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perhaps these aren't really my people
Tuesday, September 18 2018
Initially I thought I'd be proactive about injecting myself into the new workplace, but I feared perhaps I was coming on a bit too strong initially, particularly that one Friday where pizza was delivered. So I've retreated into my little workspace. I don't always have work to do, but I stay busy (or at least I look like I am busy). When I don't have anything else to do, I learn a bit about the latest version of Angular, try to figure out how the websites are put together, or I try to understand C# (the main backend language used in this shop).
Still, I can't help overhearing some of the banter from some of my colleagues. Today this banter gave me a sense that perhaps these aren't really my people. I'd had indications of that before, such as when the first conversation between two of my colleagues concerned a televised athletic event (innocent enough, but nobody ever talked about such things at Mercy For Animals!). But today when I heard them chuckling about federal farmer flood loss rules, things were crystal clear. Apparently the rules are that a farmer is only reimbursed for drowned farm animals found on his property. For this reason, farmers are incentivized to imprison animals within the flood zone, perhaps in pens or buildings, so that they drown in place. It doesn't take much of an imagination to be horrified by barn slowly filling with water while panicked pigs, chickens, or cows are trying to escape. And here they were chuckling and even devising novel ways of their own for the farmers to ensure their flood-threatened animals could not escape. I supposed that's just how people are outside the bubble.
At another point in the day, I heard one of the guys talking about some right-wing podcast he wanted to listen to. Initially I assumed he wanted to listen to it ironically, the way my father and I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh back in the very early 1990s. But then one of the other guys chimed in to talk about how brilliant the guy is who does that rightwing podcast. It's still possible that all these colleagues having this discussion actually disagree with the sentiments expressed on that podcast, but it was becoming less and less likely. For now, I'm keeping my head down and hoping they send more work my way so I can do something other than study C#. Without a practical project to apply them to, learning strictly theoretical programming concepts is every bit as dull for me as it would be for most people.
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Sometimes as I work I listen to music on my earbuds. The music plays on Hyrax, my personal laptop (which I've been leaving at work). My music player of choice is always Foobar2000 (I like how stylistically straightforward and unbloated it is), though since Hyrax isn't doing anything else, of late I've been running the spectrogram visualizer in a large window. The other day when I did that, I observed an interesting pattern during Beck's song "Unforgiven" (off the album Morning Phase). The spectrogram looked like a 3D image of a deep space with bars in front of it. The bars were the beat of the drum and the receding lines suggesting space were actually the weirdly drifting notes of the synth droning in the background.
Spectrogram of Beck's song "Unforgiven."
On the way home, I stopped at that Stewarts on the south end of Red Hook and bought a bag of potato chips fried in avocado oil and a beverage called
NOS High Performance Energy Drink. It didn't taste great, but it was better than most energy drinks.
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For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?180918 feedback
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