Me too! Me too!
I’ve been kicking around the idea of doing my own “take a picture every day for a year” project, a project that every camera owner on the planet (or at least on Flickr) seems to be tackling lately. I always talk myself out of it. I mean, I ran Moonplantation (my old photoblog) for just a couple months, which I only updated three times a week, and it almost became a job. I stressed out over producing photos for it, even though my shooting schedule was self-imposed and completely arbitrary. I’m not entirely sure why other people choose to do 365 photo projects, but here is why I’m finally going to commit to my own.
My friend Ben (one of the most amazing artists I know) has been interning at a local studio for several months now. He’s been doing so much drawing not for himself lately that he’s burning out and has started to devote an hour a day to drawing whatever the hell he wants to draw. It doesn’t have to impress anybody, an editor doesn’t have to approve it, it’s not going to be seen by anybody (except for maybe a couple friends, if they ask). Ben and I had a several-hour-long talk about creativity and the creative process the other night (which wasn’t as pretentious as it sounds) in which he brought this up. I also mentioned that I had been entertaining the idea of taking a photo a day. He was probably more enthusiastic about it than I was, and there are several reasons I ended up getting very excited about the project.
First of all, I’m getting to be a better photographer all the time. Actually, when I look back at the stuff I was shooting just a year ago, I’m unbelievably embarrassed of it. The thing is, I’ve progressed without a real conscious effort on my part. I took over 11,000 photos in 2009 — more than three times what I shot in 2007 and 2008 combined — and that was WITHOUT making an effort to have my camera with me at all times. I absolutely cannot become a worse photographer over the next year, and by forcing myself to take photos, whether I want to or not, is not only going to speed this process up, but will change how I approach photography entirely; it will put me in the habit of not even thinking about whether or not I should grab my camera when I step out the door, I will just always have it. When the year is up, I will have long since been placed in that mindset, and will continue to carry the camera with me without it being a “rule.”
But I think more important than getting better at what I do, it’s the changing of my approach to photography. My friends would say “How hard can it be to take a photo a day? You just push a button. Just take a fucking picture a day and be done with it.” It’s NOT that simple, because my brain does not work that way. There are maybe a lot of people with cameras that don’t have a problem taking a picture, any picture, and throwing it on a blog. I cannot just take a picture. When I put a camera up to my eye, there are a million things going through my head, particularly if I’m shooting a person. Most of it I can’t really put into words or explain, but a lot of it is, “Can I make this person look how they want to look in photos? If I put this online, everybody that sees it is going to judge me and my skill. Am I good enough? Is this photo going to be worth showing to people at all? Am I even going to like it? If I don’t like the photo, how can the person I’m shooting like it? I hate snapshots, this can’t look like a snapshot. I hate art, this can’t look like art,” and on and on. There’s this trepidation, nearly every time I push the shutter. It’s often even worse when I get home and get them onto the computer: “These are awful. I’m a fucking idiot. Photography is bullshit. What a fucking waste of time.” I think forcing myself to take a picture every day, and showing it to people, whether or not I think it is representative of my skill, will help ease this issue I have, and make me more comfortable with the fact that not everything I shoot is going to be incredible, while at the same time building the confidence in myself that I am a competent enough photographer that most of what I shoot should have at least a little photographic merit.
The difference between Moonplantation and my year project is that for Moonplantation I made three photos a week. For this project I only need to take a photo a day. Then, in instances where I actually want to make a photo, it should come more easily to me. Hopefully, I want to write a little bit about each photo as well, whether or not I enjoyed taking it, whether or not I like the final result, etc etc, as a sort of director’s commentary.
So blah blah blah, I can’t really explain this that well, but I tried. The point is, I’m going to take a photo every day for a year, beginning tomorrow, to in some way document an entire year of my life (tomorrow’s my birthday, I turn 28).
I’ll post a link here tomorrow when the first image goes up.
State-Sponsored Discrimination!
