March 05, 2010

the john rules

I've worked for friends for ten years straight, navigating safely from one to the other. While I wouldn't trade the feelings of mutual trust and safety, this arrangement has had one horrible downside. When I was writing yesterday's post, I realized just how much like talking with girlfriends' parents this downside is.

I can't be me.

Out of friendship.

When I was working for that cocksucking sleaze Ernest, I couldn't have cared less if I made him look bad. Heck, it was fun. But would I do that to Flo? To Christy? No, the friendship comes first, before my need to call out people's incompetence and disingenuousness.

This has led to the same exchange occurring over and over in my last ten years of work. Only the boss' name changes.

Annette: "Do you want to work with J.B. on [insert some horrible product]?"

John: "Do you want to rephrase your sentence such that you get a response you like?"

Annette: "Work with J.B. on it."

John: "Do I have the green light to handle him how I see fit?"

Annette: "Do I look stupid?"

The rules that have emerged when I work for a friend, then:

1. I always ask permission before going off on someone.
2. That permission is never, ever, under any circumstances granted.

posted by john at 10:57 AM  •  permalink

February 17, 2010

i prefer the word "stabby"

Allie calls me to blather about her pointless day. About 30 seconds in, she stops.

"Are you in Redmond?" she asks.

A stunning guess, considering I visit Microsoft's campus only about an hour a month.

"Yeah, actually, I am. How-"

"You sounded really pissed off."

posted by john at 11:48 AM  •  permalink

February 08, 2010

why i sold every last share of my microsoft stock

Three years ago, when HD-DVD and Blu-Ray were competing to become the next format, I confidently sunk $800 into a Blu-Ray player. How did I know it would win the format wars? Because Microsoft bet huge on HD-DVD. And if there's one thing I know, it's that Microsoft couldn't wipe its own ass if you gave it a mirror, map and three bloodhounds.

You probably know that too, but believe me, that degree of ineptitude permeates every corner of my life, every day. (And yes, I'm aware that that sentence came out unintentionally funny. I decided to let you enjoy it, too.)

Here's a taste of my life. Witness these two search ads, one for Bing, which Microsoft desperately wants you to use as a verb, the other for the company whose name you already do.

Remember when your middle-aged dad tried to impress your friends by saying that Wham! was, like, totally rad? That ad strikes exactly the same note. And it makes me cringe with embarrassment exactly the same way.

"Look! We, like, totally get that you think vampires are cool! We're cool too!"

Alternative intended message: "Use Bing, die horribly."

Now look at Google's brilliant ad. Simple. Elegant. Amusing. Sweet. Unmuddled. About its own product and not someone else's. And not embarrassing after 15 minutes have elapsed in pop culture.

So, to summarize these ads' messages: Google changes your life, and Bing ends it.

posted by john at 09:16 AM  •  permalink

January 29, 2010

managee

Last weekend, I went grocery shopping with a friend who happens to be a middle-manager at Microsoft. It didn't take long for me to start thinking of the outing as a microcosm of my professional life. First, she yanked me around the store willy-nilly, making me visit the same aisles, two, three times instead of simply formulating and following a plan. Then she forgot the one item we went there especially for. I reminded her. "Oh. Right," she said, yanking me to the bakery aisle for a fourth go-round.

The metaphoria in which I was drowning reached its apex in the hot-dog aisle. "We need to get these," she said. I grabbed the very package she was tapping with her extended index finger. "Not those!" she scoffed. "They have to be all-beef. Duh!"

posted by john at 11:27 AM  •  permalink

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

November 19, 2009

definition of character

I'm presently IMing with former co-worker Cheryl, reminiscing about the bad old days on the team I left behind. She was supposing that I was miserable then, what with the constant phone calls from one flake and Cheryl's own IMs through the night.

Me: I always screened her calls, as I'm sure you heard.

Cheryl: She did mention it at a few points back in December, yes.

Me: And as for your IMs, I subbed those out. That was Kiki writing you.

Cheryl: You subbed them out! Well, I guess that was easy enough:

"You go now."
"Hell no."
"Fuck no."
"I am not even looking at this until next week."

My own mother would think it's me.

posted by john at 01:40 PM  •  permalink

October 07, 2009

welding school

I was forced to "upgrade" to Windows 7 yesterday, and I've been trying ever since to make my laptop nominally useful. What a spectacular piece of crap. Anything that took me one step before now takes at least three, sometimes a ludicrous 12. Every message and dialog is a goddamned novel in which every sentence is written in the imperative, whether or not you're actually being told to do something. All of the customizations I've performed for years to the Start menu and Quick Launch sections? Not allowed. More than ever, the Windows UI is utterly random, looking like something at which Jackson Pollack's monkey thew its feces. It stuck. And I'm stuck with it.

