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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   culture of dogs
Friday, November 2 2018
People seem to be more emboldened to bring their dogs to work now that four of us have already brought our dogs. Today Tech Support Dave brought in his dog Willow, a young purebred Husky. Willow was bit skittish and nervously crapped on the floor early in the day, but otherwise she was a fairly good dog, though at a couple points Augie the Doggie (Alex's dog, who was also there) seemed to get angry at her. The dogs in the office definitely seem to help with making the place more cohesive. It's pretty much the only workplace culture we have. We all seem to love dogs, even if we come at it from very different worldviews. While others unapologetically bought their dogs from breeders and make all sorts of generalizations about dog breeds, I come from the world of animal rescue, where (among other things), adopting a dog is a way to free up places in shelters for all the dogs nobody fucking wants.
This afternoon a young man named Andrew showed up wearing a coat and tie. He'd come to the meeting with the head honcho wherein he would be offered a job. Andrew is a very junior developer, and will work in tech support for six months first. His arrival required a reorganization of the desk layout on the east side of the office where the people on my immediate team work. My direct boss set up his desk near the northeast corner of the office (near a server rack whose future components are next to it, hooked up and blinking away) with the plan to "build a wall" to contain his Boston terriers so they won't bother people when they're there. "Are you going to make Mexico pay for it?" I asked.
Later in the day some guy came into the office, saw me, and acted like he knew me. He said, "hey!" and shook my hand. I had no idea who the fuck he was, though he did look familiar. While my brain buzzed through its vast library of faces, he said "you don't know who I am, do you?" I agreed that I didn't. Part of what made this all very weird was being in this space where it seemed very unlikely I'd ever see anyone I knew. It turned out it was Jed, the guy from the Bard Prison Initiative. He and I used to go into prisons on a regular basis, and I would do networking and other computer-lab-related tasks while he did various administrative and liaison chores. The last time I did that was maybe 2011. It's been seven years! Since then, Gretchen was sort of fired in 2012 from BPI (where she'd worked as the site coordinator at Eastern Correctional Facility), and our lives have moved on. Jed, though, still works for the program. He was there at the office today to vouch for a former prisoner-student who supposedly knows SQL and whom our company might hire. "I'm terrible with faces," I apologized. I felt so mortified after that that I couldn't really focus on my work, which was super annoying anyway. I was back working on ExtJS, wondering what black magic was taking away focus from a text input. At some point I drank a cup of coffee, which was a serious mistake. That late-in-the-day boost of caffeine upset my stomach and fried my nerves. The lesson here was obvious: only drink coffee in the morning.
Back at the house, Gretchen was gone for the evening. She was down in Manhattan, hanging out with friends. Ultimately she would be attending a Pfunk show in Midtown with our friend Eulaliah. I went into the forest with the saw and backpack and salvaged another backpack load from that tricky dead oak that I let the wind fell.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?181102

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