Of annoyances, and cults

We'll start with the annoyances. (I've noticed that I'm using the Royal We a whole lot lately, especially in work conversations. As in, "We figured out that..." Or, "We thought about it, and decided..." I don't really know why I'm doing it; in some cases it's probably to give what I'm saying more weight, as if I represent a consensus of people, and in some cases I think it's because I don't want to sound like I'm singing my own praises by saying that "I" did something or solved some problem. OK, I guess we're starting with a huge parenthetical aside. Anyway, moving on.)

Like millions of people, I use my DVR to record The Office and 30 Rock. And like millions of people, I miss the first two minutes of The Office every week because NBC refuses to sync its schedule with whatever clock my cable company uses for the DVR. So, like millions of people, I spend a few minutes every week giving my cable box the finger (well, maybe I'm the only one doing that, but still). Yes, I realize I could set the DVR to start recording a few minutes earlier, but unfortunately my wife is utilizing both DVR tuners at the time to tape weepy drama shows on other channels, leaving me forever doomed to miss the opening joke of The Office. It also leaves me with the first few minutes of ER, which is currently in the midst of the most interminable final season ever. Since our cable box treats signals from our remote control as friendly suggestions more than anything, I spend a few more minutes every week pounding on my nonresponsive remote and yelling, "Why won't you fucking die already?" to ER as Breathless Voiceover Guy tells us about the nonstop excitement of the upcoming episode, which is the MOST DRAMATIC EVER FINAL LAST DON'T MISS IT!!!!!

(Another aside, lest I build any kind of coherent narrative: I've seen one half of one episode of ER in my life. In those 30 minutes, a baby died, and another guy had to be shocked back to life, which lit his chest hair on fire. I was not compelled to watch the next week.)

Moving on to the cults. Namely, Facebook, which I finally joined this week after caving to peer pressure, threats, and my own curiosity. I also needed another internet-based time suck, since football season is finished and there aren't any good video games coming out right now that I can obsess over. Mission definitely accomplished on that front; my biggest worry now is that I'm accepting friend requests too quickly, and that the requesters will think that I'm sitting on my couch all day, staring at my page and hitting the refresh button. Which is only partially true. Facebook and the social networking thing has been written about and covered from every conceivable angle, so I'm not even going to attempt an original thought here. I remain a little leery of it; there's only so many times you can look at thumbnail photos of people who tortured you in high school and lament that they didn't get fat. I have yet to experience the thrill of shunning a friend request from somebody I don't like, which might maintain my interest for a little longer. I eagerly await that opportunity.

Get your damn Jesus out of my inbox

My company recently "resource actioned" a large number of people. Note that they weren't referred to as layoffs, because layoffs draw negative press attention. The key difference here from the corporation's perspective is that the affected employees have 30 days to find new jobs within the company before they're actually tossed out. I've actually been through this process twice before and ended up with better jobs both times, so it can work. Of course, I didn't get "actioned" during a time when the entire company was under a hiring freeze, as it is now (comments about how my employer is using nebulous fears of "the economy" to justify the layoffs, despite the fact that we beat all earning expectations last year, will be left for another post). Anyway, to make a long story short (which I could've done from the start, but I have a rep for verbosity to maintain), a lot of people I work with are being let go right now.

Part two of my story begins with another coworker creating a publicly-available distribution list for over two thousand people in our organization, despite my best attempts to talk him out of it. Those things are usually kept under lock and key, and for damn good reason. Anyway, it came as no surprise to anyone with half a brain that the "resource actioned" people would use that distribution list on their way out the door. In the past few days, I haven't gotten any hostile denunciations of management (sadly), but I have recieved a wide variety of farewells and resumes. Using the list to say goodbye is one thing; I understand that, even if I personally wouldn't do it since the list is so bloody huge. Using it to find a new job makes me vaguely uncomfortable; I realize the job market is difficult, but blasting your resume to thousands of strangers doesn't seem like a good tactic.

None of this would be overly interesting, except that every single one of these emails has mentioned God or Jesus in some form, without fail. I guess pending unemployment could drive some people to religion, but it's weird that everyone took time out of their goodbyes to assert that Jesus exists and loves us and will guide us if we put our faith in him. If I were more of a conspiracy theorist, I might suggest that my company took this opportunity to purge the religious nuts. The whole trend is actually weirdly helpful; I always feel bad for people who lose their jobs, but I feel less bad knowing that they're people who want to use my time and company resources to tell me about all about Christ's love.