(Trying in vain to flick undigested corn off my monitor)

User Account Control, everyone's least favorite Vista feature ("Please confirm that you just clicked the button that you just clicked by clicking this button too"), has a friendlier new look and a new inability to be disabled. So there's that.

It was when I was researching how to hack my registry and disable that motherfucking thing that I saw my future unfold before me: my career is over. It's inevitable. We keep making products worse and worse, and the documentation I write cannot possibly (or politically) mitigate that degeneration. Customers increasingly find no hope in the product's docs. Customers are instead increasingly compelled to use third-party discussion groups and wikis in order to make their products function as they should. Just like I'm doing.

Windows 7 is going to kill my career once and for all. If not Windows 7, Windows 8 or Ate or Windows eXcitement or iWindows or Windows Precipicio or whatever they end up calling the next travesty. I tossed and turned all night, thinking about the inevitability of welding school. And then I got up and hacked my registry some more. There's just gotta be a way to make the "Display full path in the title bar" check box actually display the full path in the title bar. There's just gotta.

posted by john at 07:39 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

June 12, 2009

soulful, joyful, pointful

A former co-worker is visiting from Israel, and he scheduled me for lunch. Into Redmond, the heart of darkness, I went, grousing ungently. As I approached Microsoft's campus, I could feel the vitamins drain from my bone marrow. I hate the place. I despise the multitudes of soulless, joyless, pointless asstards who work there.

Naturally, that's where he wanted to have lunch—in a dreary new Microsoft cafeteria. And so we did. I bitched about it. And at one point, he called me overly negative. "You hate everything, John!"

"Oh, I do not."

"You do!"

"If I'm pissy, it's because I'm in Redmond."

"Oh yeah? I defy you to name three things that fill you with joy to think about."

I briefly surveyed the crowded cafeteria and shared with him my list:

1. Their mortality
2. Your mortality
3. My mortality

posted by john at 03:21 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

February 24, 2009

prelude to another couple of heartfelt "fuck you, motherfuckers"

Do you know how many days off you've had since December 15th? Do ya? You don't, do you? Well, I know how many I've had. Zero. The big doughnut. Christmas? New Year's? Sick days? Those are for the weak.

I am, as I've previously referenced, overemployed. Not the worst problem to have during layoffs and a recession, to be sure. But man, do I have no margin for error. There's no such thing as "Wow, she royally fucked that up, but I can just work tonight/this weekend and knock this puppy out." Tonight and this weekend are already booked solid, you see. I can no longer mitigate other people's incompetence or inability to plan.

Which makes me positively stabby when they're incompetent or don't plan, two qualities in abundance at Microsoft. Want to die in a brutal, disgusting manner? Make my job unnecessarily harder right now. Drop a massive project in my lap, unannounced, and then make it harder than it has to be. I dare you. I double-dog dare you. See what happens.

posted by john at 08:27 AM  •  permalink

January 29, 2009

finally, an honest performance review

My first performance review of any kind occurred at EDS, where to my complete horror my ditzy boss engraved the word "exuberant" into my professional epitaph.

"You take that out of my review!"

"No. You're exuberant. There's no other word for it."

"This word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

A few years later, another boss wrote that I need to develop opposable thumbs, as it would likely benefit my productivity. When I didn't respond to this jab, he deduced a truth that did not please him: I didn't read his review feedback. I skipped to the last page, where the compensation is detailed.

Later, yet another boss wrote that "John is practically perfect in every way," but I know when someone's baiting me, so I didn't protest. Much.

And then there was Monday, when I snapped at Flo, my boss, and pranked Lilly, my understudy, and each—independently and within an hour of one another—called me a "fucking douche."

Things that make you pause and reflect.

posted by john at 08:10 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

June 25, 2008

useless fucking tool

My boss used my laptop last week, and in doing so she saw that I had changed her name in Messenger.

"Why tool?" she asked.

posted by john at 12:21 PM  •  permalink

March 06, 2008

familiarity breeds

Blu-Ray just won the high-def DVD wars, yet my Blu-Ray player is already old and musty. How did I choose the winning format way back when, you ask? Did I look at the studios who backed this format and the studios who backed HD-DVD and somehow divine whose movie library would be the winner? Did I flip a coin?

No and no.

