Like anybody, I get a lot of junk mail. Because I’m a registered voter, I get mail from my Assemblywoman, my Representative, and both my Senators. Because I’m a registered Republican, I get mail from the Republican Party.

I got a "party census document" the other day purporting to be asking my views on political issues. Naturally, it was really just a thinly-veiled request for donations. The fill-in-the-bubble form sought contributions in the gradations of $25, $50, $100, $250, $500, and Second Mortgage. I declined to make a donation in any of those amounts, my eye wandering down to the cop-out response of "Gee, I’d like to help, but…"

Interestingly, selecting the cheapskate option pledges me to enclose $11 "to cover the cost of tabulating my survey". Eleven bucks? To run a bubble-form through a reading machine? Who the hell did they hire to tabulate these surveys? Halliburton?

I am often very thankful that there is very little Dilbertness in my patch of the cube farm. My boss is most decidedly not of the pointy-haired variety. None of the people in my group show any signs of Wallyness, though we do have a resident Alice. Her Fist of Death is generally used on those who deserve it, but we all stay on her good side just to be sure.

The other day, though, I felt as though I’d been suddenly plunged into that nightmarish world of Scott Adams’ fevered imagination. I had a conversation that, even having had a few days to digest, still makes my head spin. It was easily the most maddening one I’ve had in months.

To be fair to my boss, this nonsense was decided elsewhere, somewhere higher up the food chain. A level, where, I am told, there are strange and terrible artifacts beyond our mortal comprehension like "offices with doors" and "windows"; these totems of power, it is said, are so potent as to render nigh infallible those who are entrusted with them. It’s like some sort of psychological version of Clarke’s Third Law: the thought processes of those with sufficiently advanced careers are indistinguishable from illogic. We of humbler station, who could not possibly hope to perceive the Greater Purpose, must simply hear and obey.

I was listening to the radio during my morning commute and after I arrived at work, I was wishing I hadn’t done so. Most of the news was an offensive parade of idiotic statements from a procession of political fucktards; things like the Attorney General and the President defending the indefensible practice of warrantless surveillance of citizens, and men declaring—with straight faces—that we need to go easy on reforms intended to break up the unholy, greasy 69 position of moneyed lobbyists and Congress. Fuck all those guys. Screw "reform"; we need to ring the Beltway with heads on pikes.

Anyway, what I found most incredulous, was this pinhead "analyst" that NPR dredged up to comment on Disney’s acquisition of Pixar. Why this piece of garbage got stuck in my craw when there are more important issues at hand, I can’t tell you, but it did. This dumb son of a bitch lauded the purchase, calling it good for both parties, but especially for Pixar. There was nothing remarkable about this statement, but it was quickly followed by his punch line reasoning: it was good for Disney because they’d be picking up a great studio, and better for Pixar’s folks because now the people at Pixar finally had a future.

See, the way this big genius figured it, Pixar was "subsisting on one movie a year" [emphasis mine], and that the miserable lumpen proletariat at Pixar was no longer trapped in their dead-end Pixar jobs; they would now have opportunities to explore other career paths within the larger company.

Right. Those poor folks at Pixar, barely making ends meet, locked into crappy jobs at a moribund animation studio. I happen to know a few things for sure about the animation business: one is that Disney basically churned out one major feature a year, too, but they have a massive marketing and media empire to cover for all their flops, which were flops because they lacked what really makes Pixar flicks great: superior writing, not the technology (though that, of course, is most impressive as well). Two, the people I’ve met that are in animation generally love their work, and are often willing to starve now and again just to keep on doing it.

What really gets me going is that ol’ Einstein, some senior business analyst with Simpleton, Harumph, & Dross (or whatever his firm was called) is most likely "earning" a six-figure salary for spewing nonsense like this out of his ass. I guess I should have majored in Pontification instead of studying Political Science, foreign language, and Information Technology.

The database application our division produces has, of course, a lot of different reporting tools built in to it. It would, after all, be pretty useless if it didn’t have the ability to cough up wet wads of student data on demand. One of the reporting features is this concept called "Data Access Tags", or DATs. These are little bits of code that customers can embed in their reports to dynamically pull data so that you can do things like print report cards and have Johnny’s grades show up on Johnny’s report card.

The other day one of my irascible colleagues and I were commiserating about what a pain in the ass some of the DATs are. Many, if not most of them, were written in the Bad Old Days when our division was a completely independent company (long before they were purchased by Apple), when the development model would have been handily summed up as either "a couple of guys dicking around with source code" or "let’s add every feature suggested by every user". Dealing with legacy code is never much fun, especially if the jokers who wrote it didn’t bother to, oh, say, write anything down.

So anyway. We were talking about these DATs, and one of us (I don’t remember who) mumbled the name of one causing problems, to which the other responded, "What? Which code?". At just that moment, a third colleague, in response to some different but equally irritating problem, exclaimed "Fuck!", and thus was born the "fuck" DAT.

So, without further ado, here is ^(*fuck). It’s funnier if you understand PowerSchool, but it’s still worth a cheap laugh even if you don’t. Or maybe it isn’t. Ah, who gives a ^(*fuck).

