December 17, 2009

my day at google

"You work on a fucking cruise ship."
- John, yesterday

"Right, except that there's no tipping. And they pay me."
- John's buddy

• • •

I spent yesterday afternoon visiting Google's campus. Yes, I got to play with the new gPhone. More on that later.

Perhaps half of the square footage was devoted to offices. The rest was for pampering the employees. I knew I was in an alternate universe when I pulled in to a parking space and was greeted with a sign telling me the space was reserved for expectant mothers only.

Once inside the lobby, I saw the famous monitor that displays searches being run at that very moment. I doubt its authenticity, as the words "Miley" and "Twilight" never once appeared. I signed in with the receptionist, and through the looking glass I jumped.

My first stop was the cafeteria, which looks much like a food court at Microsoft, only with real food prepared by salaried chefs instead of real styrofoam mass-prepared by migrant workers. I bypassed the piles of absurdly fresh fruit, the cajun and Asian dishes, the panini bar, several kinds of salads, etc. and went straight for curried okra, pizza, a chocolate malt, and German chocolate cake. All I could eat, all free. People bring their friends and families in for meals.

If you're still hungry, on your way back to the office, you can stop by one of the many snack stations, with their unlimited supplies of brand-name cookies, crackers, candy, nuts, and breakfast cereals. Thirsty? Get a fruit smoothie from the smoothie girl. No tipping, now. She's on salary. Putting on weight? Hit the gym. There's a free personal trainer there waiting to help you plug your laptop into the treadmill's USB port. She's on salary too. If you're sore afterward, you can walk across the hall to the masseuses, or if you're shy like me, you can plop into one of the many massage chairs scattered around the hallways. I called mine "the tickler." "Yeah," my buddy said, "It does things that really shouldn't happen to you at work."

Agreed. But being able to drop off my laundry when I come into work and having it delivered to my office, cleaned and folded, before I leave? Sweet. Employees are similarly encouraged to bring their dogs in to work. No time to take Dex outside for a walk? No problem. Google provides dog-walkers. And of course, there were Wiis and pool and ping-pong tables everywhere.

For all that, the thing that pushed me over the edge was mundane. When my buddy sets up a meeting, this is how it works. The local people gather in a meeting room with gigantic flat-screens on the walls. Like people in Mountain View and Budapest, they key in my buddy's phone number. Two seconds later, everyone is talking via video conference. There's no 20 minutes of troubleshooting laptops ("Try Function-F5!")or Live Meeting ("Where did you install it from?"), no instruction cards, no calls to Help Desk, no crawling around for 90s-era cables, no 60s-era speakerphone to yell into, no pile of remotes to sift through. It just works, every time. I nearly wept.

• • •

Okay, on to the gPhone. It's no revolutionary device, but it will nudge the smart phone industry forward in important ways. Yes, it has a higher resolution than the iPhone, and it can run multiple apps at once. That has a cost, of course. I have no idea what its battery life is like, but I'm imagining really, really atrocious.

The touch-screen is gorgeous, and there's a little trackball if for some reason you'd prefer to navigate by using technology from 1983. It has my #1 want of the iPhone: the ability to organize apps into folders. And of course, it's carrier-independent, so you can switch phone companies and keep your phone. The obvious cost of this: without a carrier underwriting its cost to consumers, the phone won't be cheap.

Mostly, though, the gPhone is astonishingly fast. The apps just slam open. Its browser opened this web page instantaneously. As in I didn't even get a chance to move my hand out of the way, and the page was already rendered. The Chrome browser on that phone is simply the fastest browser I've ever seen, on any sort of hardware. And that's huge. Nicely done, Google.

posted by john at 07:06 AM  •  permalink

September 23, 2009

classified

Astonishingly, Stank trolls largely saw the "What do you do for a living?" survey as a means for mocking. That's so unlike you people, really. I've attempted to classify the responses.

Anti-Microsoft (I think)

"I work at a sewage treatment plant, 'cause all I do is process their crap."

