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the grind
Monday, March 8 1999
I was on a the shoreline of a vast warm ocean, its sandy beaches stretching northward and southward forever. But only a few feet from the waterline, the beach gave way to a vast empty valley dipping a thousand feet below sea level and dry as a bone. From where I lay, belly down in the water, I could stare straight down the cliff and tremble at the prospect of slipping and falling. Why hadn't the ocean sloshed over and filled this valley? Perhaps it was so big and dry that any spillage would evaporate before it could accumulate. No doubt the floor of this valley was a windswept desert of powdered sea salt. I love intensely visual dreams like this one, as absurd as it might have been.
I haven't experienced a workday as miserable as today in a very long time. The misery started with more threats against my copy-over robot (the ASP script that puts web pages on the live servers) by the security-obsessed Windows expert Marty, the guy who sees me as a promising "natural programmer." What I hated about these threats was that they didn't come directly, but filtered through other people. It's a terribly patronizing experience to find out second-hand that decisions "are being made" about something that is your expertise. Any replacement for my copy-over robot will have to do nearly everything it does, or we in Web Development will revert to the stone age. It was an important enough issue that I wrote Marty an email expressing my concerns. No matter what a hot shot he might be, it will take him a long time to duplicate my robot's functionality.
Another source of woe grew out of another Marty obsession: bringing the stylistic look of our code up to the arbitrary conventions of Microsoft. It makes sense to do so on some level, of course, but I see no urgent demand. In my opinion, we should see to it that all future code conforms to stylistic guidelines but leave existing code alone unless we're editing it anyway. But today, things went in a decidedly less pleasant direction. Eric came to me and informed me that he'd been "cleaning up" his code for the Stats project, and had cleaned up some cookie-related lines I'd written, but then had been told to uncorrect these parts and hand it off to me so I might "learn." I was infuriated, and I angrily refused. While it's true that in the past my code has been comically non-conventional in terms of style, I've recently been trying to adhere to the new norms. To essentially find my nose being rubbed in something I sweated over on the weekends for this god awful exploitive corporation was too much. I found myself thinking about what would happen if I just left and never came back. They'd be in a sweet little pickle then, huh? Or maybe not. But it seems they've had a great deal of difficulty finding others who can do what I do for this firm.
Another ongoing source of stress (and this seems to be company-wide) is the Grand Pooh Bah's recent decision to adopt a "project-based" management structure. The idea is that in the future there will be no bosses, just individual employees leading small teams in hopes of achieving discrete goals. Supposedly we'll be earning big bonuses as a result (that's the hook the Grand Pooh Bah is always using), but I'm extremely skeptical. I've never yet seen anyone get a bonus in this place. I think, instead, that we'll be working longer hours, spending more time languishing in meetings, all the while up to our elbows in paperwork. The Grand Pooh Bah himself is forever stressing the urgent need to come in on weekends and "plan by night, work by day" (as though none of us needs to either sleep or play). He's got a lot more invested in this place than I do. I can't work any harder. I'm burnt out. Eat me, Grand Pooh Bah and your slavelike sycophants!
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