Sausage Party

[prog]

Why did I come into the office today? I've had some nicely productive days at home this week. I have a meeting this afternoon, but that's not for hours yet. I guess I just like the walk. News flash: I can take long walks without having to sit in a cube farm for six hours halfway through. Yeah I know.

One result of the contractor-empowerment thing I posted about a couple days ago is resolve to bill a full work-day for every day that I work. Um... wait, so what were you doing before? Eh, I don't even want to talk about it. The point is that ITA agreed to this arrangement because they wanted to take me on part-time, but had no infrastructure set up for that, but on the third hand had been meaning to investigate bringing in some contractors. So they'd been expecting me to bill in day-long chunks, and let us say that they've been enjoying quite a bargain from me instead.

As for the work-at-home thing, even if the intent was to let me be a fakey-fake part-time employee, the true fact is that I am a contractor and I should treat myself like one. And I mean, hell, why not: I get no benefits and my scale kind of blows, compared to other software contractors with my skill and experience. OTOH I don't have many of the responsibilities that my full-time ITA friends must shoulder, such as on-call support periods and having to attend frequent meetings. I think that being in the office by default also falls into this category.

My situation in the ITA office does not present an optimal work environment for me. I sit in an all-male cube farm, and it's probably an experience closely resembling what you imagine. The monogenderedness of it is a real issue for me; Harvard had a swear-to-gord fifty-fifty split among the scientists there, even if all the tech and admin staff (incl. Y.T.) fell along the usual gender lines. I worked with the scientists enough to get workish exposure to both men and women and this was important to me. I do not get that here.

But that said, I kind of don't interact with anyone here. There's rarely any need to. The cube is a three-walled, one-man dealie, I get to use my own computer - my nearly six-year-old iBook - through which I can pump pink noise into my ears at will, drowning out all the ambient conversation. So I'm actually fairly well personalized and isolated here, which is nice. But what's the point when I can just be home, surrounded by my very own environment and comforts, instead? The worst thing I get there is Nicky barking once in a while. Feh.

Going to make some changes.

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Confession: I'm kind of over geeks and geek humor and geek culture and all of that, and I have been for some time now. You may call me a geek if you wish and I suppose I wouldn't be able to deny many of the line-item reasons you'd have for doing so. But I don't identify. Most of the time.

Comments

[ahkond.livejournal.com]

"I love sausage festival!" - Toki Wartooth of Dethklok, in Metalocalypse

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

"Geek humour" used to just be a particular kind of in-joke, the kind that any group of people develop over time. These days we've ended up with "internet humour", the oh-so-ironic use of internet speak (LOL WTF) and photoshopped pictures of cats. Which I was already old the second time someone did it.

[prog.livejournal.com]

I came to this particular realization when Dougo shared a Youtube that was a parody of "COPS" except with Dungeons and Dragons and I could stomach about 3 seconds of it. (Conf to Dougo: Yes, it's probably very funny and well-done actually, but.)

BTW hi you haven't posted in a while and I was thinking you got eaten by unicorns or something.

Some days I really like the cat pictures, sadly.

[ahkond.livejournal.com]

I was appalled when I got to college and found that all the science geeks seemed to think that Monty Python was fresh, exciting and unknown to everyone who hadn't taken calculus.

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

Try being English and having to deal with Americans who think Monty Python is the only humour that England has produced... Arrrgrghhhh...

[taskboy3000.livejournal.com]

I agree! So many forget the wonderful contribution to comedy by Benny Hill.

Slapping bald men + showing birds with large knockers = comic gold.

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

Yeah... I've felt the same way for a while. Not that I can't laugh at a particularly well-done parody (or for that matter an amusing cat picture!) but every joke spawns a million imitators on the net. This seems to be the basis of a lot of sites, e.g. Something Awful, which have the basic tenet that if something is funny once it's funny a thousand times, especially when you troll on other forums with it.

I think it's symptomatic of the "post-modern" trash all the kids watch. c.f. Adult Swim: BAD ANIMATION IS NOT AUTOMATICALLY FUNNY.

Also: Hello! I keep meaning to write an entry about my new year's resolution to stop procrastinating, but I've been putting it off.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Weird, I thought that was more of a meta-parody, i.e. more a parody of geek humor than actual geek humor. Maybe it helps to be familiar with Patton Oswalt's self-hating-geek stand-up routine.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Also, your (and my) kind of humor is pretty damn geeky too, it's just a different brand of geeky than the mainstream. but you probably already know this

[prog.livejournal.com]

Note that in my very next post I made a Dune crack while talking about upcoming Philip Pullman movies.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I did in fact notice that, and the "eaten by unicorns" line. We all have our affectations.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Oh, now I'm remembering more details about that video. It's from the Comedy Central show "Reno 911", which is a non-geek parody of "Cops". That scene was where they arrest a LARPer for shooting his friend with a crossbow. This isn't geek humor at all, now that I think about it, it's totally anti-geek. Or is your objection to all humor about geeks?

[jtroutman.livejournal.com]

Bill early, bill often.

they have more money than they know what to do with. You don't.

I could also say I told you so, but I don't want to be any more annoying than I already am. :-)