"I shovel bullshit."

"I am a truth launderer"

"I translate dork into human."

Anti-John

"I overbill professionally."

"I am a grammatical mercenary on a long term contract with a large corporate client that prefers anonymity when it comes to our business arrangements." (I think that covers technical writer for hire, for an evil organization that probably dislikes claiming you as an employee almost as much as you dislike claiming them as an employer!)

"I am an ethically challenged Microsoft-mooch." (Allie)

The obscure and even more boring than the truth

"I am a Forensic Epistemologist."

"I am a Didactical Pathologist."

The outright lie

"I don't write software documentation, that's for sure."

"I write software documentation...for space."

The fuck you

"I'm a technical writer. Got a problem with that, bitch?"

"I own my own company doing technical writing for MS. *haha* Yeah, it sounds boring, but it allows me to work from my hot tub and watch whales, so THAT'S okay." (Mister, you don't generally go to meetings. I would do technical writing for the Southern Baptist Convention if it meant I didn't have to go to meetings. Fuck'em and feed'em fish heads if they don't recognize the sheer brilliance of your arrangement.)

The winner

"It's classified."

posted by john at 11:27 AM  •  permalink

September 22, 2009

working for a dying

Back before poker rooms were utterly ruined by the advent of TV poker, I would go to Vegas and play for days. I learned not to say I worked at Microsoft, 'cause then someone would want to vent about Microsoft or, worse, ask me technical questions about some product. One day, Seattle's other big employer popped into my mind.

"Boeing," I replied, in front of someone who turned out to be a incessantly shop-talking aeronautical engineer at Boeing. As I squirmed, I witnessed a miracle: something was actually more boring than what I did for a living.

What I do, exactly, is write software documentation. Those Windows 98 and Windows 2000 books that you used as coasters? Those were mine. (And Dorkass's. The parts that were spelled correctly were mine.) It's not a thrilling living, to be sure, but my god, is it ever a conversation killer. I live in dread of someone asking me what I do.

"What do you do for a living?" said the gorgeous woman at the dog park a few months ago. I told her. "Well, that sounds....interesting!" she said, bursting into laughter on the last word.

I told the dog-park story to Sarah's friend last month, and I could see boredom sucking the vitamins out of her bloodstream. "Yeah, that...doesn't...sound...interesting...at all."

Which brings us to today's survey. What, exactly, do I tell people? Especially gorgeous women at the dog park? Nowadays I own my own vending company that performs these services for Microsoft, but the alternate answers of "I'm self-employed" or "I'm a freelance writer" sound to me like, respectively, "I'm unemployed" and "I live with my mother."

I leave it to you.

posted by john at 09:53 AM  •  permalink

June 30, 2009

mission accomplished

Two years ago, I took my brightest student ever out for beers. I was about to offer her an editing gig for Microsoft. First, though, I would follow my custom and pump her full of Bud Truth Serum. It didn't take her long to lament that she'd had to withdraw her applications to grad school. She was flat broke.

"You haven't withdrawn them yet, have you?" I replied, aghast.

And thus did my mentoring of Lilly commence as these things should: in a sleazy bar.

I adored Lilly. She was exactly why I still dabble in teaching. A great person, warm, brilliant, full of light and promise. To help her go to grad school would doubtless be one of my greatest accomplishments in life. I was excited. And then a friend had to go and mention a nightmarish and all-too-likely scenario.

"So how will you feel if she ends up staying with Microsoft, doesn't go to grad school, marries a soulless Microsoft loser, and bit by bit you see all those great qualities sucked out of her like they are the rest of us? If you become the agent of Lilly's destruction?"

Utterly. Mortifying.

"Okay, so here's the deal," I barked at Lilly later that day. "After a year, you're fired. And if you date a co-worker, you're fired."

"You can't do that!"

"Try me."

