Friction and Harmony

Okay, so I’ve been away for a while. If there’s anyone out there still driving by to see if I’ve mowed the lawn or cleaned the windows… Looking for any signs of life at all… I’ll see if I can work on getting the place spruced up and rolling again.

Geez, even my sidebar widgets are out of whack. Damn.

Excuse me if this post is haphazard and a grammatical trainwreck. It’s going to be a wild rant…

*deep breath*

So I’ve had my head in a virtual bucket of sand lately. The Virginia Tech shootings and the mindless “this is too horrible to even think, so we’ll repeat it with the same looped tape of mindless interviews and ‘eyewitness’ accounts every three minutes for the next two weeks so you don’t miss a grisly detail…” was bad enough. Of course it doesn’t help that it followed on the heels of weeks of Anna Nicole and baby’s paternity coverage… If I’d heard another minute of that idiocy, I might have been compelled to shove an icepick upward into my own supra-orbicularis orbis in a desperate attempt at an auto-prefrontal lobotomy just to quell the rage!

Yes, school shootings depress the hell out of me. Why? Sure, the tragedy of innocent life lost, of course – and in frequently more bizarre and frighteningly cruel and senseless ways, too. But what compounds my frustration and dismay are the pinheads who think GUNS are the problem use the opportunity to immediately mount their soapboxes and try to strip me, my family and countless other law-abiding American citizens of their fundamental rights. Tonight I watched a Tivo’ed episode of Medium, for crying out loud, and they had to preface it with a perfectly acceptable expression of sadness for the VA tragedy and, then said “so we didn’t feel like we needed to show any more guns or senseless gun violence.“

Those VIOLENT FUCKING GUNS. They’re taking over!! Don’t turn your back on that old Colt that your grandpa left you, it might leap out of the old shoe box in the closet and kill you in your sleep! And THEN it will head down the road to the nearest school and start killing there, too! DON’T TRUST GUNS. They’re eeeeeeeviiillll!!

*spit* Pinheads.

But that’s just a FEW of the things that have kept me from wanting to go near my TV or any news-related (or for that matter, just about any) website for the past weeks… There’s plenty going on under our roof that has kept me on the brink of madness, too. But I’ll save that for later…

However, THIS was the straw that pissed me off and finally pushed me over the edge. I sortakinda accidentally browsed Drudge and saw the headline “Environmentalist calls mankind a ‘virus’…” That title didn’t surprise me at all – I’ve been railing on the self-loathing envirotards for over a decade, at least since I had to sit at a former place of employment and listen daily to a militant gay man defend his lifestyle choice as being “responsible negative population growth.” (Whatever. He was an asshole – I’m just happy he wasn’t creating more little versions of himself. He derisively used the term “Breeders” all the time – but complained petitioned threatened to have the employee handbook add “any derogatory speech regarding homosexuality or homosexual lifestyles” be deemed “cause for immediate dismissal.”)

But it was the “humankind a virus” coupled with the associated story of the attack on children – specifically babies – and families… It’s nothing more than a new angle for the abortion debate. “Babies are harmful to the environment.”

What fucking FUCK expects any rational, decent person to accept that argument…

In this case, I’m all for supporting the rights of the extra-tree-hugging-chromosome crowd to voluntary, government-funded sterilization. Then, they will be free to take their neutered-selves straight down to the nearest hybrid-selling dealership to buy a battery-powered eco-ego-comforting coffin in their choice of “look at me, I’m saving the planet!” logo-emblazoned glory. Oh, and don’t forget, you have the option of “Meat is Murder” LEATHER or “Carbon-offset” PETROLEUM-BASED FABRIC upholstery to choose from… Just don’t expect ME to have to pay for the fucking hazmat cleanup when you pull out in front of my 4800-pound SUV! And your fucking insurance had better pay for a rental while I’m having my motherfucking BUMPER replaced, even if said bumper is your ticket off the planet!!