All I needed to know before making my $1000 investment was that Microsoft was backing HD-DVD. That ensured it was a loser.

posted by john at 08:35 AM  •  permalink

August 02, 2007

guest post: troll invasion

It had to happen eventually, I suppose. I met one of you. Rather, I had one of you barge into my life and stick your outstretched hand into my face. The following guest post is written by longtime Stank troll Chris, who is now my—sigh—co-worker. The unedited version was even longer. You're welcome.

• • •

I've heard John's name a number of times, but I've never had a formal introduction. John's "mentee," Elizabeth, was responsible for pointing me at checkraise, and over the last few years it has held a position of high esteem next to many other, and equally worthy, curmudgeons on my RSS feed.

After my recent transfer, his name began popping up more often. This time it wasn’t coming from Elizabeth; the writers on THIS team knew him too. And when they said his name it mostly wasn’t preceded by “That fucking…” or followed by “...the miserable bastard.” They liked him. I’d transferred right into a lair of followers, sycophants, and former co-workers (including my manager, who John described to me as “the most exhausting person I've ever met.”). My fate was sealed. I knew then that I’d get my introduction in short order. Or would I? After a few weeks of never seeing the guy, I had to ask of his whereabouts. "He only comes in once every few weeks,” I was told.

Yesterday he showed up. I was told he was "in a meeting" but it’s probably okay to drop in and say hello.

Folks, I’ve read this blog for some time now and I knew that barging in would likely be a bizarre situation. Aside from a few emails, this guy doesn’t know me from Adam. I’m neither fan-boy nor sycophant, but I had to introduce myself if only to combat the preconceived notion that nobody in Seattle is pleasant or can carry on a conversation with a total stranger. His congenial nature is well known. I was sure he’d appreciate the gesture.

I found him in his boss's office. I was to leave soon so it was now or never. With a knock on the door, I was let in.

Me (extending handshake): “Pardon the intrusion but I thought I’d introduce myself while you’re here - otherwise you’d think I’m a complete bastard.”

John (accepting said handshake): “Okay.”

Boss (looking disturbed and confused): “You know this guy?”

Me (as usual, I begin to over-explain myself): “Yeah we know each other through a circuitous combination of friends and acquaintances.”

(John shoves the door into me. )

John: “Okay, now, FUCK OFF!”

SLAM!

In under two minutes, I'd managed to coax a FUCK OFF out of John and it took nearly no effort on my part. The look on his boss's face as the door closed? PRICELESS. It’s exactly what the U.S. Military was hoping for when the phrase “Shock and Awe” was coined.

So now we’ve met. Elizabeth’s world is likely crumbling down around her. I was only disappointed in that I didn’t have enough time to show him pictures of my children.

posted by john at 06:00 AM  •  permalink

May 04, 2007

hags united

When I was a manager, my boss thought it was funny to muck with my team while I was on vacation. He'd move deadlines, responsibilities, people—whatever it took to irritate me. He particularly specialized in hiring people and putting them under me without my participation. This is where Dorkass came from, which worked out well enough, but it's also where two travesties originated. I needn't go into detail (although I can predict with confidence who will ask me to), so suffice it to say that 1) these petite young women were wholly unqualified for any job I could conjure and 2) the boss spoke lecherously about screwing them on a piano.

At one point, my team was composed of seven females and me. Gossip abounded, despite the fact that I hadn't hired half of them—let alone that my own hires were married or gay. In all, I hired exactly one single woman, whom I deemed Misery Chick because of her Opheliesque inclinations. None of this stopped the moronic chatter about alleged improprieties. It was my personal "harem." As is the nature of such things, this malicious fancy grew into perception. No one enjoyed fanning it more than my boss, who conveniently neglected to mention that the retarded eye candy was his idea.

One day, a young woman named Annie walked into my office. Lovely and talented and with the light bulb obviously on, she was interviewing for a job on another team. I shifted uncomfortably. If I say 'hire,' I'm going to get fucking crucified. I did, and I was. In short order, beautiful Carla plopped in the same chair for the same reason. Oh dear god no. Another obvious hire. But sonuvabitch... Again, I braced and said "hire." The howls were predictable by now, but I still tried to do the right thing.

Annie's first week, some hag saw fit to warn her about my predatory nature. "Just look at his harem."

Ya know what? Screw doing the right thing. Pretty chicks: categorically out. And the next time a guy of even threadbare qualifications came along, I said hire with an enthusiasm appropriate only if he'd saved my mother's life. Well, maybe not my mother, but someone's.

And on it goes. My modern-day search for an editor has led me to my obvious star, the student who does much more and tests much better than everyone else, the student about whom a professor said yesterday, "If she fails in life, I bloody quit. Not just the job. I quit life." If you could buy stock in human beings, I'd sink my every last cent in her.

