This news will not affect anyone outside the building where I work, but Richard, our janitor, died yesterday afternoon, just sitting in his car. He’d recently been given a completely clean bill of health by his doctor. He was only about 70, and certainly seemed in good shape to all who knew him.

He was a thoroughly decent fellow. I just wanted everyone to know that.

The other day I was chatting with a colleague, and along the line we lurched into a conversation about arcade video games, reminiscing about our youthful days, wasted among the laminated cabinets of yore, scapegraces staring glassily into the glabrous, glowing cathode ray tubes, armed with nothing more than a pocketful of quarters and a belly full of Jolt.

It was during this worldly discourse that we fell into oneupmanship, each of us repeatedly reaching further back into ever more distant memories, in an attempt to finally attain that subtle social dominance conferred upon he who is finally recognized as more “old school” than the other.

At some point, I pulled out the oldest video game memory I have: Pong. Yep, Pong. I was running around when cabinet and tabletop Pong games were new. So new, in fact, that the first one I ever saw didn’t even have a slot for quarters; a plastic milk jug was screwed to the side of the cabinet of the Pong machine in a Shakey’s pizza place somewhere near where I lived, long ago.

There was a pause in the chat. Then he replied “what’s Pong?”. I knew he was joking, of course, ..right? He followed it up with “you’re old”, and “commit seppuku now”. Thinking quickly, I responded that instead I was waiting for the Sandmen to come and get me instead, but immediately realized that this reference to a 37-year-old novel, best known for its 28-year-old movie adaptation, merely compounded the stigma. Damn! He’s right, I’m ancient. Practically a fossil, to be sure. I started remembering all the other old toys I used to play with, like Mattel’s electronic football game (heck, even the vibrating-table football games), the venerable Atari 2600, Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, and toy guns that were actually cool. (Where did all the toy guns go? I just want to thank the social engineers that made people feel bad about selling them, because their disappearance has clearly made the whole planet so much safer.)

I played the original Zork on a dumb mainframe terminal. I copy-coded and played Hammurabi on a TRS-80 (32kB of RAM! Who could possibly use all that?), and have fond memories of Super Star Trek on my uncle’s Kaypro. Ah, the magic of BASIC. GOTO statements, anyone?

I was still thinking about it when I got home, and then it hit me: I belong to the last Analog Generation. I remember returning glass soda bottles to the grocery store for deposit, and TV vacuum tube testers in the drugstore. We even had a milkman, for God’s sake. Rotary-dial telephones and fire hydrants painted to celebrate the Bicentennial. Oh, and ice cream trucks weren’t the horrible, shabby, battered, dingy converted rapist vans they all seem to look like today. They were clean- at least the one that came down our block was. Seriously, what the hell is it with ice cream trucks these days? Would it kill them to at least keep painting over the grime?

Anyway: Yes. I’m old. I finally realize that now. My self-image of a 25-year-old me is irrevocably shattered. On the plus side, I no longer feel uncomfortable sneeringly dismissing anybody younger than 25 as a “kid”. I was already laughing at today’s new, hip fashion that I remember wearing in the 70s. A few years ago, somebody told me that bell bottoms were coming back, and that I would bow to the inevitable crush of fashion pressure and wear them. No. Never. As we used to say back in the Pleistocene, “fuck that”. I did my time in the 1970s, and I ain’t going back.

This old codger’s still got what it takes to school the noobs, however. Make no mistake.

Fuckin’ whippersnappers. “What’s Pong?”, indeed. Now get the hell off my lawn.

Sometimes you just have to wonder “what the FUCK were they thinking?” when you stumble across certain inane situations. Such was the case at the local Consumecca the other day.

If you’ve ever been to one of those enormous members-only warehouse stores, you’ve doubtless seen the “Sample Squad”. You know the people. They’re generally old ladies, clad in white, wearing either hair nets or a kind of plastic shower-cap sort of affair, pimping paper cups of hot dog chunks, salad dressing, ice cream, or some other reasonably edible stuff they’re trying to sell.

I want to make it clear right now that I am NOT making fun of this woman that I’m about to describe. The idiots who set her up are another story.

