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a stab at culture and some I'd managed to miss
Thursday, December 13 2018
Yesterday day when I arrived at work with Ramona and the state troopers were investigating whatever crime they were investigating, my colleague Marc (the new guy with the long silver mane) showed up on foot. It turned out that he'd yet to receive a key to the office and nobody was there to let him in, so he'd taken a stroll around the village. I'd asked if he'd been to its center yet and he said he had. I then told him about my favorite burrito place and suggested he come with me tomorrow when I go there for my weekly lunch indulgence.
So today at noon I drove us to Bubby's. I ordered my usual vegan burrito with brown rice and he got one with chicken but no dairy due to an intolerance of lactose. We didn't really know each other, so the first topic was one leftover from the interview that had led to his being hired and concerned Raspberry Pis. But the real meat of our conversation was where I revealed some of the interesting secrets of our employer and my relationship thereto. I explained how Alex, the guy who had said a good word about me that had led to my being hired had once worked for the company decades ago and had actually been the one who had hired the head honcho. The head honcho had then hired Alex after Alex's keywording business fell on hard times. I also explained that my relationship with Alex all started with my superconnecting wife, who knew Alex's wife through the local academic literary scene. Marc talked some about workplace culture, and how refreshing the one we're currently in is compared to the dreariness of the cubical farm he had been working in. I didn't say so, but that hasn't been my experience at all. I'd loved my old workplace culture, which was lively and collaborative despite being entirely remote. This one Marc and I am in now seems lifeless by comparison. But, then again, I hadn't had the introduction Marc had had. When I'd been hired, I'd landed with something of a thud, and my new boss avoided me for the first couple days. By contrast, at his first lunch in this workplace, Marc had gone out with that same boss (as well as others on the team) for lunch at Cancun's, the Mexican restaurant in Red Hook, and they'd all had margaritas. I would've had a much better feeling about my workplace (and that feeling would've lasted for weeks) had that happened on my first day!
[REDACTED]
When I returned home tonight, the workers installing the new cabinets in our kitchen had already finished their work of ripping out all the old counters, cabinets, and stove. They'd saved for me the one rectangular piece of the old beautiful granite countertop and everything else had been donated to Habitat for Humanity (though it's hard to imagine anyone wanting some of that stuff, given how ugly masonite becomes as it ages).
I then turned my attention to the chore of fixing Rabbit, my bedside laptop (one of my several Elitebook 2740ps), whose hinge had spontaneously broken last night while I was using it to watch cars crashing into each other on YouTube). Fixing Rabbit was simply a matter of swapping in a new display lid, and I just happened to have an extra. I've been treating Elitebook 2740ps like super-powerful Raspberry Pis that come with their own monitors. They are, after all, about five times as fast and can be populated with eight times the RAM, though they aren't that much more expensive than Raspberry Pis when bought used on eBay (also, since Moore's Law now seems kaput and despite their being about eight years old, they're fast enough to handle any modern computing task). I have a dream to mount one in a console box (that is, not as a laptop) for use as some sort of stand-alone device, and doing so would not require a working hinge. This means that the working display lid with the broken hinge is perfect for that application.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?181213 feedback
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