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the neural net [this entire post is true, I swear to god]
-not been blogging because stupid things have been happening far faster than I can keep up with. Many of those things have barely happened outside my head; I keep learning things, I keep hitting these social comfort zone attacks and freaking out over them and hoping, one day, I won't be so bad at coping. It's funny because I am not a fan of social conflict aversion, which I generally think does far more harm to close relationships than good; what I've been handling badly is my stranger-to-stranger failures to achieve and tiny, unpredictable flares of ugliness. And I feel genuinely caught between my desire to learn from all this shit and blow through my own walls and get good at it, and my deep desire to not have to do this for any length of time. learn to fucking swim, or at least flail hard enough until I get to do something else. I mean, the better I get at not being completely process-, detail-oriented the longer it will take to replace me with a robot.
-I have, at least, learned that people with legit, You May Have Heard Of, Do Not Fuck With institutions are generally lovely to us. The snippy nightmare people universally work at places you've never heard of and can safely assume will go under in a couple of years if only due to the gravitational pull of the bullshit numbers they're mysteriously hell-bent on making us believe.
-M and me have been discussing the big shocker of our new jobs; we've both gone from working with consumers/clients to, for the first time in either of our lives, working in business services. The difference is that businesses are dumb as shit about money and therefore in business services your employer is totally cool with paying you exorbitant sums just to exist. Like, exist. No one cares. It's not based on anything immediately tangible any more. I incrementally improve something that some people rent out for $$$$ per year to help them make money from someone else, somewhere else. We just added another $1000 to the price tag because our boss thinks we can. And there is this genuine neural net magic where I am constantly learning and synthesising the things in my head just by being here and what I am really being paid for is knowing things and people; however, the same was broadly true of the job I had in GA that paid less than half of this and also involved lifting heavy shit and being on my feet all day. Back then, the things and the people were deemed to be less valuable - by, let's keep up here, people who have not the slightest flying clue what anything is actually worth.
-did I mention I write business fluff? Boss requires that we, collectively, churn out business fluff on a regular basis. I am way good at this in spite of being the most clueless person here. I have somehow avoided explaining in adequate detail how I became so good at this; fortunately, nobody cares. So, this has gone in two completely different bizarre directions in the last week.
The marginally more explicable one is that some guy emailed me out of the blue asking if we could chat sometime about a topic I had written on (the new general solicitation rules). Deer in headlights, because needless to say I know nothing about said topic; what's more, I couldn't figure out what he actually wanted, which is always worrying. So of course I said yes, because what is even the point if you're doing nonfic and this shit happens and you say no? I'm a regulatory nerd wannabe, and I am learning to swim. Due to the other bizarrity (we're getting there) I blew him off until Monday, and only then bothered mentioning all this to my boss. Who wasn't mad (my team are the only people he never blows up at) but was verry suspicious and now wants to sit in on the call with me. Whatevs! I can just sit there being the most mortified person in the world while getting paid for it. I've done that a lot, lately. Getting used to it.
The other wtf is that my boss is getting us to ghostwrite a book for him. I have been informed that this is not the first time he has done this. This had been going on around me for a while, and on account of my slick prose I'd been doing some of the line-editing. Last Friday, he told me he needed me to write a chapter. It was about something I knew absolutely zip fuck about. No problem; he also told me to watch a bunch of stuff on some guy's website and then write about it all. So I spent Monday mostly doing my normal job, Tuesday notetaking for dear life and dredging google for more material, wrote it all in the last two shifts, and mailed it to him late this afternoon saying 'hey, lemme know if this needs any more major work done tmr'. He read a bit of it and then called me into his office and told me how much he hated the guy he'd told me to plagiarise it off because that guy was just a bit luckier than him and that was the only reason he was famous. Yeah, I got major blackrom vibes.
-fucking boomers; can't work for them, can't eat unless you're willing to work for them. They do startups because someone told them it was cool; they are desperate to be edgy and think they deserve recognition just for showing up. They get entitlement and understanding mixed up, a lot. We are all, constantly, participating in their grotesque delusions of grandeur; I'm just doing it in a more direct fashion than I'm used to.
-You can tell there was a financial dramu because even with my goddamn stupid raise hitting last week I still earned about 4x more from investing than by working this October.
-This is only the last week's worth of completely bizarre things. I have missed so much more, not all of it my story to tell, not that that has ever stopped me before now.
-I have, at least, learned that people with legit, You May Have Heard Of, Do Not Fuck With institutions are generally lovely to us. The snippy nightmare people universally work at places you've never heard of and can safely assume will go under in a couple of years if only due to the gravitational pull of the bullshit numbers they're mysteriously hell-bent on making us believe.
