Friday, November 4, 2016

Too early, and I mean it

Okay, this is just going beyond the beyond.

Yesterday morning, at 0545, I was walking through the Pentagon City mall, and look what I found workers doing:


Then this exchange took place on the Twitters-dot-com:


Well, after that kind of "Resistance is futile" snark, I got a little bolshie.


And in case you think that's an idle threat...


'Nuff said?

.



Thursday, November 3, 2016

Electile dysfunction

Like many Americans, the end of this election cycle cannot come too soon for me. Even though I know that, no matter the electoral outcome, the vileness and viciousness will continue apace for some time to come. This may not be the most disgusting campaign in US history, but it is the foulest that has had mass and social media to smear the fecal matter around.

By way of example, Imma give you two tweets that came by just this week.

Yesterday the New York Times posted a link to a story on how “white anxiety” has shaped the political landscape in the Anglo-American arena, citing Brexit and the Chaos Monkey as examples. Frankly, anyone who can’t see white “anxiety” under both of these campaigns needs to visit an optometrist. From Nigel Farage to the people at Republican rallies screaming “Jew-S-A” and roaring approval of the building of that xenophobic’s fantasy of a wall against Mexico, it’s all about fearing and hating The Other.

But, at least in this country, The Other also includes those with the XX chromosome configuration. Whatever else Hillary Clinton has going against her, one of her biggest transgressions in this lot's perception is being female and having the unmitigated temerity to be a serious contender for the one office that should be male-only. (Eight years ago, that office would have been marked Whites-Only, and breaking that barrier has just triggered more of this white male mouth foaming.)

Anyhow, it’s not even the NYT story that interests me, since that's pretty well only stating the bloody obvious. No, it was the stream of, well, white anxiety tweets that followed it, including this cherce juxtaposition:


I really got a kick out of the tweeter essentially proving the NYT’s point in a single, illiterate tweet. (Well, s/he’s only been on Twitter since March, and perhaps a continuous spittle of 2900 tweets since then against Clinton, Obama and anyone else not a Chaos Monkey doesn’t give you much of a chance to develop communication skills. Or cognitive ones.)

In particular, it’s the claim that recalcitrant illegal “immigrates” “disrespect women” that set me off. Yes, I know, the Chaos Monkey actually has assured us that “No one respects women more than me.” And he even ignored the wave of laughter in the studio that that statement prompted.

But this tweet came less than 24 hours after one of the Chaos Monkey’s Texas surrogates, Agricultural Commissioner Sid Miller, sent out this (here in a screen shot in a tweet by Montel Williams):


Miller’s office first claimed that the commissioner’s Twitter account had been hacked. Because it would be hard to convince anyone that his dog had got to his Blackberry. Then their story changed: it was the work of a staffer retweeting something and, “They didn’t notice it had a derogatory term in it.”

Oh, right.

It’s interesting that Miller, who’s had a Twitter account for three years, with 7800 tweets to his name (not counting that one, which was deleted apparently in the unrealized hope that no one had taken a screen shot), doesn’t appear to know the difference between “retweeting”—which, you know, shows the original tweet—and copying something you found and posting it as your very own, AKA "plagiarizing". It’s also, frankly, hard to believe that anyone in Miller’s office doesn’t recognize that word instantaneously as one you would not utter in the presence of any woman of your acquaintance without expecting to get your ass kicked. Hard.

Moreover, only last week Miller (or a hacker; or possibly a staffer) scoffed at Clinton’s caution in communications by tweeting that he don’t need no stinkin’ tweet checkers, because he’s “healthy as a bull”. And “All thoughts are my own.”


Unless, clearly, you tweet something you’re actually thinking, but it turns out to be just a week too soon to be publicly shared, and you have to blame it on hackers; or an aide; or muggers; or strolling mariachis.

And herein we find the entire Republican ethos, encapsulated in just three tweets. So, NYT, I’ll see your white anxiety and raise you frantic fear of feminism. It’s a witches brew for sure.

Oh, shoot: one more tweet from yesterday. Because redneck douchebaggery.


Lord, but I need alcohol.


Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Oh, my cups and saucers

On my first day at work here, ten months ago, my boss was showing me around the floor and announced, “[Employer] doesn’t provide tea and coffee. Some people go in on a coffee club. I just go outside when I need a fix.”

Well, I’ve been working in the tech field for so long that it never occurred to me that coffee would even be a thing. I mean, yeah—I can see that sodas, snacks and Friday afternoon beer and wine might not be on offer, but at every company I’ve worked at since the early 90s, coffee is basically table stakes.

