Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2014-05-23 01:20 am
azurelunatic) wrote2014-05-23 01:20 am
They said: Take charge! Be a leader!
The weekly pre-conference meeting is now the 11am weekly pre-conference meeting. On the one hand, this keeps the afternoon from being a three-hour block of meetings starting at 1pm for most of the class. (I get to skip the last hour most times.) On the other hand, my default alarm goes off at 10:30 (this is a compromise between suitable hours for work and my natural inclination to sleep until noon or later). I think it's a decent change.
The Stage Manager is waging war against Outlook Web Access, and its sundry usability nightmares. He has opened approximately six tickets with helpdesk so far. All of them have apparently been ignored past their expected service whatsits.
Yesterday when I dropped by the Stage Manager's office because between him and his client, he'd accepted the old version of an invite and put the wrong room number on his calendar, he mentioned that my habit of signing with two initials (and different ones than you'd expect by my work email address) had caused some confusion. I allowed as how mostly it involved leaving my family name largely for ceremonial occasions, and how I didn't have any replacement handy.
"You could do like my ex-wife did, and make one up" he said, and described her process of picking a name. Then he said the name.
"... That's actually my middle name," I told him.
Apparently this name follows the Stage Manager around, with much less reasonable popularity than I have a lot of encounters with Darkside's name, and Purple has encounters with Ms. Kryptonite.
"Or Lunatic," I suggested, again on the topic of appropriate surname for myself.
"That fits," the Stage Manager agreed.
I may yet invite him to call me Reverend Lunatic. (I think he would examine it dubiously but take it in stride. The person whose face would really be a picture? My grandmanager.)
Lunch was called early, so I ran into my manager in the cafeteria, and we had a brief but intense conversation about the state of the team move. My Overlady had mentioned updates from me available via sekrit backchannels *grin* which was apparently helpful. I promised to bring any spare boxes I happened to have in our manager's direction.
The following conversation has been reconstructed.
Purple: So then lb said "Schrodinger's box of [technobabble]" and my eyes couldn't get past the first two words.
Purple: thinking, this is probably not so work appropriate, but meh.
Azz: And then I unhesitatingly follow your lead.
Purple: They said: Take charge! Be a leader! ...They didn't say what kind.
Azz: A leader of lunatics?
Purple: lol
What with all the moves, some stuff has gone missing. The usual form of stuff going missing is people either forgetting to pack or label things when moving, or people self-moving early, and their stuff getting cleared out in advance of moving them actually in.
Last week, Purple was at an offsite Monday-Wednesday. A sign indicating his new officemate appeared on the door in this time. Then another sign appeared on Wednesday, heralding someone moving in and sitting on top of Purple. The sign disappeared by Thursday.
This week, Purple had to work from home Monday-Wednesday, due to shenanigans with contractors and windows. When he came to work this morning, he found that not only did he have an officemate and the things of his which had been encroaching on the back desk had disappeared (fair), but that the things on the front shelf which were also his had also gone away (wtf). He has filed a very indignant ticket.
Designer Chairwoman Sparkles attempting to recruit two strapping dudes to schlep boxes from amongst my teammates resulted in the two guys, an extraneous guy or two, and me all wandering out to check out the swag which was in the Party Chair's fiance's car's trunk. There was miscellaneous hilarity.
In addition to the conference, there's also the Unspecified Thing that Researcher Carmageddon is trying to throw. There was a base-touching meeting about that, which went decently, and was in our building instead of way the hell over thattaway in one of the newly renovated buildings.
One of the old buildings is now no longer on our map. I wonder what the plans for it will be.
Some fucknut in Sioux Falls has commenced a pray-the-gay-away thing, which #cupcake learned about via Mr. Zune, whose home state this is in. Purple was all right with the general principle, because in the end it's showboating and appealing to a god that probably won't help out, and at least it's not punching or firebombing. I had a few things to say about the corrosive, soul-eating effects of being under or near that sort of contempt. I didn't even know that Chandler was gay until after he killed himself. That statement thudded into the middle of conversation and halted it, lead balloon style. I didn't try to lighten the mood after that, even though Purple and I kept chatting one-on-one through and after.
I was kind of reminded of a thing which went down in fandom over the weekend. A convention invited a guest of honor. Attendees noticed that said GoH published a zine which involved a bunch of content that I've heard succinctly described as "racist grandma forwards". At least one con-runner was reluctant to disinvite the guy, I believe citing the fact that he didn't actually write the jawdroppingly racist material, merely selected and published it. When the con eventually disinvited the would-be GoH, the guy was floored. The phrase "They're judging me by my WORDS!" came up. From the context that I was able to stomach, I came to the conclusion that the guy expected to be given credit from the general public for only publishing "not PC" jokes (words), and not extending his feelings or habits of fear and enmity into actual violence (there are surveillance tapes in this decade of white-appearing men kicking very young black children without even the flimsy excuse of provocation, and let us not forget Trayvon Martin).
Words foster an environment where more concrete forms of violence feel welcome. The words may be legal, but they shouldn't be welcome or well-received.