Oh, and that reminds me. Here’s an Experience Based™ note to Progressive Insurance – you’re a bunch of whiny fucking *ASSHATS! Don’t try to penalize ME for your client’s stupidity OR try to tell me WHOM I MAY CHOOSE TO PERFORM A REPUTABLE REPAIR! Yes, I DO believe the guys who have had the same body shop on the same corner in town for the past 20 years are qualified to repair my vehicle to an acceptable standard. NO, I DON’T think the acne-plastered kid in the shop that sprang-up last week who tells me he’s going to cut the quarter-panel off my vehicle and then park it in his “yard” (read OUTDOORS) with a fucking TARP over it to “protect” my vehicle until they “can figure out from the insurance company what they need to order and get the right part in” is an acceptable alternative to the “excessive” three to four-week turnaround just weeks after a FUCKING CATEGORY 4+ HURRICANE rips through our community! Your claims adjusters are RUDE and your “supervisors” are even worse. And just so you know, I was cheering in the office when the body-shop owner dared your so-called “manager” to steer clients away from his business!

*[Oh, that reminds me... Welcome back Rachel Lucas!]

Where was I? Oh, the “humanity is evil, no more babies” crowd… How about you start with yourselves. You really want to reduce your carbon output? Stop breathing. Drink the kool-aid, call Dr. Kevorkian, whatever. Be brave – do the right thing and be the leaders you were meant to be. Off the planet – now. The ride is over. I need more room for my Suburban on the road anyway.

I hear purple shrouds are stylish… And I promise a round of thunderous applause on behalf of your willingness to take a real stand.

Oh, and for the “America Sucks” crowd, I propose the following new program: The IA Footprint Offset. For every “America Sucks” or “There’s just so many things wrong with our country today” soapbox squaller, I invite you to take the place of an Illegal Alien in his or her country of origin. Trade your income for theirs – along with your American Constitutional Rights and Freedoms. Help offset the burden of health-care and infrastructure drain by illegals by offering them your home, your job, and your… Well, I understand if you don’t want them driving your precious Prius. Besides, I’m sure they’d rather have something with a little more seating capacity. Anyway, simply trade identities, careers and Social Security and Federal Income Tax status with any illegal alien already residing here. This will effect an offset to the impact on our social and governmental systems, while at the same time you are escaping the trappings of Evil Corporate America and the VRWC.

It’s pure fucking genius – although I’m not holding my breath. The door still hasn’t slammed shut behind Alec Baldwin’s fat ass, after all…

*sigh* Wow, there was more venom to purge than I had thought… I’m starting to feel better already!

Roses’ post ‘Good News, Bad News (?) part two‘ reminded me of a kind-of-similar situation we faced at Clark Development while I was there…

We were a bunch of ‘bithead’ tech-junkies working in one of the first ‘wired-communities’ – the online-world of dedicated bulletin-board systems. We found our employees – or they found us – while ‘surfing’ the boards before ‘surfing’ was the term for it. At a time when the company had need for a new programmer, we kept our eyes open to see who might fit the bill. One guy in particular stepped forward, and he seemed to have just the set of communications programming skills we were looking for.

‘Rog’ struck-up digital-conversations on the company BBS with a number of us who were already employed there, and then I happened across him on another site as well. During one of these conversations, he mentioned his former employer in an indirect way that I recognized – because I was a former employee of the same company. I chatted him about it and he was a little evasive, but did admit that he had worked for the same previous employer that I had. I thought, “cool!” We down-talked Company A’s bad points together and agreed that the ‘big-company’ environs were not our cup o’ tea. I told him how much more I enjoyed working for that particular small software company than I had the corporate giant we had come from (little did I know at the time – I was still relatively new there myself.)

When he came in for the interview, we were shocked. While some people are said to “have a face for radio,” this guy was the online-analogue. His physique was definitely made for online interaction only – and DOS text-based, at that! Nevertheless, he passed muster, since programming skills were what mattered most, and this guy quite obviously spent a great deal of time on his ginormous ass in front of a computer, so it was assumed he might prove to be ‘dedicated to his work.’

Little did we know.

About the time Rog was being hired, I happened to talk to a good friend from that same former place of employment. Since I had last talked with my friend, he had been ‘promoted’ due to an injury he had earlier sustained on the job which partially paralyzed him. He was now an HR benefits specialist – having acquired so much experience in navigating the red-tape of workman’s comp. injury, rehabilitation and insurance woes. I casually asked him, “So did you ever know a guy named Rog? He supposedly worked there until recently.”

There was an odd pause from the other end of the line, and finally, “uh…how exactly do you know Rog?”

“He just hired on where I work. Kind of creepy-looking, but he seems an okay programmer. Why?”

