So, until I started reading Side Show's post, I am trying to diagram the sentence structure of "veal fattening pen" and what I have come up with is that it's a pen obviously, and it's made of veal, probably, only that doesn't make much sense... maybe it's a pen that dispenses veal, similar to a pez dispenser, for the purpose of fattening up the user of said pen, but if that's the case, then the grammar of this phrase is off...
oh... the other pen... right.
Side Show, a while back when I was stalking someone else on here I randomly stumbled upon your earlier lengthy post about your experience with the wedding, that was some very dramatic writing, and the experience was palpable, although that could have been because I was channeling my own past similar office experiences as much as vicariously experiencing your own there...
There was the time I drove my van to work, and was apparently chatting with a co-worker/supervisor about the idea of converting it into an RV type setup... I later heard from one of the other managers who's a buddy of mine that she called a meeting of all the managers, in a panic, and declared that I was crazy because I was living in my van.
People already thought I was weird because I rode a bike to work all year round, in the midwest, where only crazy homeless people and derelicts ride a bike or even walk anywhere in the summer much less the winter... Man, I tell you... It's awful being perceived as crazy... People smile at you to your face and meanwhile they are plotting against you behind your back. It really messes with your sense of normalcy. You start to become paranoid.
This one time in the middle of the winter I was out riding my bike and some guy in a van was shooting a picture of me out his open car window. I was like... "that was weird... did I really see that? It must have been my imagination." After all, with the blowing snow and being all wrapped up and distracted with riding a bike on snow and ice, your peripheral vision is reduced and your attention for your surroundings is reduced.
So anyway, that employer with the manager who thought I was living in my van, they fired me eventually. The night they fired me, they also fired a buddy of mine at the same time, and they changed the password on the servers in all 10,000 locations of the client, which was tedious since they had to do it via dialup... I know right... 10,000 computers... dialup... and like four different passwords for them all... not real bright... but whatever... So they have the FBI waiting for me outside... I get the feeling I'm being followed as I walk home in the dead of a winter night, and sure enough, I get almost to my house, and this guy I know from the FBI and his buddy pull in front of my path, and want to go have some coffee with me. Well he and I were kinda acquainted with each other, and I sorta owed him a favor from his treatment of an unrelated case involving a friend of mine, so I was like, okay, since it's him, I'll talk to him, otherwise my propensity is to tell law enforcement to go to hell. Yeah, in some situations, talking to law enforcement can assuage their suspicions enough to keep them from arresting you, but you always take a risk anytime you say anything to a cop, so as inconvenient as it is to be arrested, it still more convenient to be arrested but not convicted of anything than to not be arrested but subsequently incriminated and convicted with the assistance of your own statements...
So the FBI dude is like 'how ya been' (it had been a few months since we'd last spoken) and I start telling him what's up as of late in my life, and then I cut myself off, and I'm like, 'well but I don't need to tell you all this -- You've read my file.' And he chuckles. So we go out for coffee, and he drops me back at home, after having done his best to dissuade me from any retaliatory plans predicted by my paranoid employer, and we're pulling up to my house, and there's my neighbor's work van parked out front (my neighbor was a plumber) and I'm like, in a sarcastic tone "oh sure, a plumber's van..." and the FBI dude just busts out laughing. Hey, ya gotta keep your sense of humor about this stuff.
Anyone who ever took the time to get to know me I think came away liking me. But most people never do. Most people literally couldn't look beyond the weird home-cooked stuff I would bring to work. Someone who didn't bring takeout Hardees or Burger King to work? What is that about? At the last job I had, I befriended this very nice guy from Pakistan. A guy in his mid to late 50's. And he tells me one day over lunch break, in his Pakistani accent with excessively enunciated slightly British English, 'you know, you arre the only one, the only person I ever see here, since I started working here, who eats rice.' And you know, it's often been the case that I connect with immigrants from other countries much more naturally than native MidWesterners. Are all of them like this? Is it worse in the cubicle job type environments? I don't know. I don't get out much. I've lived on three different continents, but when I'm in the MidWest, I mostly don't find anywhere to go out to.
