Category: Misc

I’ve been kind of productive this weekend.

I was going to complain about being exhausted, but I’m actually really not. Do I like the roll in every day? Not in the least. Is it really kicking my ass yet? No, not so much.

The urge to find some place new to stay, however, is much stronger than it was even last weekend. I want to be closer to the city and work. This needs to happen sooner, rather than later.

We can do this; just need to refocus on what’s available.

So that’s the goal in the next couple of months. Hopefully my employer will be willing to work with me on things.

The Internets are saying that FOX News is doing a silent boycott of Twitter after ANTIFA-linked thugs published one of their hosts’ addresses.  Link  Link

Twitter was slow in responding to these people.  Facebook was quick.

But instead of calling them to the fucking Senate for hours of berating by guys who probably don’t even know how to dial a cellphone, they took their message elsewhere.

That’s completely appropriate.

The Internets are saying that FOX News is doing a silent boycott of Twitter after ANTIFA-linked thugs published one of their hosts’ addresses.  Link  Link
Twitter was slow in responding to these people.  Facebook was quick.
But instead of calling them to the fucking Senate for hours of berating by guys who probably don’t even know how to dial a cellphone, they took their message elsewhere.
That’s completely appropriate.

Pretty clear now that I’m being laid off come tomorrow.  A younger, healthier me would have been excited by this sort of liberation.  Old, wobbly, blind, responsible me, not as much.  Trying to capture lessons learned from this seems somewhat pointless.  The people most responsible wouldn’t actually learn anything from the mistakes many of us made along the way.

The larger lesson?  Stove-piping everything just doesn’t work anymore.  Maybe it did ten years ago.  Maybe you could just try to make incremental improvements to the existing stuff.  But what does the existing stuff do?  Why are people using it?  Those questions remain unanswered.  The graying set don’t bother to even ask those questions.

Why would they when they believe what exists is nearly perfect as it is?  That’s doubly true when there’s financial incentive for both them, and their customers in creating new, expensive, Rube Goldberg replacements?  There’s markup, relationship-building, etc. on every frill that ends up in the design.

Going back to what I wrote about  last year, there’s a few unwritten assumptions with the oft-used tree graphic.

1.  The customer knows what he wants and needs.   Unfortunately, that’s not the case.  And, what’s worse in IT, the vendors hit up the customers, so the customers aren’t looking for a black rubber tire swing, they’re looking for the pretty colored seat, and the “cotton-nylon rope.”  (Excuse the reference…..no, I haven’t read it.)  If the customer actually does need something that’s not going to mess up a pretty white dress, there’s ways to express that in terms of requirements that’d end up excluding a filthy used tire.  That’s not to say you spec-out a certain vendor’s product by name, either.

2.  The Engineers design based on the spec.  Unfortunately, that’s not true, especiallly when it comes to IT systems.  Designers have their own personal preferences, sure.  But they also know which vendors pick up the bar tab, hand out neat swag, etc..  Instead of guarding against the sorts of vendor sway that frequently come from “sales engineers,” managers actually encourage these sorts of interactions.

But thinking about my current ending gig, so much effort’s been expended on enhancing something that already exists, without understanding what it’s supposed to do.  To depart from the tire swing, for a moment, I learned to ride a bike on a bike equipped with a vinyl padded bike seat.  Did that mean I couldn’t ride one with a hard plastic seat, or a big banana seat?

To many IT people, yes, yes it does.  Users expect to click Start, then navigate to programs, etc..  Go to a site on the web?  Well, Start, Programs, Netscape, Netscape Navigator, enter the URL in the address bar, and so on.  Maybe there’s now just an icon on the splash screen that gets the user to that site?  Maybe it’s now a fully-integrated web app running directly on the device?

Well, that’s bad news for people who’ve “fostered relationships,” with vendors.  It’s worse for government customers who want their solutions to get more expensive so that their funding stays up.  It’s bad news for the design engineers who spent countless hours, paid tens of thousands of dollars for vendor certifications.

I’m going to stop and STFU, now.  I have job searching to do.  *sigh*

I know I’ve been ignoring this, but, well, lots of shit going on.

First, shortly after I wrote that last entry, things really went to shit with work. Company missed payroll again, and one of the three people in my office quit because of it….

The office closed down Thursday.

I’m now working in Richmond until I can find another job. Had considered starting a biz w/ my boss, but….have now come to the conclusion that that’s just not a good idea(tm).

Girl and I are still together, over a year now. It’s odd how we work, but we do work. And I really am in love with her. I think I will probably be making some gemological investments soon, as she’s pronounced that she really does want to be my wife…..

And I say again, what the fuck, over?