Again, my friend sounded very uncomfortable, and his voice was really low – almost as if he were trying to muffle his voice by covering the receiver, “Bitterroot, we need to talk. But not on the phone, and not here. Meet me for a beer tonight.”

What I learned was strictly off-the record ‘as a friend’ – and most of it hearsay at that. Evidently our new hire had been caught with some high-dollar network diagnostic equipment that belonged to Company A, under his bed in his apartment. He had been ‘documented’ entering the building and then leaving with the equipment after business hours. In a highly-video-monitored facility. With magnetic swipe-cards for access to every door. The stupid sonofabitch even used his own card.

My friend gave me someone else to talk to – the owner of a small business computer shop who had been literally bankrupted by employee thefts perpetrated by none-other than our newest employee. It seems he found his way into the ordering system and forged Purchase Orders for equipment from just about every vendor they dealt with, often ‘drop-shipping’ the orders to a fictional “suite” that was actually a mailbox center. By the time the small business realized they were over $180k in debt for purchases they had never made, it was too late… He had quit unexpectedly when they started to get suspicious. He had been careful enough to cover his tracks that time, and the investigation had been slow and plodding, yielding only enough ‘evidence’ to get him about nine months in jail.

It was rumored that at the time of his arrest they had also found a mysterious $60k DEC VAX sitting in a corner of his apartment with the serial tags peeled and scratched off. It was unclear where the washing-machine-sized mini-computer came from or how he could have ‘boosted’ it without anyone noticing.

And now he was our problem.

I went to management with everything I knew, but I wouldn’t divulge how I knew it to protect my friend. Even though he wasn’t involved in the investigation or termination of this creep, he was still part of the HR department that did, and so he certainly would have lost his job or worse. My employer decided his hands were tied – he thought it best to wait for ‘evidence’ of our own to legitimize a termination at the earliest opportunity possible. Meanwhile, I wasn’t to breathe a word of suspicion to anyone in the office – or it would be my head too!

I sat and bit my tongue as things in the office began to happen. The ‘honor-box’ for the fridge full of cokes started leaking money – from largest denominations to smallest. Of course whole-flats of cokes would disappear altogether. We no longer had free-access to the office. Our keys were taken-up and the locks and alarm codes were changed. The ‘energetic, dynamic, fun’ atmosphere that the office had been became one of suspicion, distrust and unease. Small things began disappearing from desks – personal CD players, change, odd desktop accoutrements. Nothing major.

Then there were Rog’s own personal admissions… That he ‘bragged’ about dealing coke to a fourteen-year-old, who could only pay him with a blow job. And as offensive as that sounds to the casual reader, you’d have to have seen… No, not even just seen… Gah!

Do you know what ultimately got him ‘dismissed’? Of course you don’t so I’ll tell you:

Hygiene.

The guy stank to high heaven, and often wore the same clothes for days without changing. When he did change clothes, it must have been an effort to ‘throw-us-off’ because they were already wrinkled and stained – clearly from the hamper or floor or the bottom of whatever shitpile he lived in. At probably in the neighborhood of four-hundred pounds, his filthy, enormous visage was still no match for his repulsive, overpowering stench. Glade air-fresheners seemed to sprout from every desk in the office without explanation or notice.

And it wasn’t until days after he was finally gone that we realized how cloying all of that perfumed air actually was…

The ‘elevator story’ from This Post by Roses at Ack! Thbbbt! reminded me of a similar story from my days at Clark Development where we, the ‘jokers’ got utterly, totally and completely ‘pwn3d‘ by the joke-ee – who was one of our bosses.

Our offices were on the fourth floor of a four-story building, and there was of course but one elevator. At the end of the day, a co-worker and I challenged our Senior Programmer – who was a stand-up guy with a good sense of humor – to a similar ‘elevator race.’ He didn’t exactly agree – he just shook his head and grinned as we raced off down the stairs, letting the elevator doors close on him. At the third floor, I burst through the stairwell door to punch the elevator button while my co-worker advanced to do the same at the second floor. Satisfied with ourselves that we had caused him the added annoyance of having to stop at each floor, we met-up again in the lobby and stood with our noses just an inch away from the elevator doors, waiting for them to open.