So that job I got fired from was a cubicle job. My next job, ironically enough, was working for a different sub contractor of the same client, only this time instead of working out of a cubicle, I was working on-site, each week I would fly to a different locations. The irony of it was half of why I did it. (the other half being that I needed money, and it was a great opportunity to relocate out of the deep midwest where all we had were $8/hour cubicle call center jobs to more of the periphery of the midwest.)
So yeah.. the irony... so here I was, all alone at a client location, with no supervision, actually physically installing and logging into and reconfiguring the very same servers that my prior employer had so carefully changed all the passwords on only weeks prior... in my training class for the new company, they were like 'these are the passwords for the different server versions' and I was like 'um... I don't think those are going to work anymore... but I can make some calls to my buddies at the other company and get the new passwords for you...' (we didn't usually have to log in as root, and in fact it was officially frowned upon, but it certainly could come in handy for some technical glitches.)
So at my new job, onsite, I would actually have to call up my old employer on a regular basis for tech support when things didn't work right or when I had defective hardware... so here I was disguising my voice, using my middle name... One time I was talking to a former co-worker, and at the same time as I was talking to her, I started chatting with her in instant messenger... I was like 'so who you talking to' and she was like 'some field tech.' And then I told her it was me... so that was fun. She maintained my anonymity on the phone call. She was one of the few cool people I worked with that I could trust to keep it on the down low. Nothing like having the tech support person in your corner when you want to fix a problem.
Certainly there could be a lot of entertaining intrigue in cubicle jobs, if you had a lot of nerve, and/or if you were a little bit crazy, both of which applied to me I guess. I think that there are more bona fide opportunities for intrigue in higher-level management type jobs. It's all stupid and sad, this intrigue, but my point is, if you're gonna get mixed up in it, it makes a hell of a lot more sense to get mixed up with it at a higher pay grade than $8 to $14 an hour.
If you're in a bona fide cubicle job type of company, I think there's gonna be intrigue no matter what.. there's gonna be back stabbing. By bona fide cubicle job, I don't mean a company that's using cubicles because it can't afford anything better, I mean a company or organization that has the resources for a better office situation, but simply doesn't have the imagination or vision... cubicle is in their florescent green blood.. it's in their culture.
I think a lot of the cubicle intrigue is a function of the commodity that the company trades in. You might think that a company that serves as an outsourcee for call center help desk tech support would be kind of.. you know.. a technical sort of place that values problem solving and puts a premium on people who can think straight and who are good with the formality and structure needed for technical problem solving... You might think this, but you couldn't be more wrong. The companies that need to provide tech support to their customers aren't in the business of selling quality tech support. They're in the business of selling an approximation of quality tech support... a very vague approximation... For whatever reasons, there is no real competition on the basis of the quality of tech support... This is probably the way it is for the same reasons, whatever they may be, that there is generally no real competition on the basis of the quality of the product either... if there was, then say, cell phones, for example, would have gotten much better long before Apple came along and made a phone that doesn't completely suck. But they didn't, and Apple did, and that's why Apple got so much market share - because there was no competition that provided a product that didn't completely suck.
When you look at vegetables in the U.S., you can get some insight that somehow or other must help to explain why the market dynamics are what they are: U.S. consumers overwhelmingly prefer to buy vegetables that are: big, symmetrical, consistent in texture, smooth... in other words... everything that a vegetable that is gorged on water, consumers prefer. The fruits and vegetables that have not had as much water will be smaller, will be more oddly shaped, will have more inconsistent texture, will perhaps have a more rough skin... and consumers are far less likely to consume these, despite that fact that for many, if not most, varieties of fruits and vegetables, the product tastes better if it isn't gorged on water. Essentially when you see some giant-ass hydroponic tomato on the shelf, you can be assured that it is one of the most bland tomatoes you have ever tasted, unless of course that's all you've ever known, in which case it will, unfortunately, seem to you to be about average.
So when a population has been brainwashed to the point of preferring a more objectively measurable value of lesser import over a less objectively measurable property of a product of the utmost import (e.g. taste), that speaks volumes, right? It speaks to the extent to which the population has suffered brainwashing and newspeak indoctrination.
So there I was, sitting in my cubicle, with my home-grown hair cut and my vegetables and rice, my thrift-store attire and, conspicious in their absence, the pictures of me proudly posing on the home field of my favorite sports team bedecked in $500 worth of gaudy primary coloured and hued officially licensed team apparel still distinctly showing the creases from where it was folded in the shrink-wrapped package, complete with name-brand shoes, and well hey, for as far as my co-workers were concerned the salt in my salt shaker may as well have been cultured anthrax.