I was reading online about some racially-motivated assault, and I was trying to imagine the feeling of having to live with the understanding that some people dislike you just because you exist. You know, trying to imagine I’m not a 20-something white American male from a middle-class family; humanity’s most generic creation. My empathy experiment didn’t get very far, because, short of the one time I went to a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles, I’ve never really felt displaced. So yeah, I have a very limited world view, but I did remember this exercise my third or fourth grade teacher organized, and looking back on it, it’s kinda funny.
We were learning about discrimination, and to demonstrate, the class was split into left and right-handed kids. Left-handed kids would be second-class citizens for the day. Unfortunately, the left-handed kids in the classroom consisted of me and maybe one or two other students (anybody that was in that class with me… which is probably just Ray, I think it was me and Kevin Phung). We had to wear an arm band or some sort of other identifier, and we had to be last in line at lunch, we were the last to be allowed to go to recess, etc etc. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I was, what, eight years old? I wasn’t traumatized, but that’s kinda fucked up. The funny thing is, the experiment was never reversed! The left-handed kids were just shit on for a day and that was that. By the end of the day, everybody had learned a valuable lesson: It pays to be a part of the majority, and god help you if you’re not.
BlackBerry Diptych
You wouldn’t believe how often I try — and completely fail — to produce usable results on my BlackBerry’s shitty camera. I like this, though, after slathering on a thick blanket of Photoshop.
Koston Sighting… Almost
I was sorting through some old photography magazines to decide which were going in the garbage and discovered my December issue of The Skateboard Mag, which I thought had just been lost in the mail. So I was flipping through it and one ad immediately caught my eye. Not because it was an impressive photo, or a really impressive trick, or because it was a company I like *cough*… but because I recognized the spot. Because it’s literally a block down from my apartment. Crazy! This might not be a big deal to somebody who’s grown up in Portland and is used to being in skating distance of Burnside (or Nike SB, for that matter), but this sort of thing will probably continue to blow my mind for a while. Especially since it wasn’t Joe Schmoe. It was Koston.
I had to throw my fisheye on and head down the street to take a shot of it. If this building wasn’t in the way, you’d have direct line of sight to my apartment.
It’s interesting to note that there’s a railing there now (and I think there always has been, because I’ve recognized it as an otherwise skateable gap before), so they either dismantled the rail for the photo or, if I’m mistaken about it always having been there, the rail was put up in response to a blitzkrieg photo/skate session. I should just go walk around my neighborhood more, I guess.
A Path: Apathy
There was a time in my life, from late high school and for several years afterward, where I embraced a philosophy of my own design, which I called “aggressive apathy.” The idea was that not only did you not give a shit about what everybody else on the planet concerned themselves with, you went out of your way to not give a shit. Here’s an example: For the first several weeks after GW Bush was elected president, a couple friends and I went out of our way to not learn who was elected. That was not an easy task, but several of us pulled it off for quite a while. I was 18, the US had elected a new president, and I intentionally did not know who it was.
Because, really, how would knowing who the president was affect my life at all? Or affect anything? It didn’t, and I loved my philosophy. I even wrote a short essay in its defense, which was widely panned by my mom and a friend who had recently decided politics were really cool.
So fast forward a couple years and I’m a little older and maybe a little wiser, and I’d dropped aggressive apathy in favor of aggressively caring about shit, because that’s what smart people do. Though I had previously been an atheist out of apathy, I was now atheist for a reason and Christians were all idiots and fuck all Republicans because Republican invariably means Christian and Christians are the badguys and everything’s either black or white and I needed to pick sides in all things. I read a bazillion books from prominent atheist authors, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, etc, and thought I’d gotten everything pretty well figured out. My Facebook profile made things easier by giving me labels to slap on myself. Liberal. Atheist. Opinionated as fuck, and if we disagree, we argue until we agree that I am right. That was basically how things went for a couple years.
Then I joined Reddit, where there’s a fairly large and vitriolic atheist community, and I subscribed to their forum and read their articles and discussions daily. The problem is, the community as a whole is so fucking over the top, it’s a parody of itself. Everybody in there discussing religion and gods and blah blah blah are all condescending, elitist pseudo-intellectuals, parroting the same few talking points over and over and basically running a very simple argument completely into the ground. And then some. It slowly started to dawn on me: “Oh, fuck. I’m one of these people.”