Lazily strolling through the aisles, I was marvelling at such wonders as peanut butter packed in tubs large enough to fit small children into, 800-piece ratchet tool sets, and 15-pound sacks filled with “fun size” tubes of Preparation H. I didn’t want to ponder what anybody would plan on doing with the last item. Talk about your sucky Halloween treats. The Sample Squad didn’t really have anything interesting going on. Some flavorless-looking crackers, soy “milk”, some kind of chicken marinated in a pale, sweet-smelling goo, and a sour, horrible, multicolored gelato knockoff was all that was on offer. They must go through their entire inventory, item by item, never repeating, until they’ve offered samples of every one of their comestibles, and I’d decided to shop on the very last day until it rolled back to the good stuff.

Even with that in mind, I was baffled to find a woman standing behind a table laden with… plastic trash bags. Nobody approached her the entire time I was there, and she certainly looked supremely bored. I can’t understand how any moron could possibly imagine that sales of black plastic trash bags would be increased by attempting to offer samples. What’s the woman going to do? How would the sales pitch sound?

Bagpimp: Excuse me, sir, would you like to try one of our trash bags? They’re 4 mil.
Customer: I haven’t anything to throw away.
Bagpimp: No problem, sir. I have some wadded paper for you to test the bag with. While you’re waiting, see how smoothly they open, and the high gloss on the outer surface of the bag. They’re rip-resistant. These are great trash bags, better than any I’ve ever seen. They also come with your choice of twisty-tie colors: white and light grey.
Customer: Wow, this is the best trash bag I’ve ever used! Honey, kids, come over here and check out these trash bags! (Picks up several dozen boxes) These are great. Thank you!
Bagpimp: You’re very welcome, sir. Would your little one like a bag? (Offers bag to infant) Enjoy your bags!

Yeah. That’s how it might go down, assuming anybody, anywhere, gave a shit about what kind of trash bags they used. I was so astounded to see this display set up that I decided to surreptitiously snap a photo with my handy little digital Zippo Cam. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure I fumbled the whole thing. Not only did I manage to get my finger in the shot, I think she totally made me. I got the hell out of Dodge. The last thing I need is a plastic pimpin’ bag lady from the Sample Squad on my ass. Nobody wants a piece of that action. She probably thought I was some kind of pervert jerk.

But hey, everybody thinks those white hair caps are way sexy, right? Right?

You’d think that after decades of experience with eating, I’d remember that a diet consisting almost exclusively of fresh fruit has… consequences. Still, I can’t resist a bowl full of delicious cherries, no matter how hard I try.

I’m regular now, boy howdy. I practically elbowed a colleague in the face to get into the restroom this afternoon. The dolt was standing right in the doorway chatting with some sales drone. In his defense, he probably had no idea that I was struggling to contain one of nature’s most elemental forces. Poop.

Nonetheless, social niceties such as “excuse me” can be, I think, understandably forgone when one’s sphincter is the sole barrier between the municipal sewage system and a veritable colonic Krakatoa.

Things are just fine right now, though, thanks for asking. Or will be, until the rest of the cherries ripen in the next few days. Oh, and if you think this post was tasteless, read this.

My cherry tree has, after a long hiatus, borne fruit. Three years I’ve waited for cherries, since the last crop of any significance. According to the University’s Cooperative Extension, a goldmine of botanical knowledge, it’s been a crummy period for the precious fruits until now.

But now I have CHERRIES, one of my very favorite foods, and I am loath to share, especially with the nasty, pestilent little birds that covet my fruit. I pay a squad of common jays a weekly protection fee of raw peanuts, and this helps a bit, as the bigger jays fend off the swarm of feathered locusts that otherwise known as finches and sparrows. The jays have gone from looking rather scruffy when they first arrived, to hale and hearty warriors of the trees, thanks no doubt to a steady diet. I’m not above employing hired muscle to safeguard my beloved cherries. I suspect that the jays might be pilfering the occasional red globe now and again, but I suppose even the most tightfisted mob boss allows his thugs to skim just a bit here and there, as long as they don’t get uppity or greedy about it. As long as they terrify or injure the little pests, I’m happy. I’m hoping the jays will grow a lot bigger under my patronage, so that I can send them forth against some of the smaller neighborhood children that like to tramp unbidden through my front yard.

