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structures needed to formulate
Friday, November 10 2000
I keep listening to Ween's White Pepper over and over, particularly "Back to Base," trying to make sense of exactly what happened last night. This is the worst workplace hangover I've had in a very long time.
Yesterday I'd been in meetings all day, a participant in a so-called "data summit" on the issue of integrating an acquired company's messy database with our own possibly less messy database. Oh the humanity! I've realized something sort of interesting along the way: I'm one of perhaps only two non-contractor database developers in the entire company. I've seen it happen before and it's always a serious mistake, so let me stress again to all you would-be internet moguls: don't let contractors build the infrastructure of your company. They are very expensive, and when they leave, they're gone.
My key contribution to the data summit was the making of a diagram to explain data flows we'd agreed upon. I didn't have a properly-configured copy of Visio to work with, so I had to do it all in Paint.
Towards the end of the day my hangover was so bad that I was rendered almost completely inarticulate. Frank from the UK team came over to ask one of his endless stream of "quick questions" and my mind was completely boggled (in all fairness, it was a complicated question). I felt like such an impostor as I struggled with the conceptual structures needed to formulate a response. Who was I to be lead developer on this project? Frank even said in exasperation at one point, "I thought you were lead developer!" But it was an easy enough embarrassment to shrug off; Frank reminds me so much of Matt Rogers.
In the evening Linda called and invited John and me to join her and Julian at a West Hollywood movie theater to see a new movie called Requiem for a Dream (how about that website?). So, sure, we went. In the mini-mall containing the theatre, the fucking Bank of America machine surcharged me even though I was using a Bank of America card. But what choice did I have?
Requiem for a Dream is by the same people who brought us Pi. On one level it might have just been artistically-clever anti-heroin propaganda. But in the way it mined the culturally-crass fantasy world of the protagonist's elderly mother, the movie had a more overtly Lynchian (by way of The Matrix) feel. I have to confess that these weird alterna-movies are all starting to run together in my head.
When it was over we rode the elevator down into the subterranean parking lot catacombs and went our separate ways. Total interaction: a half of a paragraph and one hippie hug.
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