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antfarm syndrome
Monday, January 4 1999
My bike is an old piece of crap I bought at a Normal Heights yard sale for $25. The wheels are shaped a bit like potato chips and I think the brakes rub on the rims most of the time. So I'm riding it, I don't make especially good time. Consequently, I'm one of the slowest cyclists I encounter on my twice daily commutes. There is, however, one older woman who is even slower than me. I usually pass her in the morning on Friars Road somewhere between the Pacific Highway and the Mission Valley YMCA. She has a pink fanny pack and something about her reminds me of my mother. I think its the slow but determined nature of her pace. She's biking, damn it, and she's going to pedal her bike each and every day, at least until her next kick comes along.
At work today I built a management tool for the chat rooms. It confers special status on certain people known as "hosts." Traditionally this status was conferred only on rare occasions by someone familiar with the three different files that had to be modified. These files weren't even active server pages, mind you, they were pages from an older incarnation of server-side scripting known as POW. But those few of us capable of modifying these files are so overworked it's been many weeks since we conferred host status on anyone. Consequently, the hosts have gradually become bitter and jaded with our entire operation. They've been writing nasty email to co-worker Al and claiming our entire operation is a joke. To them, special status (as indicated only by dashes around the username, mind you) is like a laurel garland. It has no actual value beyond the status it symbolizes. Of course, to me, with enormous power wielded by text editor, it all seems ridiculous. I can make up a username and give it dashes at the slightest whim. The concerns of the members of the online community I'm paid to build and maintain are, to me, much like the concerns of ants in an antfarm: cutely comic at best.
So today I solved the "challenge" of the backlog of unruly hosts clamouring for dashes once and for all. I stayed late and, as I said, built a tool for Al so he can easily confer dashes on anyone he chooses. His comment about the tool: "It kicks ass!"
Before we fell asleep tonight, Kim was telling me about a guy in her bodyworks masters program who has been studying "magnetic therapy," the use of strong permanent magnets to somehow induce good health in the body. The magnets used in this psudoscience can cause noticeable attractions and repulsions through the entire thickness of a human body. "Magnetic therapy" is founded on such patently dubious principles that the subject proved as entertaining for Kim as it was for me.
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