes me a little bit gay.

I get my food and sit back down at the table where I had been reading. I realize, however, that my left side is flush against a wall, and being left-handed, this will make it awkward for me to eat my Taco Supremes. I wonder how weird it will look if I suddenly get up and move to the chair opposite me. I decide I don't care that much, and make the move.

I eat my Taco Supremes and then finish reading the essay. I still don't get it. I wonder how stupid I will look if I return the book.