That title was supposed to evoke drama or intrigue but it’s also mostly true. The company I work for which, as always, shall remain nameless is bucking real hard for a sale. You can hear the potential of big dollars in every contrived story about how we desperately need to conserve cash despite allegedly sitting on huge piles of it. There’s a huge pile of shit in there somewhere and whether or not that bullshit is about the amount of money the company is setting aside for a rainy day despite being stretched beyond functionality or about how all this paper shuffling is actually in the name of dominating the market for whatever it is that our software is supposed to be really good at doing this quarter. We’ve basically thrown all of our resources at hiring impressive-sounding executives and haven’t backfilled any of the positions that do things other than attend meetings and affix their names to ghost written glad handing for the pages of some trade magazine.
The feeling that it was past time to chew my leg off and flee from the trap started during a meeting when I found out concretely that most of the projects, at least the ones that have real impact on my workload and sanity, have been shelved. To be fair, we did also hire a CTO and wanted their input on how to prioritize the work we need to do to stop drowning in tech debt and running all of our capex into the ground with hardware refreshes gradually making their way into the five year cycle. At the same time, I’ve been fucking over my fellow rank and file workers to handle a bunch of firefighting tasks to make the C level folks look good and being expected to handle all of the wrath from people who can’t have their issues addressed in a sane span of time any more. Any operations role contributes to feeling like a punching bag on the particularly bad days but I was losing my mind by 10:30 AM this morning. I also found out that some work I’d promised to finally complete for our support staff was going to be pushed aside so another C level Sales hire could have their laptop a full week before their start date because, reasons. Fuck every bit of that. I logged off early today after completely running out of fight. The worst part is that I’m stopped caring at all about the day to day because I can’t plan and can’t prioritize and feel like I’m working in a call center or something.
Anyway, so disasters in professional life and my horror about them aside, here are some things I thought were interesting today:
1. I had a great time working with a Raspberry Pi for the first time and have enjoyed how little advertising I see due to the deft hand of Pi Hole. The first hit is always free and I ended up buying another Pi and setting up openmediavault early this evening. I’d nearly forgotten how much fun setting up personal servers can be. Yes, it was a matter of snapping together some inexpensive pieces of hardware and attaching an unused 2TB external hard drive to that but it was more fun than I’ve had working with any other bit of technology in ages. It was also an expensive alternative to the pricey NAS hardware that I’ve been eyeballing lately especially while spending most of my life in my house. I guess it’s about time to find somewhere accessible to store the gigabytes of comics that I’ve been downloading. That way I’ll be able to not have time to read any of them from any device! It’s going to be like living in a dystopian Jetsons!
2. I’d be more intrigued about the story behind some guy flying with a jetpack near commercial airplanes in Los Angeles if it wasn’t so damn likely that this was result of a start up, flush with cash from a new round of funding, disrupting air traffic control or something equally inane and contrived. The headline from that story definitely grabbed my click but I was really hoping less for instant millionaire publically measuring dicks against all the other millionaires trying to be the first to endanger planes full of passengers and more for something like the hilarious (and also intensely sad) story of Larry Walters and his solo lawn chair flight into commercial air space.
3. If you needed more reasons to despise the way that Amazon treats its employees then here is a super gross story about buying their own Pinkertons to spy on employees organizing. That is blatantly disgusting and shameless. Imagine interviewing for that job. Is there a personality test? Do you enjoy helping drastically increase the fear and distrust at your workplace? We have the perfect job for you and your lack of human empathy.