I was pretty dang libertarian when I was a teenager. My parents had raised me without very many externally imposed rules: they treated me like a reasoning human being capable of enlightened self-interest very young, and when there was something that I was not to do, they would explain why it was not in my best interests to do it, and I feel like I generally was able to agree and comply. (No flicking lettuce-water on your sister! was one of the externally imposed rules which I didn't feel like following to the letter. No using the African Violet as a bookmark. No cats in family hugs.) The external world with rules which were not exhaustively explained seemed irrational, petty, and frightening -- I followed the rules that I didn't understand because I was terrified of Getting In Trouble. Later, I would learn about which rules could be safely bent and how far, and that the consequences for breaking them was no longer a painful spanking served up with a terrifying aura of barely leashed violent rage.
So by high school, I had that smart-kid problem where I only particularly felt like obeying the rules which made sense to me. This made libertarianism, with the whole idea of no rules except the ones which make sense, a really attractive idea.
Then I hit the real world, and realized there were situations I had never dreamed of in my comfortable white middle class christian-by-default upbringing. And my ideas of how things should work started to meet cold hard reality.
Bit by bit, my mental model of the world crumbled when I realized that my idealized vision of how things should work would involve a lot of actual people being worse off than they could be.
Every time a conversation with Purple brings me up short, I'm reminded of the person I used to be, before reality smacked me around with a wet noodle a bit. (And I'm hardly finished with that process. Keeping a journal creates a record of the cringeworthy things past-self has said, and I've been doing this for over two decades.) He means well, and thank fuck he's a software engineer and not a politician or manager. Since he means well, I can work with that. My plan is to bring out examples of what actually this sort of thing hurts, and allow his social conscience and his regard for his excellent array of friends sit down and have a long talk with his ideals of how the world should work.
My poor grandmanager appears to still be living in the world where we'll all be moved over to the new building by the end of May. Bless. (This came out at a team meeting, and was said in that flailing sort of surprised pull-out-of-ass tone of his that we know so well. Don't put our grandmanager on the spot. It results in panic and bullshit.)
By the end of the day, I got really good at quickly assembling those plastic IKEA bins. I got some of them for my shelves, so I wouldn't be using tacky and dusty cardboard boxes the whole time.
I dropped off the last moving boxes that I was able to scrounge with my manager, and encountered my Overlady just leaving. Hilariously, we both had lollipops. Mine was a dark purple blowpop. Hers was something bright red and without gum. We took the chance to catch up on things.
Purple is guru this week. Due to the current size of his team and how the turns stack up, this means that he's likely to be guru on his birthday.
He dropped by my cube on his way out. I was still wrapping up, so he flomped down on the adjacent seating area. He found it difficult to make a snow angel on upholstery, and sat back up and cracked bad jokes at me while I attacked the wiki.
Tomorrow is Friday. Hooray Friday.
The Stage Manager is waging war against Outlook Web Access, and its sundry usability nightmares. He has opened approximately six tickets with helpdesk so far. All of them have apparently been ignored past their expected service whatsits.
Yesterday when I dropped by the Stage Manager's office because between him and his client, he'd accepted the old version of an invite and put the wrong room number on his calendar, he mentioned that my habit of signing with two initials (and different ones than you'd expect by my work email address) had caused some confusion. I allowed as how mostly it involved leaving my family name largely for ceremonial occasions, and how I didn't have any replacement handy.
"You could do like my ex-wife did, and make one up" he said, and described her process of picking a name. Then he said the name.
"... That's actually my middle name," I told him.
Apparently this name follows the Stage Manager around, with much less reasonable popularity than I have a lot of encounters with Darkside's name, and Purple has encounters with Ms. Kryptonite.
"Or Lunatic," I suggested, again on the topic of appropriate surname for myself.
"That fits," the Stage Manager agreed.
I may yet invite him to call me Reverend Lunatic. (I think he would examine it dubiously but take it in stride. The person whose face would really be a picture? My grandmanager.)
Lunch was called early, so I ran into my manager in the cafeteria, and we had a brief but intense conversation about the state of the team move. My Overlady had mentioned updates from me available via sekrit backchannels *grin* which was apparently helpful. I promised to bring any spare boxes I happened to have in our manager's direction.
The following conversation has been reconstructed.
Purple: So then lb said "Schrodinger's box of [technobabble]" and my eyes couldn't get past the first two words.
Purple: thinking, this is probably not so work appropriate, but meh.
Azz: And then I unhesitatingly follow your lead.
Purple: They said: Take charge! Be a leader! ...They didn't say what kind.
Azz: A leader of lunatics?
Purple: lol
What with all the moves, some stuff has gone missing. The usual form of stuff going missing is people either forgetting to pack or label things when moving, or people self-moving early, and their stuff getting cleared out in advance of moving them actually in.
Last week, Purple was at an offsite Monday-Wednesday. A sign indicating his new officemate appeared on the door in this time. Then another sign appeared on Wednesday, heralding someone moving in and sitting on top of Purple. The sign disappeared by Thursday.
This week, Purple had to work from home Monday-Wednesday, due to shenanigans with contractors and windows. When he came to work this morning, he found that not only did he have an officemate and the things of his which had been encroaching on the back desk had disappeared (fair), but that the things on the front shelf which were also his had also gone away (wtf). He has filed a very indignant ticket.
