Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2014-09-12 03:37 am
azurelunatic) wrote2014-09-12 03:37 am
37 inches of trolling
The switch in my head is not in the position that I previously put it. This is not optimal.
Things are returning to, if not normal, than at least sensible, with the return of my manager. She simultaneously creates motion and stability. She is our rudder. She is also simultaneously trying to be both herself and my grandmanager, because he is out sick and basically won't be back until November. (I don't have details.)
Today I sent a bug report to Office Depot, about their website. It's just a corner case, and technically it's already being caught by their thingies, but it could be handled better.
1. Load the cart to the final page pre-checkout just before the cutoff date for next-day shipping.
2. Leave the defaults.
3. Wait to hit the submit button for checkout until just after the cutoff time for next-day shipping.
4. Watch the defaults result in an error message you've never seen before about how that date is ineligible for that kind of shipping.
5. Realize what just happened.
Today is my virtual nephew's birthday. Congratulations, dude!
It's starting to feel like fall, which means I'm starting to feel acutely alive again.
Purple still has his beard. I am pleased. I attempted to explain the current state of my brain. I am moderately faceblind: it takes me a certain amount of concerted study to learn someone's face (and match that face with a name). I first met Purple online, in work IRC. Therefore I first learned his face from his badge photo in the system, the one where he's a little owl-eyed behind glasses that look like a not-pink version of the glasses I wore in 1995, where he has that geekdude Van Dyke beard. Then I saw someone with the same head hair but no facial hair passing through my floor, and I asked tentatively whether he was pkeeper, because I was ajl. And we chatted. So I got used to the reality of him, with an occasionally scruffy but naked face.
Purple, it turns out, is fundamentally lazy about optional grooming. Dealing with facial scruffiness is optional for geekdudes working places which don't have rules about facial scruffiness. And as it turns out, my brain feels that he looks more like himself with a proper beard and moustache, and it's getting long enough that it's actually that and not just scruffiness now.
So now my brain double-corrects. My mental picture of him is still either the homepage picture of him or the workbadge picture of him. With facial hair. And then it corrects: no, at most scruffy. And then it corrects again: no, beard: still thin, but beard. And it is surreal. So I attempted to explain. It lacked the important faceblind/studying/IRC factor. Purple was genially confused (as he often is in my presence, for some reason...)
Generally the most I say about Purple's looks outside of my own head (where I do tend to go on a bit about his lovely long hair and his arms) is that he does not aesthetically displease me. With the correct beard, I am willing to describe him to people other than myself as handsome.
It's noticeably fall. Today Purple was wearing long sleeves, a dusty maroon shirt with a waffly, thermal-underwear type weave, straight out of the 90s and possibly actually from then (since I gather he only wears those shirts a few weeks a year). My brain identified the shirt as something Shawn would have worn. My brain is helpful like that.
There was some disagreement about whether the TV/monitor belonging to my department and plugged into a dubiously tethered Mac Mini is a bigscreen or not. My line for "bigscreen" is, of a flatscreen, whether or not I can reasonably carry it by myself. I cannot with this. So even though it is only 37 usable inches, I think it big. Everything I can carry is small. I don't have a "medium" range. Purple, with his "60 inches of fun" tv, disagrees with me. :-P
I brought up the matter of the nightshift security guard who had alarmed me by greeting me with "hey, beautiful" two weeks ago at my 1:1 with my manager. She immediately went facepalm-equivalent. Having talked it out some previously, I went on to detail that an engineer or someone doing this, I would feel much more comfortable about going "hey, handsome", or "no thank you". But in the case of a security guard, exactly who you gonna call?
I mentioned in #cupcake; lb evidenced relief. Purple sent me a vaguely baffled PM. He trusted that the security guard factor made it worse because I said it was, but he still didn't understand why.
We talked about it for a while. For me, the horror strikes at the "Who you gonna call?" moment. There were, I said, a lot of different shades of discomfort. (And simultaneously, Purple and I both arrived at the number 50 just out of thegrey blue, though he was the first to say it. Bonding moment over our terrible, terrible senses of humor.) I was having a hard time articulating (and said as much) and started to lay out some of the different factors.
* the base level of discomfort at being hit on by someone with whom there isn't mutual interest
* it's night
* it's at work
* we're alone in the building
* Who you gonna call?