Even though she ended up working for two years, I was hyper-protective of her. She never met management. She never went to a meeting on campus. She never met a co-worker who wasn't a middle-aged woman. My proudest moment came when Lilly met a guy in a bar and he asked her out. Seeing his Microsoft badge, she turned him down flat. "My mentor would kill me."

"I don't believe Lilly really exists," a handsome young writer told me just last week.

"Fuck off," I replied. I almost have this cow in the barn. I'm not spooking it now.

Today is Lilly's last day in her job, and in a month she'll be in the grad school of her choice, where presumably her soul will be fed, not depleted. We went out to dinner last week, reflecting both backward and forward.

"One of the things I've learned in the last two years, and I hope this doesn't offend you," she began hesitatingly, "is that I don't want to work with Microsoft."

I have never loved another human being more than I loved Lilly in that moment. I gave her a hug.

"I have nothing more to teach you."

posted by john at 09:08 AM  •  permalink

March 26, 2009

reply-all

When I teach college writing, we spend a day discussing professional email. You'd think modern students would already be able to send a professional-sounding email, and you'd be right. What we concentrate on is email gaffes.

"For the love of God, little-R! Little-R!" I plead, thinking of no one more than myself in a year, when they're my spamming co-workers.

I also tell the following story.

My boss Maggie was emailing her friend, who like us worked at Microsoft. Maggie ripped our boss, calling her a "mouth-breathing, puseous twat-tard" among other things, as if other things are necessary. And then Maggie's email proceeded with the normal business of friendship, discussing dinner, shoes, and motherhood. She recommended that the friend check out the "new mom" e-mail group at Microsoft. "Its alias is..."

She typed the alias in the CC line, just to verify that she had the right one.

"...newmom."

No, she didn't delete the group's alias from the CC line. That mail went out to thousands of women, including the twat-tard. Humiliated and apologetic, Maggie became both legend and corporate cautionary tale overnight.

Astoundingly, Maggie was not fired.

Less astoundingly, her husband was a senior VP.

posted by john at 07:36 AM  •  permalink

March 17, 2009

the upside of layoffs

I just found this chestnut. When I was a manager and on vacation, the utterly charming writing staff put together this hallway tribute.

posted by john at 07:08 AM  •  permalink

July 09, 2008

easy being green

My team at Microsoft has moved to a new building on a new campus. I'll skip the architectural review and get straight to what most annoys me. It's a "green" building.

Green, I discovered yesterday, means that the kitchens are stocked with compostable paper cups. Imagine, if you will, what happens to a compostable paper cup when it's left half-filled on a desk for a week. Ironically, that compostable paper cup required that I throw out about three reams of paper.

And then there are the low-flow, we-flush-for-you, planet saving toilets. Someday I hope to see one that isn't already packed with well-marinated feces. The toilets' flush success rate is simply not up to Western standards, and there's no way to manually compensate.

It's a worthless idea, ineptly executed and imposed on people who never asked for it, and now we're all standing in untold volumes of shit. Why, it's almost like we made these toilets ourselves.

• • •

Epilogue
Longtime Stank troll (and, lamentably, recent co-worker) Chris says:

You forgot to mention the compostable "plastic" spoons that melt when exposed to hot fluids like coffee or tea

posted by john at 10:25 AM  •  permalink

July 01, 2008

career highlight

"Don't say that you were reading Entertainment Weekly," Blondage advised. "You'll get ridiculed."

So anyway, I'm in the hot tub—sipping a '77 tawny, wearing a top hat and reading the New Yorker—when I come across a cartoon. It's about the guilt we feel about not reading enough. It's mildly amusing...until I come across this panel:

To summarize: out of all of printed history—out of the entire spectrum of possible books the artist could have selected as representatives of hellish reading—she chose L'Amour, low-carb cookbooks, and something I wrote.

posted by john at 07:11 AM  •  permalink

July 27, 2006

but what i really wanna do is act

In response to Wednesday's post, esteemed Stank troll Dinah asks the obvious question: okay then, why do you teach?