My problem is that like many college students, she's pretty. That will serve her well in business and life, so I don't feel too sorry for her, but no job offer is forthcoming from me. Someone else can mentor her. I can already hear the criticism, the vicious innuendo gleefully whispered by embittered, middle-aged, self-proclaimed "feminist" hags at Microsoft. So the hags have their victory; I will take the path of least resistance and discriminate. I'll find a less talented but less aesthetically threatening protege.

The kid will be their boss in five years, anyway. The right people will still win and lose. And thus do I put my trust in physics: cream rises, shit sinks.

posted by john at 06:29 AM  •  permalink

March 21, 2007

point, stank

Several people thought that in my recent post about class, I was too harsh on Microsoft folks. Of course, these people are all in Microsoft's employ, but still.

I had lunch with Dorkass yesterday. It's always a delight to watch gyoza tumble in her open mouth like so many socks in a glass-door dryer, but I'm going to focus instead on her complaint—extremely common in my circle—that the free valet parking at Microsoft is just too damned slow.

"Congratulations," I said. "You just made tomorrow's post."

"Shit."

posted by john at 08:07 AM  •  permalink

March 20, 2007

the wow starts now

It started with a tip from a friend.

"Hey dude. Your girlfriend has an ad up on Match.com."

Dude looked. Dude saw. Dude felt entitled to peruse scores of girls' personals ads and collect them as his "favorites."

Girlfriend discovers this on their computer. Girlfriend is pissed. Girlfriend writes me, confronts him, and accusations and counter-accusations rip flesh like shrapnel.

Hurtful things were said, and things are extremely iffy today. And who do they really have to thank for this bliss? Why, the source of all pointlessness and idiocy in my life: Microsoft.

Turns out Microsoft pimps out its Spaces bloggers, photos included, in ads on Match.com—without their consent or knowledge. (Yeah! What possible harm could come from that?) Oh, I'm sure it's in the 170 page license agreement somewhere, but Legal's thoroughness is not on trial here. Microsoft's genius is. If we could only get them to stop being so passionate about our potential, we might actually have some.

posted by john at 07:28 AM  •  permalink

March 13, 2007

ostraschisms

I like to think of myself as supremely comfortable in my own skin, but there have been lapses. So long as humans interact, I suppose, someone will feel like outsider.

The youngest child of five, I experienced outsider status from Day One. Childhood memories are seldom anything but being on the outside, watching the older kids do activities I was denied. Thanksgiving was a metaphor for the life to come. As my siblings grew older, they migrated one-by-one from the kids' table—a card table with paper plates—to the main dining room table, until finally, I presided at the kids' table alone. Apt.

I would feel like an outsider again, of course. Taking care of my dying mom and her household when I was a teenager precluded a normal teenhood. Having nothing to offer but scintillating tales of balanced checkbooks, I would listen with rapt attention while my peers boasted of their exploits. And later on, I would be the White Guy in my neighborhood, forever skewing my sense of racial identity such that no race really feels like my own.

The modern-day version of this is one that took me by surprise: class.

I am a poor kid who's done well, and the transition hasn't really taken. Like a fat guy who's lost a lot of weight but still feels like a fat guy, you never really stop feeling like a poor kid. And as such, I'll never be comfortable with my own demographic, that being well-off white folks who work at Microsoft.

They're insane. These are people who want for nothing materially, who insist on taking their BMWs to the dealership in order to get the tires replaced, who make six figures a year for making sure the words "Server" and "2003" have a non-breaking space between them in documentation that is never read, who can complain with a straight face that their annual bonus of cash and stock was less than they truly deserved. At my best, I merely despise them. They're soulless, joyless fucks with an insatiable, positively deranged sense of entitlement.

They are why I moved to the peninsula. I wanted to be with...not "my people," per se, but people not so objectionable. People whose senses of self and reality have not been mutated by money. A funny thing happened on my way home, though. I am now the Rich Guy. And man, am I ever unprepared for this.

I am not rich by metrics that do not include the Third World, but try telling that to someone deeply thankful for a job that pays a fourth as much as mine. The gap is inconceivable to him. To him, I might as well be a millionaire. A billionaire.

And so I am treated differently. My stuff is broken without comment, even stolen, because I can afford to replace it. Contractors bid huge, which is annoying, and anything I purchase is pointed out as evidence of my differentiating richness. That's just people being jackasses; I can handle that. But friends seem somehow ashamed of their station in life, which is just intolerable. They even apologize for not being able to afford as much as I can.