And in the Valley They Call Silicon, they’ve moved well beyond the coffee pot stage: if it’s not outright espresso, they’re individual-serve pod-based machines. Some even grind the beans for each cup. I was disagreeably surprised to find that Cisco Systems is still really old-style, with coffee pots (and the cheapest industrially-extruded bottom-of-the-barrel no-name coffee on the planet) that seem to turn their contents to sludge within the first 20 minutes of sitting there. (I’m betting that the executive offices don’t sport this crap, but it’s apparently good enough for all the worker bees still left after multiple years of layoffs.)

So I was shocked. And I marked my boss up as somewhat cagy, because at no time in the interview process was this mentioned, and he was an employee of AOL in its high-flying days, so he’s well aware of the delta. He knew he was concealing pertinent information.

Well, after trying it on my own for a few months, spending $2.50 for a cup at the salad place on my way into work, I finally joined the Coffeebot club on my floor. It’s $5 a month. The coffee quality is on the lines of Cisco, tbh; I mean—how is it even possible to buy stuff this bad in an open, competitive marketplace?

(In fairness, I seem to be the only person in the club who doesn’t drown their java in cream and sugar. So I may be the only person who actually tastes the crap.)

Way back in the last century, I worked for an engineering company—one of the three largest in the world, all headquartered in the Pasadena area. Evidently having the employer supply coffee was a big deal (it was one of my first jobs, so I didn’t have any point of reference). There were machines, pots, packets of coffee, and ancillary stuff like sugar, sweetener and that ground-up Styrofoam fake cream-like product.

(I’ve never used cream, real or artificial, in coffee. But if I had done, a demonstration by a colleague at a much later job, on the other coast, in which he set that stuff alight, would have weaned me off of it. If you can use a powdered fake cream to break into a safe, I’m betting that you don’t really want to be drinking it.)

The thing about this setup was that the coffee machines weren’t hooked up to water lines, so if you wanted to make a pot, you had to rinse out the empty one, fill it with water and pour into the well of the machine. Then you did the usual: opened the coffee packet, emptied the contents into the filter, put the filter in the basket and hit start.

Well, you would not believe what a rift this caused in The Force. As I mentioned, this was one of the Big Three engineering companies, which is to say that it was 98% male, with women almost exclusively in support roles. There was one female engineer I worked with, I was a tech writer, and there was a woman in marketing. All the others were pretty much admins.

So, when the guys wanted coffee, they’d barrel into the kitchenettes and come to a halt when they discovered that there was only a splash left in the bottom of the pot. Seriously—at least once a week I’d come across the pathetic sight of a middle-aged white guy in short sleeved white shirt and a pocket protector standing in front of the machine gazing dejectedly at the empty (or as good as) pot. If a woman walked into the space, his face would light up, and he’d hand her the pot and wait.

No, I am not making that up.

Well, I’ve noticed that, while not quite as dire as those old days at Jacobs, there’s still a custom whereby people will happily take the last viable cup of coffee and walk away without making a replacement pot. Because, in this case, that would entail emptying and rinsing the coffee basket, scooping grounds from the canister right next to the machine into it, rinsing out the pot and filling it with filtered water, pouring it into the well, and hitting Brew.

You can see where this would constitute an undue burden.

(And, as the first person to make coffee in the morning, let me just say that walking in there at 0630 and finding the last sludge in the bottom of the pot still there, along with the 17-hour-old used grounds in the basket for me to empty and clean is not my idea of a morning wake-me-up.)

Okay, but that’s not even the really interesting part. Apparently the supply of coffee has been consumed at an inordinate rate. First there were time/date stamps on the Coffeebot white board, then injunctions to the effect that people are not supposed to eat the coffee. Then the canister was marked at a level to signify 1.5 pounds, so the disappearance could be more carefully monitored.

Then the Coffeebot instruction poster was amended to include the names of official Coffeebot contributors. IN REALLY LARGE FONT. I guess in an effort to shame poachers.

But the corker was when I went into the kitchenette last week and stumbled into a conversation between two other club members about trying to quantify how much consumption is “normal” use. (“If there are four pots a day, that’s [some figure of ounces] of ground coffee, so 1.5 pounds should last [some period of time].”) They said they were engaged in "coffee sleuthing", because apparently running through that quantity of coffee in less than three days is excessive.

And they were discussing installing a web can to monitor who actually takes coffee from the pot.

Look—if I’m lying, I’m dying. I do not make this stuff up.

Leaving aside the issue that where they were talking about mounting the camera wouldn’t have provided them with any useful information (unless shots of hands emptying and refilling the basket could be considered useful), and the whole creepiness of setting up traps for your fellow employees, how petty do you have to be to even consider it?