Other random notes:

• My web hosting company let me know that my domain name was about to expire, so I sent them an email saying, in its entirety, "Please renew my domain for three years at the cost of $24 per year." And they wrote back, "We would be happy to renew your domain, but first we need to know how long you'd like to renew it for." I could have replied, but I figured there was no possible way that the respondent could be so dumb and that I must be missing something. So I called customer service, and after the guy who answered read my service ticket and cleaned up the coffee that shot out of his nose, we shared a good laugh over how inept his colleagues can be.


• I'm making a remarkably half-assed attempt at legitimate software ownership. I've had my eye on Adobe's Web CS4 for some time, but something (guilt? paranoia? lack of a decent torrent file?) has kept me from pirating it, and something else (the $1700 price tag) has kept me from buying it. I had an epiphany last week, however, when I remembered that I have friends who are students. One trip to the local university bookstore later, and I've got CS4 for the considerably more reasonable price of $350. Has anyone ever paid full price for this thing, or is part of the fun getting a discount or getting someone else to buy it for you?


• Lest anyone think the previous item indicates any thriftiness on my part, I'm seriously considering buying Street Fighter IV, despite the fact that I suck at fighting games, don't have the patience to get better, and would actually have to buy a specialized controller to adequately play the damn thing. I have issues.

Look upon my keyboard, ye Mighty, and despair!

Necessity is supposed to be the mother of invention. For me, it's the absentee father of trips to Best Buy (along with its friends Irritation, Boredom, Malaise, and Wednesday).

Today's necessity? A new keyboard. I've had a wireless keyboard/mouse combo for about six years now. The rechargeable battery in the mouse tops out at about 20 minutes of use per three hours of charging time, but I have mice spilling out my desk drawers. The bigger issue is the keyboard, which is noisier than D-Day and therefore no good for insomnia-fueled late-night browsing, as the office is next to the bedroom (insert surfing-for-porn joke here). Also, the keys have to descend what seems like six inches into the keyboard to register anything, so typing for half an hour is more strenuous than giving someone a deep-tissue massage.

I've been wanting a new keyboard for a while, but I woke up this morning and realized that A) keyboards are not that expensive, B) I'm a fully-employed adult with disposable income, and C) it'd been at least three days since I'd been to Best Buy, and the employees there were probably starting to worry about me.

So off I went. Unfortunately, it didn't take long for the buzz I get from being in a whole store full of New Electronics Smell to be replaced by growing annoyance at the general keyboard-buying population. Apparently consumers are clamoring for bizarrely-shaped ergonomic "wave" keyboards with... really noisy keys that travel a great distance before registering. They're shiny, pretty, futuristic-looking, and 100% not what I want. I was close to yanking the keyboard off one of their floor model HP computers, stuffing it in my pants, and charging out the door, but I ended up with a "gaming keyboard" instead.

I've written about video games in this space before, but I'm almost exclusively referring to console games. I lack the money and patience necessary to upgrade my computer hardware every six months, which takes me out of the PC gaming market. However, I've clearly been missing out on the "game-themed computer peripherals" phenomenon. My new keyboard (in addition to its tacky rubber finish and ninja-esque quietness) features "slim keycap structure with Hyperesponse technology" and "1000Hz Ultrapolling / 1ms response time" and "Gaming cluster with anti-ghosting capability."

Motherfucker is also backlit with blue LEDs. So there's that. Also, the opening panel on the (fashionably all-black) box is labeled "Nexus of Dominion." Inside, there's a message from something called RazerGuy claiming that "You now have the tactical advantage on every terrain, and your enemies' fates are in your hands. Let the hunting begin."

It may surprise you that there's a photo of RazerGuy on the box as well. It will not surprise you that he is pale, skinny, and has a bitchin' wafro.

Finally, the box also boasts a Certificate of Authenticity that says, "There's no turning back... You're now officially part of the Cult of Razer (tm) and you own a page in the history of gaming."