But I didn’t have a lot of time to think about it, because election season was in full swing and I was busy frothing at the mouth whenever Republicans were on-screen and found myself identifying with politicians that have absolutely nothing in common with me, don’t even care who the fuck I am or what I want out of my life, and, aside from possibly sharing a few progressive ideas with me, are most likely terrible, terrible people. I loved Kucinich, but he was clearly too fringy, and who cares about who most closely represents you or your ideas if they can’t win, because it’s not about principles but winning, so I hopped on the Obama bandwagon pretty early on. Me and everybody else my age. I got swept up in the whole mess, attended his speech in Portland (with a million other people), argued with the Clinton supporters and, just like with my militant atheist days, generally made an ass out of myself.
When you’re this high on yourself, you come down pretty hard. Nina and I watched on election night as McCain conceded the presidency, and there was a brief moment of elation where I thought “Wow, I was a part of something really important here,” while people celebrated up and down Burnside street. Then it was more like, “…okay, now what?”
After he got sworn in and immediately started disappointing all the progressives that deluded themselves into thinking this guy was anything more than a moderate, I was over it. Just that quickly. It’s just politics as usual from this point on, and now that we all believe we made some sort of difference, everything goes back to normal. You know what difference it made when I voted for John Kerry in 2004? None. You know what difference it made when I voted for Obama in 2008? None. What was the point of all that passion, time, and energy? There wasn’t one. I was just tricked into taking sides in every single aspect of my life, and that is so completely unlike me, I’m embarrassed for it. When people split into factions, I’ve always created my own faction. When teams were chosen on the playground, I chose not to play, because fuck teams. In high school I didn’t believe in school spirit, and I have no pride as an American. These things are accidental by-products of my birth. I didn’t choose to be born in America any more than I chose to be born on the west side of my town, rather than the east side of my town, which dictated what high school I would attend. The shitty thing is, the things I was spending my time choosing — and choosing to be proud of — ultimately bore no consequence. Does it make any difference in my life or anybody else’s that I believe there is no god? No. Did it make any difference if I convinced a single supporter of Hillary Clinton to vote for Obama? Fuck no. What a fucking waste of time.
Since then I’ve started to develop an almost physical aversion to “heavy” talk. As soon as things start to sway political or religious now, I find my eyes rolling involuntarily. When people try to trick me into discussions like this, I will state something simply and briefly (if at all), and be done with it (I often try to change the subject, or ignore the conversation entirely). Does this make my opinions any less valid to me? No. I believe there is no god, and I believe that if you believe there is a god you are wrong. I believe that humans have an inherent right to healthcare, and that free market economies do not work. If you disagree with me, I believe you are wrong. Will I tell you you’re wrong? Most likely not. See, I quit giving a fuck. But not like “aggressive apathy.” The key now seems to be that I don’t care that I don’t care.
I have more important things to worry about. Like, trying to figure out what the fuck to do with my life, since I’m approaching 30 and don’t have a plan, or even a plan for a plan. This is partially a result of another thing I’ve come to realize in recent months: Every three years or so, I can look back at myself and say “Wow, I was a fucking idiot.” It happened at 25, it happened around 21, it happened around 18, and clearly it’s happening again. It just took me this long to realize that in three years from now I’ll be thinking “Wow, I was a fucking idiot,” so I’ve quit taking myself so goddamn seriously.
It’s very liberating when you finally realize you’re a fucking idiot. It’s probably the best start I’ve had in years.
More Reverse Macro Crap
I found a fly in our apartment this morning (which is weird considering it’s almost January), so I caught him in a mason jar and threw him in the freezer while I set up my camera gear. After about 15 minutes, I took him out of the freezer and dumped him onto a sheet of white paper on the computer desk and placed my flashes on each side of him. I moved him into position with a pen, took a couple test exposures, and after a couple minutes he started to thaw. They’re still pretty slow after they’ve come to, so I was able to get several shots of him standing before he decided to start walking around the desk.
