On Becoming That Guy

Nic-Fit

I got my first taste of office life when I worked a Summer in the basement of the Breathitt County Courthouse as a gopher/assistant for my paternal Aunt Lena. Her office, like that of my maternal Aunt Lenora, handled paying people. That cigarette-smoke infested basement was so bad that one weekend I had nicotine withdrawl, and I wasn’t a smoker. But, everyone was congenial enough, a group of women who got along on a molecular level. They covered for each other, looked out for people in trouble, and generally had a “work to live” attitude.

I learned an office could be a supportive place where people were somewhere between cynical and real with one another. That proved a life-long lesson

Internship

My second taste of office life was as an intern at Lexmark from 1999 to 2001, where I shared an office with Darren and Brian. This was my first professional programming gig, and I was way, way out of my depth. Our job was to write custom applications to support the 400+ mechanical engineers using a piece of software called I-DEAS running on Silicon Graphics workstations. To that point, I’d only ever interected with unix via Telnet to HP-UX at my college. Day One, they sat me down at one of these jewels:

In front of me was a 19" (or maybe 21"?) Sony Trinitron flat-screen CRT monitor.

“How much does this setup cost?”

“Oh, that’s the cheap one. It’s only about $10k retail.”

My car wasn’t worth that much. So I had to learn: IRIX, XWindows, Vi, Motif, C++ (this was pre-ISO standard stuff), PERL 5.x, awk, sed, SQL, MySQL, and every command line hack imaginable.

Darren and Brian were insanely patient, because aside from having CS fundamentals from Pascal, one (bad) C++ course under my belt, and the ability to touch type, I was just this side of fucking useless. Every day was exhausting. I was learning constantly but the work piled up faster. Still, imposter syndrome was tough.

Then, I got hired for real.

My Real Job

In 2001, I interviewed with 4 separate groups at Lexmark. It never occurred to me to interview anywhere else or go to grad school. I wanted “that bag” as the kids say these days, and in truth, making the unimaginable sum of $11 / hour as an intern had made me like the finer things in life. I bought myself the Valentine One radar detector I always wanted. It accurately detected the laser shot from the Kentucky State Police that nailed me going 75 in a 55, but it (probably) kept me out of a few tickets. I also bought a 866 Mhz Pentium III Dell computer I could use as a programming/gaming machine. It came with Windows Me. I don’t think I ever played games on it.

In any case I chose to join the MarkVision Professional (“MVP”) team based on a recommendation of another personal connection, Joel. They put me in a 10x10 office shared with a great guy named Patrick, who became a true friend as the years wore on. We didn’t always get along, but he cared enough to call me out when my ego and mouth were bigger than my capabilities. I got to put those skills I’d learned from Darren and Brian to use: Writing Perl scripts to automate drudgery, reading and worshipping “The Pragmatic Programmer” and its dictums. The cast of characters on the hall were esoteric and interesting: A recovering physicist who did differential equations by hand for fun, a hockey player who never smiled, a lady with a truly awful cackle but a great heart, an ultramarathoner. Then of course there were Jeff and David, both of whom had senses of humor that still make me smile.

And finally we come to my reason for writing today: Let’s call him Dean. Every office has a “Dean”.

The “Dean” of it All

Dean was our Cassandra, the prophet of doom. Any time any sort of email, rumor, chat message, or carrier pigeon came by, you could count the seconds until Dean beat a path to the door for Patrick and myself to hear his theory on why the sky was falling. Layoffs! Reorg! Reinstituted the Draft!

It was demotivating, because Dean needed us to soothe him. He couldn’t self-soothe. It got tough, because Patrick was both incredibly nice, and he had really high standards for “rub some dirt on it.” That last was something I appreciated. Myself, I’m a people-pleaser and I want to find a path for people to be happy. There wasn’t happy for Dean; he wanted to be miserable.

As time went on, re-orgs did happen and I no longer worked with Dean, but I never forgot him and how he made me feel: Generally demotivated.

Die a Hero or…

So goes the saying “Die a Hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the Villain”. Yesterday was that moment of clarity.

Typically near the end of the day, most people have left the office. Remaining were my longsuffering desk-mate Eric, my friend Luke who works on a sister team, and another group of people across the knee wall to another line of desks. Since the Inauguration/Coronation/Anschluss, I’ve made a point to avoid the news while at work. It provokes a “WTaF?!” response and it takes me 30-60 minutes for me to get back into flow state. So a coworker said something about another stupide DOGE move or another.

I lost it. Well, I maybe 50% lost it. Me 100% losing it likely means building security involvement and getting fired.

Anyway after a 5 minute rant where I somehow got to include “THIS IS HOW MY UNCLE NEVER LEARNED TO READ AND DROPPED OUT OF SCHOOL IN 4th GRADE!” I got a grip, shut up, and packed up my things. There really isn’t coming back from that.

As I was walking out, I stopped by Luke’s desk and mused: “I had this coworker named Dean once. Dean would always rant at every little thing. And now….”

Luke: “Uh-huh.”

Well, shit.

I just find it impossible to concentrate when we’re in a constitutional crisis and no one cares