August 14, 2001
scatopy too
Ella Fitzgerald's singing something over my speakers; the stars are shining on her caravan. She's the marijuana jazz queen: sweet, smoky, and oh so bad. Sing it, Ella.
I thought I would write something vaguely serious about things that are happening to somebody important in my life, but I decided I wouldn't. It's not really my story anyway, and I think if I actually tried to write something serious, I'd start bleeding out the eyes. So, instead, I present you with a small melange of completely scatter-brained and disconnected issues in the life of yours truly.
1.
Birds are pooping on Bob. It's pissing me off.
You remember that I got Bob cleaned last week, right? (Sorry, dude. Bobby, though I'm telling you, you're seriously wrong on this one. I've looked all over Bob, and I've yet to find a single breast. Admittedly, possession of breasts isn't necessary an indicator of femininity, and absence of same isn't an indicator of masculinity, at least not if I'm any indication. However, in lieu of any other commanding features...) So, anyway, I paid some nice little car-washer-upper-people some big money to wash and wax the car, which they did. For all of two hours, he looked good. Then I got out of work, -- did I mention I did this on a late lunch break? -- and checked up on Bob, and he was covered with a thin film of dust.
Well, shit, thought I.
I drove home. I parked the car. The next morning I woke up, yawned, showered, dressed, and went out to the car ... only to discover that some overly generous avian had seen fit to deposit the processed leavings of his early morning breakfast on the windowshield.
Well, shit, thought I.
Fast forward to today, when I was getting into the car. Bob is now covered in dust and has little tiny white spots all over his roof and hood, from relatives of that same, initial bird. They're Hungarian or something. I don't know. It's like they have to share every single meal with complete strangers. I pulled out of the choice parking spot right in front of the apartment that I'd managed to land, a beautiful parallel parking job if I do say so myself, and just as I was turning a corner, something flickered in my peripheral vision. A new little white dot on the windowshield, right in front of me. Talk about adding insult to injury.
I cursed my way to work. I swear, if I get a choice in the matter, I'm coming back next life as a cat. A big cat. A big, clean, bird-eating cat.
2.
The Firecracker came stomping into work yesterday, and instantly came crashing around the corner to our corner of the office. "YOU GUYS," she wailed. "YOU GUYS, I DO SOMETHING AWFUL YESTERDAY. I ALMOST KILL MY BAY-BEE."
Apparently, she was changing her son's diapers on their changing table -- at this point in the story, she jabbed her chest with the blade of her hand to show us how tall it was -- and had strapped her son in with some sort of belt that these things come with. She turned away to get some water, "BECAUSE HE DO POOPY," she explained, (I can just imagine how her son will cringe when he's introducing his fiancee to his parents and his mom tells her how she once nearly killed him), and somehow while her back was turned, he managed to squirm out of the belt and fell off the table.
"I TURN AROUND AND HE ON FLOOR," she grieved. "HE CRY, HE LAND ON HEAD, I NEARLY KILL HIM. I BAD MOTHER."
"Where is he?" we asked, hopeful; if she'd brought him, we would have had a toy for the day.
"IN DAY CARE. I CAN NO LOOK AT HIM. I FEEL SO GUILTY. HE CRY AND HE CRY. I CALL DOCTOR AND HE SAY NOT BRING HIM IN, I DO 20 THINGS INSTEAD. I PLAY WITH HIM, SEE IF HE DO THINGS."
She shook her head, drowning in her inadequacies as a parent, while we attempted to comfort her. "I TERRIBLE MOTHER," she said, desolately. "TABLE THIS HIGH. ALMOST ONE METER. I MEASURE."
Ah. Important to have empirical data about one's failures as a parent. "I DROP ON HEAD. MAYBE HE GROW UP, BE STUPID, ALL MY FAULT."
"THIS HIGH," she reminded us, and demonstrated on her own body how high the table was. Her hand had moved up slightly since the last retelling. Of course, all of us are fairly short.
A few minutes later, someone else in our group came around the corner; one of the tallest in our team, actually. The Firecracker latched onto her to tell her the saga of her bad parenting.
"THIS HIGH," she said, and lifted her hand, breast-high on the other person. That this now made the changing table at eye-level with herself didn't seem to register on her.
Today, she spent the day with her baby, first taking it to the doctor to make sure that everything was okay. Before she left, there was a small argument in the manager's cube, which is right next to the Firecrackers. "...and anyway, it's not as though I dropped a baby," one of my teammates told the manager, heartlessly. The Firecracker wailed.