"For the money and prestige," I thought.

"For the sex," chimes another reader, a female high school teacher who declines to be identified. Coward.

It started at Ohio State, where the English department chair threw me in front of a class as part of her research. I was a talented student and writer, at the height of youthful insolence—I fully expected to succeed. I failed spectacularly. And within a quarter, the experiment was over, and I was left with the horrible taste of failure in my mouth. This was nothing new—I'd taken Calculus—but I did not expect to fail at imparting to others what I myself did best.

When I was shopping myself to grad schools, my first criterion was my own curriculum, and my second, the opportunity to teach composition. I very much looked at grad school as a bookend to my years at Ohio State. Grad school would teach me what Ohio State failed to, and it would provide me a chance to redress my greatest failure.

In the months leading up to that class, I studied and studied hard. I'd taken preparation lightly before, relying, as I always had, on my ability to adjust on the fly. No longer. That had failed me utterly. This time, I would prepare hard and slay the beast. And so I entered my second classroom, and I failed again.

Third classroom, third failure.

Around the fourth classroom, I started coming into my own. Two things happened: I developed my own, more improvisational style and lesson plan; and I started to enjoy myself. It seems obvious, but only in retrospect did I realize that if you're not having any fun, your students ain't exactly dancin' a jig, either. My own intellectual development surged; there's nothing like having to teach a subject matter to compel you to learn it forwards and back, and fast. Spending every minute of every day putting myself in other people's heads, I built up my critical-thinking muscles. As I started becoming more effective, the kids grew more engaged, and I started getting hooked on pride in their accomplishments. It's an addiction roughly like crack, only more expensive.

By the time I left grad school, I wouldn't say I was the best teacher in the world, but I'd come a long way, and my students tested better than anyone else's, so I had that as a metric on which I could forever hang my teacher hat. When I graduated and had a job in hand, the university asked me to apply for a teaching job in which I would have been brutalized (six classes/day with four different preps, and after five years you're fired no matter what) for about a third of what I would make as a lowly copyeditor in Seattle. I declined.

And then the whole Fucking Amy thing happened. And then I ended up at Microsoft, indexing SQL Server documentation. Twin pillars of happiness, they. I couldn't believe how little what I did mattered. I clearly remember sitting at my desk, numb. Bored. Hollowed out. Soulless. Unchallenged. Not doing or learning anything of value. Not growing. Hating myself for not taking that horrible teaching job. The initial realization that what you do all day just doesn't matter, at all, to yourself or anyone, is the hardest. And on the heels of teaching it was quite the fall indeed.

Moral: you start your career as a drone and move on to teaching, not vice versa.

But for the first time in my life, I wasn't poor. Unwilling to take a vow of poverty, I thought for a while about getting my doctorate, but that hardly seemed like a cure for poverty. I decided I could fuel my soul by teaching just one class a year, as adjunct faculty, and I started making contacts at my first choice of universities.

And here we are, several years later, plan in fruition. I catch at least two plagiarizers a quarter, I have students stealing my out-of-print textbooks, and the privilege only costs me $10,756/quarter in lost income and expenses.

Still better than Microsoft.

posted by john at 08:34 AM  •  permalink

the jen clause

Jen has ruined my life.

We met online some seven years ago, when she was a lowly undergraduate. She began to watch my dog, Ed, when I was out of town, although we took care never to actually meet. Whereas giving someone I'd never met the keys to my house seemed natural enough, and finding her long brown hairs in my bed didn't bother me, meeting her seemed freakishly weird. We agreed that when she got married, she'd set up a webcam feed for me. I think she was kidding, but I wasn't.

Somewhere along the way Jen morphed from a chemistry major to holding the same Master's I do, in technical communication. Inevitably, she landed at Microsoft. More inevitably, she started working with people I know.

"Jen is housesitter Jen?" Dorkass exclaimed. "I thought she was, like, 20."

