"Ow! Wrong end, ya cowboy!" or, My Nightmare on Dec 24, 2009, or, Why I Finally Quit LJ Volunteering

[azurelunatic]

This entry has been at least a year coming, and I suppose I want some closure. I listened to a silly holiday song, it upset me, I realized why it upset me. And it tied into the "why I left" entry, which has also been coming for a while.

I want to make it clear that I don't feel like LJ wronged me specifically, even though I think a lot of the things that contributed to my departure would have been solved with the sort of infrastructure for the volunteer team that it would require if technical support and customer service were all done by employees. I still know and like people at LJ, and I support their efforts to make positive change from within. It's no longer the right place for me, even though I still keep a journal there as I still have friends there. I hung on too long after I was no longer comfortable there, contributed to tensions, and made at least one epic willful fuckup for which I was quite rightly censured.


Yesterday I listened to "Chipmunks Roasting on an Open Fire", which I never had before. I was aware that it was a parody of "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire". The part that I hadn't quite connected was that the chipmunks in the song are not just any generic chipmunks, but Alvin and the Chipmunks. The chipmunks are roasted and eaten in the song.

I was a little surprised by the strength of my reaction to the song. (And, inevitably, aware that admitting to having this reaction to something that's not meant to be upsetting would be an invitation to "tease" me with it, if I were in the middle of a cluster of bullies.)

The thought of roasting and eating anonymous chipmunks does not disturb me. The thought of taking chipmunks that people know and care about personally, roasting them (presumably alive), and eating them, upsets me gravely.

This is not a new thing for me. A year ago today, I had a nightmare about chickens that woke me up in considerable distress, and eight hours later, I was finally calmed down about it enough that I could burst out in hysterical tears to niqaeli (who happened to be the trusted-enough-to-talk-to person in the splatter zone).

This is a hazard you get when your small-cuddly-pet of choice is something that's a locally accepted food animal. Your especial pet, the one you tell your secrets to, allows herself to be dressed up and played with, trusts you enough to lay eggs in your hand despite you also tucking her in doll beds and putting lacy bonnets on her, the one who comes when called, does tricks, snuggles up to you while you're reading, and tells you things and asks you questions (even if you can't understand a word she's saying) -- you're acutely aware that if she were to get loose, she'd probably have a different fate from a stray dog or cat.

A stray pet animal may wind up in the pound and killed if you don't claim it, and no one else adopts it.

A stray food animal may wind up not only killed, but dinner, and less attempt made to locate the owner, since it's only a small food animal. Even if it was actually your pet, and there will never be another hen who appreciates Little Women in quite the same fashion.

People with cruel senses of humor joke about eating your pet, and laugh when it upsets you.

Last year, my Christmas Eve plans were derailed by not enough sleep and a nightmare wherein I was in some sort of cooks' training area, holding a young rooster under my arm as a voice delivered instructions on how to prepare the barbecue rub. It was a technique unfamiliar to me, involving a chicken with feathers still on. I wasn't part of the cooking team. I was standing in the room holding a spiced rooster comfortably under my arm, absently petting him and scritching the spot on the back of the neck, as one does, as he looked up at me, inquisitively, trustingly, with not a trace of fear in his big brown eyes, the way that the chickens who are going to become especial pets and come when called by name and voluntarily sit on laps to be petted and fed will do.

The cooking technique involved deep-frying -- deep-fried, barbecued chicken. Then someone in the class spoke up. "But what if they're still alive after?" they asked.

And in the dream, it was suddenly apparent that the chickens were plunged, alive, into the boiling oil deep-fry.

And the instructor reassured the student: "No, in the unlikely event that one survives this process it will not last long."

It all made sense and felt normal until I woke up, at which point I realized the horror of the dream my brain had spun up for me, and called off my plans for the balance of the day.

Eight hours after waking up from that dream a year ago, I was finally calm enough that I was able to articulate what went on in it, and only then burst out crying hysterically. (Today, a year later, thinking about it is still likely to make me feel like crying.) In describing it, I mentioned that I was reacting as I imagined someone else with a more typical American upbringing might react to the thought of the same thing being done to adorable puppies or kittens. "A frog in boiling water wasn't personal enough, I see," I said. And the clue hit.

