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By Tgreen, March 17, 2011 12:53 am

Just a reminder, we’re coming up on the two days you are absolutely, positively, under no circumstances allowed to call out sick. Do you even have to ask why? First up, we’ve got St. Patrick’s Day on the 17th. Call out sick then and everyone you work with is gonna know you’re passed out on some bar, open tap crammed in your mouth.

I mean, we all know you’re the type who would invent an entire adopted family if it provided you with some new family members you could kill off when you want some time to attend their fake funeral. So it’s not a stretch to assume that when you say you’ve got some kind of bug on the 17th, you really mean the drinking bug. And your plan to eliminate this bug is to drown it repeatedly with Jameson’s and Guinness. Your fake cough, while impressively authentic-sounding, fools no one.

And if the 17th is bad, the 18th is worse. Call out on the 18th, even if you legitimately have coughed out a lung, tripped over it, fallen down the stairs and suffered two concussions and a ruptured spleen, and everyone thinks you can’t hold your liquor.

So be careful over the next two days. Your reputation is at stake, and considering what you did at the office Christmas party after totally ignoring my advice about that, it’s not like you have a whole lot of reputation left in the first place. Think it’s annoying when your coworkers think back to that night and call you the “Millimeter Monster”? Call out on Friday and see what happens.

See you in the office.

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By Tgreen, March 13, 2011 5:03 pm

I used to work at a place called The Voyager Company back in the mid-90s. We made CD-ROMs (remember those) back when CD-ROMs looked like they might be the future, at least for a little while. The place closed down in 1997, gave me a severance check I used to buy my first Jeep, and that was the end of that. Here’s a clip from an astrology CD we made:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzTI-2emGAQ

Okay, so maybe it’s not such a huge mystery why the place went under. Or maybe it still is. I worked there for about two and a half years, testing software, managing the group of testers, and maintaining the testing “lab”, which was basically a couple of long tables piled with several out-of-date computers. We did make some cool stuff along the way, and any job that forced me to watch Spinal Tap, Robocop and A Night to Remember multiple times as part of my regular duties couldn’t be all bad.

The problem was, or my problem was, anyway, no matter how interesting a job might look to an outsider, eventually the people on the inside are gonna be sick of it. Do the same interesting tasks, or look at the same interesting thing, every day and it’s gonna wear you down. At least I have to believe that or else I’ve got to take responsibility for how most all of my jobs have ended. But really, could you look at this every day for a couple of months and not go just a little insane:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUQN98dKfuE

The only reason I’m even thinking about this old job is because I realized recently how much it contrasts to the job I’m doing now. On the surface, the jobs look the same. They’ve got the same title and fairly similar job descriptions. But the main difference is that at Voyager, I was mostly helping artists make their art work on new technology. At my current job, well, I’m not. We won’t get into who I’m helping or what I’m helping them do, but there’s not a whole lot of art going on.

As I try to squeeze some form of creative activity into whatever time is left over after work is done, I find myself thinking more about jobs I had where I got to do the creative work, or jobs like at Voyager where at least I was able to contribute in some way to someone else’s creative works. I have a feeling this will all contribute to whatever decisions I make when it’s time to move on to the next thing. Assuming the economy allows for such thinking and doesn’t, as it does now, force everyone to take whatever they can get and be thankful they’ve got it. But yeah, when I watch a clip like the one below, and recall the crazy days and nights trying to force the technology to do what the art demanded of it, and ultimately succeeding, it makes, for example, banner ads feel a little lame:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPYOSLqN5Ns

That clips is from Laurie Anderson’s Puppet Motel. I worked on the Mac version of it my first day at Voyager. A couple of years later when we wrapped the Windows version, on the spur of the moment I decided it should be my last day. I stayed because it was raining out and I wouldn’t have had anything fun to do in the rain. This was seriously my thinking on the matter that day. And that thinking reminds me not to get too nostalgic over the Voyager job, or any other job I ever had, because no matter how good they might look in the rearview mirror, there wasn’t a single job I didn’t spend some time trying to figure out how to bust the hell out of at some point.

But hey, Voyager folks, don’t think I hated the place. I didn’t. You were all crazy talented and I consider myself lucky to have worked with you as long as I did. I sure can’t say that about some places I’ve been. Time to leave the mid-90s back where I found them as I contemplate my next move.

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By Tgreen, April 1, 2010 10:19 pm

The company I work for uses GMail for our office email, which was not something I was used to but I got into it pretty quickly. It was nice for a change to be able to access work emails from anywhere. Not that I’m desperate to come home every night and see if anything interesting has happened at the office since I left, but it’s let me work from home without hassle, update my boss on some info from two states away, and at least once explain to a bunch of people at once why the A train was making me very late. So after a couple of years of this, I can safely say that GMail = cool.

Recently, though, something unexpected happened that has me wondering if it’s time to rethink my relationship with GMail. As I often do in my job, I had to take a screen shot to send to someone as a way to explain what was wrong with the page I was testing. So as I wrote my notes, I included a little aside that said see attached after I explained the issue in question. As I also often do in my job, when it came time to send the email, I’d forgotten to actually attach the screen shot. Whenever this happened in the past, it would lead to an exchange much like this one:

Programmer: Where’s the screen shot?
Me: D’oh!

Not this week. No, this week, I wrote my test notes and forgot my attachment and sent the email out to maybe half a dozen people when suddenly Gmail itself stopped me with a message that said, you wrote “see attached” but you did not attach anything; do you want to send this email? It was at this point where I wondered if GMail = kinda stalkerish.

So I added my attachment and sent my email and Gmail looked at me with a smug expression that said, yeah, I covered for you this time, but if you continue to slack off like this eventually even I won’t be able to keep your sorry ass employed. And this made me wonder how closely GMail was reading my emails, and if there were any other ways for it to help me out. I mean, I deal with some confidential stuff, so am I supposed to be comfortable with the fact that my confidential email is being shared between me, some coworkers, and GMail? Or should I trust that confidential or not, most of these emails are so boring that they’d put even a computer to sleep? Either way, this just drilled home the point that someone’s always watching us. At least this time it was watching and was willing to help. So maybe ultimately GMail = my new best friend.

Which is why my coworkers are already sick of seeing every one of my emails this week ending with the sentence I really, really want an iPad.