It's horrific. If you have any degree of sensitivity at all, you feel self-conscious, sheepish. And I do. I even feel guilty for feeling sheepish. I find myself emphasizing my roots or my 13 year-old car. Or hiring a stranger to watch Ed rather than asking a friend and having to tell them I'm flying off to another football game. It feels like posturing. I loathe it. I am not Condescending Rich Guy. But all it takes for you to be that guy, it turns out, is a popular vote.

posted by john at 06:36 AM  •  permalink

September 06, 2006

death to caps lock

About a year ago, I saw Bill Gates excitedly showing off an early version of Windows Vista. What one feature did he demonstrate? Photo-stitching. You know photo-stitching software. It's the stuff we've gotten for free with our digital cameras for about six years.

"If Microsoft really listened to what customers want," I recently held forth, "They'd give 'em a way of turning off that gODDAMNED cAPS lOCK kEY."

Hmmm. A little research later...

Microsoft didn't, but this guy did. I ran disable_caps_lock.reg, rebooted, and caps lock is no more.

posted by john at 05:15 PM  •  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

May 15, 2006

another brush with greatness: the melinda gates story

In the mid-90s, the world's wealthiest woman and I had a "thing."

My office was five feet from hers, and in the manner of eating, drinking, peeing human beings in close proximity, we crossed paths several times a day. It didn't take me long to notice that polite acknowledgement of another human being's existence was not in her social arsenal. When we passed, there was no eye contact, no courtesy nod.

My peers reported similar non-treatment. Melinda acknowledged no one. In fact, women sitting in a bathroom stall could tell when Melinda entered the room, because a "cone of silence" immediately enveloped everyone. The woman was a walking frost warning.

I took it upon myself to force her to acknowledge my existence. I pointedly said "good morning," which went unreturned. I sneezed. No "bless you." I startled her with loud noises. I did pratfalls. One time I held open a door for her and she stood there, staring at her feet, refusing to go through. I'd say that the harder I tried, the harder she resisted, but the cold truth is that I doubt she could have picked me out of a lineup. I never once saw her look at me.

I left that job in abject failure, and soon Melinda left the company altogether to birth a daughter. I figured that was the end of the story.

Six months into my new job, I returned to my old office to visit friends. As I whirled and left, I clobbered Melinda, who, apparently visiting someone herself, had not seen me coming. In that staggering second, as I helped her regain her footing, a miracle happened: she made eye contact. True, it wasn't exactly warm, but I'll take it.

"What's the matter? Didn't you see me?" I chided.

She averted her eyes and walked away.

posted by john at 07:51 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

March 24, 2006

i felt a funeral, in my brain

A few years ago, a fad called "personas" became all the rage at a certain world's largest software company. In theory, personas are useful for getting thousands of people to think of customers the same way. We know that the fictional token white guy Chris Redman is a system administrator for a fictional medium-sized company, and that he manages seven servers and 2000 clients, and that....oh you don't care. You get the point. MS made up hypothetical customers with hypothetical needs. Why didn't they use actual customers? Because that wouldn't be cool.

It started with baseball cards. Someone with entirely too much budget undertook to create an authentic baseball card for each persona and distribute these as gifts. You laugh, but I can name people who excitedly tried to collect them all. "I'll trade you three Chris Redmans and a Mariko Nakatani for your Olukun'le E'luhonla! He's cool!"

Three more brain cells died when I was typing that sentence.

Soon, glossy posters dedicated to the personas appeared in the hallways. I could now pick Chris Redman out of a crowd sooner than I could a family member. While I'm desensitized to the everyday detachment from reality in Redmond, its latest manifestation caused even me pause. Chris Redman is now praising our products. "Windows Server 2003 changed my life, making my job easier and my network more secure! Thanks!"

The voices in their heads are officially speaking back.

posted by john at 08:10 AM  •  permalink

February 27, 2006

the most microsoft-centric post ever

If you're not in the software industry, flee while you can.

From Dorkass comes this cute link. The folding sysreqs are my favorite part.

posted by john at 11:30 AM  •  permalink

February 26, 2006

old cop, young cop

After a lengthy diversion into writing, I've lately returned to editing. In the journalistic world where I began, editors ruled. They hired writers, fired writers, and got final cut. They owned you. Everyone wanted to be an editor, if for no other reason than being the abuser is infinitely preferable to being the abused. In technical writing, it's far more pluralistic. We're peers. Content ownership is a squishy subject, but fortunately it's just computer documentation; no one really goes to the mat to own such a thing.