(Ghostbusters? asked Purple, knowing that I'd phrased it that way on purpose.)
* And yes, there's more than one person on duty even at that hour with a campus this size
* We're both at the end of our respective chains of command, so at least there isn't rank inequality to worry about
* But if you call the security dispatcher, the mere thought of the conversation in which you have to convey that you are WORRIED BECAUSE OF ONE OF THEM and that they need to not send the closest guy, who is the one who is concerning you, but the second-closest one -- that is not an easy conversation under any circumstances.
* In-group bias is that fun thing where people on the same team are possibly going to be biased in favor of each other, so you're starting from a disadvantage.
I do have to say that one of the good things about not having a dating relationship with Purple is that I am happy to be friends with people who are still in various 200-level feminism classes, while I probably would not be able to date someone at that point in their lives.
And just then back in #cupcake, phone said nearly the same thing as Purple: he believed me that there was a difference, but he didn't understand why/how. Having just been discussing it with Purple let me articulate a little faster.
lb had quite a few things to say also; he was the one who brought up the specific term of art "privilege", which I personally tend to avoid when not in company who have been trained in its use as a term of art and not just the general social and computing senses.
Something clicked around then, and phone summed up quite astutely: making me feel safe is the security team's job. And this particular member of the security team had instead done something to make me feel unsafe.
And that uncorked the rant which I had been apparently sitting on for a bit, then one about how there was a line that certain people drew: on one side of the line, if a woman is uncomfortable around a man, she should get over it because he didn't mean any harm. On the other side of the line, after something terrible has happened, she should never have allowed herself to be alone with him because she should have trusted her instinct to be uncomfortable around him! And fuck all that noise.
phone had a few observations based on relatively recent experiences in his life. Yay learning stuff!
Later, there was a conversational reason to mention power dynamics, and Purple mentioned that some people discovered that they had a kink for same (having observed some of the people he knew saying "ugh power dynamics bad" and then ...) and I mentioned that this was one of the factors in my thing for Shawn. "But that would mean that you ... looked up to him?" Purple said in deep bafflement. I allowed as how Shawn's boundless creativity was one of the things I admired. Purple said some pretty dismissive (and very, very true) things about Shawn's engineering efforts. But, I said, those were not the things -- it was the various creative, like, artistic type creative. The engineering stuff -- "Like the headphones," Purple said. Yes. Like the headphones.
"And the air taser," I said. And apparently I had not told this story to Purple yet. So it was, yet again, Storytime With Azz.
This is a story that I have told before, although the live telling of it may have become better with time: http://azurelunatic.dreamwidth.org/4498486.html
It seems that while I have told this one countless times over the intervening twenty years, I have never before told this story to someone with an electrical engineering degree. Purple howled with laughter, and then explained the, in retrospect, obvious: that while you might indeed be able to build such an electrical device that could zap somebody without the benefit of wires, once you got the charge to the effective point, the worst place you could be in relation to this was to be the guy holding it, unless you were truly not the shortest path to ground. The second worst place was next to the guy holding it. Ideally, you'd be at least ten feet away, with your less-bright friends arrayed between you and Shawn in the kindergarten circle. Basically the safest position was to be the guy he was pointing at, with sufficient distance! And the whole shebang would require a really beefy capacitor. He gestured.
"Larger than the energy drink can sized one that Mr. Johnson was using for his capacitor demo," I said. Shawn's capacitors couldn't have been larger than the batteries he was using, and they weren't even Cs.
From there we digressed into my dad's taser binder, and his dad's acid-tipped darts. These men should never meet.
I realized I should probably hit the restroom before hitting the road. (Insert digression about fruitless hobbies involving punching the wrong things.) When I came back out, Purple was milling around my team's lobby like an aimless pinball, and the drawer adjacent to thebig uncomfortably large to move by yourself screen (currently showing the Non-Boring Manager's choice, our standards page) was a little more ajar than I'd left it.
"Fuck single-sign-on," Purple declared, and began to castigate the new helpdesk software in stronger terms than I'd heard him complain about it previously. It was terrible! You had to sign in to even see the front page!
I looked at the monitor, looked back at him, and began to snicker.
"You'd have to leave yourself signed in if you wanted to leave it up there!" he complained. "You could at least go to the front page on the old one!"
