Hard on the heels of our purchase from Apple comes the information that our new masters have just acquired another company that used to be one of our competitors.

Naturally, all of us cogs are trying to scry the future through the glass of our monitors. One thing seems obvious: Pearson is on (or has, perhaps, just ended, but who can say at this point?) a veritable spending spree. As far as I know, that only leaves the fledgling Infinite Campus as the sole competitor (of any significance) to Pearson’s overnight juggernaut.

The natives in this strange new land seem to be friendly, but they’re certainly on some kind of warpath.

When I got home yesterday afternoon, the mailbox was full of bills and junk mail. Hooray. I emptied the mailbox and went inside to go over all the mail and shred the seven different credit offers—one of which offered me up to $250,000 (!)—that were in the day’s mail.

As I went over my American Express Blue statement, my eyes flitted past the Annual Percentage Rate on the card; I hadn’t really examined the statements in detail for some time. I had to do a double take. The APR on that card is 29.99%.

Holy Bejeezus! Thirty percent? That’s not an interest rate, that’s fucking usury. I grabbed a folder of bills from this time last year and checked the AMEX statement. APR: 10.73%. My interest rate has trebled in a year’s time. It’s not like I’m getting stung because of late payments, either; they’ve been paid on time.

Every week, a ridiculous number of “pre-approved” credit offers land in my mailbox, and I know I’m not alone in battling this deluge. Overlay that with a 30% interest rate (does the Mafia even charge that much?) and the ridiculous ease of identity theft, it makes my head spin to remember that Congress passed this piece of garbage last year to ostensibly crack down on deadbeats. Let’s see now, the credit companies are practically breaking into our houses to insert cards into the wallets of anybody capable of breathing, the interest rates are ridiculous, their profits are breaking records, but they need protection?

Thirty freakin’ percent. I still can’t believe it. I cut up my AMEX card last night. Screw those guys.

I spend a lot of time commuting to and from work. Too much time, really, but that’s another story.

During my driving hours, I get to spend a lot of quality time alone with my brain. I think about lots of things. I ponder eternal verities. I listen to music. I take in the sights and watch the world as it passes under my speeding wheels.

No matter how many hours I put in over the asphalt, though, there are some things I just can’t wrap my brain around. It is, perhaps, unsurprising that these mysteries revolve around the greatest X factor in the world: the thoughts (or dearth thereof) in other peoples’ brains. Seriously, there are quite a few drivers on our roads that should be taking a short bus instead of being allowed to steer 2,000+ pounds of steel and gasoline down the freeway.

I’m not talking about the irritating but unremarkable driving styles of the tailgater, the snails, or the wannabe Speed Racers. Those are easily explained. What baffles me are those driving decisions that are readily classifiable, but lack any clear purpose.

• The Bulldozer: These are the assholes who not only tailgate you, but tailgate you when you’re in the slow lane. Even when you’re the only other car driving down a four-lane freeway. I’ve actually had some of these twats flash their brights to tell me I should get out of their way, even though there are three fucking lanes open to my left. My usual response is the same I give to most tailgaters: I slow down.
• Fake Tailgaters: Garden-variety tailgaters are in some sort of huge hurry to get down the road faster than everyone else. Fake tailgaters are the drivers who zoom up in your rear-view mirror and ride your bumper but, when you pull over to allow them to pass, just sit there. It’s like their only goal was to catch up to you. Bizarre.
• The Looming Stalkers: These drivers always trigger my paranoia. They appear to be normal, if fast, drivers, proceeding down the road at a good clip, but once they’re neck-in-neck with you, they match your speed exactly. I half-expect the windows to roll down, revealing some villain’s menacing stare before he perpetrates his horrible vehicular assault, but it never happens. Wouldn’t you be creeped out if you were walking down the street and some stranger ran after you, only to slow down to walk shoulder-to-shoulder? Unsettling.
• The Gun-Jumpers: A lot of ricers fall into this category. Gun-Jumpers are the dorks in front of red lights who are itching to get across the intersection. They rev their engines. Their cars creep forward in anticipation of the green light, sometimes even lurching ahead prematurely when the left-turn lane gets its green light first. Yet, for all their hot-headed anticipation, These guys are almost never actually the first ones across the intersection when the light finally turns. In fact, they usually seem taken off-guard when the green light finally does appear.

What strange traffic behaviors have you seen on your commutes?

Well, it’s official and public now: Apple sold PowerSchool to Pearson, a British publishing and curriculum conglomerate. We were given the news on Tuesday by Apple’s CFO, Peter Offenheimer, in a way that one of the engineers aptly described as an “it’s not you, it’s me” breakup speech. Lots of noise was made by Apple brass about how wonderful it will be for PowerSchool, and what great news this is for all of us.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not being cynical about the deal. It does make sense for Apple and Pearson. Apple is getting rid of a division that, while profitable, wasn’t really considered part of Apple’s core business of selling snazzy consumer devices, software, and digital content. Pearson acquires one of its competitors, gains our technology, and grows its market share by a significant amount. Win-win, on the macro level.

For those of us down on the PowerSchool cube farm, we all get to keep our jobs. Our CEO is heading up the newly-combined entity, and it’ll be headquartered out of our office in California. These are Good Signs. Still, something of a pall hangs over us, and it’s not just because of the uncertainty that change imparts.

We won’t be working for Apple anymore.

Some of us are Apple fanatics from way back, and are fiercely partisan. Others hadn’t even so much as looked at a Mac before they got here. Pretty much everyone is agreed on one thing though: it was good working for Apple, and we’re saddened by the end of the relationship. Pearson is relatively, well, boring. There’s just no other way to say it. We’re all thinking it, no matter how hopeful we are about the future. Let’s face it, Apple is pretty much defining “cool” in the technology sector these days. The loss of that intangible coolness factor by association, the je ne sais quoi of the Apple mystique, is disheartening. (This is not to say, however, that PowerSchool was all about the bling. Far from it; most people outside school IT departments don’t even know we—or our application—exists.)

But still… we won’t be working for Apple. Sure, we might not have been part of Apple’s core operations, but were nonetheless part of that greater whole; while we toiled away, we were all stoking the same fire, moving Apple’s shiny white plastic and brushed-aluminum ship forward.

Now we watch as that ship pulls away from us, leaving us behind on an unfamiliar shore.

I hope the natives are friendly.

Change is good. Change is invigorating. Change mixes things up, people and organizations emerging stronger for the struggle. Yay for change. Everybody likes change. Change is good, remember?

Until your boss starts talking about it. Then it quickly transmogrifies from one of those nice, faraway, harmless sort of concepts into oh, shit.

Change, she is a comin’. More information later.

What is it about people in this building who don’t wash their hands after using the toilet? Please, for the love of God, spend the extra minute and put some soap on those filthy mitts. I’m begging you. It’s gross.

I’m considering asking the office manager to put a badge reader on the popcorn machine, or maybe the whole breakroom, so that we can set up an access whitelist to keep, literally, the Unwashed Masses from distributing particles of excreta throughout our food preparation areas.

Note: Flicking one’s hands under the faucet faster than the infrared sensor can turn the water on does not qualify as washing your hands. That’s not cleaning, that’s goddamned pantomime.