Sigh. So did I. Damned kids these days keep getting older. It flummoxes me, I tells ya.

Knowing that my virtual kid sister is roaming Microsoft's campus has positively ruined girl-watching for me. How am I supposed to objectify a woman who might, upon closer examination, be Jen? It's not like I could identify her from 20 yards. Mathematically, this mistake is inevitable. I well remember accidentally staring at my sister-in-law's posterior at Northland Mall one day. A repeat horror is something my heterosexuality might not be able to withstand.

"You can safely leer at tall blonds," Jen suggests. Great advice. In Scandinavia. In Seattle, not so much.

"Okay," she sighed, which I don't know for sure but I heard nonetheless, "You can have ponytails. When I wear my hair up, it'll be pigtails."

Wow. Now this is friendship! My only fear is that word of this will get out and women across Microsoft will set their scrunchies aflame.

posted by john at 07:27 AM  •  permalink

June 12, 2006

carrie

By the time Carrie arrived at Microsoft, I'd been there about a year. Which is to say, I was already broken, disillusioned—my standards in a breakneck freefall. She was all the things I do not trust: cheerful, earnest, hard working, pretty, Canadian. She looked like a sorority girl, and at first I looked right past her. A mistake.

Her body might have spent hours in interminable meetings about MPEG compression, but her mind was on more elegant things. For one, the girl loved writing. Everything about it, really. And in this, we bonded. Long after we'd both left that team, we kept in touch. Usually it was to share an article or some buffoonish instance of illiteracy perpetrated by a peer—"My hand to God, today a PM used the noun bucketization"—but sometimes there were impassioned dialogues about our mutual longing for travel, for more meaning and beauty in our lives. For more, period. A year farther on the burnout train, I was well ahead of her. She listened with interest as I prepared my exit, as I researched doctoral programs and small towns and African safaris.

And then one day, I got goodbye mail. Carrie was leaving, intent on a bigger life. The burnout train has a passing lane.

"All our conversations got me thinking," she wrote. "I have to get out of here and live a little."

Time passed. I settled on a small town, Metamuville, and re-entered the world of teaching I had loved and missed. But I also cheated—I stayed within range of Microsoft, unwilling to spit out its golden teat. After about a year without contact, I googled Carrie.

She was in the very same graduate program I had chickened out of joining. Bitch!

I gagged out congratulations, even though it felt like my dream had been usurped. She did so unknowingly, of course—it was just a big coincidence. And even though I forsook twelve dreams so that I could live the one, seeing my doppelganger there, walking that path not taken, made me feel all the more soulless. And it would get worse.

She showed me the articles she'd written from Nepal, the photos she'd taken from Kilimanjaro. Fume, fume. "So enough about me. What are you up to?" she asked sweetly, clearly not knowing I was trying to reach into the monitor and strangle her.

And then she married a doctor and returned to Canada, and another year passed until I googled her again this weekend. I found more of her writings, from as recently as last month. When she was trekking Mount motherfucking Everest.

Can the space program be that far behind, really?

posted by john at 12:54 AM  •  permalink

March 28, 2006

great moments in telecommuting

Today I was scheduled for one meeting, a silly meet-and-greet with nary an agenda item. I stayed home and conference-called in. As I used one hand to listen to everyone blather awkwardly about the weather, I used the other to water the trees I planted yesterday. The person who called the meeting explained his purpose in assembling everyone. "Well, I just wanted to touch base and say hello," he said. "I'm sorry I don't have more. Do you have anything, John?"

"I'm just glad to be here," I said, not joking. Everyone laughed.

They talked about which neighborhoods in Seattle are cool. I daydreamed about a world without phones. Right when I was absent-mindedly using my grandmother's back-scratcher on my left butt cheek, Jason asked what I was doing at that very moment. I paused mid-scratch. Do I tell?

"He's probably fishing," he said.

"Something like that."