Dear sweet Purple. I went over, fiddled about with the keyboard a little, and re-arranged things so the drawer would close better. (And if my fingers happened to hit command-T, http://[oldhelpdesk.dept.virtualhammer.biz], enter while I was fumbling about with it, well, that was just an unfortunate coincidence, eh? How clumsy of me.)
Things are returning to, if not normal, than at least sensible, with the return of my manager. She simultaneously creates motion and stability. She is our rudder. She is also simultaneously trying to be both herself and my grandmanager, because he is out sick and basically won't be back until November. (I don't have details.)
Today I sent a bug report to Office Depot, about their website. It's just a corner case, and technically it's already being caught by their thingies, but it could be handled better.
1. Load the cart to the final page pre-checkout just before the cutoff date for next-day shipping.
2. Leave the defaults.
3. Wait to hit the submit button for checkout until just after the cutoff time for next-day shipping.
4. Watch the defaults result in an error message you've never seen before about how that date is ineligible for that kind of shipping.
5. Realize what just happened.
Today is my virtual nephew's birthday. Congratulations, dude!
It's starting to feel like fall, which means I'm starting to feel acutely alive again.
Purple still has his beard. I am pleased. I attempted to explain the current state of my brain. I am moderately faceblind: it takes me a certain amount of concerted study to learn someone's face (and match that face with a name). I first met Purple online, in work IRC. Therefore I first learned his face from his badge photo in the system, the one where he's a little owl-eyed behind glasses that look like a not-pink version of the glasses I wore in 1995, where he has that geekdude Van Dyke beard. Then I saw someone with the same head hair but no facial hair passing through my floor, and I asked tentatively whether he was pkeeper, because I was ajl. And we chatted. So I got used to the reality of him, with an occasionally scruffy but naked face.
Purple, it turns out, is fundamentally lazy about optional grooming. Dealing with facial scruffiness is optional for geekdudes working places which don't have rules about facial scruffiness. And as it turns out, my brain feels that he looks more like himself with a proper beard and moustache, and it's getting long enough that it's actually that and not just scruffiness now.
So now my brain double-corrects. My mental picture of him is still either the homepage picture of him or the workbadge picture of him. With facial hair. And then it corrects: no, at most scruffy. And then it corrects again: no, beard: still thin, but beard. And it is surreal. So I attempted to explain. It lacked the important faceblind/studying/IRC factor. Purple was genially confused (as he often is in my presence, for some reason...)
Generally the most I say about Purple's looks outside of my own head (where I do tend to go on a bit about his lovely long hair and his arms) is that he does not aesthetically displease me. With the correct beard, I am willing to describe him to people other than myself as handsome.
It's noticeably fall. Today Purple was wearing long sleeves, a dusty maroon shirt with a waffly, thermal-underwear type weave, straight out of the 90s and possibly actually from then (since I gather he only wears those shirts a few weeks a year). My brain identified the shirt as something Shawn would have worn. My brain is helpful like that.
There was some disagreement about whether the TV/monitor belonging to my department and plugged into a dubiously tethered Mac Mini is a bigscreen or not. My line for "bigscreen" is, of a flatscreen, whether or not I can reasonably carry it by myself. I cannot with this. So even though it is only 37 usable inches, I think it big. Everything I can carry is small. I don't have a "medium" range. Purple, with his "60 inches of fun" tv, disagrees with me. :-P
I brought up the matter of the nightshift security guard who had alarmed me by greeting me with "hey, beautiful" two weeks ago at my 1:1 with my manager. She immediately went facepalm-equivalent. Having talked it out some previously, I went on to detail that an engineer or someone doing this, I would feel much more comfortable about going "hey, handsome", or "no thank you". But in the case of a security guard, exactly who you gonna call?
I mentioned in #cupcake; lb evidenced relief. Purple sent me a vaguely baffled PM. He trusted that the security guard factor made it worse because I said it was, but he still didn't understand why.
We talked about it for a while. For me, the horror strikes at the "Who you gonna call?" moment. There were, I said, a lot of different shades of discomfort. (And simultaneously, Purple and I both arrived at the number 50 just out of the
* the base level of discomfort at being hit on by someone with whom there isn't mutual interest
* it's night
* it's at work
* we're alone in the building
* Who you gonna call?
(Ghostbusters? asked Purple, knowing that I'd phrased it that way on purpose.)