I haven’t written anything, really, since September. There’s lots of reasons for that, but I haven’t really felt like writing. For the most part, my life has been living hell, mainly because of work. The only thing that’s kept me from swallowing a shotgun is that I really have met the person I want to spend the rest of my life with. She’s wonderful in ways I can’t begin to describe. So, to catch up, I guess what I’m going to do is compartmentalize my life into three areas, and go into them sequentially — work, love, everything else.

So, let’s start with work…..I’m just going to use initials, instead of real names or pseudonyms. I have trouble keeping up with the latter, anyway. Excuse the stream-of-consciousness, but I can’t really help it.

I mentioned in my entry on 9/22 that the contract I’d been hired for got cancelled. To me, it wasn’t all that big a deal, because I was already working on these research projects we’d gotten contracts for. The guy (RB) who’d originally been hired to manage the research projects took over my slot on the other contract. No big deal, really, except that he, in essence, got promoted ahead of me, even though I’m more qualified, and is making more money than I am, even though I have just two years fewer experience, but I do have a degree, and he doesn’t.

Who it was a big deal to were the three people who were working on that contract, RB, WB, and BG. Because there were a lot of things to wrap up with the project, they had work until about the end of October. I, meanwhile, was up to my ears in work with the research projects, as well as writing proposals for new projects. In the span of six months, I wrote probably close to 300 pages of technical papers.

I guess that’s probably a good enough excuse for not writing here….

Anyway, things around the office at that time were pretty darn miserable. My boss, thankfully, was out on travel quite a bit, but, the company missed payroll repeatedly, and basic needs weren’t being met. I wrote about my trip to Phoenix back in September — I filed an expense claim for that trip, as well as another short trip, two days after I got back. I’d filed another claim a couple of weeks before I left, most of which was around $300 in priniting costs incurred on behalf of the company president, preparing presentations for a briefing they were going to do. All told, the company owed me close to $800.

After a month of not getting reimbursed, I started getting really pissy about it. I talked to RB about it several times, as well as the office assistant, MK. I kind of snapped at my boss one afternoon, and he called in RB to ask wtf was going on with me….why my attitude was so bad. RB told him about my expense checks….that I’d been working 60 hours a week, and struggling to make my bills, because the company hadn’t paid me. From that point on, my boss has been totally different to me. I really haven’t had a problem with him. Maybe he felt guilty about pukin’ in my car, but I don’t think that’s it, really. I’ve bailed the guy out on a lot of stuff, and I think he finally realizes that. Maybe I’m not the sunniest person around, but I do get the job done, and done well.

In October, too, I interviewed for two jobs. One I could have had, if I’d wanted to take it. The other I bombed the interview. The one I could have had, I ended up not taking for two reasons… One, it would have ended up being about a $10k paycut after I calculated in the costs of my benefits. The salary wasn’t too much different, really, only about $5k less, but they didn’t pay for a lot of things that are included in my current job. The other reason I didn’t take it is because I thought I wouldn’t like the work, and didn’t feel like I could commit to staying in the position for the long-term. One of my friends is part-owner of the company, so I just told him the truth about it. He actually had offered me a job, previously, but the radio station beat the offer. I really regret now, not taking the job. I stayed, partially, also, because I’d been promised a considerable end-of-year bonus from my current job. What I’d been told was that the previous year’s bonuses averaged $10k. I figured, hell, I can stay around through the end of the year, and get the bonus. It can’t be that bad….

But, actually, it is. MK quit the week before Thanksgiving, which really cramped what I was doing with the research papers. While she didn’t contribute a whole lot in the way of content, she was excellent at making sure that my writing explained the concepts, and was easily understandable. When she left, I was really on my own as far as the writing goes — the other people in the company can barely read, much less write.

One of the last things that she did with me was attend a meeting with a large defense contractor. Let’s just say that they’ve built spacecraft, and tons of aircraft. With us in this meeitng was a guy the company president had found who he was wooing to become “Vice President of Business Development.” After the meeting with Defenseco, this guy and I got into it the first time. He used a bullshit buzzword term when talking about our research projects, and when it came dribbling out of his peniswrinkle mouth, my boss visably cringed. (I say penis wrinkle, because this guy looks like a dick. Seriously.) My boss (who, at the time, was the only corporate VP), was also unimpressed. We recommended to the president that they not hire walkingdick. He got hired, anyway.

Walkingdick has proceeded to make lots of people in the companys’ lives hell, focusing on meaningless symbolism bullshit, while earning lots of money, and not actually winning any business. Oh, yes, but he’s “raised the profile of the company,” and “fostered important relationships.” Fuck all that. When your company is failing to make payroll, none of that shit matters. What matters is getting contracts and bringing in revenue.

And I’m stopping for now……more later….