Last year, in eager anticipation of a crop that never came. I put up bird netting, half of which is still on the tree. I was going to take it down this year, but then I found that what was left still deterred the vile little thieves. Now it’s not only a physical barrier, but a psychological one as well; it’s my own little backyard warning effigy. The upper half of a bird is tangled within the net, no doubt having been relieved of its lower half by one of the neighborhood cats who shits in my flower garden and front lawn- about which I will, perhaps, weave a later tale. I’m sure the rest of the small birds don’t pay it any mind, but I like to imagine it’s the avian equivalent of sticking a head on a pike as a warning to all who would approach: Stay The Hell Away.

By the time I found the chunk o’ bird, it was already dried out, the ants having already had their fun with it. Since it isn’t rotting or nasty-smelling, I decided to leave it up as the aforementioned token of barbarism, a brutal token warning of violence and death to trespassers, in an otherwise placid suburban neighborhood. Next is either a cat head, or the noggin of one of those little flower-stomping kneebiters that infest my surroundings. It depends on how big the jays get.

Much has been made of our great nation’s economic recovery; that is to say, the recovery of Wall Street. Lo, the floors of the great exchanges are again brimming with prosperity and enormous drifts of paper. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a picture of an exchange devoid of both traders and paper. In all the pictures, they are either packed, cheek-to-jowl, with the howling, scrambling slaves of Mammon, clad in a colorful array of polyester jackets, utterly obscuring the floor. That, or the place is empty, save for a few janitors in a vast sea of litter, representing the suffering and death of millions of trees, formerly home to untold multitudes of heartbreakingly charming woodland creatures with big, sad eyes. Shame, shame on the callous securities trading that would dispossess such agonizingly cute bearers of plague and rabies!

Anyhow, we’re supposedly in good shape, because… because, um, we say we are. Take that, G8! Still, the outlook for the IT industry is not sunny, in terms of employment. This is in part due to the fact that companies are sending jobs overseas to tiny, well-educated, nimble-fingered Indian children who cost mere pennies to hire, and work without complaint in the
dangerous, noisy, hot, steam-filled, and otherwise unsavory environments of server farms and call centers. I hear that, sucked dry of their life essence, they are also delightfully crunchy and taste delicious, once their contracts are up, or so an article in Fortune magazine’s annual homemaking issue informs me. The other reason is that as IT professionals, it’s our job to automate everything, leaving only sinister, untended machinery and crushed human dreams in our wake. We’re probably automating ourselves out of jobs. We need to start breaking more stuff as a profession. Hopefully Microsoft will help us out with the next security patch.

The true gauge of the job market, as everybody knows, is the Internet, that font of Truth Eternal. Speaking from personal experience, I know that there’s not much to be had out there for followers of the IT profession. I recently had this confirmed by recent results of a job market scan sent to me by Monster.com, where, in days of yore, vast, untamed herds of geeks grazed the fertile workscape, employed to their content. Not so any longer:

These were the results returned by two agents with extremely broad search criteria for the industry. I didn’t doctor the output, or rig the agents so that only lame stuff was returned in the search. I’m now thrice as thankful for the job I have, because otherwise I’d be emigrating to India, which would suck because I don’t speak any of the languages over there, I don’t like curry, I have a fetish for parasite-free drinking water, and I hear cheeseburgers are hard to come by. The only other option seems to be the computerized equivalent of those lame envelope-stuffing scams that suckers pay hard cash for.

Thus, the Cubelodyte forecasts big gains in this country for wealthy and institutional investors who couldn’t give a gnat’s fart about what is written here, as well as strong indications that it will be a good decade for early speculators in caffeine futures on the Indian subcontinent. Demand for new buzzwords is expected to remain relatively constant, and government spending on smoke and mirror production may spike, despite extremely low market demand. Small producers of social noise and blogs are also expected to continue their exponential growth in output, despite a comprehensive market glut.