revision99

Almost midnight.

Then it will be the year 2007. 2006 didn’t do much for me. I have a little more hope here at the end than I did at the beginning, but then hope springs eternal, doesn’t it?

For some reason I can’t let go of New Year’s Eve as an important marker. It could be any day of the year — we’ve simply decided we will make this one is the last night of the year, and tomorrow the first day. It’s completely arbitrary, but I go along with it, I give it power. More power than my own birthday.

Do you remember when you were young and old people acted like they didn’t want anyone to know when their birthday was, or how old they were? They weren’t acting. What the heck was that all about, I always thought. But when you age you have to leave things behind. You just have to, even if you still feel like a young person, even if your childish curiosity still sometimes gets the better of you, even if you’re still naive about finance, or sex, or you’re shy at parties. I’d like to think that the only things I left behind were my foolishness, my fear, my inexperience, my intolerance, and it’s true I have left some of that baggage. But I have walked through many doors, and explored far into the labyrinth, and while I wasn’t looking someone came and closed a bunch of those doors, and now I can’t go back. I’m not sure I’d want to, but shit — I would have liked to be in on the decision.

So, like the ancient ones before me, I don’t pay much attention to my own birthday, because I just don’t want to think about the never-can-go-back aspect of life, or the number of doors that are closed behind me. I don’t want to be reminded of the things I didn’t get around to, or the ever-shortening time I have to do the things I think are important, or even to figure out what’s really important. If you’re young and you’re reading this, I know you can’t hear me, and you shouldn’t. You have lives to live. But if you’re not delusional you’ll probably arrive at some of these thoughts one day. The rest of you, well, maybe you’re the lucky ones.

I give power to this night, and so it is on this night that I feel time passing more than on any other night.

At midnight, the moment of Change, I go out into the street in front of my house. It’s a quiet neighborhood in a normally quiet town, although you wouldn’t know it on this night, because my neighbors and their neighbors and all the neighbors in all the neighborhoods are out making the biggest ruckus they can, and it is a hell of a ruckus, with yelling and singing and rockets and probably even small arms fire. But when I look into the sky I know I’m looking back through time, starlight from ages past coming to touch me from the endless void beyond our tiny spinning rock, and all the noise we can make; all the rockets we shoot; all the laughter and tears; the triumphs and hurt and all the self-conscious celebration, it all seems quaint, and sweet, and touching.

My main computer at home is farkled, so I have to work on that when I can, instead of blogging.

It has been a rough couple of months at my crummy job, and I am worn out from the stress. I don’t feel like fixing this computer. I feel like going out and buying a new one, but the screws have been tightening at work, and now it’s a close call as to whether I will get fired or quit pretty soon. So I have to conserve my money, which means I will have to geek around with the computer until I get it working again, which means I may not be writing for a little while.

Being in this position at my job makes me feel like a loser. I’m smart and educated and I’ve worked all my life, a much longer time frame than I even want to admit right now, and all I have to show for it is a crummy job from which I will never have the wherewithal to retire, part of a corporation that doesn’t have a clue, in an industry that makes most of its’ money doing things that would be illegal in a just world, under the thumb of a swaggering, big-mouthed egomaniac who in a battle of wits would be unarmed.

I try to let the shit roll off me, and considering my underlying attitude I guess I’ve been doing that pretty well. I try to tell myself that being there is like going through the looking glass into an upside down world, and that my real life starts when I walk out each day, but the corporation is so in my face lately that it’s getting too difficult to forget about it when I’m not there.

I wish I were earning my living doing something I loved. I have said that I would play blues in a corner bar for hot dogs, but I really can’t do that. I don’t want to go into the whole mess right now, but I have responsibilities and as bad as the crummy job is, it gives me a regular — albeit minimal — paycheck and health benefits.

So I have become the gray, plodding, broken man that I mocked when I was a brash youth, and I owned the world. Sorry, Dad. I didn’t know how life can beat you down, how you can get hooked on the money, trapped into doing things you loathe, running as fast as you can just to stay in the same place.