I don't tend to have normal nightmares. My sister was the one who had nightmares. I had some upsetting dreams as a kid, but mostly I woke up and it was fine. When I have a nightmare that really upsets me, it's related to something in my life that's either upsetting me already, or is going to become a problem if it keeps going in that direction, and my subconscious is smarter than I am. This dream was about LJ.


Over the previous two months, there'd been a number of disruptions in my experience of LJ. By September 2009, I was on the crispy edge of burnout again.

This was not new. The transition from Six Apart to SUP in late 2007 and early 2008 did not feel smooth, from my seat as a volunteer. Denise quit in July 2007, and it became apparent that she had been an amazing umbrella manager, insulating those of us below her from as much of whatever chaos that was going on above as she possibly could. Carrie was, and is, still amazing, but Denise is epic, and their management styles are different. Whatever the true state of affairs up above actually was, it felt as if the people actually steering the ship were discarding the advice of the people who knew how to site actually worked, without considering their input in the slightest. Additionally, although this would not become a problem for me until later, the logistics of managing a full team of volunteers seemed to be underestimated by those above. The options for an average Support-only volunteer to relay information was to the category/address for discreet handling of technical/customer service issues (accessible by employees employees and volunteer support administrators), to the manager directly, or to any one of the other employees directly. However, few of the other staff members in backup-oversight of the Support department seemed to spend as much time bonding with the Support-only part of the team. This felt to me as though Carrie (and later Tupshin) were the only parts of the chain of command that I had a right to approach should I have any issues.

By spring 2008, I was on the verge of quitting, frustrated with the whole situation and the tools at hand, but unwilling to dump my workload from suggestions on Carrie, the volunteer manager, without an exit strategy and a replacement. I also felt as though I had to help maintain the appearance of some form of normality, as I was acutely aware that in situations where it feels like no actual information is being released, people will watch those who are heavily involved and likely to have access to better information, and interpret their every twitch as something possibly related to the site. The combination was stressful (she says, understatedly).

Then tupshin came onboard. The usual effect when a new can-do manager barges into a new team is for their team to roll their eyes and drag their feet. Tupshin's tactics worked well with the situation. His first action after introducing himself was to ask how things were done, and what needed doing, and applied himself with great energy to learning how it all worked. (Few things are more surreal than seeing the new manager going through the local equivalent of bash.org.) Apparently the presence of someone in a position of obvious power actively listening, and making changes based on the listening, was enough to keep me from fucking off completely. But there were still social stresses on the team. The friendly and open relationship between Dreamwidth and LiveJournal crews was nice while it lasted; for a considerable time, even while the users were dividing and starting to feud, there was a great feeling of camaraderie and a considerable amount of overlap.

Then there was the great layoff of January 2009, and I'd had a crisis about security by obscurity on LJ around about then as well. Something that I thought of as a bug and a security hole was actually a compromise to allow compatibility, and deliberate, and would be left as it was, but without the level of documentation I considered appropriate.

Stress from moving, personal life drama, and job search, did not help my general attitude. So between one thing and another, by September 2009, I was crispy again, and considering quitting. Given a few uneventful months, I might have had time to recover. But in late October 2009, the whole team got the devastating news that Tupshin had been made redundant; directly on top of that came the change in news format, which I took particularly badly.

In December there was genderfail, and stuff around that contributed even more to social fragmentation and feuding. To make everything even better, the usual peacemaker, Carrie, was out of office for December, and I was determined to not do anything that could add to her workload, whatever the effects on me. I don't know how well I managed. Probably not that well, in retrospect. Since it felt like she was the only workable point of contact for me as a Support volunteer, I didn't feel comfortable crying on the shoulders of any of the other staff, even though their contact information was available for serious issues. It was my problem, therefore, I should be able to handle it by myself. The varied reactions around the genderfail incident made me feel alienated even more from large portions of the team, including people I thought I should have been able to confide in. If I were doing it all again... I don't know. The loss of Tupshin may have been the point when it was no longer possible to prevent my departure, since I'd been ready to quit when he arrived in the first place.