First of all—this coffee is so bad, it’s probably on some war crimes lists. Second: if someone’s in such dire need of any coffee-like drink substance that they’re willing to dance with death to snag a cup—I say, let ‘em have it. As it is, my $5 is going to pay for your half-and-half, which you apparently buy by the half-gallon and which I am never going to use. Do you hear me whinging about that?

In its efforts to appear more with-it, our HR has been talking about maybe standing up for coffee and tea in the kitchenettes. They announced this at a big all-staff meeting a few weeks ago. I got my dog into this fight as soon as I could. I recommended they not install coffee pot systems (because of the whole sludge thing), but go for one-cup-at-a-time jobbers. Either pods or individual grindings at point of dispensing.

But then I went for broke: made an impassioned plea for a full-blown espresso machine in the area currently underused 11th floor lunch room. HR has plans for converting the space into a “downtime” area—sofas, rugs, possibly a guitarist, I don’t know. But I got in there and made the case for installing an espresso machine, which would give people a reason to go up there, even if they have coffee on their floors.

I see a doctor in a building near Union Station that has a heavy-duty commercial-grade espresso machine in the lobby. I sometimes invent reasons to visit this doctor, just so I can make a latte on my way in. And out. This would be my dream.


It even uses little disks instead of pods, so it’s environmentally friendly. Plus, it makes cold drinks, too. And it only costs $11K. But that’s list. Nobody pays list.

This may be an amenity too far, but I’m going to play it for all it’s worth. We deserve it. At least, I do.



Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Be even more afraid...

As I reported last week, we had an unfortunate incident in our computer server room. It was pretty gruesome. But it turns out that, at some point over the weekend, there was even worse.

When I got in yesterday morning, there was crime scene tape all over the windows and the entry door.



When I got closer—it turned out that there was a body, as well:



Clearly a scene of extreme violence, as witnessed by the one shoe all the way across the room. Don’t like to think about what that experience was like.

Evidently there was an unsuccessful attempt at making a break for it, too:


And to top it off, our CTO has been split in two in a particularly unsavory way:


Can’t wait for Thanksgiving.




Monday, October 31, 2016

Gratitude Monday: light over darkness

We’re in an interesting corner of the calendar, where days grow shorter and people of various traditions celebrate the triumph of light over darkness, of good over evil and of life over death.

Yesterday marked the first day of the Hindu festival of Diwali. I learned about Diwali when I moved to the Valley They Call Silicon. Since I was struggling with driving back the dark, I glommed onto it like limpets on a rock. Last night I again massed candles to drive back all manner of dark things. Not only do I like the soft light that groups of candles give off, the very act of lighting them one at a time and nursing along some of the ones at the end of their life slows me down. It calms me down.



Filling a room with candle light takes time; you can’t flip a switch and move on to the next task on your to-do list. And if you’re lighting those floating jobbers, you have to be very focused on not disturbing the water, because then it dowses the flames and you have to wipe them off and start over again.




It’s like the count-breaths-to-21 methodology of meditation: if you lose count because your monkey mind is distracted, you have to begin again from one.

There are some days I never make it into double digits.

But there’s something about knowing how happy the moving lights will make me that enables me to persevere with candles. I light them, sit back and watch; and for at least a few minutes the world around me is peaceful and full of hope. Light prevails over darkness, love conquers fear, and good triumphs over evil.

Today—the holiday you know as Halloween—is also the Celtic holiday Samhain. It marks the bringing in of the harvest and the envelopment of the world in winter darkness. And tonight is the night when the doors between the living and the dead open, and protective and cleansing bonfires are lit.




Today is also el Día de Muertos in the Mexican tradition, when the living open their lives to the dead, who are celebrated with sugar skulls, favorite foods and drink, both in the home and via picnics at cemeteries. The celebration runs through tomorrow (All Saints Day, in the Catholic Church) and Wednesday.


Because on Wednesday, Christians mark All Souls’ Day, remembering the faithful departed. Not precisely inviting their spirits back into daily life, but certainly making space for the memories and praying for their souls.

This year I have one more custom to add: the yahrzeit candle of Jewish tradition, to mark the anniversary of my BFF’s death. That happened the 18th of October last year, so I’ve been more focused than usual on consciously filling my life with light. This consciousness includes gratitude—acknowledging the things and events, both large and small, that connect me with the world (and the spirits) around me. Walking in the light, as it were.

Like lighting many candles in a dark room, this takes time. You don’t flip a switch and fill your life with light; you light one candle at a time, and nurse the weak ones along to give their best.

So: light over darkness, good over evil, life over death, love over fear. These are the things I give thanks for at this time of year.