I threw up the most symmetrical one (which more or less matched the style of the ladybug I also shot with this technique — sans freezing) on my Flickr, but I’ve included a couple more for the blog, just because I think bugs look neat up close.
From left to right: Fly passed out, fly coming to and starting to stand, fly conscious but probably confused as hell, FLY AWAKENS BOTH PHYSICALLY AND SPIRITUALLY.
When I was done, being the enlightened guy I am, I picked him up and set him free out on my windowsill, where, considering this is Portland in late December, he probably promptly died. An old man dies, a young woman lives. Fair trade.
My First Photo Contest
I completely forgot to mention anything about this, so I figured I would for posterity. There’s a local non-profit that holds photo contests to raise funds/awareness of other local non-profits. First place in their contests is a D90 (the new version of my current camera), so I had been watching them for a while, entertaining the idea of entering one of their contests. Every time it came down to it though, I’d choke and not shoot anything. Finally, after three or four of their contests in which I was not impressed with the winners, I decided “I can win this contest,” and set out to win it.
The theme was “fruits of our labors.” I originally came up with some bullshit like an aged hand pulling an apple off a tree. Stupid, yes, but judges like that sort of dumb shit. I talked about it with Cameron a bit and he had the idea of having this guy in our building eat a peach, and take pictures of that. I approached the guy, Tom, about it, and he was flattered that I wanted to take his picture. Tom’s got a very rugged Clint Eastwood sorta look to him, so I figured it’d work well. Unfortunately, we put it off until we were out of peach season, so we had to settle on a pear, which didn’t work as well. I liked the results when I got home, but when it came time to actually submit it to the contest, I again choked, decided it wasn’t good enough, and almost didn’t enter again. I finally opted to just submit it, though I was no longer really proud of it, and waited to see what happened.
I didn’t win. I got an “honorable mention” just underneath the terrible third place entry, but it netted me a $75 check, so I’m not complaining. I bought Tom a nice cigar for his help. The entry has been sitting over on my Flickr for a while (though it’s a slightly different edit), so you’ve probably seen it, but I thought I’d write this up to make it official.
Where I Live, Where I’m From, Where I’m Spending Christmas
“My Mother Drives the Company Car” – A Chat with a Crackhead
This has been a LONG time coming. I don’t even really remember when I shot this footage. A couple months ago at least. The thing is, cell phone footage — the 3GP format — is the maybe the worst fucking example of human technology in history. I’ve been fighting this fucking video off and on for weeks and weeks. I won’t bitch for long, because the video (well, mostly the audio, but it’s just not the same without the video) is fucking incredible, so you’ll want to get right into it. I just feel like I should explain what took so long.
The day Cameron and I discovered this guy, sitting on the sidewalk yelling at a building, holding a bundle of mail and occasionally screaming at the mail, Cameron didn’t have his cell phone on him. Cameron’s cell phone has an amazing camera on it. Blackberries, like mine, do not have amazing cameras. But after listening to this guy for about five minutes, I knew I needed footage, so I pulled out the phone and started recording. I recorded over 20 minutes of video, which my cell phone immediately corrupted (trust me, I tried FOREVER to recover it). I had three clips, each about 7 minutes long, and only one clip played… but only two minutes of it. And the audio started at about a split second off sync and ended about two full seconds off sync by the end. This was almost impossible to re-sync, and I totally half-assed it, but it’s workable.
I can upload this directly to YouTube, but the audio was fucked, and I wanted to subtitle it. This took weeks. I must have tried 3,000 programs to edit cell footage. Even once I got it to something usable, I fought with subtitle programs off and on for another couple weeks. I finally decided I would get this whole fucking mess online tonight, no matter what, and I did. FINALLY. I even had problems uploading the final result, which required re-encoding the whole mess in trial-and-error fashion in about 400 different encoder/container combinations (for whatever reason, the typical H.264/MP4 thing wasn’t working once it hit YouTube, and I was getting garbled video). I finally got it with a plain Xvid/AVI/MP3, but there was considerable quality loss, which isn’t good when you’re starting with cell video.