I hope you enjoyed this little lesson. This handy information will also be sent to our customer base in the general release notes for the next version of our application.

oogle pays scant attention to this site. This, of course, is not really surprising, since this tiny little pile of digital scribbles is but an insignificant point of jetsam adrift in the vast, uncharted seas of intellectual pollution that comprise the blogosphere. In checking my hit logs this morning, though, I found that Google’s bots have crawled my site twice in the last week. The last time they’d hit it was months ago. I’m guessing it’s just a fluke, since it’s not like I’m getting Googlebombed or anything (here’s the proof).

So, anyway, great fun, Google bots are crawling my site; whatever. What really piqued my interest was that I got three unique hits from Apple- as in the mothership. A wave of paranoia suddenly washed over my ape’s brain. I mean, sure, I work for them, but tucked away in an independent software division about 146 miles away from the Sacred Core. I’d be willing to bet that more than 99% of the residents of the main campus have no idea our specialist software division even exists. I only know one person who works within the warrens of the Infinite Loop, and I’m pretty sure we never discussed this blog, ever. So what shadowy cabal is pinging me from Cupertino? I got even more paranoid.

"Shit", I thought, "did I post something I shouldn’t have? Does corporate HR have me in their baleful glare for inadvertently trashing the company somehow? Did I let slip that top Apple executives were, to their secret shame, forced to get Windows logos tattooed on their left buttocks in 1997?" (You didn’t hear that from me, by the way.) I spent a few minutes reading recently archived posts just to make sure I hadn’t said anything more stupid than usual, and spent the next few hours nervously prairie-dogging over the cubicle wall to see if I could spot somebody from HR heading my way with the dreaded Plain Manila Folder that is always a portent of termination.

The day came and went, though, and neither the HR staff nor a gang of logo-wearing toughs showed up to work me over and kick me out the door, so I figure I’m probably safe. Still, the whole episode gave me enough of an adrenaline kick to finish a bunch of stuff I’ve been meaning to finish for a week or so. I guess mental instability can produce positive results every once in a while.

All I wanted was to go home. The whole day had been a real pain in the ass. It was Friday. I was running really late after a bunch of last-minute changes were made to the copy of a promotional flyer, which meant I had to redo the layout. Finally, my work was finished; all that stood between me and the sweet, sweet taste of weekend freedom was the production of a color proof. Two lousy pages. That’s all I needed. I was so close to the weekend, I could already taste the artichokes, Comté cheese, and wine that I had carefully laid up earlier in the week to celebrate my temporary release from bondage.

I sent those two pages to the color printer, and walked down the corridor to retrieve them, happily contemplating the weekend of indolent bliss that was finally within my grasp. All I needed was to grab the proof and—what was this? A blinking error light? Ah, I saw the printer was out of paper. I found and fed the machine another half ream, but this was not a sufficient remedy. The error light continued to blink angrily at me. This time, the display told me that the output tray was full. I picked up the hefty sheaf of printed pages, and it resumed printing.

And printing. And printing. And printing. Obviously, somebody else had sent a job to the printer before I did. I groaned with dismay as the machine ground out page after page, with no signs of stopping. Curious to know whether or not any color toner would be left for my job, I flipped through the papers I held in my hand, and let out another groan. I was holding over 200 pages of a black-and-white document, and there was no end in sight; the printer was still churning out pages of the stuff. What the hell? Who sends 250+ page grayscale jobs to a color printer? Please, for the love of all that is holy, what could possibly have prompted you to send that document to that particular printer?

All I wanted was those two measly pages of color proofs, and I would have been out the door, but no: your bloated, Brobdingnagian job had already devoured every last piece of paper in the printer, and had demanded more. On and on it went. I resisted the urge to scream and fling the papers into the air, but the frustration at the horrible injustice of it all still managed to find its outlet in a colorful, bitter string of Spanish obscenities, culminating in me banging my head on the printer, then sinking to my knees, sobbing uncontrollably. Which one of you bastards did this to me? What did I ever do to you?

In case you are not aware of it, let me acquaint you with the fact that there is an enormous, fast grayscale printer about thirty feet away from the color printer. It holds an staggering amount of paper. It collates, prints double-sided, and scrambles eggs in the shell, yet you chose to send your grayscale document to the slow color printer, holding me in abject thrall to your sadistic choice of output devices. I do not know who you are, but let me inform you that you, sir or madam, made an enemy on Friday. I am so furious that when I discover your indentity, I will most likely send a hostile glare in the general direction of your desk from the safety of my cubicle, and that’s just the appetizer before the main course of pain I will be serving you.

The next time you need a multiple-page document from me, I will give it to you without staples or paper clips, and I will print it on the printer farthest away from your cubicle, then ask you to go fetch it. I will use the Hobo Bold font instead of Myriad Set. I will print it in landscape instead of portrait. You, my friend, have no idea what you’ve gotten yourself into. I will make you beg for death, or at least for a cup of coffee.

Oh yes. Vengeance will be mine.