* And yes, there's more than one person on duty even at that hour with a campus this size
* We're both at the end of our respective chains of command, so at least there isn't rank inequality to worry about
* But if you call the security dispatcher, the mere thought of the conversation in which you have to convey that you are WORRIED BECAUSE OF ONE OF THEM and that they need to not send the closest guy, who is the one who is concerning you, but the second-closest one -- that is not an easy conversation under any circumstances.
* In-group bias is that fun thing where people on the same team are possibly going to be biased in favor of each other, so you're starting from a disadvantage.
I do have to say that one of the good things about not having a dating relationship with Purple is that I am happy to be friends with people who are still in various 200-level feminism classes, while I probably would not be able to date someone at that point in their lives.
And just then back in #cupcake, phone said nearly the same thing as Purple: he believed me that there was a difference, but he didn't understand why/how. Having just been discussing it with Purple let me articulate a little faster.
lb had quite a few things to say also; he was the one who brought up the specific term of art "privilege", which I personally tend to avoid when not in company who have been trained in its use as a term of art and not just the general social and computing senses.
Something clicked around then, and phone summed up quite astutely: making me feel safe is the security team's job. And this particular member of the security team had instead done something to make me feel unsafe.
And that uncorked the rant which I had been apparently sitting on for a bit, then one about how there was a line that certain people drew: on one side of the line, if a woman is uncomfortable around a man, she should get over it because he didn't mean any harm. On the other side of the line, after something terrible has happened, she should never have allowed herself to be alone with him because she should have trusted her instinct to be uncomfortable around him! And fuck all that noise.
phone had a few observations based on relatively recent experiences in his life. Yay learning stuff!
Later, there was a conversational reason to mention power dynamics, and Purple mentioned that some people discovered that they had a kink for same (having observed some of the people he knew saying "ugh power dynamics bad" and then ...) and I mentioned that this was one of the factors in my thing for Shawn. "But that would mean that you ... looked up to him?" Purple said in deep bafflement. I allowed as how Shawn's boundless creativity was one of the things I admired. Purple said some pretty dismissive (and very, very true) things about Shawn's engineering efforts. But, I said, those were not the things -- it was the various creative, like, artistic type creative. The engineering stuff -- "Like the headphones," Purple said. Yes. Like the headphones.
"And the air taser," I said. And apparently I had not told this story to Purple yet. So it was, yet again, Storytime With Azz.
This is a story that I have told before, although the live telling of it may have become better with time: http://azurelunatic.dreamwidth.org/4498486.html
It seems that while I have told this one countless times over the intervening twenty years, I have never before told this story to someone with an electrical engineering degree. Purple howled with laughter, and then explained the, in retrospect, obvious: that while you might indeed be able to build such an electrical device that could zap somebody without the benefit of wires, once you got the charge to the effective point, the worst place you could be in relation to this was to be the guy holding it, unless you were truly not the shortest path to ground. The second worst place was next to the guy holding it. Ideally, you'd be at least ten feet away, with your less-bright friends arrayed between you and Shawn in the kindergarten circle. Basically the safest position was to be the guy he was pointing at, with sufficient distance! And the whole shebang would require a really beefy capacitor. He gestured.
"Larger than the energy drink can sized one that Mr. Johnson was using for his capacitor demo," I said. Shawn's capacitors couldn't have been larger than the batteries he was using, and they weren't even Cs.
From there we digressed into my dad's taser binder, and his dad's acid-tipped darts. These men should never meet.
I realized I should probably hit the restroom before hitting the road. (Insert digression about fruitless hobbies involving punching the wrong things.) When I came back out, Purple was milling around my team's lobby like an aimless pinball, and the drawer adjacent to the
"Fuck single-sign-on," Purple declared, and began to castigate the new helpdesk software in stronger terms than I'd heard him complain about it previously. It was terrible! You had to sign in to even see the front page!
I looked at the monitor, looked back at him, and began to snicker.
"You'd have to leave yourself signed in if you wanted to leave it up there!" he complained. "You could at least go to the front page on the old one!"
Dear sweet Purple. I went over, fiddled about with the keyboard a little, and re-arranged things so the drawer would close better. (And if my fingers happened to hit command-T, http://[oldhelpdesk.dept.virtualhammer.biz], enter while I was fumbling about with it, well, that was just an unfortunate coincidence, eh? How clumsy of me.)