-M and me have been discussing the big shocker of our new jobs; we've both gone from working with consumers/clients to, for the first time in either of our lives, working in business services. The difference is that businesses are dumb as shit about money and therefore in business services your employer is totally cool with paying you exorbitant sums just to exist. Like, exist. No one cares. It's not based on anything immediately tangible any more. I incrementally improve something that some people rent out for $$$$ per year to help them make money from someone else, somewhere else. We just added another $1000 to the price tag because our boss thinks we can. And there is this genuine neural net magic where I am constantly learning and synthesising the things in my head just by being here and what I am really being paid for is knowing things and people; however, the same was broadly true of the job I had in GA that paid less than half of this and also involved lifting heavy shit and being on my feet all day. Back then, the things and the people were deemed to be less valuable - by, let's keep up here, people who have not the slightest flying clue what anything is actually worth.
-did I mention I write business fluff? Boss requires that we, collectively, churn out business fluff on a regular basis. I am way good at this in spite of being the most clueless person here. I have somehow avoided explaining in adequate detail how I became so good at this; fortunately, nobody cares. So, this has gone in two completely different bizarre directions in the last week.
The marginally more explicable one is that some guy emailed me out of the blue asking if we could chat sometime about a topic I had written on (the new general solicitation rules). Deer in headlights, because needless to say I know nothing about said topic; what's more, I couldn't figure out what he actually wanted, which is always worrying. So of course I said yes, because what is even the point if you're doing nonfic and this shit happens and you say no? I'm a regulatory nerd wannabe, and I am learning to swim. Due to the other bizarrity (we're getting there) I blew him off until Monday, and only then bothered mentioning all this to my boss. Who wasn't mad (my team are the only people he never blows up at) but was verry suspicious and now wants to sit in on the call with me. Whatevs! I can just sit there being the most mortified person in the world while getting paid for it. I've done that a lot, lately. Getting used to it.
The other wtf is that my boss is getting us to ghostwrite a book for him. I have been informed that this is not the first time he has done this. This had been going on around me for a while, and on account of my slick prose I'd been doing some of the line-editing. Last Friday, he told me he needed me to write a chapter. It was about something I knew absolutely zip fuck about. No problem; he also told me to watch a bunch of stuff on some guy's website and then write about it all. So I spent Monday mostly doing my normal job, Tuesday notetaking for dear life and dredging google for more material, wrote it all in the last two shifts, and mailed it to him late this afternoon saying 'hey, lemme know if this needs any more major work done tmr'. He read a bit of it and then called me into his office and told me how much he hated the guy he'd told me to plagiarise it off because that guy was just a bit luckier than him and that was the only reason he was famous. Yeah, I got major blackrom vibes.
-fucking boomers; can't work for them, can't eat unless you're willing to work for them. They do startups because someone told them it was cool; they are desperate to be edgy and think they deserve recognition just for showing up. They get entitlement and understanding mixed up, a lot. We are all, constantly, participating in their grotesque delusions of grandeur; I'm just doing it in a more direct fashion than I'm used to.
-You can tell there was a financial dramu because even with my goddamn stupid raise hitting last week I still earned about 4x more from investing than by working this October.
-This is only the last week's worth of completely bizarre things. I have missed so much more, not all of it my story to tell, not that that has ever stopped me before now.
no subject
Anyway, thanks for another stream-of-conciousness-insight into a world I will never gain entry to. (Vicarious experience is almost as good as the real thing, when it's this detailed.) You've confirmed much of what I suspect about organisations and their approach to money. Mind you, do economists have any idea how to price things? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_value_(economics)) Its a fascinating issue. It's where ideas become concrete things.
"Why should I care?" is the question I keep asking myself about mobile OSes. Learning is never easy. It makes you vulnerable in the same way that falling in love does.
I think some of the things that are in your head are called "social capital". I should write more about, but *I'm* getting tired now.
As to handling the conversation with you fan. Well, in these situations I say "I don't know. I'm not really an expert. It could be..." and then list everything that seems logical to me, before concluding "But I don't really know. I'm not expert." Then, if I'm wrong, they remember the equivocation, and if I hit upon the right solution they remember that; every good oracle writes themselves a get-out-of-jail clause.
But in a world where nobody reads the manual, knowing the rules makes you an expert. My dad constantly says "'x' is an unknown quantity and 'spurt' is a drip under pressure" and that is his definition of an "x-spurt". *sigh* But it applies in this case. Remember that as an outsider, without preconceptions, you will have an advantage. And if you are smarter than him (likely) then things that are obvious to you might not be obvious to him. So have confidence (while retaining your humility); you're smart - so go get 'em girl. Blog how it goes.
My hormones briefly dipped to "contentedly single why would I want to make any of the sacrifices necessary for a relationship". And then I saw my paramore with someone else. My "heart" has jumped to all sorts of conclusions and will not listen to reason. Unfortunately, the disappointment is worse than the hope. :roll: Hopefully it will help me let go of the obsession - because this person is warm, very much on my wavelength, and has lots of interesting stories to tell; and that's worth having even as a friend.