Jun
14
June 14, 2007
There are some very nice things about my office job. There are the benefits, which range from a full time onsite chef to full body massages. There are the ridiculously chillaxed hours, and the universal acceptance of an excuse such as, “I stayed up too late playing WoW, I’ll be in around noon”.
My workplace is also, for its all foibles and bumblings, totally sincere. They are an honest lot, and while everyone wants to make a buck no one wants to do it by oil-of-snake methods. We are an engineering-driven company, not a marketing-driven one. No one sits around in meetings assessing the market and brainstorming product specs based on the highest return on the investment; instead, engineers tend to individually decide something is worth building and bang out a vat of code before any requirements are decided upon.
We used to have an employee who called this organic product development. It’s taken some getting used to, but despite the lack of planning and ever-elusive ship dates, it seems to work out very well.
My job is not to work marketing from the front end of the process—I have almost nothing to do with development or product management—but to put a shiny package on the completed piece of software. I write the words that are supposed to make the software sound enticing (someone else writes the words that describe how it actually works), for the most part. I work with a talented designer to create ads, retail boxes, and other collateral stuffs. I have a PR function too, which includes updating our blog with product development news, or sending out press releases.
While I might dip into the Well O’ Hyperbole on occasion (I can’t help it! I love the word powerful), the vast majority of my job is bullshit-free. From a marketing perspective, anyway. I mean I don’t have to LIE, unlike pretty much every other job I’ve ever had.
So: I don’t have to lie, my company is legitimately concerned first and foremost with making a good product, and I don’t work with anyone whose job involves thinking of ways to slowly butt-fuck our customers without the common courtesy of a reacharound. Compared to the place where I had to write about apps that didn’t exist and was micromanaged by a psychotic, pot-smoking husband and wife team who made their money from camgirl porn and infomercials, Workplace both kicks ass and takes names.
However, I keep experiencing what I can only describe as bourgeois career angst, a feeling that I should be doing something more meaningful. As problems go, I realize this one hardly registers past the “Privileged Whining” sector—when you have a good job that pays the bills, your focus should be on thanking the gods (SO SAY WE ALL) for your luck, rather than idly wondering why you aren’t more spiritually fulfilled by your work. I’ve been unemployed, and to say it sucks would be doing a great disservice to the sheer amount of suckage that comes from months of fruitless job searching, the inevitable lowering of standards (“Port-a-Potty sanitation engineer? Maybe they offer training?”), and the resounding echo coming from an empty bank account.
Still. I feel like I should have a Plan, an answer to the question of what I want to be when I grow up. What do I want to be doing in five years, ten years? I don’t know. I have some general ideas: I want to make connections, I want to help people in some way, I want to learn new skills. I do hope to write a book someday but I don’t have dreams of being a full time author in that sense (too isolating, for one).
Then there’s the enormous issue of family life and how to balance that with whatever I’m doing, and how that could change if I were to be doing anything different from what I’m doing now, and boy, I just don’t know.
What about you? Are you where you thought—or hoped—you’d be right now, with regards to your job (“job” = whatever you’re doing for work, which definitely includes staying home with children because if that isn’t work, then brother, I don’t know what the hell is)? Do you have long term plans for what you want to do with your career? Or are you like me, playing things by ear and hoping for the best?
Jun
13
June 13, 2007
Well, I never thought I’d be saying this . . . but I succumbed to the most faddish and infomercial-esque of self-improvement methods, allowing a man to enter my house in order to shout random things in my ear (“COUNT IT! COUNT IT!”) and intimidate me with his shiny, bulging muscles. And although the entire experience was more than a little ridiculous, my ass tells the story of success, which goes like this: OH MY GOD OW OW JESUS OW.
I’m talking, of course, about Tae Bo:
Feast your eyes on the terrifying visage of Mr. Billy Blanks, a man comprised of rippling sinew; a strange, Paris-Hilton-like, comes-and-goes drooping eyelid; and a series of robotic (but surprisingly effective) motivational phrases featuring the term “ya’ll”.
I took that photo while attempting to work out to the “Cardio Circuit 2” DVD obligingly coughed up by Netflix, which at first seemed chock full of faults: the music sucked, Billy’s increasingly transparent pink shirt was disturbing, and his cues were hard to follow—but about halfway through I realized that I needed an excuse to hit the pause button because hey! Were those my lungs . . . lying on the floor?
There is a woman on the DVD whose utterly ripped physique and periodic screams of encouragement to her fellow sufferers seem to indicate she is there as a motivator, or a shining example of What To Aspire For, but the longer I was forced to endure her grim, ferocious presence, complete with one fist thrust dramatically in the air after each routine and a triumphant shriek aimed to the class (“YEAH! YEAHHH!”), the more I began to . . . well, it doesn’t seem nice to say that I began to really, really dislike her, but there it is.
It’s just that she reminds me of an evil member of the Inner Party observing us all in order to report us for our various physical shortcomings, and I’m positive she goes batshit during the Two Minute Hate.
(She’s probably a perfectly nice person when she’s not doing Tae Bo.)
Billy periodically pulls up her shirt and paws her midsection, ostensibly to show her ab muscles during a routine, and I cannot help but picture the behind-the-scenes footage involving the two of them. JB, briefly passing by the living room and catching sight of the TV, observed: “Man, I bet he tears into her, you know what I mean?” And I DID know.
(Edited to add: oh my GOD, I have learned that the Terminator girl is Billy’s daughter [!!!], so clearly JB and I are going straight to hell.)
All in all, I am much more fond of chirpy Chalene Johnson and her focus-on-FUN! Turbo Jam workout, but that Tae Bo definitely has something going for it. Holy crap, I’ve joined the Cult of Billy. COME ON, YA’LL!
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