• • •

I knew, of course, that vending from home would add hours to my day. I have to say, though, that I'm blown away by the cumulative effect of this work style. Free of interruptions and the overhead of meetings, 1:1s, reviews, brown-bags and other corporate atrocities, I can get a full workday done in about 4 hours. No commute? Plus 2 hours. That's about 30 waking hours per week that I did not used to have. I get everything done nowadays. Even when I have to work overtime, the entire day doesn't vaporize on me. Yesterday was typical. I worked ten hours, with four hours of gardening in the middle, and I was still done by 6:30.

Dear god, please oh please oh please don't let the gravy train ever stop, amen.

posted by john at 08:39 PM  •  permalink

September 30, 2005

the validation manifesto

Several women have already stopped reading. Several weary women.

I've referred to my "Validation Theory" many times on this page, but I've never spelled it out. Simply put, I believe that the primary social force in the world is the human need for validation. In the bulk of human interactions, we are either seeking or granting endorsements. Simple, no? This theory scales like a motherfucker. Once you start filtering human behavior for validation, you see nothing else.

And yes, I'm fully aware of the irony here. I'm waxing about my belief system on my web site. Self-indulgent and validation-seeking behavior if ever there were one. See how well it scales?

So say I'm right. So what? It's a harmless enough social force. Sadly, it is not, for the Validation Theory has a very ugly corollary: most people view validation as zero-sum. If I'm to feel good about myself, you cannot—unless you make the same choices I do. But if you don't, any happiness you feel invalidates my own and must be denigrated.

My favorite example of zero-sum-validation thinking will forever be the Christian bumper sticker

Know Jesus, know peace

No Jesus, no peace

If you want to drive a fundy positively insane, show them how happy you are without their religion. That so invalidates everything they believe, everything in which they've invested their self-image, they cannot even consider the possibility. Nope, you're Satan's intermediary.

All the new moms in my life have experienced a zero-sum crossfire lately. If they continue to work, stay-at-home moms revile them as bad parents. If they stay at home, their professional colleagues snort disdainfully about "breeders." The invective is harsh, unrelenting, and unsolicited, and it invariably comes from women whose own choices are being—cue the organ music—invalidated.

Let's view recent posts through the validation filter.

• Lionel, pretentiously suggesting that poetry be read at business meetings? Seeking validation.
• Courtney, thinking people in Seattle are mean? Obviously being invalidated. Me, posting about it? Being validated.
• Jim and Marceline, irrationally defending their product in the face of evidence? The validation they get from their work was threatened.
• Ed's failing health? No validation link—she's a dog.
• Jessica Alba, saying she really wants good roles? Please.
• I'll skip Bobby Brown's playlist. That's too easy.
• Percy? His "that kid already has everything" comment suggests my age and station make him feel much resentment.
• My friends, pouting when I didn't go with exactly their color choices? I suppose they feel as though I criticized their taste.

And on and on. The need for validation is why people dress up and wear make-up. It's why they buy expensive things. It's why people pair up. It's why lousy relationships persist well past the establishment of lousiness. It's why people have kids. It's why they pray instead of taking kids to doctors. It's why your family goes batshit if you don't come by and stare at the TV with them often enough. It's why managers create direct reports aliases (e.g., "Jim Jones' Direct Reports") that are of no conceivable use to anyone but them but that inconvenience many. It's why we insulate ourselves with people who affirm our belief systems. It's why seemingly good people can rationalize doing horrible things. It's why we want our friends—strangers, even—to couple/parent/buy something/change cities/etc. like we did, and it's why we feel curiously rejected when they don't. It's why we feel self-conscious about dining or going to movies alone. It's why people with no education disdain its necessity, and it's why I so value it. It's why people find a way to diminish your new house/car/S.O. It's why the top-10 non-fiction list is half books about how smart you are, half books about how stupid "they" are. It's why readers send me email arguing "I don't seek validation from other people." It's why people kill those who don't share their beliefs. It's why they want to introduce matters of faith into the science classroom. It's why I go weak-kneed every time I hear "Lover Lay Down" and remember that the sexiest woman I've ever known actually thought of me when she heard that song. It's why my brother and sister-in-law would rather lose me altogether than admit that the John mythology they've concocted is untrue. It. Is. Everywhere.

