i think
my faculty expects me to be flattered when she sets it up for me to go talk to
those people at microsoft. i think she anticipates a brilliant
powerpoint presentation, a demo of a project that, though it sucked two months ago and no one has touched it since, will dazzle the
corporate poodles and inspire them to give us money so we can buy yet another machine my
lab administrator will quickly deny me access to. (you can imagine how not having access to one's development machines makes it difficult to get things done.)
of course, that has never happened. i give a presentation that changes little from iteration to iteration, press them to release the same
code i've begged for before, and leave
feeling like an idiot. maybe that's my own fault, as i refuse to play the political games that have that feeling as their end result, should one lose. my beloved colleagues do things incorrectly and remain silent as i get a lecture on how
a login is unique to whatever client it was born on. (which i knew and is the reason that i would never have tried to log in as
admin. but then, i didn't log in.) a question is raised about whether we've been using
script or
com modules, and someone who has never done any programming on this project jumps in to answer. incorrectly.
and i just sit there, feeling stupid, not knowing what to do.
so that was my morning. much
bitterness and biting of my tongue. my car died exactly seven times before i got out of the m$ parking lot, and i got lost wandering across the steep hills of
queen anne. i gave up trying to find something to do in seattle, finally, and pulled into the
ballard denny's. where i sat down in the lounge and promptly began to
get drunk. you might think that's pretty foolish, drive all the way to seattle just to end up in a
denny's lounge, but it was relaxing. no
sullen hipsters, no absurd array of
microbrews. and
grilled cheese sandwiches with tomato. so i sat and smoked and read
speaker for the dead and drank scotch and soda that tasted like
carbonated rubbing alcohol. that probably has much to do with why i'm sick today.
and eventually, i came home to find that my house was very cold and my roommate had disappeared again, leaving her cats to tear across the furniture and stink up the laundry room with their untended litter box.
i'm trying to decide which is worse:
the painful futility of yesterday or
the familiar banality of today and all those to follow.