I guess what I’m trying to say is — this video went through hell and back to get to your eyeballs. The nutjob we were talking to is fucking hilarious, and you better goddamn appreciate what I go through so that my three friends have something to laugh at from time to time.
Keep in mind that the following conversation came out of this guy’s mouth in this exact order. I didn’t put together clips of his best stuff, he just jumped from subject to subject, and it kept sounding like it was going somewhere or would tie together, but never did. This is one clip, no cuts. AMAZING.
My Slapstick Return to the Workforce
Wow, make a sandwich. This turned out a lot longer than I had planned when I began.
Today was just… off. It wasn’t an awful day or anything, and nothing went horribly wrong, nor was I in a bad mood. Everything was just off.
I knew today wouldn’t be amazing because I’ve been unemployed for a little over a month, and it takes about two days for my sleeping schedule to return to my body’s preferred sleeping schedule, which is whenever the fuck I want to. I’d been staying up til sunrise for the past week at least, and there was no way I was turning that around over a weekend. Instead, I tried to go to bed “early” last night (2 in the morning) to get up fresh and full of vigor five hours later. Of course, I don’t get to sleep very easily, and when I do sleep, it’s often not very pleasant, but I still managed to fall asleep in a near record-breaking one hour, around 3AM. This was cut short by Faust, the goddamn cat that came with the girlfriend package, who was busy all night working on his audition material for the World’s Most Fucking Annoying Animal awards. He came in second in 2008, so he’s been practicing extra hard this year. Faust woke me up at just before 6:30 with a little medley of judge favorites, “knock all of Nina’s plants on the carpet and spread the soil around,” “get on the computer desk and swat everything onto the floor,” tried-and-true classic “unroll a roll of toilet paper,” and a special routine he’s been working on called “repeatedly jump up by the liquor so all the bottles and wine glasses clink together.” He’s a shoo-in to finally take the crown from that chimp that ripped that lady’s face off.
I’m a master at sleeping through stuff, but it was just too much this morning, so I finally got up — cursing at the cat like an idiot — and put some water on for coffee. I normally sleep in til the last minute, so I tried to convince myself that it’d be nice to have time for coffee and a bagel before work for a change. Once I got a pot of coffee steeping, I hopped in the shower. Nothing to report here; maybe today wouldn’t be so bad. I got out, poured myself a cup of coffee and went into the bedroom to get dressed. I bought a brand new pair of pants last night, which I had washed but was too lazy to put away, so I was digging through a laundry hamper looking for pants that met the following criteria: Darker than my other pairs of pants. I grabbed the first pair of pants that met these requirements, and hopped into them. “Wow,” I thought. “The dryer really did a number on these.” I had some difficulty squeezing into them, was a little miffed my brand new pants had shrunk, then plopped down at the computer to check email, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, blah blah blah. I of course waited until the last minute to leave, so at about 8:35 I pulled myself away and grabbed my cell and my keys. But I was surprised that my cell only fit halfway in the pocket. “What? I didn’t check the pockets when I tried these on at the store yesterday?” Ugghh. I was so pissed I’d bought a pair of jeans with those stupid, useless, designer pockets. Then I got out in the hallway and noticed the ankles were kinda flared around my Converse. I didn’t remember the pants looking like that when I tried them on yesterday, so, right in the public hallway, I opened the fly to check the tag. “Medium waist” is not a men’s pant size, it occurred to me. Afraid I had accidentally purchased a girl’s pair of pants, I went back into the bathroom to scope my butt. There were silly designer swoosh things on the back pockets, which I recognized. These were Nina’s pants! Ugh. I thought they’d felt a little tight in the… you know, everywhere, and I didn’t quite remember the cut on the hips feeling so… gay, but c’mon. I was running on maybe two hours of sleep. Christ. On the other hand, maybe it’ll make her day tomorrow when she puts her jeans on and they’re a little loose in the waist. That’s what boyfriends are for.