Incidentally, the doctor says the baby is fine. "You'll do a lot worse before he's finished growing," he apprently told the Firecracker.
So who's heartless now, hey?
3.
3.
I've started editing my older entries to bring them online, bit by bit. It's a painstaking process. The older ones have no pictures, which is fine; still, I have to strip a lot of HTML tags from the things. Irritating. Irritating. Perl script time. First up will
be the Chicken Family story, which I actually got three requests for today from different people. Well, two requests, and one reminder that I'd actually written it to begin with. As a nod to those people, and to The Guy, who's just started reading my journal, um, today? Yesterday?, I'll do something about that.
4.
RIF. Reduction In Force. Sounds a lot like Rest In Peace.
Three people were Reducted from my department today; one of them was extremely unexpected. One of them I didn't know.
And then there was Tweedledum.
I've never spoken about Tweedledum -- mostly because he could've gotten my ass fired, possibly -- but now that he's gone, you all
get to share in the glory that was Tweedle. You, my gentle readers, have no idea how much it nagged me to have this comic masterpiece, this treasure trove of entertainment sitting at my fingertips, blocked from my journal by political expediency.
No more.
My first encounter with Tweedledum was at an All Hands meeting, a company almost-rah-rah in which everybody is required to lose three hours of precious work time to sit in a conference room and listen to the head of the department talk. Sometimes, this is actually productive; the last one, I'll have to admit, was really worth every minute. They're of varying quality, like any meeting.
At any rate, this first meeting, someone's mobile phone suddenly went off. It was Tweedledum. In the middle of his boss's talk, he got up, went to the back of the conference room, plugged his ear, and started talking. It was quite irritating. Five, ten minutes he talked, and then he folded up his phone and walked back to his chair, without comment.
This is not a auspicious start, wiser heads -- mine -- thought.
It turned out that one of the women I work with, a scarily competent network engineer, is one of the technical leads under Tweedledum. From the very beginning, apparently, they hit it off like two dogs with one bone. The first time she actually met him, he told her that he had come from being a very good Vice President of Engineering at a start-up, and how he had provided superior leadership and motivation to his workers. Of course, then he had had to lay them all off when the company had gone under, he said. During the course of the conversation, the two of them started to map out exactly what the application she was heading would require, and what resources would need to be allocated from other departments. One of the pieces was a few HTML pages, relatively simple things that could've been slapped together with a rudimentary knowledge of Dreamweaver.
"We can get some women to do it," quoth Tweedledum. "It's low-skilled labor."
Ass, quoth I.
That week, my status report contained the following.
...finished documentation on application design, analysis of reliability and availability, and future architecture proposal. Lots of documentation; I hope I did an okay job of it. I'm a little worried because it wasn't low-skilled labor.
Through the course of his career at my company, Tweedledum continued to make a royal ass of himself. He informed the people under
him that they were not allowed to speak with his superiors, then went on vacation for a week and a half, during which time his superior emailed the people under him an urgent engineering question. Political astute, the person he emailed responded, wisely (or not) cc-ing Tweedledum on the reply. "You should be able to get more information from (Tweedledum) when he gets back," the email ended. "Hope that answered your question."
"So-and-so said this," Tweedledum's superior said during the next meeting that he was present at.
Tweedledum went back to the subordinate involved and yelled at the hapless fool. "You have a bad attitude!" he told this person. "I told you you weren't allowed to talk to him, and you tried to do things behind my back."
Given responsibility for an engineering group based in Utah, he gave them half of an engineering project, the other half of which
was being done by people in Redwood City. He then forbade either side to hold direct communication with each other. "Everything has to come through me," he decided, and that was that. Except he wasn't reading email, because he was too busy, and didn't answer phone calls, because he was too busy, and didn't have time to set up appointments, because he was too busy.
"Nobody likes you," he told one of his most popular managers during performance reviews, which he showed up fifteen minutes late for. "You're very unpopular, you don't work well with people, and I don't really like you either."
The cap to all of this was a meeting he held with all of his subordinates on Monday. Having gathered them all in a room, he announced, "I submitted one of your names for layoffs."
Today, we were greeted with the news that he had been Reducted.
All I have to say is: couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.
4.
The Guy thinks my roommate is a hamster.
I would have chosen a more flattering animal, myself. Hummingbird, maybe. Hummingbirds have a really high metabolism, besides being the only type of bird that I'm in charity with right now. At least, I'm pretty sure that no hummingbird has as yet shat on Bob.
The Guy insists it's a hamster, and there the matter stands.
I'm not going to explain that. You can just torture yourselves trying to figure it out.