So if this blog post seemed a little more menacing, a bit more intimidating than normal, well, now you know why. After re-reading it, the only difference I can see is that I've shattered my personal record for hyphen usage, but I might be immune to petty intimidation now. I guess today's lesson is that you should always be wary... you might walk into Best Buy looking for a regular old keyboard, and walk out a certified, bad-ass member of the Cult of Razer (tm).

Basic math

Here's a little equation I've been working on today:
Illiterate minion + overworked boss + slightly complex issue = total clusterfuck

I'll elaborate.

We've got a bunch of people with various specialties and roles in our organization. We need to track these people in a database so we can send them the information they need to sell our products. Creating this database has been one of the more agonizing projects I've ever been a part of, but I'm not going to tell the full story because I don't think my keyboard would survive the pounding.

Anyway, part of the project is deciding which roles and specialties we need to track, and which we can safely lump with others and ignore. I have delegated this to my minion, partly because she's the one who will work with the database, but mostly because I just got sick of dealing with it. My boss wants to go one direction, which happens to be completely wrong. The minion can't formulate a coherent argument to change her mind, and the boss is too busy to think it through any further or get together with both of us on a conference call. As of about 30 minutes ago, I've thrown up my hands and resolved to accept whatever comes out of this unholy union of inattention and stupidity, since I no longer have to use the damn thing.

My only regret here is that we've got a fantastic database guy working with us on the technical side. But now, after the third time we've completely changed directions, he probably thinks we're a bunch of meth addicts. So it goes.

One more random note of frustration: I've had no fewer than five different people this month explain away a missed deadline, failure to follow basic directions, or refusal to learn new things by saying, "I'm not technical." Which might be a reasonable excuse if they didn't work at one of the largest tech companies in the world. I understand that not everybody is as big a nerd as me, or gets the same buzz that I do when they install and run new software for the first time. Which is why I wrote step-by-step instructions with fucking pictures and sent them to everyone, with a giant flashing due date in bold at the top and a gracious offer to answer any questions. If you can't succeed given all that, it's not because you're "not technical," it's because you're either lazy or stupid.

The Anti-Midas, at your service

Everything I touch these days breaks. It started with our garage door opener; turns out that if the gear that turns the chain is out of alignment, banging on said gear with a hammer won't fix the problem. The new opener is somewhat precariously installed, awaiting delivery of a replacement tensioning screw I may or may not have broken while putting it together. I also managed to snap off the (stupidly delicate) plastic tabs on the opener button. The fine gentlemen at Home Depot thankfully let me plunder another opener box for a new plastic button, though they told me not to stop at the register and carry the button out in my pocket. Three cheers for retailer-mandated shoplifting.

The entropy-by-touch continued with my car itself, which kicked on the "Check Engine" light as I was driving away from the dealership, having just paid for my 90,000 mile maintenance. I haven't had time to take the car back in, because the javascript code I added to two dozen web pages broke links in Firefox browsers (but not Internet Explorer or Chrome, oddly). Fixing the coding issue has been an absolute slog, because our normally rock-solid internet provider has been having random outages all week, the new script file broke the company server it was uploaded on, the content management system that stores the web pages keeps crashing when I try to save them, and the editor in charge of approving my changes came down with pneumonia.

Seriously.

If blogger.com or Google itself should wink out of existence tomorrow, my devoted hypothetical readers will know exactly what happened.

Since I have no doubt that my entire company will soon fall victim to some bizarre trading scandal and go belly-up, I'm going to need another source of income. I've decided to start posting ads on Craigslist offering my voodoo services. For a small fee, I will hang out with your enemies, use their electronics, operate their appliances, handle their food, and root for their favorite team in the Super Bowl. And now I'm shutting off my computer before I cause a failure in the power grid.

That giant sucking sound

I could discuss at great lengths all the things I enjoy about working from home. But lately I've found some serious disadvantages. For one, since our organization within the company is so spread out, we have to completely rely on conference calls for all meetings. A lot of times, this is wonderful; if I'm not an integral part of the call, I can zone out and nap while listening for my name. However, I'm apparently more important than I used to be, because I've had to actively participate in a lot more calls the last few weeks, enough to notice some serious fundamental flaws in conference calls.