As the elevator doors slid apart, we shouted and flung our arms up and into the elevator, “BWAAAAAAHAHA!!”… just as our boss hurled himself out the stairwell door behind us, hoping to catch us by surprise in the lobby. He had no idea that we would be in attack-stance at the elevator doors…

Or that we would cause a poor little businessman from the second floor to nearly suffer a heart attack from sudden fright as he jerked his expensive leather briefcase up to defend himself from two would-be attackers at the elevator door!

As we stood there in the elevator doorway, stunned to discover that our thirty-one year-old boss in jeans and an oxford shirt had morphed into a sixty-five year old man in a three-piece suit and with absolute terror in his eyes… Our Senior Programmer was literally on his back… On the ground… Screaming with laughter at what he had just witnessed.

Pure pwn4g3.

I’m pondering a layoff at my company… The only problem is, I’m the only employee. The reasons are simple – I’m bored out of my skull, and my clients are moving in directions that I don’t know that I want to follow.

Of course, my “Husband-In-Law,” a.k.a. The Other Ex, or more commonly between Mrs. Who and myself – “Fish Hook“ – has already written a letter threatening to “notify the IRS” about the alleged SALE of my business… Hmmm – from his letter, I’m guessing this happened early last year, but I can’t be sure. It’s the first I’ve heard of the sale of my own company! COOL! I could be RICH!

He seems certain that I am hiding money from the government, and he’s desperately looking for ways to punish us for his own damned (albeit well-deserved) insecurities. However, if I am hiding money from the government, I must be pretty damned good at it, because even I can’t find it!! If I sold my business as shitwick so certainly claims, WHERE’S MY DAMNED CHECK?!! I mean, I would really, really like to have something to show for my alleged sudden prosperity. A new King Ranch F-250 diesel would be nice. But did my alleged-invisible-mystery buyer even buy me lunch? I’d settle for a cheeseburger and a Coke – maybe even a vacation and sick-day package with a side of fries…

Fuckwit.

Hell – it’s not like there’s much to sell… I’m an independent IT consultant specializing in medical offices and hospitals. Let’s see. That means there’s… Me. My laptop. My Office PC. My cellphones. A few odds and ends in the way of diagnostic tools and LAN-sniffing software. A few leftover boxes of plenum-rated Cat5e and what puny knowledge is still left in my cranium. No employees, no office building, no corporate vehicles, no high-dollar industrial machines or equipment. It’s a simple living, but it’s been getting us by for over seven years… Somehow I don’t see Microsoft or GE knocking down my door to ‘acquire’ what should probably be in a jar, labeled “Abby Normal.”

Perhaps the worst part of having my own business is that my boss is an asshole, and my sole employee is a good-for-nothing slacker…

In fact, as I sit here assessing my options and pondering whether or not I should dust-off the old resume, I realize my work history is pretty dire – for my employers, that is. Every single company I’ve worked for has gone down in flames (some literally) shortly after I’ve left:

• Taco John’s restaurant – my first job – closed repeatedly by Dept. of Health – finally bulldozed to build a shopping center. Should have caught fire.

• The Hawaiian restaurant – caught fire -then bulldozed to build a shopping center.

• Yet another unnamed restaurant – caught fire – burned to the ground. High drama: after trying to use a puny fire extinguisher to put out the inferno caused by what turned out to be a broken gas main feeding an overheated grease fryer, I stumbled out of the building blinded by smoke and coughing up my lungs only to be nearly run-down by an arriving emergency vehicle. I found myself on my hands and knees in an alley with a “Crown Victoria” grille just inches from my forehead and tire smoke rolling past me.

• Pharmacy (delivery driver, later ‘intern’) – Robbed. Robbed. Robbed. Robbed again. Finally, the pharmacist/owner was convicted of dispensing drugs without a prescription (actually, he was too kind-hearted for his own good and had on several occasions overlooked a known prescription forger, whom when caught, turned the tables on him) about the same time his son committed suicide rather than go on a Mormon “Mission.” He and his family were of course devastated – Doors closed.

• “ACME Big Computer Company” – pioneer in computer graphics, CAD-CAM and movie production, airline and military flight simulators. Through apprenticeships, study and a couple-years hard work, I “moved-up” from entry level to a management position in the graphics workstation division – which was outperformed by SGI, bankrupted and closed its doors less than two years later.

