Culturally, in America, you are what you do.
In a very real sense, that means when you’re unemployed, you’re nobody.
Even though I know, intellectually, this was just a circumstantial mismatch… there’s a part of me still trying to figure out what I did wrong.
Filed under: Business, Philosophy
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I woke up this morning at 2 AM to work on the stuff I’m doing for the EU protocol documentation effort. Around 7:30 I managed to get a big obstacle handled, so I could make real forward progress for the first time since the middle of last week.
And at 8 AM, I found out my employer -Â RDA Corporation -Â is terminating my employment.
It’s really one of those things that mystifies me. I came on board to do a specific job, and I was summarily pushed out of the project by a Microsoft FTE who didn’t like my methods. The projects since then had been a bad fit in oh, so many ways… fundamentally, I’m a shirt-and-tie go-to-the-office kind of person. RDA’s Redmond office is largely a virtual team environment, where your work day starts when you wake up and ends when you go to bed and in between you don’t really see anyone or collaborate in any real sense.
I don’t work well that way. I told them I don’t work well that way, from day one. And in my latest position, the state of the infrastructure was very, very immature… large swaths of support materials didn’t really exist, and “features” of the software I was using simply didn’t work. It looked like it would work, so I made estimates accordingly… and then I ended up past deadline because when it came down to the wire, the foundation was mud.
What surprises me is that this is precisely what I said at the beginning of the contract: that I was concerned about scope creep if the infrastructure wasn’t what we expected, and the language of the SOW was not specific enough for my taste.
They’re a great company. We didn’t fit well together, but honestly, I’d go back to them in a second given the right opportunity. It’s just that the right opportunity never quite materialised, and I guess they ran out of patience before I did.
I’m kind of lost now. Yesterday, on the way to work, my car just blew up. It’s unsalvageable. I spent four and a half hours on the side of the road with a dead cell phone. It really sucked. And things just keep getting worse.
Momentum being what it is, and since I’m a problem solver at heart, I’m going to finish up the stuff I was working on and send it to my PM anyway. I’ve spent four days trying to get over this hurdle, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to drop everything just because I don’t get paid for it. I’m not really in this field for the money, anyway.
Filed under: Business, Economics, Philosophy
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Every once in a while, I’m reminded that people get creeped out if someone can figure out where they were on a given date and time.
But why does that bother people? After all, if you go anywhere at all and encounter someone you know, that person knows where you were and can tell anyone he likes. Theoretically, you could tell this person not to tell anybody he saw you, but that would just make it worse. And if you didn’t see him, but he saw you, it’s every bit as bad.
I thought of this today because I turned on my Zune to squirt somebody a copy of Black Tide’s single “Black Abyss”, and there on my “Social” tab I saw a gamer tag I knew from XBox Live. Given the range of the Zune’s wireless receiver, that means I know this person (or at least, his Zune) was in building 34 on the Microsoft Redmond campus at 2:30 this afternoon, while he knows absolutely nothing of this.
My personal opinion is that if you’re not up to anything illicit, you shouldn’t care who knows where you were and when. So I should be able to walk up to him and say “hey, I saw you were in building 34 earlier” and he should say “yeah, I was”. But what really happens in these cases is that people act suspicious and say “who told you that, then?” while furtively glancing about. They want to know who told me they were there - because that will tell them who they can’t trust. If I say I saw the Zune listed as nearby, he’ll probably just turn off his Zune’s wireless and then I won’t see him next time.
I get really tired of people being so antisocial. I like to go out and see people I know. I like to run into them days later and say “hey, saw you at the concert last week”. And it really annoys me when they get cagey and say things like “what concert, I didn’t see any concert” and then you realise they blew off their SO to go see it. It’s like everybody I know is lying to the rest of the world about who they are and what they like and where they go. God forbid I see someone coming out of a gay bar.
“What? The uh, the Madison’s uh, a gay bar? Why, I uh, never knew.”
Well, gee, it sure looked like the guy hanging all over you knew. But I won’t say that, because I know what you really mean: “nobody knows I’m gay”. Everybody sort of grasps the idea that appearance is reality, but nobody wants to alter the reality to match their desired appearance. If you don’t want to be caught going out to gay bars - don’t go! Then you can’t be caught. If you want to go out to gay bars, then accept up front that you will be caught, and when you get caught… just draw yourself up and say “why, yes, I was out looking for hot young college dick last weekend; and I found it, too”.
Privacy is a polite fiction we maintain by mutual consensus. That’s all it is. It’s not a right. Expect that people will always know the truth if they care enough to look for it, and it just makes your life so much easier. You don’t have to hide or lie or make stuff up. Just tell the truth. Isn’t that easy?
Filed under: Gay Rights, Philosophy, Security
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