Realizing I’m now behind schedule, I run back into the bedroom to dig again for the other pair of jeans that are darker than my other pairs and hurried down the stairs. Oh, I also couldn’t find my travel mug, which was annoying because my workplace requires a mug with a lid. No lid, no coffee. Just like kindergarten. I was really hoping it was in my car, and was relieved to discover it was. I wasn’t so excited to discover that I had left about half a cup of coffee in there over the weekend, and because of the recent cold snap, it had frozen. So it’s like 8:45, probably about 20° outside, I’m supposed to be at work five miles away in 15 minutes, and I’m smashing a frozen mug against the side of my car waiting for a solid coffee cylinder to slide out so I can put new coffee in it. It finally inches its way out, like a seized coffee piston, and there’s an interesting sludge at the bottom: hyper-concentrated, frozen French press sediment. No time! I dump the coffee out of my mug into the ice-cold travel mug. This, of course, instantly lowered the temperature of my coffee to about room temperature, and the four-day-old sediment at the bottom didn’t add much to the flavor. I speed to work, somehow lucking out and getting a parking spot right in front, which allows me to pop in the front door just seconds before the clock turns to 9:01. I almost look like a responsible employee, but really, only on the wears-jeans-consistent-with-gender standard.
The place I work at has a set number of parking spaces out front available for temp workers. They’re numbered 20-83. That’s the first question I get from the temp service representative: “Where’d you park?” as if I don’t know the rules by now.
“Oh, uh… just out front here.” I say.
“Is it numbered 20 to 83?”
For whatever reason, my brain interpreted this as “Is it numbered 2283?”
I know our parking spaces don’t go that high, so I answered “…what?”
“Did you park in space 20 to 83?”
“Twenty-two… *looks out the door at the parking lot, as if it will provide the answer to me* Twenty-two… what?” (At this point, I think this is some crazy new rule, somehow dealing with numbers higher than the parking lot can accommodate.)
“The number of your parking space. Is it between the numbers of twenty. And eighty-three?” She took care to enunciate every syllable for me.
“Ohhh yeah. …yeah.”
Clearly I’m still more or less asleep at this point. She shakes her head and takes me and another last-minute sign-in to the rest of the group in the break room. She gives her standard orientation speech, which I’ve heard five times now, I think. The coffee is starting to work — I can feel synapses misfiring — but I’m only semi-conscious of it, observing myself third-person through a dreamlike haze. There’s the standard walk around the campus, the discussion of what the company does, the pointing out of lounge and restroom areas, testing the electronic ID badges, etc etc. I’m seated in a new cubicle shortly afterwards, while supervisors run from new hire to new hire getting them logged into and set up on their new computers. While the rest of us wait, they gave us wetnaps with which to wipe off our desks, keyboards, and monitors, as they hadn’t been used for a while. I put my travel mug on the floor next to me while I did so. When I finished, I scooted my chair back to leave my desk, but the chair stuck. Confused, I pushed harder, and there was a tearing noise. I look down, and a piece of carpet had gotten snagged in my chair’s wheel well. When I pushed harder in response, all I had done was dug the wheel into the carpet and torn a huge strip out of the floor. It wasn’t subtle, either; it had gone through the padding, down to bare concrete. A HUGE strip. A manager was watching. I started to apologize and stood to lift my chair up to unsnag it, kicking my coffee over in the process. I think at this point, I just paused and looked at the manager. The manager, impressed, left to tell maintenance that somebody had managed to rip the carpet up with a wheel. I mopped up my coffee, then went to refill my travel mug, which had also stabilized at room temperature.