I spent the latter half of my two-week trip to Washington State on the "Chicken Camp" clicker training workshop with my aunt at the beginning in of December 2009 in a state of high distress, with zarhooie consoling me over the phone and convincing me to not quit on the spot, to at least wait until people were back in office and give the whole thing a while to blow over. It never did blow over, though, it was just one damn thing after another. The Best Buy full-browser-takeover ads with video and audio represented a violation of my faith in the integrity of the steering of LiveJournal -- I'd never thought ads on LJ would be allowed to go that far, and figured that either management no longer cared about the quality of LJ as a service to its users, or were so desperate for cash that the whole service might belly-up within the year.

From IRC that night:
[volunteer]: It used to have a line that said, "Audio or video events must be triggered by user-initiated behavior within the ad unit."
Me: ... they took that part out?

I was damn upset, and aware that my fury was damaging to the morale of the rest of the Support team. I cared just about enough to ragequit IRC so I wouldn't contaminate the rest of the team too badly when I exploded; I made a very hurt and angry post in my own journal, very filtered.

I managed to decompress over the next few days, and true to form, about as soon as my brain figured that I wasn't actually going to need to stay wound up to be functional, hello nightmare. And chicken camp, and how much I love my pet chickens, was fresh in my mind. After talking with Niq, I figured it out. While it wasn't actually as bad as the situation described in the nightmare, I felt that I was betraying my users, particularly my suggestions users, by pretending that everything was all right when everything was all wrong. [insert "starched velvet dresses" and tomato horn worm reference here.] Because of course the trusting sweet rooster represented my users, triadruid in particular, and I had been pretending everything was all right pretty damn hard since the takeover.

After figuring out what the dream symbolized to my subconscious, I was remarkably calmer about the whole thing, even though the literal content of the dream still upsets me.


(the rest of it all)
And then Boxing Day 2009 hit, and it was a downhill slide from there with me just getting madder and madder and sadder and sadder. It got to the point where I didn't feel like I'd be listened to if I complained about interpersonal conflicts, since I was the odd one out and the one yelling the loudest. In May of 2010 I made plans to wrap up my involvement with LJ, having picked a successor for Suggestions in addition to my existing second-in-command; I had observed that triadruid duplicated my abilities at least in potential, and we began training him.

The general disaffection and disconnection contributed to my monumentally stupid moment where I fucked myself over with my big mouth in June 2010. And after that it was another slow slide of me descending into apathy about anything resembling volunteering for LJ, until September 2010.

September 2010 was the Twitter-and-Facebook thing, which was a whole pot of issues, but the thing that sealed it for me was a security bug (unrelated to those, but around the same time). Some changes made me think of a really horrible concept. I have uncovered my fair share of bugs over the years, both touching on security and not; part of my process for reporting something is to test it first, and try and figure out what makes something reproduceable. I tested the concept on some journals of my own, and had the ever-loving fuck scared out of me when it in fact was a security bug on the live site, and not just me being paranoid, and not just something that beta testers (which I had not been for quite some time) were subject to. I reported it through the tightest channels I could find: security by obscurity is something I object to, but not publicizing a newly discovered bug before people have time to fix it, when a fix is presumed to be planned and publicity would not have helped people protect themselves, is just good security sense. Somewhat later, it was quietly fixed.

The fact that this particular security bug existed at all crossed a line I wasn't aware that I had until it was crossed, and that turned out to be my final straw. I felt that the bug was obvious enough that I should not have been the one to discover it, especially as I had not been particularly active in volunteering for months, and severe enough that the fact of its mere existence was a problem.

In the few days that followed, I noticed that I had pinged out of LJ IRC, and set myself to not auto-join before reconnecting to my other channels. I drafted and posted my resignation from LJ suggestions within the week. The bug being fixed meant little to me by the point it was fixed.