And feeling the knot of fear in your stomach when you realize you’re not even staying in the same place. You are slipping behind.

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I’m OK. Maybe what I wanted to say is that, while I’ll be busy working on the hardware for a bit, 2007 will be a big year for revision99, so stay tuned. As always, my heart skips only for you.

To all my bloggin’ buddies…

You can’t know how much you’ve meant to me.

You just can’t, OK?

I hope your Winter celebrations are going great.

Last night I was stuck at the tackiest “Christmas Party” ever.

In lieu of a real party, we closed the doors at work (at 4:00 PM, big deal) and had a dinner on the premises. There was no music. There were no decorations. We didn’t have Secret Santas. There was no indication that we were celebrating anything, or observing any ancient tradition.

“Gifts” had been extorted from our various vendors, and were distributed by means of raffle tickets and a drawing. Yes, that’s right: We called the businesses that supply us and told them that we expected them to donate stuff to our Christmas party, or else we would have to rethink our relationship with them in the new year. And yes, we are a Fortune 500 company.

Gifts. You know - things you give to others, people you love or want to impress or for whom you want to do something nice. I understand that certain holidays, most notably Christmas, have created a sort of ritualized gift-giving frenzy, whereby we feel that we must give to certain friends and family and associates. But still, at least we know who’s getting the presents, and the giving bears some resemblance to the real thing.

Our event last night was fully disconnected from the entire concept of giving. The “gifts” were from people who didn’t want to give them, to people they didn’t know. A bald guy got a hair curler. The 19-year-old receptionist got a jug of Johnny Walker Black. The guy who got the golf balls was trying to trade them - for anything else.

I didn’t want any of the tainted booty. I knew it would be cursed, so I threw away my raffle ticket and stayed in my office. In the end I was forced to put in an appearance, and I must say that the food was fantastic. One of our employees, a guy from New Orleans, operates a family catering business on the side, and he cooked up a phenomonal cajun feast for us all. He spent the whole day on the meal, and it was worth it. About half of it was still here in the morning, so all I have done all day is eat.

Except for the gumbo and the sausage and the crawfish, this event was easily the low point of the worst year of my professional career, and helps keep me focused on getting the fuck out of this gig. I hope I am able to do that.

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On a much happier note, Blue Girl and Neddie Jingo have recorded a Christmas song, collaborating long distance on a sweet little masterpiece for the holiday. Blue Girl is in my Reciprocity blogroll, and Neddie Jingo is someone I’ll be reading a lot more in the new year. Some of you may recall that I did something like this with y’all last year on a protest song, but they have taken the collaboration idea to a new blog level, and it is wonderful. If your computer can play music, click here to hear the song.

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Finally, I might be talking to God this weekend, so let me know if you want me to ask anything.

You people are not showing me any love.

I mean, can you not see my Christmas tree? (Hint: Top of the page, to the right of the banner. Blinking.) I spent at least an hour trying to set it up right in that spot and get it to blink at you, to brighten your holiday blog reading.

Hope you like it.

I’m having my annual holiday wallow in “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

Those Precious Few who have been reading here for a while may have suspected that I am a sap, and I guess this proves it. Until a few years ago, this movie was almost in the public domain, and as a result every local television station in the country had a beat up, dog-eared copy which they ran forty or fifty times every December. In a big market like LA you could catch it any time you wanted, twenty-four hours a day during the whole holiday season. I viewed most of these showings. Gradually it became a “classic,” even though it wasn’t well-regarded when it was released in 1946.

Then somehow NBC acquired exclusive rights to it, and they a.) made everybody stop showing it all the time and b.) decided to exhibit it only once (or twice) a year. As much as I loved to watch the movie, I was OK with these limitations, because by that time I knew the entire movie by heart, and I think it’s fitting for it to be treated with a little more respect. NBC got a nice, cleaned up print of it, so it looked better than ever, too. Some of those old prints were so bad you could hardly see the picture, or hear the great dialog.

