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Friday Without the Girlfriend
Friday, April 9 1999
It was Friday morning and already a bad day for John the Senior Editor. Uncharacteristically, he was freaked out, but in his usual cool-casual kind of way. A global email (an official spam) that he'd sent to our entire member base contained untested links that didn't work until I tweaked something in the website file structure. Then, in a part of the site designed to promote various Arista artists, he'd accidentally had me featuring the wrong band, a hip-hop act called Next instead of a bubblegum pop band named 5ive. John was seriously worried about being fired over this cluster of "challenges"; after all, it doesn't seem take too much to get fired in our workplace, unless of course you're an engineer like me. Yes, believe it or not, though I'm a college drop out, I'm also an engineer! Everybody's mutha should be as proud as Hoagie must be.
John's funk was saved by Marty, our new chief technologist. Marty works long nights and deals with all kinds of frustrations in the hopes of saving our site from its many technical bottlenecks and inabilities to scale with our growing user base. Still, despite all his efforts, the site still goes down regularly, the NT web servers constantly need to be rebooted, and complaints pour in from users and colleagues. Regularly the Grand Pooh Bah storms in and yells about what fraction of the company's value the latest outage has cost us. To make matters worse, Marty has decreed that no new structures be added to the database until there is some system stability. So now many of the schemes and swindles conjured up by marketing and sales are logjamming in and around my department. If they're lucky, you see, I can figure out a way to recycle some existing system for their latest scams.
Marty has been collecting some new kinds of stats lately and has figured out that, for the most part, the bulk of our site is an unvisited ghost town. He has decided that John is the man to redesign the site and heighten traffic to its nether corners and increase retention. Marty met with John, Al and myself in the big meeting room, but we were quickly booted out by a phalanx of marketing hacks, so instead we went for a stroll along the San Diego River. Beneath the bright sun and clear blue sky and the freshly leafing cottonwoods, we discussed the many problems we've been facing in trying to get our work done, particularly the relentless push of marketing to make our site into a frumpy commercialized hell that no sane person would ever frequent. We all agreed that the site is garish and unhip. So Marty came up with a plan. He offered us each a $10,000 bonus if we'd stay extra late (I know...) and redesign the site. I asked him how he could possibly be married (he is) and working the ungodly hours he does. He said he's looking forward to a day when the long hours will end. For my part, I'm strongly against working any more hours and do not feel I could accomplish any more even if I stayed at my workstation 24 hours a day.
The plan was further hashed out later in the afternoon with the other engineers. They seemed pretty psyched about the bonuses. But I'm cynical. I'm not doing a lick of extra work until I see some promises put on paper. That last bit of free time I have is extremely precious to me; it is probably worth more than $10,000. The thing that sucks is that I really like Marty and believe he's leading us down the right path. I just cannot make any further sacrifices, even sacrifices for which I am paid, for this rather dull capitalist enterprise.
My subversion at the "Energy" ritual today was to spin an elaborate metaphor for the things Dave the database programmer does for me. I said that sometimes I feel like I have no hands at the ends of my arms and that it's difficult to make something like a bird cage out of paper clips, but that at such times I depend on Dave and his hands. Most of the people around me are so shamelessly conventional that simply speaking in metaphor is enough to seriously set their worlds on end. Being able to tweak people so is just one of the many delicious pleasures my workplace offers.
In the evening, I had to make some decision about with whom to spend this precious "Friday Without the Girlfriend." I'd already managed to avoid spending it with the usual cast of co-worker-friends (seeing them when I'm not at work is actually not too different from actually being at work). I might have been content to just putz around the house all evening, but then Kim's friend Eric the defense engineer called up and said he needed to use my internet connection for a little while to pursue some job leads, so I said sure, come over. As a very-much-in-demand engineer type, Eric has been surfing the job market of the entire country, taking all-expense-paid junkets to points hither and yon to find if he'd make a good fit in various companies.
Eric doesn't come across initially as a geek. He's clean cut and conservative and looks like he might have played on a college football team. But he's such a geek. Our conversation was mostly about aspects of Unix, with a little here and there about how much NT sucks or the particulars of how PC architecture is cramped compared to that of a SPARC workstation. After he was done checking his email, Eric went to a number of free email providers and signed up under the name SysV, for System 5, what Eric calls "the first cool version of Unix."
We drank some beers, exchanged a trivial amount of gossip (when Eric gets to talking about people, he's actually rather interesting), and then headed down to Pacific Shores on Newport Street. We talked some about Kim's attempt to fix Eric up with Jenna the German girl, and Eric admitted that he actually did find her rather attractive. So there's still hope in that department. But there are lots of games that must be played beforehand, though one of these, "half-assed phone tag," is already underway.
We didn't run across anyone we knew, so we didn't have much in the way of an adventure. We talked a little about the sexual virtues of the various women we saw, including the fake blond bartender whom Kim hates for me to admire. True, she's a little on the nasty side, but, in addition to the style in the way she mixes a drink, there's something kind of nice under that tight miniskirt of hers. Eric has far more refinement and poise when discussing women than, say, Kevin the DBA. I don't really enjoy guy talk that focuses exclusively on sex and sexual attributes and it doesn't take very long for me to weary of Kevin's cat calls and other animal noises. It was nice to hang out with more of a cultural match tonight.
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