Do not convert anyone to Linux on your first day on the job
Hello once again from the lunchroom notepad. It's a good day. My work is sufficiently repetitive that now that I'm used to it, I can listen to podcasts while I work and suffer no performance difference. If this keeps up, the job will be considerably better than I expected.
It's like the mouse-clicking version of a factory assembly line. The catalog's text, pictures and prices are handled by other people through spreadsheets and inserted automatically through a proprietary markup language. I only adjust the typography and positioning of the markup, which will be replaced with facts long after I'm done with the document. After the first dozen pages, it felt like an IQ or psych test. Like the phenomenon of "Focus" from Vernor Vinge's A Deepness In The Sky, it's oddly soothing, at least when podcasts allow me to go away in my mind to my happy place. Without podcasts it would become difficult somewhere around the first thousand pages.
This building is furnished from the 1970s. It is like a set from The Incredibles.
I am avoiding talking about Penguicon at work. It is kind of like a separate job, and I can't talk about it without it seeming more important than my paying job.* Skirting the topic is surprisingly difficult, and requires vigilance. On my first day, I was talking to the lady who works next to me about our mutual surprise to find ourselves back working on our old friend Mac OS 9.0 after so many years. I said at home I have Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and she asked me what Linux was. The next half hour (5 to 5:30, so this was not done on my employer's time) was like a blur of enthusiasm. Before I knew it, I had given her a nice cardboard-sleeve copy of Ubuntu Live CD that I carry on me at all times, and she was pretty excited about all the things I had told her about it. I probably should try to avoid converting someone's grandmother to Linux on my first day on a new job. Coworkers generally get the impression I'm in the wrong line of work.**
*true
**also true
Comments
rbradakis on Mar. 5, 2008 11:31 PM
Ah yes. I am not surprised that you would be ready and able to convert someone to Linux on the first day of a new job.
cymbelline on Mar. 6, 2008 4:36 AM
What is your job exactly and what would be the right line of work for you?
matt-arnold on Mar. 6, 2008 11:56 AM
For ten years, my career has been in publications. I do "production art", which is using Quark XPress, Adobe InDesign, Pagemaker, Illustrator and Photoshop to make a publication; the difference between a graphic designer and a production artist is that a production artist does not exercise creativity. At ad agencies, I'm on the team of people who carry out a creative person's pencil sketches on a high volume of ads every week. At a catalog job such as this, there isn't even the pencil sketch; it's just fitting words, pictures and numbers in the exact same style on a dozen pages a day, for months.
The right line of work could be many things. I'm still trying to take the things I'm good at, such as converting desktop users to Linux, and find a way to turn the skill into money. Odds are good that it will involve computers in some way. It might involve designing user interfaces to some product. It will definitely involve creating something end-users or viewers would seek out or desire, rather than creating billboards and direct mail that they don't want. Or it could be a community-based webcomic. Or board games. Or Flash animation.
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