“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” — Maya Angelou
I’m not even sure what’s real anymore. When I state that I have a slippery sense of reality right now, I am relaying an accurate portrayal of my internal state.
Slippery. Sense. Of reality.
It sounds funny… is kinda funny… and kinda not funny at the same time. The weirdest shit happens to me. The timing. The situations. The contexts. The outcomes. The outputs. All a hurricane of negative and positive experiences. Jerking back and forth. This is too much.
Which is funny cuz all that shit above was a total tangent to what the title is. lol. Also, you can’t have time without Tim. Or intimacy.
I am currently on a dinghy, sailing through a sea of meetings, with a tiny engine, that needs oil, and has a gas tank that’s rapidly approaching empty. So many meetings. Sooooo many meetings. So little gas.
Many of these meetings I can pay half-attention to until topics start to tickle my brain that draw my attention back to the conversation. Maybe it’s about some sort of database. Some sort of network related thing. Some sort of cloud platform or performance thing or data center provider or vendor or something.
I make an effort to stay on camera as often as possible. I like attention, so I gotta show myself off, right? My favorite part about when I start to lose attention and drift onto other cognitive considerations is that people can see what the fuck my face is doing. Today one of peers say, “You look fascinated. What are you speed reading?” He was able to accurately predict what I was doing based on my face. I was reading an article about how Discored stores trillions of messages.
This happened to me in a meeting today in which we were brainstorming and discussing what kind of details must be considered, and how we’re going to implement them, in order to migrate very large PostgreSQL databases to tHe ClOUd.
“The Cloud” is just code for “other peoples servers.” Literally. Other peoples servers. So many people in this industry are all gung ho over overspending what they’ve got with relatively expensive public cloud providers. I am oversimplifying many of the financial considerations that an organization must take into account. Heh. Also, some say that large amounts of data are big data , I firmly believe that thick data is a more accurate description of what’s really going on under the hood. I officially propose that someone other than me should start using the term Thick Data.
This dude from AWS Professional Services is leading the conversation in the six thousandth meeting of the day I’m tending to. We’re all using this shared brainstorming post-it mind mapping or whatever synergy service to collaborate like good little worker bees. The dude man is running Ubuntu Linux on his laptop and has to use the MS Teams Web Client. The unfortunate reality of using that client with Linux is that it sucks. Or, put another way, it only allows him to share his entire screen.
Now, this guy has one of those gigantic widescreens as his secondary monitor. In order to stop, drop, and collaborate he must share that gloriously wide screen.
Pretty sure it’s one of those gigantic ultra-wide monitors that displays at something like 5120x1440.
So little old me, with not such an exquisite ocular interface to my machine, has to display his long sausage screen on my tiny little laptop screen. And the fonts are tiny. And the cursor is tinier. And it’s stupid funny.
He recognizes the situation we’re in and apologizes profusely for how large and rectangular and tiny and hot dog like our screen sharing session is going to be — my words, not his. We all assure him it’s all good… and then, when there’s a pause in the conversation, I let loose whatever thought that tickled my fancy, and made me laugh on my insides, tumble out of my mouth.
Chucking a grenade and hoping it blows up the right thing at the right time at the right place… rather than myself, right here, right now.
I’ve been working on my deadpan abilities. I think pretty much everything is some sort of comedy. Even when there’s tragedy and trauma there, there’s something that can be found that can be considered funny. The absurdity of life is funny.
It’s also a coping mechanism AND a trauma response all-in-one!!! Unfortunately, there are many people out there that might disagree with me. Which I get. It can be tough to find something funny in something that you’re experiencing as something other than funny.
So, yeah. Practicing deadpan, and quite often failing at refraining from cracking a smile at something in which a double entendre is something that the receiver of the information gets to choose whether exists or not.
Deadpan. Cuz I laugh too much at questionable times, and with questionable timing.
With the face of a mummified stoic, I say, “Well… you know what they say… it’s not about the size of your screen, it’s about how you move your mouse.”
Then shut the fuck up and wait.
Deadpan.
A few seconds of silence progress as they process what I just said. They’ve all been in “let’s collaborate and work and slice and dice this problem up mode,” and I’m all in, “my sense of reality is slippery, this is really fucking funny, and oh man that comparison is really fucking funny, and oh man this is so funny I’m going to say it mode.”
After a few more seconds, the undertones of the joke begin to trigger all the right neurons in their brains, and everyone laughs.
Knowing then that this joke hit home, I slap my face and say, “OMG. That’s terrible. Oh wow.” And laugh at myself. Because that was terrible. I had no clue what I was going to say until I said it. I had no clue how anyone was going to react. And I had nooooo clue how I was going to respond when they responded, and how my response then may be interpreted in kind.
No clue.
Just gotta chuck that grenade.
Also, dude, I said nothing risqué. At all. If you don’t know of any other comparative concepts that joke may map across to, then you don’t know. If you do know, then you’re damn well not going to say it because then you’re admitting where your mind is. Whereas, I said nothing other than something funny about how the dude moves his mouse and the way this tiny little cursor of his skirts around that wide thick data visualization tool he chooses to use to display information.
The meeting was all dudes because that’s just what normally happens in the tech industry as of 2023, but there was one woman on the call who works at the altar of Bezos’ businesses that manages the overall project. She was on mute. And off of video. So the meeting was not all dudes.
This is a pattern though. Just about every meeting with her, she remains off camera, and muted at the beginning of the meeting.
Which is understandable. I don’t want someone hearing me flush the toilet at the beginning of a meeting either.
But I’m still not so sure how well that was received. No sight. No sound. No clue.
I’m going to go ahead and roll with positive. Imma assume she laughed because she’s laughed at stuff that I’ve said before. But, you never know, right?
I guess I could ask. That might make it weird though. Dunno. Maybe I’ll ask, I dunno. I do hope and wish that people approach me directly if they do feel as if maybe I said something that was a little tone deaf.
And this was totally not what I was planning on posting or writing or whatever. But I thought it was funny enough that I wanted to write it down and remember it. And maybe make someone else laugh. And definitely make future me laugh.
Hopefully. You should be laughing if you have any sense of humor no matter how boisterous or dry. 🤷 There’s no accounting for others tastes though. Or feelings. Or sights or sounds or smells.
Yup. This entire post was given birth unexpectedly.
Fun stuff.
And definitely way more words than I was expecting to write tonight. And also writing way later than I expected. But, writing and posting way earlier than I have been the past few months. So, I suppose that’s something.
This’ll so be thick data in a few years. Yup. Gonna be thick.
Tomorrow? Navigating the never-ending sea of meetings. I am so looking forward to divorcing myself from my occupation for the next two weeks starting next week.
A temporary case of irreconcilable differences.
And I still need to get back onto my pi project horse. I’ll probably do it on pi day.