When I returned, they were ready to give me my login credentials. First, the supervisor told me to try my old password. This did not work. She said, “Okay, then your password is ‘welcome.’” I typed in “welcome.” Nothing. “Oh,” she says, “‘welcome1.’” I type in “welcome1.” Nothing. “…with a capital ‘w.’” she adds. Well, as anybody that’s ever worked on computers on a domain knows, you get three chances. It didn’t matter that she had now given me the password I actually needed to log in, my account would be locked out from login for several minutes unless an administrator reset it. She gave me this look like “Wow, there’s one in every group!” and left to tell somebody in IT that they’d need to reset the idiot’s account because he fat-fingered his password over three times! When she returned, she gave everybody that had successfully logged in (as a result of being told the correct password the first time!!!) further directions. She made sure to announce, “Not you, Bill. We’re still waiting for IT.” to ensure that everybody knew I don’t know how to log into a computer. An IT guy came out of the back and over to my cubicle at this point.
“What’s the problem here?”
“Oh, my account is locked out.” I said.
“The password is ‘welcome1.’ With a capital ‘w.’”
“Right, I know, I got the password wrong and now my account’s locked out.”
“You have to mess up three times before it locks you out.”
“…yeah, I messed up three times.” I then added, as if it vindicated me, “I’ve been here before.”
The IT guy, impressed, went into the back to reset my account.
I was pretty sure I couldn’t look any dumber at this point, but now that I was logged into my computer, the supervisor came over to give me the directions she had given everybody else just a couple minutes earlier. I’d done this all before, and I’m pretty sure she knew that, since we interacted on a daily basis for over three months, but there are also a lot of employees. Maybe she really didn’t remember me. She was explaining everything to me as if I had never seen our software before. At one point, she showed me a nifty little trick — that anybody that looked at the program for 15 seconds could have figured out — that if I clicked this specific arrow icon on the side, it would minimize the tool menu so I had a larger workspace. I’ve worked at this place off and on since last spring. I’m well aware of the “click the arrow” trick, so I went to show her I knew what she was talking about and attempted to click the arrow. I missed somehow, and clicked the icon next to it, which performed another function. “No, not that one, this one.” she said, as she took my mouse from my hand and clicked a minimize arrow for me.
What can you possibly do at this point? I can’t say, “No, I know which one.” because I clearly clicked the wrong one. I thanked her for minimizing my toolbar for me. What? I worked at fucking Yahoo before this whole temp thing! Where did I work before that? In networking! I designed and implemented networks for businesses! That IT guy that went in the back and reset my account on the domain? I’m that guy! I KNOW HOW TO USE A COMPUTER! I CAN BUILD THEM! I CONNECT THEM TOGETHER! I CAN BREAK INTO THEM! It didn’t really matter today. All that mattered was today I was the guy that didn’t understand the question about where I parked, tore the strip out of the carpet, spilled my entire mug of coffee on the floor, locked myself out of my login, and, when instructed on how to click a button, clicked the button next to it. And almost came to work in his girlfriend’s pants. I’ve never been so thankful in my life that I was not wearing women’s pants.
Finally, after a quick introduction to minimizing toolbars, we were taken to a training room where we’d learn other useful basic computer skills. There’d been issues with the network all day, which they’d warned us about when we arrived, but it was also preventing any actual training from happening. As a result, we watched this flash video on an introduction to databases… twice. After the second time, the instructor told us that it’d be a couple minutes until we had access to the server we needed, so if anybody needed coffee or a bathroom break to take it then. I was too wrapped up in my doodles at the time and didn’t take advantage. But sure enough, as soon as we actually got to the actual training part of training, I had to go. Bad. Like emergency level, if-I-don’t-go-unload-this-coffee-I-will-pee-my-pants sort of “bad.” So I just got up and left. It didn’t take me long — the bathroom is just around the corner — but I forgot that it locks behind you. So of course, in one last ditch effort to appear like the biggest fucking idiot they could possibly hire, I had to knock and interrupt training to get back in. I’m sure everybody was thinking, “…really?” I thought about justifying it with, “I’ve been here before.” but resisted. I still felt slightly triumphant as I wasn’t wearing my girlfriend’s clothing.
That was about it; the rest of my day went smoothly, since the systems were down for most of it and I had exhausted all scenarios in which I could possibly have embarrassed myself (there was an optional meeting followed by a holiday luncheon, which I avoided, just to be safe). I was paid mostly just to drink coffee and doodle, which I’ll include here. The doodles, not the coffee.
