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crazy talk
Saturday, October 16 1999
At a little past 2am last night, out in the desert some hundred or so miles to the northeast, there was a powerful earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter Scale. I was too drunk to feel it, but it's still possible that it woke Kim and me up; in the middle of the night last night Kim freaked out and remembered some take away Italian food she'd left in the car. Naturally she'd sent me out save us from this possible food poisoning fiasco.
On the way back from a characteristically Zen experience at the Zen Bakery, we stopped by the corner of Saratoga and Cable to check out a "yard sale" of Halloween costumes consisting mostly of weird and vintage outfits. The fact that the sale was occurring in a yard was about the only thing about the sale that made it a "yard sale"; the merchandise itself was not especially inexpensive and the whole production had the gloss of efficiency and experience indicating a well-planned tax-evading mercantile event.
We looked over the various costumes and Kim tried on a quaint little blue and white "Dorothy dress" (as in Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz). It fit her well and matched Sophie (as Toto) to boot, so we decided to buy it. This necessitated a run to a bank machine; the price was $22.
In the afternoon Kim had to do a chair massage gig at a health fair while I had to put a Halloween subsite together for the company website, so she dropped me off at the Mission Valley office building where I work.
I wasn't there too long before I was descended upon by both the Grand Pooh Bah and one of the VPs of Business Development. They were wanting to see the hierarchical link list system I was putting together for a new part of the website. Nothing anyone ever builds is ever good enough for the Grand Pooh Bah, especially since the official code freeze came and went and was replaced with what amounts to a subsequent de facto code freeze. The Grand Pooh Bah wanted to know if users would be able to rank the links or if the links could be displayed according to popularity. My response was, "not without database support." I can do lots of things with the file system object, but statistics-based ranking systems are impractical without a SQL database. I went on to explain that the DBAs are swamped and that I'm smart enough to know that any projects requiring a database won't be finished in time to make their deadlines. So the Grand Pooh Bah went into the kitchen and tracked down my good buddy Kevin the DBA. He brought him to my workstation and said that I needed some stored procedures approved but that he, Kevin, had been "dragging your feet" (note the crudely blatant attempt to pit two colleagues against one another!). I immediately jumped in and said that I'd only been saying that I knew the DBAs were swamped and that it was impractical to launch projects requiring changes or additions to the database model(s) on the live system. Kevin defended himself by launching into a monologue about the existing architecture's many sicknesses and concluding with a mention of the vast backlog of procedures and data models still awaiting approval.
In the Grand Pooh Bah's mind, for every problem, no matter how complex, there exists a simple solution that can be summed up in a single direction-providing sentence. In this case, the solution was for Kevin to come up with an automatic system that, for some simple database changes or additions, would allow developers to make the changes to the live database without any other human intervention. In effect, what the Grand Pooh Bah was asking was for Kevin to write a program that would do what he gets paid many thousands of dollars per year to do. It was about as absurd as asking a computer-savvy marriage advice columnist to (in a matter of days, mind you) come up with a program that can answer questions for people experiencing trouble in their marriages. I piped up that what was being asked was for Kevin to write an artificial intelligence program. Kevin and I looked at each other in amazement and started laughing. But the Grand Pooh Bah didn't join us in laughter; he clearly didn't appreciate what he actually seemed to think was some sort of cop out on Kevin's part. The Grand Pooh Bah's voice went tense and he shouted, "Don't give me that holier than though brow-beating programmer attitude! I was a programmer for ten years and I know there's nothing special about AI! Some AI programs are only four lines of code!" Kevin was so angry by this point that he actually turned around and left the room. Any more tension and the conflict might well have turned violent. The VP of Corporate Development was there for the whole thing, and by the end he was so embarrassed that he was cradling his head in his hands.
A little later I could overhear the Grand Pooh Bah over at Kevin's workstation trying to make amends for the disaster, even inviting Kevin to a little get-together at his house tonight. Surreal times at Ridgmont High!
Later on Kevin and I went outside and discussed the altercation among ourselves. I told him how I particularly resented the Grand Pooh Bah's transparent attempts to pit us against one another. Then I characterized as "crazy talk" the Grand Pooh Bah's idea for a DBA-simulating robot. Kevin, of course, agreed vehemently.
I caught the public transportation home. It's not nearly so bad when you have a way to write while you're waiting.
[REDACTED]
At around midnight when Kim came home, she and I decided to visit the sales guy Scott from my workplace at his new digs in La Jolla. He was having a little get together with the likes of Kevin, Al, as well as a number of girls.
The directions Scott had given us weren't so good, but after a time we were there, complete with a dozen clove cigarettes Scott had ordered.
Scott lives in the second story of a two-story contemporary dwelling done by one of Frank Lloyd Wright's students who goes for that earthy "log-cabin and unrefined rock" look. He has a housemate on the first floor, and that's where the bathroom and kitchen are too. But the second floor is all Scott's. His room looks a little like the inside of the sort of sample adobe cliff dwellings one sees in a museum diorama.
Kevin the DBA was there with his relatively new girlfriend, Shiva, a Persian girl he met through the strong Persian contingent in our company's management. Al was there too, growing increasingly sleepy on the couch but occasionally busting out the guitar. Al plays mostly just the blues when he's armed with a guitar, but with its missing D string, this guitar was only good for a Spanish sound.
Along with Shiva was another girl whose friendship Shiva had made at the University of California at Berkeley. She was from Singapore by way of Australia and had an interestingly exotic accent.
The surprise of the evening was how interesting and extraordinary both Shiva and her Australian friend were. Far from being the Schtevette that I suspected she would be, Shiva is an intelligent, straightforward girl with an interest in music, the arts, and (above all) bizarre & interesting people. She hit it off phenomenally well with Kim; after most of the men had passed out (including, they erroneously suspected, myself) I overheard them talking about their deepest feelings in a way no woman would ever share with any man. What an unexpected windfall! [REDACTED]
While we drank and smoked, Scott kept the fireplace "totally stoked." The ruddy firelight and the sound of the crash of the nearby surf induced the feeling of being alone in the woods on some delightful desert island. But we were most certainly not; every now and then one of the neighbors would call to complain that our talking was disturbing them. Consequently, every time our talking rose to an enthusiastic crescendo, Scott would have to shush us.
Kim tries on her "Dorothy Dress" while a bored Sophie scratches.
A little of what makes Ocean Beach different from Pacific Beach: shoes on a telephone wire over the intersection of Cable and Saratoga.
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