Oh man, the shit that I’m sitting in on right now. These dudes are something else. I literally heard a dude talking about how a drunk man and a drunk woman can constitute rape because apparently only women can’t consent while drunk, and then he details how that should preclude a woman from serving as president. This guy is a real piece of work. He’s the one that’s been espousing the most virulently conservative rhetoric I’ve seen, and I think he’s gonna end up causing a scrap with this shit.

It’s always slow going when you work on site in an industrial manufacture facility. They have lengthy and involved processes and a lot of them take a while. The products being manufactured are typically large in scope and very complex, and every change to every part of every process needs document and propagated through every affected work area. It used to make more sense than it does now. It used to have a goal, and that goal used to be combining efficiency with intellect to generate profit, but now they’ve cut out the efficiency and the intellect. It’s all only about profit, and everything suffers, and it becomes more and more evident.

I’m rambling today. The ADHD takes hold when it sees fit, and most of the time I have little to no ability to focus that energy. The IT department in this billion dollar company is probably just about the worst IT department I’ve ever seen. They too are a result of “profit over all”, because they’ve taken aggressive measures to simply reduce functionality, rather than improve security. Best practices don’t really exist here, they just chant the mantra “If you lock it down, they can do minimal damage”. It’s really sad to see, but also incredibly common.

I’m writing this blog post because I literally have no other tasks before me to occupy my time. I can’t start checking off items on my task list because they won’t release one of the three machines to me until they’ve used them. They need to run a cycle or two, and I can’t say anything. They’re paying me to sit here idly. This is by design, because apparently wasting my time is more cost effective than efficient time management. At least that’s what they’d have you think. It isn’t true, but it’s what they’re going to do regardless. That’s alright, though. I can sit here and let my thoughts dribble onto the keyboard until they’re ready to turn me loose on the project and start getting things done. It’s whatever. It’s my job, I guess. It isn’t like I’m making minimum wage, I’m playing in the “big leagues”. It’s not as impressive as you might think, either.

Sometimes I’m amazed at how little effort it actually takes to “be the best” at some of the things that have made corporations billions of dollars. Google, for instance, didn’t really have to put a lot of effort into their garage-started enterprise. I’m sure they put quite a bit of time and effort into the original instance, but the reality is that there was just a need for something and two guys in a garage had what they felt solved a problem. It wasn’t even a problem that needed solving, we had plenty of search engines in the time of Google’s inception. We had Alta Vista. We had Yahoo. We had AOL search. Hell, I’m pretty sure Ask Jeeves is still around. None of them were that great, though. It turns out that picking words out of a page isn’t intrinsically useful to someone looking for information. But the text that someone would describe a link with happened to be the exact way that our minds want to discover things. If someone has already made that discovery, or even multiple someones have, then that information can be fed back to the search engine to revise what results will be pushed to the top of a search for those terms. It’s really genius when you think about it, and it was enough to build the hulking behemoth that knows all and sees all known as “Google”. They truly do know and see all, if not directly, then by AI inference. Google knows what my goddamned ADHD-addled brain is doing at any given moment, for fuck’s sake. It’s wild. Yet again, even AI is a great example of “minimum effort, maximum impact”. I think it’s time I create something that’s minimal effort and maximum impact. I don’t know what that is just yet, but I think I need to bury myself in a computer screen for a while and find out. I need to tinker again. I need to discover again. I need to work on passion projects and make things and do things. I’ve been idle for so long that I forget what initiative feels like. It’s insane. I’m sure the muscle memory is there, but I’m even having trouble digging it out.

All I really know for sure is that I’m not a millionaire yet, but if I work hard and jump at worthwhile opportunities, it’s certainly not off the table.

I should probably make better use of what really should be considered “downtime”. Right now I’m just watching mini-cycles of a program and making sure they don’t have errors. It’s brainless work, in all honesty, and something any new programmer should be capable of. The guys here at the plant who program machinery should be capable of it, but they’re also burdened with taking care of machinery that’s too old for warranted service or new projects. They’re basically acting as caretakers for dead and dying equipment. It’s not what I’d choose as a career, but I’ve certainly been there.

I went into an REI Co-op yesterday, and I kinda liked it. I was surrounded by “ruggedized and lightweight everything”. That’s really up my alley, to be honest. I love rugged and lightweight stuff, things made to near-exacting standards that are either backed by lifetime guarantees or are so good it wouldn’t matter if they were. Most of the time you’ll see it described as “heirloom quality”, because it’s the notion that you can purchase the item and it’s so robust and durable that it’ll still be operating nominally or better by the time you’re in a grave and your kids are poring over your assets to see what they can take or sell. I’m such an asshole, though. I was literally walking through the store and saying loudly “Yeah, I’m at the place where rich people go to LARP as homeless”. It’s funny, it’s true, and it’s absolutely an asshole thing to say. I kind of get the appeal, at least from a birds-eye view of not actually being outside in the elements. I dunno. The idea of being self-sufficient and off the grid sounds great, but when you get there you realize you’re actually just there to drink heavily, smoke weed, and float down a river. The tent doesn’t fucking matter, the wilderness can go fuck itself, you’re only there because if you tried doing it at a public pool you’d get fucking kicked out. Literally, this is the only reason for these types of trips. You have to leave society to not be judged for being heavily intoxicated around a group of friends.

I need a goddamn tent and probably a sleeping bag. Man it’s gonna be rough to be outside for longer than an hour. I’ll make it though, but not without your thoughts and prayers. Hah.