• Ceramics research company – grants lost, division closed, layoff (after nearly being vaporized in a near-industrial accident, resulting in OSHA and other agencies crawling through the place issuing citations and code violations. Guess who blew the whistle after a severe bout of Toluene poisoning… What an asshole!)

• Clark Development Company – A long, bitter story that ends with the company bankrupted shortly after I left.

• A Data Collection, Processing and Billing Solutions provider for United Parcel Service – Awesome, fast-paced and interesting job where I did Fox Pro programming and rodeoed cats from midnight to ten AM every Tuesday through Saturday. Closed doors to move to Mexico City while I was on vacation. Offered me a house and car, and all moving expenses… I had a four year old, a new one on the way, and I don’t speak a word of Spanish. Well, besides what I picked up working at Taco John’s…

• “ComputerLand” franchisee – This one doesn’t count – it was a ‘shared write-off’ company for an investment triad. It was designed to fail from the beginning. As soon as I realized this, I was out the door…

• Computer Services division of local Medical Service provider – a “for-profit” branch of an NFP organization designed to reduce costs by acquiring parts and services at wholesale and reselling at-cost to the NFP. Plagued by embezzlement and scandal (female manager / partners ‘rollicking’ naked at Mardi Gras party didn’t impress the board of trustees!). Rumored $250k inventory “shortfall” on heels of other alleged business practices scandals was the final nail in the coffin – about seven months after I ‘saw the writing on the wall’ and walked out to form my own company.

So I have to wonder – do I dare quit my own company? What will happen? Will I burst into flames, move to Pakistan or discover that I’ve been embezzling from myself for years? What to do?!

Shit. I really am sick to death of my job – but I’m far more afraid of spontaneous human combustion.

There are contingencies, but for some reason Mrs. Who is vehemently against me hiring any rollicking naked female employees.

As I wrote the last post, memories were stirred, and I followed the links in Wikipedia to find this.

I laughed.

The last paragraph in particular was (okay, at least to me) hilarious:

The Clark Development corporation ultimately collapsed in an ugly fashion in the late 1990s, assigning a new president before going bankrupt. All indications are that the PC-Board code disappeared with the company.

Want to know the real story?  Oh, you know you want to…

Clark Development Co. was already doomed from without, but we didn’t yet know it…  Algore was just about to “invent the Internet” – which would inevitably spell doom for the standalone dial-up BBS system.  However, there was a cancer – an internal “power struggle” that at least contributed to the company’s ultimate demise.  The passion-play starred none other than yours truly and a group of malcontents I called “The Exodus Club” that seemed to have formed around me.  (The Communication Workers of America, Local 7704 played an amusing hand too.)  We were rats on a burning, sinking ship, and we sensed it.  And a few of us “rats” were striking matches just to watch them burn…

I had been working at CDC for a number of years already, filling every role at some time or another except programmer and president.  My desk sat just outside Fred’s office – he was the President and founder of the company.  The programming staff all worked one floor down, and their office space was more limited than ours.  We were office management staff, technical support, and production.  I was all three at once for a time.  One of my duties was technical layout and production of the nearly 900 page software manual.  For reasons I won’t get into now (I’d be writing a novella just to build to the point, otherwise), Fred and I had locked-horns.  It was a battle-royale of wills.

I dared him to fire me.  Really, I dared him.  Fred thought it would be better, instead, to make me as uncomfortable as possible in hopes I might quit so as to avoid increased unimployment insurance costs.  For me, the battle was about hypocrisy and principles that I felt had been violated.  Then it happened…

Fred was a heavy smoker, and he smoked frequently as he walked about the office.  He bent-down to show me something on my PC – with a cigarette hanging between his fingers as he typed on my keyboard.  Ash dropped into the keys as the smoke curled up and into my face.  I had nowhere to go – my desk was in a small nook, and he literally had me cornered.  I asked him to please move the cigarette and not smoke near my desk…

“This is my goddamn company, and I can smoke wherever I goddamn want to!” he bellowed.  Tech support personnel prairie-dogged about the office.  “If you don’t like it, you know where the door is!”

He wore a self-satisfied, arrogant, ‘Ha!  I just told you!‘ look.  He then turned and stomped through the office, cigarette smoke billowing behind him as he huffed away.