Unfortunately, the editing profession often appeals to the wrong sort. Editors, like cops and teachers, are a mixed bag of 1) professionals with a genuine calling and 2) poseurs who simply crave sanction to tell others what to do. The latter's mission, as they see it, is to find fault. And like King Shit with a Badge or the pontificating professorial windbag, their masturbatory proclivities do a disservice to the actual professionals in their ranks—the people who just want to collaborate, to focus on the content. It's almost a religious difference. The pro editors see their job as making the writer look good; the poseurs see their job as making the writer look bad. The poseurs try to embarrass their writers with sheer volume of (alleged) corrections, and some even deride their writers publicly. And not surprisingly, writers learn to distrust, subvert, even hate editors. The dirty cops taint the good cops by association.

• • •

Courtney asks me what she'd need to do to be qualified for an editing job at Microsoft. At about four bourbons, I skip straight to snorting disdainfully.

"You're there."

"No, seriously."

"No, seriously. There are no qualifications, no requirements, no desired skill-sets. Does it say 'Editor' on your paycheck? Why, that makes you a professional editor."

"Yeah, but no one would hire—"

"You're cute. You'd be hired in a heartbeat."

She points out, quite rightly, that her academic and professional backgrounds have prepared her little for editing. She's naturally gifted with language, which helps. She was an English major, a fact that's persuasive to everyone but former English majors, who know there aren't exactly any requirements for that dubious status. She and I have done a couple hours' training on points of grammar, but that's the sum of her preparation. She's all potential.

"I'm not qualified," she declares crossly, shaking her head, echoing what I said of myself a decade ago—before I got qualified. "Not nearly. I haven't trained. I haven't apprenticed. I wouldn't feel comfortable correcting a professional writer. I mean"—she wrinkles her face in empathetic irritation—"who am I to find fault with someone else's writing?"

"At Microsoft? You're bloody over-qualified. In that you trained for five minutes, you're in the top tenth of a percentile." At least I didn't use my they're editors only because if they were hookers, they'd starve to death line. "Look. If someone catches on to your faking it, just say you changed it because your way 'sounds better.' Or say that you didn't know x because it's not important enough to warrant knowing. Or just poll some idiots who'll vote your way. This is a culture where that constitutes evidence."

"That's frightening."

A veritable horror show, it is. Welcome to Nightmare on 40th Street.

posted by john at 10:27 PM  •  permalink

February 15, 2006

four sweetest words

This year I work four days per week from home, which in my estimation is about 80% perfect. My greed amazes even me. As much as I planned to be in this position, I'm also lucky. Knowing I'm lucky tempers my greed not at all. Oh, how I resent getting into my car and actually venturing to the office. I bitch. I pout. I punish all with whom I come in contact.

A miracle happened yesterday.

"Don't come to Redmond," my boss wrote. There was no reason for me to.

"Are there four sweeter words in the English language?" I replied.

The baby's not yours.
Cheney shoots campaign contributor
World champion Pittsburgh Steelers
USC: one time champion
Ernest's wife dumped him.
I got my period.
Pat Robertson's gay son
Percy listed his house.
I've no living relatives.
Chris Webber's time out
Let's have sex. - Beyonce

Nope.

posted by john at 11:11 PM  •  permalink

January 18, 2006

dell on earth

I've been out of commission for the last 29 hours, trying to pare all the crap off my new Dell laptop. It's no small undertaking. The desktop was nearly completely obscured by shortcuts to unwanted crapware. But now I've gotten the problem down to my trying to get Windows to work as it should. Little things, really. Like getting "Windows Media Center Edition" to play Windows media files, or getting Microsoft's web browser to display images at higher than 72 dpi, or getting the Microsoft operating system to recognize the Microsoft mouse. Another two weeks ought to do it.

posted by john at 12:31 AM  •  permalink

January 12, 2006

of maxim babes and hr twinkies

I knew I was getting old when I was at the magazine rack and, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, I no longer recognized the girls on the cover of Maxim. I used to know them all, complete with their scant filmographies. Then click. Old fartedness set in. "I have no idea who she is, but I bet her parents are really proud of the lollipop-sucking photo," I found myself snorting, rolling my eyes. And then I shrieked in horror. "I MEAN, WOW SHE'S SMOKIN' HOT! LIKE, TOTALLY HITABLE!"

But it was too late. Once your mother's words come out of your mouth, they cannot be shoved back in. Report to the nearest Chevy dealership and buy a station wagon.

With this moment in time has also come a brand new peeve: when businesses try to sell me something by shoving a 21 year old's cleavage in my face. I used to just be offended by the crass misogyny of it all, but now first and foremost it offends my intelligence. I'm supposed to take a job/buy a camera/eat at a restaurant/watch a show because...I'm not sure why, actually. Apparently I'm that stupid. The mere presence of a beautiful woman is supposed to make me part with rational thought and/or money. Pardon me if I find that presumption extraordinarily irritating.

