Consumer Guilt

Maybe it's trepidation at the purchase of a product that I don't deem necessary to existence - a giddy feeling - this could be a left over involuntary reaction from being born on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. There were few products there of any sort.
We found creative ways to play as children - a form of marbles, but with chewing gum wrappers. Chewing gum wrappers seemed so exotic - the bright colours - the fragrant smell soaked into them - one sniff and it smelled like a better, less drab place.
Yes, there is that giddiness - thinking about a product, doing the research, locating it and finally the purchase. Yes, in my logical mind, when thinking about it, it's guilt that I feel.
Guilt for supporting an unsustainable economy.
Guilt for purchasing something from a retail store that dehumanizes the consumer. Isles of strategically placed items. Being herded down a chute - like cattle to the slaughter - towards a cashier. Then, the walk of shame - where someone looks at your receipt before being able to exit - giving you the eye to see if you're stealing... The experience always gives me the creeps.
Guilt for not giving the money to a cause or to the poor or even just saving it.
There shouldn't be any guilt for spending money earned through labour - but it's an internal struggle I can't rationalize because the act supports The Man - and The Man always is looking for a way to take you to the cleaners and put your ass in an endless spin-cycle of want (not need) for bread and circus.

Kafkaesque - look it up.

I walk through this hallway several times a day. Sometimes it feels just like it looks.

The "I" in IT dues not stand for "intelligent"...

- Slowly crumbling vintage 70's technology.
I love the sound of an HP3000 and the quaintness of COBOL just as much as the next historian, but at some point, passing $17 million a year through it gets a little hard.
- "Senior programmers" with no interest in programing.
Why does that report print an extra blank page? He doesn't know and doesn't give a damn - and mind you, this is one of the few programs based on new technology that a 16 year old would eat up in 48 hours and consider a challenge to do right.
- Accountability? Please...
Don't even think that three months in IT time equals anything close to what we're used to in our dimension... Somehow IT's found a way not only to give one unmet deadline after another (and blame the failures on unseen forces beyond anyone's control), but to stretch out time to at least twice or thrice it's quantitative measure in human terms. When a project is not completed - or even worse, just done enough to be twice as cumbersome to use as what was in place before - the MO is to move on to another project and give it the same treatment. There's always plenty of saps in the building with work to impede.
- "What the hell do you need that for!?!"
This mantra reverberates in ones mind whenever some sort of application is needed. In the IT Universe the user doesn't know what's needed to do a job. Anything asked for is, in their minds, asked for as to inconvenience the IT Squires from doing what they do best (see my point above) - tending their gardens of daisies waiting for the weather to turn ever more favourable.
This alone - if only it were all that lies beneath the surface of IT - would make Kafka proud. Machines with enough complexity to have the potential for infinite combinations of incompetent human interactions.
It seems that the natural order of things in our IT Department is something akin to the best of Soviet style bureaucracy. An endless spiral of incompetence, anxiety, passive aggression and eunuch bravado. The whole vibe is like some kind of virus that turns the stout of heart into piddling clock watchers.
It's despicable and nauseating. I wonder if any of them have read Kafka?

Sound words of advice indeed!
- Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable. -Franz Kafka

Pizza Crust?

Kevin finds a new religion...