• • •

What, if anything, is to be learned from this? Like any point of view, it's subjective. It's a theory that happens to fit the facts. A helluva lot of facts. What began as a desperate attempt to explain one person's behavior became a plausible explanation for most of mankind's behavior. Does this make it right? Is it the only possible explanation for a given behavior? Of course not. But I've yet to come across an alternative explanation that scales so, so well across all of human behavior.

Although I found the theory life-changing, I didn't exactly find it life-affirming. Understanding validation, both your need for it and others', is not an A-ticket to bliss. The benefits are more subtle than that. I look at it more as something to keep an eye on within myself. When someone upsets me, I question why, filter for my validation needs, and very often am able to let it go. This is a good thing. I take great pains not to feel invalidated by others' beliefs or choices, and that eliminates much of life's unnecessary misery. And of course, the rhetorician in me benefits from appealing to others' validation needs. At this point, Allie and I are pretty overt about it.

(phone rings)

Allie: Hello?

Me: I need some unconditional validation.

Allie (bored): You're so smart.

Me: Thanks.

So there you have it, my world view, honed by years of wondering why so-and-so is acting that way. And if you don't agree with my Validation Theory, well, you're just stupid.

posted by john at 08:20 AM  •  permalink

September 22, 2005

fake wedding

Elan and I met on Valentine's Day. Intoxicated by whimsy y mas tequila, we had some woman marry us in a bar that night. When we subsequently went to Vegas a few months later, it seemed only natural that we mock-renew our mock-vows in the nation's most mock-romantic mock-city. "I want to try a sociological experiment," I said. And thus did I email Dorkass the following two photos, my only comment being "Hey mom, look what we just did."

Bedlam ensued. My experiment worked beyond my wildest dreams. Dorkass was, by all accounts, hysterical. She went so far as to contact the chapel, which I'd instructed to say that yes, we were really married. Dorkass being the Western world's leading disseminator of information, it wasn't long before Elan and I were crushed in email and phone calls from across the country. People panicked. People congratulated us. Jilted men worldwide knocked the earth off its axis a bit by simulatenously screaming "Him?!" Someone ran an announcement in the Microsoft newsletter. My co-workers voted on baby names and filled my office with 300 pounds of rice. In retrospect, our only regret was that we didn't register for gifts.

Once again, the evolution of communications:

Telegraph
Telephone
Tell Dorkass

posted by john at 08:26 AM  •  permalink

January 01, 1800

on WTFF

The origin of "WTFF" is only vaguely more interesting. When I was a manager, I'd read behind the writers' work regularly. Some writers were impeccably clean on the very first draft. I call them "my favorites." Some sucked bilgewater (as the editor, Annette, put it), no matter how many drafts they got. I call them "Roxanne." And one turned in excellent final drafts but really—insanely—weak initial drafts. She answers to "Dorkass." If the words stuck to the page, she figured, she'd done her job and met her deadline. She'll fix it later. Off to the mall! She specialized in the glittering generality. "Windows can be faster than nearly each and every one of the other alternatives," she'd type just to fill up space so she could get to the Bon Home sale. "Almost every last one of them."

One day, when I was working a weekend in order to read the draft she'd handed off before going to Banff, I came across the following. This is verbatim. "The new, comprehensive migration tools provided with Windows help you migrate items comprehensively."

My note was succinct: "WHAT THE FUCK? I MEAN, WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK?"

On Monday Annette sniffed, "I guess I've been doing it wrong all these years, giving actual feedback when all I had to do is swear like a 10 year old." She then proceeded to butcher the phrase in her memory, and now half the world thinks I say "what the fuckity fuck."

posted by john at 12:00 AM  •  permalink