Like most of the tech industry, Microsoft hires very attractive young women as recruiters. While of course there are exceptions, I've had to deal with far, far too many hot young HR reps who hadn't the slightest idea how to do their jobs, or even what their jobs were. Their serial inability to recruit writers with basic literacy skills drove me mad, and I took to calling them "HR Twinkies." (Admittedly not really fair, since they're the exploited) Their unstated job seems obvious: to attract candidates in every sense of the word. It certainly seems to comprise the sum of their skill-set. I often wonder if the recruiters were hired because most of the candidates are male, or if most of the Microsoft is male because the recruiters were hired. Apparently we're that stupid.

posted by john at 12:08 AM  •  permalink

January 05, 2006

i’ve got the urge to purge

In a compelling demonstration of Microsoft's hipness (and hard-won Freedom to Innovate), last night Bill Gates enlisted the aid of Justin Timberlake, the hottest musical star of 1999, to announce the company's plan to clone iTunes, Apple's 2002 music download service.

posted by john at 10:32 AM  •  permalink

October 22, 2005

i microsoft

And for once, I love its serial inability to tell right from wrong, to tell legal from illegal, to tell what it wishes were true from reality. It's about damned time these qualities worked for me instead of against me.

Thanks for the class-action settlement check! Keep the money coming!

posted by john at 08:21 AM  •  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 28, 2005

one microsoft way

I just visited some friends who work for the 'Squish. You might remember them; they long ago drowned in Kool Aid any souls they once had. Let's call them Jim and Marceline Jones. Jim and Marceline are one of those curiously smug pairs who've concluded that when they put their IQs of 90 and 80 together, they combine to form one unassailable 170 IQ. Together, they comprise the all-knowing masters of the universe.

Jim, Marceline and I were watching TV when a commercial for the new iPod nano came on. I braced. I needed to.

"WHAT A FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT!" they howled at the screen in unison, so you know they must be right. Their tone is hysterical, scornful, exactly like that of a teenage girl shrieking "SLUT!" at another girl whose only sin is popularity.

"Yeah, go ahead and throw your money away on one," snorted Jim to one of the three HDTVs he uses to watch analog programming.

The commercial shows the credit-card sized Nano in someone's fingertips. It's an impressive bit of engineering.

"The Muvo is smaller than that!" snorts Marceline.

"The what?"

"The Muvo. It's what Apple stole the design from for the Nano."

I know very little about such things, so I held my tongue, but the distinctive odor of MS Bullshit® was definitely wafting through the room. When I got home, I looked them up. I'll be damned if the iPod Nano isn't brazen design theft.

Other things Apple stole:

iPod Nano	Muvo Slim
3.5 x 1.6 x 0.27 inches	3.3 x 2.2x 0.3 inches
14 hour battery	8 hour battery
4000 MB storage	256 MB storage

Note how much smaller the Muvo is.

As amazingly irrational and, well, let's face it, made up as these Kool Aid–guzzling cultists' claims are, to really understand the MS culture, you need to understand that even when confronted with facts, they are not dissuaded from their original claims. They just do another shot and 'splain to you why you're stupid.

And this, kids, is why you can't figure out how to even minimize the media player; why your word processor changes every two years even though you were happy with it in 1994; why, say, changing the speaker volume increasingly requires you to read paragraphs upon paragraphs of "inductive" ui and security warnings; why Passport couldn't remember who you are, even through that was its sole function; and why the MS web browser blocks MS web sites as security risks. Because we're so much smarter than you. Here, lemme 'splain to you why you're stupid.

posted by john at 07:11 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

August 03, 2005

names list

It was a decade ago. Mark and I were both fresh out of school and at MS. How long ago was this? I still thought that any quality work I did might actually make a difference. I was working on SQL, he on some product that never shipped. We were both stuck in our offices into the wee hours of the night, but at least we had this "e-mail" fad with which to kill time. I still have many of these e-mails, especially the etchings of me with barnyard animals that a bored Mark made in Paint. Those might be worth something someday. But I digress.

One night, I e-mailed Mark about a nameplate I had just seen: Anne Kruglick. "Poor girl," I wrote, chuckling.

"We should introduce her to Dick Butkus," Mark replied. "Then she could hyphenate and be 'Anne Kruglick-Butkus.' I've got a woman over here named Emily Hausenfluck, and the L and the U on her nameplate run together. That always catches my eye."