For one, it's too easy to skip a call. When your whole organization works in the same building, there's nowhere to hide come meeting time. Your coworkers have seen you around the office, and everyone is expected to show up. But if your coworkers are in Texas and California and don't even know what you look like, it's a lot easier to justify ditching the meeting and taking an extra-long lunch. This has led to me having the exact same conversation five different times with five different managers in the last two weeks, which could have been avoided had they all attended the first conference call like they'd agreed to do.

Second, there's no subtle, polite way to tell someone to shut the fuck up. When everyone's clustered around a table, it's easy to tell when you're carrying on a bit too long. People start shifting in their chairs, fidgeting with their pens, avoiding eye contact, etc. But on a conference call you actually have to cut people off by yelling at them, which I don't have the authority to do at this point in my career (when I do get to that point, look out).

On a related note, nobody listens anymore. And why would they? Ninety percent of these conference calls are taken up by bloviating gasbags in love with the sound of their own voices. I spent two hours today answering a dozen slightly different phrasings of the exact same question, because every time someone asked it, they rambled in corporate-speak (teaming, strategic partnerships, deliverables, blah-de-blah) for so long that everyone else tuned them out. At least I was only on a conference call, so I could gesticulate wildly and give the telephone the finger repeatedly.

Moving on.

It's far too late to make any meaningful comments about the elections, but a friend of mine raised a very valid point when he asked, "Why don't victorious politicians and campaign managers shower each other in booze like athletes do when they win a championship?" Clearly, there's no valid reason for this not to happen, and it's not too late for Obama to pour champagne all over Biden.

No other thoughts on Obama, except that he seems to be my generation's JFK. I fit (barely) into CNN's Young Voter Demographic, and had never really understood the fascination with JFK and the other Kennedys that my parents have until now. Obama's the first politician I can remember that people seemed genuinely excited to vote for. Or maybe I'm just getting less cynical in my old age.

Visions of damnation

I'm not a big believer in the concept of hell, for reasons I won't go into here for fear of alienating any of my thousands of readers. However, I was raised Catholic (got confirmed, even!), so I've spent some time thinking about eternal punishment. And I realized the other day that I know what it is.

If there is a hell, it's me, alone in a movie theater, forced to watch every embarrassing, stupid, boorish moment of my life as narrated by Dan Dierdorf.

I reached this conclusion while watching my beloved Broncos go down in flames against one of the worst teams in the NFL the other week as Dan Dierdorf howled with pleasure. Around about the fifth time he started a sentence with, "If you don't think the Kansas City Chiefs aren't fired up for this game..." I muted the volume and barely resisted the urge to fling the remote at the dog. I appreciate that Dierdorf is there to inject a little drama into the proceedings, but there's no need to turn an early-season contest between a mediocre-but-lucky Denver team and a hapless Kansas City squad into the second coming of the Miracle on Ice. Every play, no matter how mundane, turned into the epic struggle of plucky underdogs against overwhelming odds. Every tackle by a Kansas City player was a scream of defiance into the cold dark void of an uncaring universe. After I while I stopped thinking of ways the Broncos could get back into the game and started imagining scenarios involving me presenting Dierdorf with some kind of Crappy Sports Announcing Lifetime Achievement award, then removing his larynx with a plastic spoon.

I'm sure none of this had anything to do with my team losing. Anyway, that's my hell:

"If you don't think that the pretty girl didn't just throw up in her mouth when she realized the geeky boy was asking her out, and that he geniunely believed he had a shot..."

"Oh, ho, ho! Let me tell you, that was one AWKWARD, mumbling answer that guy just gave there when the popular kids asked him how he was doing. If you don't think they're not looking at him like he's some kind of MUTANT from another PLANET right now..."

On a completely different topic, this week's quote of the century:

"Really, if you are a competitor in any field of human endeavor, you haven't lived until you've been called 'be-atch' by one of your opponents."

That comes from the late, great Ralph Wiley. I was re-reading some of his old ESPN columns the other day and stumbled, once again, upon this gem. Of course, when reading Wiley, it feels like I spend most of my time stumbling over gems. I just spent twenty minutes trying to describe what I love about his writing, and I failed miserably. Which, I guess, is the difference between me and him; he made something I can't even achieve look effortless. The best way I can put it is that he's one of two people (Mike Royko is the other) who make me want to be a writer.

Why the sudden nostalgia for a dead sports columnist? No idea. Probably just an excuse to put that quote up there. Enjoy.