In addition to the conference, there's also the Unspecified Thing that Researcher Carmageddon is trying to throw. There was a base-touching meeting about that, which went decently, and was in our building instead of way the hell over thattaway in one of the newly renovated buildings.
One of the old buildings is now no longer on our map. I wonder what the plans for it will be.
Some fucknut in Sioux Falls has commenced a pray-the-gay-away thing, which #cupcake learned about via Mr. Zune, whose home state this is in. Purple was all right with the general principle, because in the end it's showboating and appealing to a god that probably won't help out, and at least it's not punching or firebombing. I had a few things to say about the corrosive, soul-eating effects of being under or near that sort of contempt. I didn't even know that Chandler was gay until after he killed himself. That statement thudded into the middle of conversation and halted it, lead balloon style. I didn't try to lighten the mood after that, even though Purple and I kept chatting one-on-one through and after.
I was kind of reminded of a thing which went down in fandom over the weekend. A convention invited a guest of honor. Attendees noticed that said GoH published a zine which involved a bunch of content that I've heard succinctly described as "racist grandma forwards". At least one con-runner was reluctant to disinvite the guy, I believe citing the fact that he didn't actually write the jawdroppingly racist material, merely selected and published it. When the con eventually disinvited the would-be GoH, the guy was floored. The phrase "They're judging me by my WORDS!" came up. From the context that I was able to stomach, I came to the conclusion that the guy expected to be given credit from the general public for only publishing "not PC" jokes (words), and not extending his feelings or habits of fear and enmity into actual violence (there are surveillance tapes in this decade of white-appearing men kicking very young black children without even the flimsy excuse of provocation, and let us not forget Trayvon Martin).
Words foster an environment where more concrete forms of violence feel welcome. The words may be legal, but they shouldn't be welcome or well-received.
I was pretty dang libertarian when I was a teenager. My parents had raised me without very many externally imposed rules: they treated me like a reasoning human being capable of enlightened self-interest very young, and when there was something that I was not to do, they would explain why it was not in my best interests to do it, and I feel like I generally was able to agree and comply. (No flicking lettuce-water on your sister! was one of the externally imposed rules which I didn't feel like following to the letter. No using the African Violet as a bookmark. No cats in family hugs.) The external world with rules which were not exhaustively explained seemed irrational, petty, and frightening -- I followed the rules that I didn't understand because I was terrified of Getting In Trouble. Later, I would learn about which rules could be safely bent and how far, and that the consequences for breaking them was no longer a painful spanking served up with a terrifying aura of barely leashed violent rage.
So by high school, I had that smart-kid problem where I only particularly felt like obeying the rules which made sense to me. This made libertarianism, with the whole idea of no rules except the ones which make sense, a really attractive idea.
Then I hit the real world, and realized there were situations I had never dreamed of in my comfortable white middle class christian-by-default upbringing. And my ideas of how things should work started to meet cold hard reality.
Bit by bit, my mental model of the world crumbled when I realized that my idealized vision of how things should work would involve a lot of actual people being worse off than they could be.
Every time a conversation with Purple brings me up short, I'm reminded of the person I used to be, before reality smacked me around with a wet noodle a bit. (And I'm hardly finished with that process. Keeping a journal creates a record of the cringeworthy things past-self has said, and I've been doing this for over two decades.) He means well, and thank fuck he's a software engineer and not a politician or manager. Since he means well, I can work with that. My plan is to bring out examples of what actually this sort of thing hurts, and allow his social conscience and his regard for his excellent array of friends sit down and have a long talk with his ideals of how the world should work.
My poor grandmanager appears to still be living in the world where we'll all be moved over to the new building by the end of May. Bless. (This came out at a team meeting, and was said in that flailing sort of surprised pull-out-of-ass tone of his that we know so well. Don't put our grandmanager on the spot. It results in panic and bullshit.)
By the end of the day, I got really good at quickly assembling those plastic IKEA bins. I got some of them for my shelves, so I wouldn't be using tacky and dusty cardboard boxes the whole time.
I dropped off the last moving boxes that I was able to scrounge with my manager, and encountered my Overlady just leaving. Hilariously, we both had lollipops. Mine was a dark purple blowpop. Hers was something bright red and without gum. We took the chance to catch up on things.
Purple is guru this week. Due to the current size of his team and how the turns stack up, this means that he's likely to be guru on his birthday.
He dropped by my cube on his way out. I was still wrapping up, so he flomped down on the adjacent seating area. He found it difficult to make a snow angel on upholstery, and sat back up and cracked bad jokes at me while I attacked the wiki.
Tomorrow is Friday. Hooray Friday.
no subject
Sing it! I have to go through a lot of old journal entries soon, for a Thing, and I am not looking forward to that part of the experience.
no subject
I have a mixed experience. On the one hand, I wrote a lot of cool stuff. On the other, there are always going to be those chunks of "oh past-self nooooo".
no subject
no subject
If he didn't, they would be very different, and possibly nonexistent, conversations.