The Twilight Report

Today was the holiday bowling party. I don't bowl because years ago when I was just a wee little Graham Cracker, I attempted something kind of dumb and made the stupidest split second decision I have ever made in my life. I tried to catch a bowling ball when I accidentally dropped it. Kids, don't try this at home. My right middle finger is permanently disfigured, although not in a way that you would ever notice.

At the party, Linda takes me aside and asks if I want to sign the going away card for Kari. I didn't even know Kari was moving. I don't talk to Kari any more, not since The Incident really. We're not really friends anymore, I am not even sure that we ever were. I didn't really feel like telling Linda that I didn't want to sign the cared, so I just printed "Good Luck in CA - GRAHAM" in a space that hadn't been overwhelmed already by signatures.

I don't understand why Kari is such a popular person. If I had to think of the least nice person I have meet since moving to New York I have to say it would be her. Even Richard doesn't like her: he said good riddance. As Kathy would say, dealing with her is so like being in Junior High all over again.

I left early with the intention of coming home and doing some work, but let's face it. This project isn't going to be done by the end of the year. Who am I kidding?

Because the writers guild is on strike, today's episode of The Twilight Report will be a flashback episode. I am going to tell you about a legendary former employee of The Company. To protected this person's identity, I will refer to him using the pseudonym "Bill." For those of you who already know this story, please forgive me if I get any of the details wrong. I didn't know "Bill" well, but I did meet him and talked to him a few times.

The first time I met Bill, he was giving me a ride to West Point so that we could watch Army get beat by some Christian private school. He was telling me that he really didn't want to work for the company, and would rather go back to school to study Art. He also wanted to visit Australia, and since I am from Australia originally, we had something to chat about. He was a moderately big guy, and he drove an enormous green station wagon. We got to the tailgate, had some BBQed food, played a drinking game and made our way up to the football stadium to watch the game. Army was playing some private religious school (as mentioned) so I dubbed the game "Army vs. God." Needless to say, Army has a terrible team and lost a close game. When I got back to where the cars had been parked for the tailgate, I discovered that Bill had left without me. Fortunately one of my friends gave me a ride.

Bill wanted to get laid off from The Company so that he could get the juicy severance package and go back to graduate school. Keep in mind that this was a few years back when The Company was having these big massive layoffs every six months, so you would think it wouldn't have been that hard for him to arrange it. However, Maintaining employment at The Company is never a logical affair, and try as he might he could not get them to fire him. His approach was to dress more and more casually every day. Very gradually, until (I am told) he came to work in his pajamas, when allegedly, Nobody said anything about it.

Back in the day The Company had a reputation formality and suits, those of you who know which company I work for know this. Things have changed. Today, our work environment, especially for those of us who are engineers, the dress code is very lax. Usually I come to work with a nice casual shirt, although today I was feeling especially casual and so wore my University of Arizona Math Nerds T-Shirt, which was given to me when I graduated as a Math major. So although I can't say that I was there, I can say that Bill's story is not so far fetched.

Since dressing down didn't do the trick, Bill decided to just go ahead and move to Australia and go to graduate school to study Art. Without telling management. He wanted to see how long it would take The Company before they stopped paying him. If you have seen Office Space and know about the bureaucracy of Corporate America, you know that this could take years. In Bill's case The Company moved at the lightning speed of several weeks to terminate Bill's employment.

Sometimes, I sit in my office (here is where the Flashback fade effect brings us back to the present, you can see me sitting at my desk typing this into my computer as I wait for another timing run to complete), and wonder whatever happened to Bill. But mostly I wonder what Australia is doing with him. He seems like the sort of person who would do well there.

So a couple of weeks back, I posted to The Twilight Report a story based on my life back in Arizona (Arizona Fish Story : A Life Less Serious), which included a reference to someone Tyler and I met "virtually" but never in real life. Last night Tyler and I are running around a virtual maze chatting about the good old days, and somehow we talked about our eventual goal of actually having Pizza with I_SUCK, one of the Quakers on our LAN at school. Like all of the Quakers we ran into from those days, we knew his real name and Tyler put it into google (or something) and found his web page, and e-mail address. The crazy thing is he works at The Company, just like I do. Had I known that I could have just searched the The Company employee data base. Big Brother has got to keep an eye on us after all, so we are all in there. Tyler sent him an e-mail and we swapped a couple of messages today. The thing is, after all of these years, and after telling the story (mostly to each other) for so long, I_SUCK has achieved a sort of mythic status. I doubt the actual guy could live up to it. Still, we must have pizza sometime, until that happens my life will remain incomplete.

So I have been working in my new department for about nine months or so now. I basically work on two major things. I don't want to get into the details of what I do, because it is pretty boring, but lets just call them Interface and Parallel. Neither have anything to do with each other. I have a partner for Parallel with whom I work with pretty closely. It has to do with the nature of the beast. When I work on the Interface, I am much more subordinate to the owner of the code, and it is therefore not a partnership. One day, when I learn more about how the Interface works it could be, but it is far too early for that.

The guy who owns the Interface code had a family emergency recently and was gone from work for three weeks. When he got back he asked me how much time I had been spending on Interface vs. Parallel. The truth is I have not been working much on the Interface, because Parallel has been soaking up all kinds of time. I find out today that my idiot manager strongly suggested that the Interface owner resign from The Company and everyone understands if he doesn't that they will probably fire him. My manager seems to think that he hasn't been working hard enough, which is bullshit.

It's bad enough that The Company continually shoots itself in the foot by getting rid of good people that they really need, but this seems totally over the top. The guy's son had been in the hospital for three weeks he comes back to work and they kick him while he's down. What makes it worse is that I think the reason they moved me into the Interface when they did because they wanted to get rid of him. They are using me as a tool to get rid of this guy and that makes me hate them.