So anyway, long story short, because there is no market pressure for companies to provide more than a vague semblance of quality, the way that contracts get structured with outsourcee call centers, the call center ends up selling not so much quality to the client as it winds up selling quantity and also a sort of hypocritical pretense of quality. So... the 'qualities' (if I may use this word in this context) that are rewarded and promoted in these call center cubicle jobs are basically any sort of behaviors and propensities which make for good autocrats and PR lackeys. Working at a lot of these cubicle call center jobs is like being trapped in a room with a bunch of people who could almost be used car salespeople, only, they're not subtle enough.
I guess, what else would you expect in a country that has this thing for waging wars for years, no, for decades, that really terrorize millions upon millions of people, kill a million plus people, (but officially they don't keep count) and it's a country that is so eager to do this, that it actually borrows trillions of dollars for this purpose, it's like, going down to the pay day loan place, and signing on the dotted line... oh, but it gets worse... yes it does... right... because the 'enemy,' you know, they get their money from this same country... yes... indeed... both sides in this war are getting their funding from the same source... The one side is funding the other side... and has been doing so not for weeks, months, or even the first year of the fog of battle... no... this has been going on for years upon years... long after the initial fog of battle lifted, this certain unnamed country is STILL going strong in providing, who knows, perhaps upwards of a billion dollars per year, to the enemy. Now tell me you couldn't buy some mighty fine weapons 'o war with that kinda scratch. Damn, that's more than you could use up front. How would you even invest it all? It's a fund manager's nightmare.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122563121 So I mean, from the grunts in the field, on up the chain of command, what you have is a cubicle culture. I'm sure here and there at every level of the bureaucracy, from the grunts to the whatever they are... four smliey face generals.. presidential advisers, whatever.. I'm sure that interspersed among their ranks are a few, anyway, individuals, who have the education, experience, and the perspective to actually understand the difference between quantity, and quality... whereas... when these cogent individuals are distinctly in the minority, and the majority is so stoned out of it's fcuking mind as to still believe, years later, (yes, scientific studies prove this statistic beyond doubt...) to still believe that there was any, *ANY* connection, at all, between 9/11 and Iraq...
Well... It's gonna be one of those long-ass tech support calls... And you know you're probably gonna have to call back again... 50/50 odds the tech is gonna "accidentally" hang up on you."
Tech: "Yes, okay, now.... do you see any Taliban on your war map?"
You: "No. Yes. I mean, I know they're there, but they melt into the local population, I can't tell the difference! What should I do?"
Tech: "Okay, now I need you to call in your BlackHawk heeelacopter"
You: "For real? You pronounce it like that?"
Tech: "Yes, your BlackHawk heeelacopter"
You: Okay, I didn't get one with the package.
Tech: "It's not included, there is an extra fee, it has to be ordered also."
You: Okay... Um... can you hold while I procure one?
Tech: "Okay but this call is still being billed to your credit card per minute"
[hours go by]
You: "Okay I'm back, I got the BlackHawk. Now what?"
Tech: "Okay, now you need to fire a self-guided missile"
You: "What? You're kidding right? You didn't say anything about no missile!"
Tech: "I'm sorry sir that's the procedure."
You: "Well but, these things cost a cool million a piece. The BlackHawk I can amortize over several decades, but this
missile is a one time use thing."
Tech: "I understand this sir but if you want to remove the Taliban we have to fire the missile."
You: "Okay, okay okay... firing..."
Tech: "Be sure to target the Taliban and not civilians."
You: "Huh? what?"
Tech: "I told you to target the Taliban with the missile, you did this right?"
You: "ummm... yeah..."
Tech: "Okay now what do you see on the war map please."
You: "umm you know what I forgot there's this important diplomatic meeting I need to be at in 10 minutes..
I'll uhhh... have to call you back"
Tech: "Okay your reference number
You: "No no no no no that's fine you don't have to save a case file for this call really that's fine I don't want to trouble you.
bye!"
This has been another installment of tl;dr. thank you.
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Topic: Veal Fattening Pens (Read 7303 times)