Hmmm…  I had an idea.  I got out my phone book, I made a call.  I went to lunch.

About an hour and a half later, I came back in with a packet from the Utah State Department of Health.  I walked up to Fred and said, “Here’s everything you need to know about the Utah Indoor Clean Air Act.  An inspector will be in the office at nine o’clock tomorrow morning.  This is now a non-smoking office.  Think you want to fire me now?”

I think he pretty much shit himself right then and there.  He took the packet and then stomped into his office, slamming the door behind him.  I could hear him shouting on the phone – he was talking with his attorney.  He left the office early that day – clearly not a happy man.

The next few weeks were spent watching fred chewing nicotine gum as he brought-in engineers to evaluate and bid modifications to the office design that would allow him to keep smoking in the office.  He discovered that the additional walls, ducting and control wiring would cost him tens of thousands of dollars – in a leased office space.  He tried to settle by declaring the shipping room the officially-designated smoking room since it didn’t share any common ducting or ventilation with my area of the office.

Of course when a neighboring tenant called to compain about cigarette smoke circulating into their office space… and then when he realized (with the help of a follow-up visit from the UDoH) that the Coke machine and our only designated company “break area” was the very area he chose to toke, Fred seemingly decided it wasn’t worth the continued battle.  He hired a young, business school graduate to act as appointed president puppet, and he took his leave of our office, gracing us with his presence only a few times a week.

I always made sure to greet him cheerfully, and with a big smile…   Until I finally did leave of my own accord, grinding my heel in his back with a smile was my “cherry” atop the steaming shitpile that my job had become at CDC.

Confession:  While I find cigarette smoke distasteful (I don’t smoke, myself) I grew-up in a smoking household, so I was more or less used to it.  It was his overreaction to my simple request to simply move his cigarette that set in motion the inevitable chain of events…

So I guess now is an appropriate time to introduce my theme song…

So I was reading lurking Bad Example, and found Harvey’s post on a handy editing tool, NoteTab Light.  I downloaded the .ZIP file.  I opened it, and what did I find?

Memories.

There at the top-left.  Locked-away in a little, inconspicuous file named FILE_ID.DIZ were more oozings of the stuff this blog is bound to be made of…  Of course this isn’t the first time I’ve noticed the little 1k file lurking inside a distribution .ZIP file.  You’ll come across them from time to time.  But why is it so significant, you ask?

I was there when the FILE_ID.DIZ file was born. I knew it’s father…  I saw the controversy and the pain as the little sucker was spewed forth from the loins of a tiny – and mostly gay – software company.

The “DIZfile” was created to allow software authors and computer Bulletin Board systems to automatically place an accurate description of the contents of a compressed (ZIPped) downloadable file in the file directory listings.  (I’ll spare you the technical details!)  This happened at a time before the advent of the wide-scale popularity of the Internet.  I must be getting old, because to me it wasn’t so long ago that the Internet was primarily text-based and campus-bound.  At that time, the online world for the public consisted of Compuserve and Prodigy.  But even before they were born, there was the dial up BBS, or Bulletin Board System.

I worked for a company in Salt Lake City, Utah that arguably made one of the most popular, if not The most popular bulletin-board software used worldwide, PCBoard.  The brain behind the little file was a fuzzy-headed gentleman named Michael Leavitt – not to be confused with the then newly-elected governor of Utah, also named Michael Leavitt.

I name him openly and without a pseudonym because well, I’m quite sure he would want the credit.  He was a bit narcissistic, a lot eccentric (though hardly gay), but a fine gentleman.  He also claimed to be able to envision clearly in his mind eleven dimensions.  This claim led to many interesting discussions arguments about quantum physics and philosophy.    He was certain, at least, that he was on the winning side of every single one… I was certain at the time that his hair was the least-wild thing emanating from his head.  ;-)

Oh, the memories of Clark Development…  The whistleblowing.  The backbiting and, well…  back-stabbing had a different meaning there.  The Exodus Club.  The Onion Man.  Pizza Pockets and black holes, the glue vs. snaps wig controversy, “Breeders” and the Not-so-Gay Ranger, hot and hotter-running flyboys, The Sun, red-velvet curtains and the steam-shower demo at Bossman’s new house…

Blogfodder, every last bit…  It’s amazing what that little file can hold.  And you had no idea.