But I was not always able to watch when NBC felt like showing it, so a couple of years ago I bought the DVD. Most of the time I try to seem tough-minded and skeptical, but once I year I become a quivering mass of schmaltz, as I worship at The Church of Frank Capra. That’s what I’m doing tonight, as I write.

I don’t know for sure when I became aware of “It’s A Wonderful Life,” but it feels as if I have literally grown up with it. The life of George Bailey is so touching and there are so many indelible scenes in the film that I sometimes lose track if it’s a movie or a rerun of my own life. Sure it’s hokey, and I love the hokey-ness. I know it’s over the top and manipulative, but for a couple of hours each year I give up my heart, suspend my sophisticated disbelief and go along for the sweet, sweet ride.

The moment when George realizes he is in love with Mary Hatch (the fetching Donna Reed) gets my vote for Most Romantic Scene Ever Filmed, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat across a table from my brother and repeated Nick the bartender’s words: “Look, mister, we serve hard drinks in here for men who want to get drunk fast, and we don’t need any characters to give the joint atmosphere.” Has there ever been a more despicable villain than Lionel Barrymore’s “warped, frustrated” Mr. Potter? And surely we could do worse than a guardian angel named Clarence.

I’m not reviewing the film here, or summarizing the story, except to say that each person’s life touches many others, and even if you do only small things the world stands to be dimished if you were never in it. I wouldn’t be missed the way George Bailey was, or welcomed back so enthusiastically, but seeing this movie makes me want to do a few good deeds.

You know. Just in case.

To those who have suggested I write a song about my HugeCorp Blues:

I refer you to Jimmy Reed, who recorded this Al Smith/Willie Dixon composition 46 years ago. Click the little blue button to hear the song.

Jimmy was born in Mississippi in 1925 and was working in a meat packing plant in Indiana when he started making records in the forties. When I think about working that kind of a gig, I can only smile at my own job-related angst.

The blues got Jimmy out of meat packing, and he actually became a pretty big star in the fifties and sixties. He drank too much, though, and he left this world in 1976. If this song sounds familiar to you, it may be because his music has been copied by everybody in the business for the past forty years.

I can hear you, Jimmy.

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BIG BOSS MAN
Big boss man, can‘t you hear me when I call
Big boss man, can‘t you hear me when I call
Well, you ain‘t so big, you‘re just tall, that‘s all

Got me working, boss man, working ’round the clock
I want me a drink of water, but you won’t let Jimmy stop
Big boss man, can’t you hear me when I call?
Well, you ain’t so big, you just tall, that’s all

Well, I‘m gonna get me a bossman, one gonna treat me right
Work hard in the day time, rest easy at night
Big boss man, can‘t you hear me when I call?
Well, you ain‘t so big, you‘re just tall, that‘s all

Later for Gravatar.

I must apologize to Blue Girl, Theresa, Ron and everyone who went at my insistence to gravatar.com and got their own Gravatars. I have been forced to disable Gravatars on revision99, because it was causing the site to be verrry slow. It went like this:

Once I had enabled Gravatars on this site, every time one of you Precious Few would leave a comment, the machinery in the basement of revision99 World Headquarters would call gravatar.com and request an image. If there was an image, it would retrieve it and display it next to your comment. If no image, well, we still had to go look. All of this took time. And even though revision99 saved a copy of your image and reused it instead of getting it fresh each time from gravatar.com, there were still those who didn’t have a Gravatar, and we had to go check that out every time. And I suspect the system actually went and checked for images even if all you wanted to do was view a page. And because the Gravatar server is overloaded and overworked and stressed out and bogged down, all of this image searching and retrieval was taking a long damn time.

The result was that I lost almost all my readers (I think), because no one had time to wait for this procedure to take place just to get a chance to see the latest stupid stuff I was writing about. Can’t say I blame anyone, but please come back!!!