In the afternoon I was working with my Parallel partner and we came up with an idea which I hope may tie up a whole bunch of loose ends. My Parallel partner has been at The Company for about 20 years, and he was telling me that he felt as though he had done himself a real disservice by staying here for as long as he has, because bam! they get rid of you and the things we work on are so specialized that you really don't know enough about the real world to get a decent job. After 20 years and with a family to support it is real tough to start over. I've been here for four years and I'm thinking it is time to get the hell out. Suggestions anyone? Seriously. Suggestions?

After work I was both pissed off at management, while at the same time excited about our potential Parallel breakthrough. My friend Sarah had asked me to take her portrait for her web site. She is an aspiring wedding photographer and she is going to need to advertise. I was humbled that she asked me, because she knows lots of photographers. I was also super excited to get back into the studio and shoot some pictures. Tonight was the night that we were going to get together for this.

Afterward we ordered a pizza and talked about various things. She's broken up with her sort of boyfriend and she's going to be moving to New Hampshire, probably sometime next year. I'm going to miss having her around. She says that she will be back eventually, but by the time she is, I had better be gone, for my own sake.

My one time best friend Guthrie "gUe" "In a Pear Tree" Partridge thought that it was pretty funny when my Linux box at the time (Either Figment or Pacific the First, I forget which) crashed and said "Kernel Panic." Now, it wasn't a big deal, it wasn't like I had some critical application running, since the computer was just booting and couldn't find the root partition where it expected to find it. I forget how, but I fixed it. So when I say I don't understand why it is funny, it's not because I've been blinded by techno rage because my computer refuses to work. I just don't know why "Kernel Panic" should be so funny. "What's a matter Kernel Sanders... Chicken?" - now that is funny. Someone please enlighten me. gUe doesn't talk to me anymore (at least not politely) so I can't ask him.

Driving to lunch today I see that the leaves are beginning to change in earnest. There are spots where it looks rather breathtaking, I should have brought one of my many cameras to document it a little bit. Hopefully I will find the time to do it before everything DIES and makes New York look like a miserable dead land of Ice.

Oh yes, and it turns out there is hope for me yet. The purveyors of wisdom at The Company decided not to do the sensible thing and allow me to put both of my commuters at work on the fast Ethernet/ius. Instead of becoming bitter and angry over it, I have decided to go about doing what they want me to do, which is move my web services from my computer to our organization's web server. I still think that it is The Wrong Thing To Do, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that it is actually not too bad a hardship for me to endure.

For those of you who have been keeping up with the exciting adventure which is my life, I finally made the finishing touches on Feature 123879 and checked the code in. In the words of (I believe) Doctor Peter Venkman, "It'll be bigger than a microchip." Hopefully it won't break the build.

By looking at my old credit card statements and pay stubs I came up with a budget. I was only about $250 over budget for September. I think that is pretty good considering I applied the budget retroactively on a month where I was still on my vauge... "try not to spend too much money" budget. I should be worth nothing in no time. What a thing to aspire to.

Oh yeah.... Last Friday I got a letter from the DA in Orange county. Apparently they caught the crook who cashed $1000 in fraudulent checks on my account. I called the DAs office today, but the attorney handling the case was in court. At this point it doesn't matter too much to me. The bank's insurance covered my loss and I didn't have any other out of pocket expenses, so I can't really ask for restitution, though I am sure the Bank will. Still, that a-hole caused me a lot of grief and I hope they punish him appropriately.

Streetlight outside my New York home. I might never have seen it?

Those of you, who know me best, may not know that I am in fact from the planet Shashars, where I was the emperor of an empire that I ruled with an Iron Fist^TM. I am actually here on Earth as part of the Emperor Exchange Program. It's a service of the Galactic Dictators of the Universe, an elite club that only the biggest and most ruthless belong. It is very very invitation-only, if you know what I mean. Anyway, I'm here on Earth for vacation, to get away from it all, as it were, as an anonymous computer programmer working at The Company (real name removed to protect Corporate America).

I've been telling people this story in various forms for decades now. Not bad considering I am only approaching my third decade on this planet. In the first grade I had nearly my entire class convinced that they were also from Shashars. I even had a Queen to rule by my side (back then, I was the King instead of the Emperor - at some point I decided Empire sounded better than Kingdom).

Back then I was living in New Haven Connecticut, where my folks were employed as post docs at Yale. Later my dad would move to Chicago and my mum and I were off to Los Alamos. I was just now in my kitchen trying to think of what I wanted to snack on (finally decided on a tall glass of Chocolate Milk) and I wondered out of nowhere, how my life would have been different had I stayed in New Haven.

This is a bit embarrassing or maybe just funny... but I was theoretically engaged to a girl back then. I really wish I could remember what prompted me to do it, but I remember whispering into my Queen's ear "Do you want to marry me?" She answered in the affirmative. Now here is the embarrassing part: it has been so long and my memories of the first grade are so corrupted that I don't actually remember this girl's name. I don't know a girl I was sort of engaged to once.

If I had stayed in New Haven, might we have been friends growing up, like some of my friends in New Mexico? Would we now be old friends who occasionally sent e-mails back and forth at odd intervals? It is just so hard to say. It is hard to imagine how entirely different my life would be now, except just to know that it would have been completely different. When I think of life changing events, I usually think of two: one was moving to America with my parents (when we moved to New Haven in 1980), the other was when I put a free quotations database onto the Internet in 1995, which eventually led to a job offer at The Company and lead me to where I now live in New York State. Now that I think about it though, Moving to New Mexico from New Haven may not have been as dramatic as leaving one country to live in another one, but probably at least as causal to my effect.