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narrow-minded money people
Thursday, February 18 1999
Isn't she pretty in pink?
Actually, no. I think she'd have to be gorgeous to be pretty in pink, especially to be pretty enough to inspire a song. But the song, the song is a masterpiece.
Today I felt a growing hostility seated somewhere in the soul of my homunculus. It came from the loud din of the marketing staff, talking loudly and bombastically into their phones, more seemingly for the benefit of us in the room than for the person on the other end of the line. To them, everything turns on quantities of money. They don't seem to process any other information whatsoever. To get at that money, they'll use any trick in the book, but most of the tricks they know are purely rhetorical. I've heard at least one of each of the following: flattery, flirtation, threats, insults, deception, promises, gifts, and outright lies. They're so pumped up on what they're doing, they've grown detached from the reality of what the whole business is based upon: creative output in terms of graphics, writing and programming. I feel like these people view me as merely incidental to the company business. I'm sure that in their minds I'm little more important than a janitor. I make stuff, what's that? They wheel and deal and bring in the dough with their transparently cheap hucksterism. Even their laughter is detectably ersatz.
Part of my cranky attitude stemmed from my failure to eat any lunch today. I was so focused on my fascinating self-assigned programming projects that I completely missed lunch. Of late I have not been too distracted by projects handed down from on high and I've been able to work on things such as a robot that does tasks repeatedly over time and another that cranks through a log file to help update production web servers that go out of sync. It's all stuff that's going to be essential as the company grows, but I'm the only one who sees this work as important enough to sneak it into my schedule. If the Director of Web Development knew how much of this system-scalability work I was doing, he'd probably call me on the carpet (so to speak).
In other work-related news, I'm fairly sure that at least one girl at work has an easily detectable crush on me. And she's not ignorant of the fact that I live with my girlfriend either. To me it's just an amusing little added highlight in the workday, that's all.
When I got home, I handled my hunger by eating a bowl of pasta, a cheese and salsa sandwich (a blast from the Dynashackian past) and a bunch of icecream. When it comes to shopping, Kim usually buys the fancy expensive organically hand-produced stuff and I usually buy the cheap commercially manufactured crap, but when it comes to icecream it appears that Kim and I have our policies reversed. Kim's Thrifty Brand cherry icecream was perfectly good, but it was no Breyers.
Some days are up and some our down in our relationship. Yesterday was up, but today was definitely down. Kim was so angry with me tonight that she threatened to go hang out with Eric our engineering friend. She said he was a much nicer guy than me and she needed to hang out with him to prove to herself that all guys weren't creeps. True, Eric is a nice guy, and I was okay with the idea of her hanging out with him. But in the end we made amends and she didn't go. I was actually feeling fairly warm towards Kim today and didn't anticipate this turn of events. She successfully made me regret some of my recent behaviour.
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