Don’t worry — if you signed up for a Gravatar, you still have one, and it will show up in Haloscan comments and other sites that have Gravatars enabled. And in the future I will give gravatar another try, because they claim to be working on an upgrade that will make everything speedy again, or maybe because I will try a different way of enabling them that doesn’t take so long to work each time. Stand by for that announcement, but don’t hold your breath.

In the meantime, revision99 — minus the pictures and Sock Puppet Bunnies — is quite snappy these days. No need to make a pot of coffee before checking it out, and as always, my heart beats only for you.

I really, really, really need to get a new job.

It’s Friday night, approaching midnight, and I feel like I have just finished a week of running in front of the bulls at Pamplona. I don’t want to complain abut this too much — after all, at least I have a job. It’s a steady paycheck and subsidized health insurance. But since we were bought out by HugeCorp things have gone from bad to worse. I have tried to maintain some sense of balance, and after almost fourteen years at this place I have seen a lot of self-annointed bigshots come and go and I know that no matter how bad things get it’s just a job and my real life starts when I walk out of there each day.

But money touches everything and HugeCorp, like all corporations, exists only and purely to make as much money as possible, and it is like a giant machine, whirring in the basement (or the penthouse), grinding out new schemes and initiatives and procedures, blissfully unaware of what it’s like to be me, trying to implement them and still find time to get some work done. Some of the schemes make some sense in theory, or at least it’s possible to discern the good intentions behind them. But when they are brought into the workplace and start bumping up against reality all their flaws are exposed and eveything the planners didn’t think of takes place and there is chaos, anger and frustration.

I usually like chaos, but I am angry and frustrated because I am starting to see that I am a square peg and I will never fit into any of these HugeCorp round holes. For years we could both ignore this incompatibility, because they paid me and I efficiently did their work. But they are losing interest in getting work done. What they want now is to seem to be getting work done, so investors are impressed by the prospectus and the stock value goes up.

Another thing investors like is cost-cutting, so this week all the office supplies were moved to a warehouse a block away from the building where they are used, where they are being cataloged and shelved. This started without warning or explanation a few days ago, and by today most of our day-to-day stuff we need to work was gone from our premises. So when I was in the middle of a print job on the main laser printer and it ran out of paper, there was no fucking paper anywhere in the building. I asked the woman who had previously been in charge of supplies, and she told me to go to the other building and ask for a ream.

Really. Do I need more of a hint than that? Not only am I getting reamed, but now they want me to ask for it.

OK. I get it. It’s a huge corporation and they want to be as efficient as possible. They want to enhance the bottom line by saving money on supplies by making people accountable for what they use. But because of the stupid, arrogant, thoughtless, haphazard way they went about doing it, I - and the other twenty people who use that printer - had to stop everything and wait for someone to hike down the street and ask for a ream.

It was me, of course, and I didn’t ask. I took four reams of paper and hiked back to the office. I loaded the printer and asked the former supply-woman where she wanted the rest of the paper, and I asked her to call the warehouse and let them know how much paper I had taken, since no one had been there when I arrived. Just helpful Jones, trying to keep all the wheels turning.

For this rogue behavior I got to have a special, ten-minute closed-door meeting with the (new) general manager and the (new) controller, who together have worked there a total of six months. I won’t go into the grisly details of my reprimand, except to say that even though neither of them could refute my logic that I was just trying to get the whole fucking office back to work and ensure that another such delay didn’t occur in a couple of hours, they insisted that I had to play by the new rules (which had never been revealed to me, but that didn’t matter), that there could be no exceptions and it was too fucking bad if I didn’t like it. And, oh, yeah, neither of them was responsible for the new rules - they just happened spontaneously. (I actually used the word “spontaneously” in our conversation, and it appears that neither of them know what it means.)

So, to summarize:

• Stoopid rule.
• Productivity suffers.
• Circumventing the rule and actually working gets you in trouble.
• No one is responsible.
• I really, really, really need to get a new job.