And so did we begin our ten-year labor of love, compiling a list of amusing names we ran into at work. It just dawned on me that since I am no longer in the employ of MS, there's no reason not to run this. As time went on, the bar grew higher and higher. So in order of discovery, here they are as they appeared in the corporate address book:

Where it didn't impact the joke, I've tweaked the names of the innocent. Where it would have impacted the joke...well, I'm very sorry. Blame your parents.

posted by john at 07:37 AM  •  permalink

July 13, 2005

say, say, say

Anyone who uses voice-dial on their phone has had this experience.

Phone: Name, please
Me: Katrina, cell
Phone: Did you say "Katrina, work?"
Me: No.
Phone: Did you say "Katrina, home?"
Me: Nope.
Phone: Did you say "Terrell, cell?"
Me: AAARRRRRRGGGGHHHH!
Phone: Dialing "Terrell, cell"

It does make one wonder about the algorithm the thing uses. My favorite response of all time was, until today, the time I belched.

Me: Buuurp.
Phone: Did you say "Mark, work?"

A few years ago, Microsoft switched to an electronic operator, and the results have been equally entertaining. After enunciating a name like a livid Judi Dench eight times, to no avail, I'll give up and see who it connects me to if I'm not trying at all.

MS: Say the name of the person you're looking for.
Me: Butt Kisser.
MS: Did you say "Bob Tanzar?"
Me: No.
MS: Say the name of the person you're looking for.
Me: Shit-faced Moron.
MS: Did you say "Christina Wall?"
Me: No.
MS: Say the name of the person you're looking for.
Me: Donkey Raping Shit Eater
MS: Did you say "Tom Piritino?"

Yes, yes, this is how I entertain myself when I'm alone. Very cerebral and mature, I know. If you'll indulge me one more, this is the delightful exchange of this morning.

MS: Say the name of the person you're looking for.
Me: Butt munching bumblefucks
MS: Connecting you to "1-800-MICROSOFT"

posted by john at 07:38 PM  •  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

name two adjectives that one might use to describe a stunted intellect

Micro, soft

Originally published February 6, 2005

The other night, a friend showed me something very telling about a certain world's largest software company. A pinhead executive there recently distributed a survey to my permanent-status brethren. He wants to know how many employees own iPods. He then plunges straight into question-begging, scolding 'Softies who buy non-MS products. Although I was morbidly curious about his justifications for dictating how employees choose to spend their wages, I stopped there. After ten years of traversing the scum-laden petri dish that is the corporate culture, I have the rest of the memo memorized. It will assert that MS technologies are clearly superior due to their obvious non-inferiority and that customers, although always right, are unequivocally wrong. The memo will then prove these assertions by citing someone who quotes the memo. Slogans will be coined, posters will be printed and hung in the hallways, and 4.0s will be handed out, all without a single goddamned sale being made. Such is the nature of accomplishment there.

A few years ago, a slogan du jour was "delight the customer." We all had to huddle in our offices and somehow work that buzz phrase into our annual reviews, the scores for which were of course already submitted, but I digress. We had to specify how, precisely, we were delighting the customer, and since we were being evaluated on a curve, the delights we were concocting had damned well better be more salacious than our peers'. The slogan has long since passed into oblivion—going the way of the February bonus, merit raises, stock options, and motivated employees—but I'm resurrecting it here in order to demonstrate a crucial hypocrisy. I am an iPod owner. Like the overwhelming majority of iPod owners, I am thrilled with it. Every day I use it, I become more impressed by the thought that went into its elegant design. And I am a dream customer. If it died tomorrow, I'd shed a manly tear, have a tasteful little funeral, flush, and then sprint to the store to get on the waiting list for an even more expensive one. I am, in short, the quintessentially delighted customer of my employer's competitor. But are my experiences mined for a better understanding of the customers' wants and needs? Are they a handy catalyst for introspection and self-improvement? No, they are resented, berated, corrected, dismissed.

Here's a more personal tale. I know folks who work on Windows Media Player. We were discussing the Big 3 media clients (WMP, Real, QuickTime), and I told them that, as an average end-user surfing average Web media, my experience was that QuickTime and WMP are the most reliable of the three, in that order. Did they shake their heads sadly? No. Did they want the details? No. Did they politely thank me for my data, roll their eyes at some oversight on my part, and forget about it? No. Did they inform me that my experience was somehow not representative? No, no, of course not. They argued that my experience wasn't what I remember. Instead of listening to the customer, they sought to discredit what he said, even if it meant correcting his own memory. And I'm their friend. Imagine how little regard they have for you.

Correcting the customer's memory. Is there a better metaphor for arrogant incompetence? Well, maybe one.

Stock performance during the iPod line's brief lifetime

posted by john at 12:00 AM  •  permalink