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big anomaly in the sky
Thursday, March 4 1999
It's getting to be stressful at work again. Engineering is terribly understaffed and today we were patronizingly told (by none other than the Director of Web Development himself) that we should each come back tomorrow with an idea for how we were going to do more for the company, as if the company really deserves us to do more. I've given my time, health and the health of my relationship to the company, but that's not enough. Just because I might possibly get some shares of company stock (that is, if the company can be trusted to come up with them when the time comes), I'm expected to act much like a slave. This would all be positively demoralizing if it wasn't also somewhat comic in an Office Space kind of way.
Then too there's the issue of engineering procedures being adopted without my input, though my input is desperately needed. Last time this was attempted it failed miserably because too much of the system depends on mechanisms that I've created. My mechanisms have since grown and taken on even more work, and yet again I'm not being consulted as a new course of action is charted. Again I'm feeling unjustifiably marginalized, though I suspect the needs of my mechanisms will have to be obeyed this time much like these needs had to be obeyed last time.
I've noticed that the pleasure I get from work has much to do with the feeling that I'm controlling my destiny there. By controlling much of the routine functions with my robots, I bolster my sense of control over my own destiny. But I always feel like I'm one step behind where I need to be, and much of the time my automation work is done with a single-minded franticness. By contrast, work unrelated to automation is an irritating distraction and gives me very little satisfaction.
As I biked home from work, I saw a bright light tracing a slow path high above the Pacific, leaving behind a huge leaf-shaped smoke cloud illuminated by the light of either the long-set sun or the just-rising moon. The smoke spread quickly and vanished, leaving a milky wash of reflected light. On the news I learned that it had been a military rocket launching some sort of satellite, though I'm sure conspiracy theorists will draw other conclusions.
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