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I think that my two favorite features of Myspace are the ability to see the status of messages that you send, and the button that appears below bulletins that allows you to remove the sender from your friends list. Regarding the status message: this really appeals to my deep well of schadenfreude. It's like impatiently waiting by the phone for someone to call you back, 2.0, people sweating bullets while mashing F5. That bitch has time to read my message, but not enough time to write back?! I wonder if the guy who wrote the Myspace code, Tom or whoever, intended to make people insane or if it's just a happy side effect. I do wish that other forms of communication had the same level of transparency, like a voicemail system that informs repeat callers that, in fact, their messages are being deleted unplayed. Delicious!
Regarding the remove friend button: I wonder whether this feature was available at the conception of the bulletin system, or if it was introduced upon request. It's funny that the coder/s realize how fucking obnoxious receiving bulletins is that they give you a way to sever all ties with chronic bulletineers, but they don't just remove the broadcasts altogether. I suppose they expect that you should police your own "friends."
And that pretty much sums up all that I like about Myspace. Everything else: the non-scrolling background images; embedded audio; horrible polychromatic fonts against clashing background colors; stupid, meaningless, and often misattributed quotations. The Internet Prime, circa 1996. The worst offense, to my mind, is how fucking scene it all is. I guess I appreciate the opportunity afforded to independent musicians, but Myspace is unquestionably the face of hipster posturing in this young century.
Speaking of "scene," I've become pretty sick of the way that I've been acting recently. I'd like to begin with an apology to my friends on the off chance they care enough to read this: I'm sorry for the judgmental prick that I've become. Now this is where you pause to think "You've been an insufferable prick ever since we met." Well, fuck you. It wasn't always this way. I remember a time when this fresh-faced lad, a newly minted high school graduate, approached each day with a smile and a sense of adventure.
I don't want to place the blame for this situation on anyone else's shoulders, but I remember vividly the events that started my descent into ignominy. Stop me if you've heard this before: I met a girl, totally unlike anyone I'd met before. She was my antithesis, while I totally conformed to what one might expect from a white suburbanite in the late nineties, she completely eschewed the mainstream in a way that was totally outside my experience. I fell for her hard. And events progressed more or less straight from the script of any coming-of-age romantic comedy. The degree by which I was in awe of her was matched by how totally she intimidated me, and it wasn't until after she moved to New York that I attempted to express my feelings to her. I began to emulate her attitudes, her taste in music, even her chosen path through college, in what I expect was subconsciously an attempt to become more impressive. What I'm saying is that she deeply influenced the person I became. She had a great breadth of knowledge and experience, and she was a bright and charming person. I have attempted to gain a measure of that breadth, but I feel that it has caused me to affect a world-weariness that I find unpleasant.
I guess that the point of all of this is I feel like I have become a caricature, and I need to find some way to change. I've been making a concerted effort to be less of a dick, but I still catch myself making faces or shitty comments almost on impulse. Anyway, enough of that for now.
Posted at: 01:30
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After deleting all of my previous entries from the bad, old, wordpress days I had resolved to not write anything about my job. While some people would have me believe my work stories were my most entertaining, I found the practice a bit worrying for several reasons. The first is entirely caused by my inflated sense of self-worth: I worry that I will write something that is unintenionally scandalous that will get noticed and bring shame and embarassment down first upon the nice people who give me money and then invariably upon myself.
The second can be explained by my vanity: going to the trouble of writing something and then not shamelessly self-promoting it? You clearly don't know me very well. So what I ran into at my last job was that I would write something obliquely about a co-worker or a call that I found frustrating, and then I'd pass the link around to my friends at work. Pretty much every story that I have to tell is borne from my desire to share how ridiculous people can be. The problem was that I didn't really know how wide my audience was among my co-workers so when something appropriately mockable occured I was unsure whether I could sling arrows securely protected by a veil of passive-aggressiveness.
Related to the first point is also the fact that I seem to recall seeing a sub-heading in the employee handbook that advised against blogging. I must consider that warning means that we shouldn't publish anything about the company because it could be misconstrued as being the ruling opinion of the company at large, which is certainly not how I am trying to present myself.
There we have three very compelling reasons to completely steer clear of posting anything to the internet that is even remotely connected to my place of employment. This is problematic, however, because living at home and saving money to finish my degree hardly make for scintillating conversation. I just can't seem to get very passionate about decrying the people I encounter in the infrequent errands and dinner dates that fill the time between work and sleep. These people are rarely ridiculous at all, they're just shopping or lazilly performing their own simple, unfulfilling jobs.
So, in the interest of living a shame-free, drama-free, and continually employed life, I am not going to write anything specific about my job. Further, I will not pass this along to anyone at work. I also ask that once I finally add the ability to leave comments that any commenters who know me personally please respect this and not identify the company that pays my bills.
With all of that said, I was talking to Justin last night and he reminded me of a story that I told him a few months ago that I thought was worthy of a few paragraphs of melodramatic buildup.
I was speaking with an older gentlemen who had just recently purchased one of our products. As is common for the neophyte, he wanted to cut his teeth on something he knew: setting the device to his home. I held his hand through this process for about twenty minutes or so and I was getting ready to end the call. He said that he just needed one more thing, one last bit of help to satisfy him. He wanted to change the name of this label he created to "home." So I show him how to bring up the keyboard and change the name of the label, when he floors me with the following exchange:
And that was good enough for me!Him: Oh! I misspelled it! It says "Iome."
Me: That's okay, just use the left arrow button to get back to the first character so we can change it.
Him: *muttering incoherently to himself for about a full minute* Oh! Okay, I got it. *begins to read the alphabet to me as he is cycling down through the letters* I, J, K, L, M...okay, I got it!
Me: *shaken, struggling between wanting to set this right and wanting to not talk to this man ever again* I'm sorry, I'm pretty sure that was an "N." *internally: GOD DAMMIT WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME*
Him: What? No, it says "Home," just like I wanted!
Posted at: 21:32
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