Bars
Going to bars is always an amusing event. That's because I am deaf. I'm not actually deaf. I merely have trouble distinguishing speech. All speech. When someone talks, it takes a considerable amount of my concentration to turn the sounds coming out of the person's mouth into discernible code which can then be interpreted as language. It's a scary amount of concentration too.
I'm not completely sure when this problem started. I was never a social kid. Growing up I was a chubby one but that all changed when I ran cross country in high school. After that I never had trouble fitting into any group socially until my senior year of college. I completely lost interest in all social activities at about that time and since then I've had an extremely hard time interacting with other people.
This whole problem originally started much earlier than college. I can't remember names. At times I felt like my laziness was to blame. This became especially apparent to me when I realized that I could only recall a few of my parents' friends' names. Still, I try very hard to memorize names and even have trouble recalling the names of people I see every day. I feel that my inability to remember names goes hand in hand with my lack of a desire to engage in social situations.
Regardless of my name impairment, bars have always been a problem for me. After you have enough beer in you, any situation can be handled with enough common sense and social ingenuity. But my problem is that I straight up can't hear people in loud settings. There's a natural flow to conversations that I can see happening before my eyes but I cannot continue it because I don't know what was just said. The situation usually ends with me oddly reacting to the social cues I just witnessed and saying something like "Cool!" or "Ya, that sounds awesome!" or possibly even "Wow, I think I'll try that when I get home!" despite what was just said.
It's unreal being in these kinds of situations. The amount of information my brain is processing astounds me, yet I miss so much because two of my organs are not functioning to their full potential. Despite my inability to hear, I feel that my brain and body have made up for the deficit in other ways. These compensations make me unique.
I don't know how I'm going to end this. I don't actually know why I started typing in the first place.
The next time you are in a loud social situation, consider yourself lucky because I may be a few stools away from you struggling as hard as I can just to get by.
After College
Sometimes I'm amused by the fact that I used to ask the question "What's life like after college?" The reason I find this question so amusing is because there is no life after college. There's only work after college. Any inkling of a 'life' has long since faded after you graduate and get a job.
Strange bugs
I hear the phrase 'I found a strange bug' fairly often. At first I thought this phrase was bad because all bugs are technically strange behavior. That fact makes the phrase redundant. But after doing user support for long enough, I have learned that there is actually a difference between bugs: strange bugs and normal bugs.
The idea is that normal bugs are bugs that keep popping up again and again. I see all kinds of normal bugs that might be there one week, gone the next, then back again a while later. I can diagnose these issues in just a few seconds because of how familiar they are.
Strange bugs are a little different. They are bugs with symptoms that are unfamiliar. These are the tricky ones that make me stare at the screen and say "Huh...I can't figure this out."
So I guess the phrase 'I found a strange bug' is not that strange after all. What a boring outcome.
Sleepy morning
Every morning I set my alarm for 745 and 815. This morning I slept through both of those alarms. When I finally woke up at 9, I got up and did my normal routine. Brush teeth, shower, clothe, feed cats, change litter boxes. In addition to those chores I ate a leftover burrito and poured myself a pint of Coke. After finishing this delicious burrito I bussed my dishes, but instead of putting them in the dishwasher I attempted to put the dishes in the refrigerator. Fuck!(#1)
This coke accompanied me through the rest of my chores. It was then time to leave. I grab my backpack, phone, Burt's Bees, and pocket knife and head out the door. Once down on the street I realize I still have a pint glass in my hand. Fuck!(#2)
Whatever, I'll just carry it to work. Oh, hold on, where's my wallet? And my Mifi? And my on-call pager? FUCK!(#3)
So the moral of this story is to pay attention to what you are doing so you don't end up being an idiot like me.
iPhone 4
iPhone 4
I have decided that I am going to try to avoid bitching about the new iPhone and how crappy the iOS is from today forward. Instead, I will simply not purchase another iPhone ever again and let that speak for itself. Well, maybe not ever again. At least not in its current form. Afterall, they say you should vote with your dollars, but maybe that's why politics is so corrupt.
Banning Plastic Bags
I am all for banning plastic bags. The problem I have with the whole idea is the media's coverage of these bans: http://www.good.is/post/california-bans-plastic-bags/
The media writes things like "San Francisco becomes the first city to ban plastic bags" or "California banning plastic bags". These headlines anger me because they are utter bullshit. No city is outright banning plastic bags. As far as I am aware, no city in the entire world has completely banned the use of plastic bags. What has been done is that plastic bags have been banned at certain businesses like supermarkets while gas stations, convenience stores, and other smaller retailers still use plastic bags by the truckload. So while it is true that plastic bags have been outlawed at specific locations, it is entirely untrue that plastic bags have been banned completely.
The reason all this gets to me is because the world reads these headlines and thinks, "Awesome! Now there's no more plastic bags in SF!" I think people also believe that if cities like SF bans plastic bags, enough has been done. They read the headline and are satisfied with the progress that has been made. I disagree. Banning plastic bags in supermarkets is a good first step, but 99% of plastic bags are not used at supermarkets. Banning the use of these bags at supermarkets is such a small, insignificant change that it won't help the current state of consumer waste.
We need to ban plastic bags outright. Then we need to start taxing companies that package their products in excessive amounts of plastic. Then we need to start taxing the consumers of plastic. These are REAL steps to curbing our addiction to plastic. Showboating a news headline about how enormous cities 'ban' plastic bags is absolute rubbish.
Customer Support
"When I used to work at a large software company, I couldn’t imagine many jobs worse than being a tech support person. Perhaps it was my own interaction with support folks stuck supporting products they almost never had control over, and often didn’t have enough expertise in." (from How I almost ignored our single best source for customer feedback)
Hillel mentions that nothing could be worse than being a tech support person in a large software company. While Twitter might seem like a large company, we only have a little over 200 people working here currently. The difference between the support work I perform here at Twitter and the work I performed at YouTube is that at Twitter I have some control over the products we provide and I am also an expert on most of Twitter. At YouTube I argued endlessly about certain issues which were upsetting our users but my voice was never listened to. Because I was not listened to, I was much less enthusiastic about the company and had much less knowledge about how it worked. I never realized until now that how little say I had in the service was what ruined my experience at YouTube.
At Twitter I have a say in things. My voice is heard all the way up to the senior staff. I doubt this culture will last forever but right now it is absolutely amazing. As I move through life and different jobs, I will try to keep this idea in my mind so that I don't end up in a position where I again have no voice. I also want to remember this lesson so that I don't put coworkers through the same experience.
@BPGlobalPR
"The point of this story is that if someone is terrorizing your neighborhood, sometimes it’s alright to grab a stick and take a swing."
from Leroy Stick – the man behind @BPGlobalPR
The Man in the Arena
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
-Theodore Roosevelt at the Sorbonne in Paris, France on April 23, 1910 (Wikipedia)
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