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83

Charlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”

#83. I’m not impressed by presentation, window dressing, or personal titles.

Look, if I’m eating, I want food. As long as it’s fresh, and prepared properly, I really don’t give a rat’s ass how it looks. Slop it on the plate with a ladle, for all I care, and smoosh it down, and plop it in front of me. It really doesn’t matter. I’m all about the taste. Maybe the smell, and in certain cases, the feel. But the looks? Couldn’t care less.

And while I’m on the subject, I don’t really want to pay an extra ten bucks for you to drizzle olive oil around it ‘festively’ and toss flowers carved out of radishes on the plate next to it. If I’m not gonna be eating it, then keep it the hell away from my plate. I may not be paying a lot of attention while I’m stuffing my gob, and might accidently grab a parsley sprig or lemon rind, thinking it’s a tasty bit of chicken or broccoli, and actually ingest it. Ew! So make it easy for me, and just give me the food I ordered. Leave the garden scraps in the kitchen. Thank you.

Next topic: look, just show me what you’re selling, all right? Please. If you’re peddling clothes, just put the clothes in the window of your store and leave it at that. You can have mannequins; I can see how they provide a service. They allow me to see how the clothes might look when actually in service. I’ve got no beef with that. But there’s ne need to twist and contort said dummies into all sorts of positions, creating life-sized dioramas of people playing tennis, and dancing, and spanking each other on the ass. Really, it’s not necessary. If I’m planning on engaging in those sorts of activities, I’ll want to know more about the garment than how it looks in a still shot of a serve or a pirouette. (And incidentally, if I’m ever at the point where a woman and I are spanking each other, I’m truly not going to be thinking about how my cardigan looks. Bank on it.)

While you’re there at the display reverting your ‘action figures’ to more suitable poses, do you think you could also lose the props? The giftwrapped boxes full of nothing, and the cardboard faux televisions, and crepe paper moons and all of that? Could you just shitcan all of that, pretty please? If you’re selling clothes, I want to see clothes. If it’s office furniture, then show me desks and chairs and those lamps with the funny green shades. Don’t try and use smoke and mirrors and glitzy crap to try to distract me from your high prices and shoddily-made merchandise. It’s not working, and it’s really cheesing me off.

Finally, I don’t give a damn if you’re an ‘executive’. You can be a president, or chairman, or board member, whatever — I’m not impressed. My last company had more VPs than spaces in the parking lot. Similarly, you won’t get special treatment from me for being a mayor, or Senator, or a ‘Chief’ of anything. I didn’t vote for you, and your title doesn’t earn you my respect. Nor should it earn you anyone else’s. You have to earn that. A few people who are accustomed to preferential treatment understand that. Vanishingly few, but they do exist. The majority of people with corner offices or friends in high places seem to be assholes, however. They get used to the fawning and deference and toadying, and come to expect it. I say, fuck that. And if that’s their attitude, then I say fuck them, too.

Look, there’s nothing wrong with climbing up the ladder. There’s no crime or harm done in accepting lofty positions, assuming that you’ve earned your new perch on the basis of your merits. (As is too often not the case.) But the title says nothing about you, in my book. Before we meet, I have no idea whether you’ve earned your way to your post by the sweat of your brow, or by the cash in your wallet, or the clout of your family, or time spent on your back. And frankly, I don’t care, because the title is fluff. Inconsequential.

My concern is going to be with the sort of man or woman that you are. Are you worthy of respect? Can you earn it? Can I trust you, and will you listen when I talk, and who’s side are you on, anyway? Will you be there when it counts, and if you are, what will you do? Are you part of the solution, or part of the problem? Do you do unto others, and do as you say, and do that voodoo that you do so well? (Okay, I’m losing it a little. Back to the rant now.)

In short, are you the kind of person I would be proud to know, most of the time? Hell, I’m not always proud to know myself, but I put in the effort. Will you? And even better, will you try to be the kind of person that you’re proud to know, and to hell with what I think, and if we agree on important principles, then fine. That’s the kind of person I can respect — one who lives, as consistently as possible, in accordance with his or her values. There’s a logic and purity in that that I can understand and admire. Of course, if I don’t agree with those values, then not everything’s going to be peachy. I may argue with you, or even shake my head and walk away. I may not care to spend time with you. I may not even like you. But I’ll have some level of respect for you, so long as you’re sincere and true to your beliefs. (And, you know, not a nutbag. There are some very sincere, very crazy people out there. I have to make exceptions for those, or I’d be respecting some insane mother fuckers, let me tell you. Oh, and who’s to say who’s crazy, you might ask? Well, me. This is my respect we’re talkin’ about here, so no one but me is gonna decide who gets it. Shouldn’t it always work that way?)

Anyway, you can’t meet my criteria for respect in an hour, or a day, or even a week. I’m won’t know whether I’d want to go to bat for you, or war with you, for quite some time. And I expect you to make the same careful consideration about me, whether my title is far loftier or well beneath yours. And regardless of my presentation or ‘window dressing’. I’ll do my best to gloss over your suit and your fancy car, if you’ll try to look past my shorts and rugby and sneakers ensemble. Start me out with a certain level of respect, and I’ll do the same for you. Where we go from there is up to us both. We’ll just have to see how it goes.

82

Charlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”

#82. I never took any computer or typing classes in school. So, naturally, now I’m a software engineer.

This is pretty much the way my life works. I come up with a plan, and think it through, and set off to accomplish something. I work, and work, and work, and make some progress, and then — guh! Sonething happens to screw it all up, and I wash onto some uncharted shore, with just my loincloth and a packet of beef jerky, and I have to make the best of it. And eventually, it works out, but all that planning shit goes right out the window. You’d think I’d have learned by now.

Anyway, back in high school I had the option of taking typing. Not a lot of guys signed up for it, but a few did. It was pretty damned easy, I guess, when you think about it. Hell, I played video games — I could have aced through something that required only a little bit of finger dexterity. But I laughed at ‘Typing 101’. Nay, I scoffed. I may have even guffawed, just a little.

I wanted nothing to do with typing, or keyboards, or computers. Oh, sure, I’d occasionally have to type a letter, or a college application, and then I’d hunt and peck my way through it, mumbling and cursing under my breath. And once I finished whatever I was writing, I’d pack the typewriter away and be happy that I wouldn’t have to see it again for another few weeks or months.

Then, I got into college. (I guess that smudged application essay with all the x’ed out mistakes and White-out was just fine after all, huh, Mom? Nyah nyah.) And I was greeted by a whole new world of possibility — more typing, and computer studies, and computer science, and programming. All these doors had opened to me. So I ran right over and slammed the damned things shut, one after the other. Nope, nope, nope, and nope. I was going to be a scientist, dammit. I might use a computer to build a spreadsheet, or — if I had to — type up some results. But learn to type, or — gasp! — program? Nuh uh. Not gonna happen.

Remember, this was back in the early ’90’s. (Yes, that’s nineteen nineties, smartass. I’m not that fucking old. Dickhead.) But the internet was in it’s infancy, and there really wasn’t a ‘web’ to speak of. Not to mention that there was an awful lot of beer to be drinking, and sports to be playing, and TV to be watching. How the hell many academic interests did I really have time for? I’m just one man, fer Chrissakes.

So, I made it through college without succumbing to the enticements of the keyboard. I went to grad school, in a far-off city, while my then-girlfriend / now-wife stayed behind to finish up. I didn’t know many people, or have a hell of a lot to do. I learned about email, and discovered the web. Suddenly, I spent a lot of time in front of a computer screen. I was still hunt-and-pecking along, using two fingers (and a thumb, when I was really feeling racy) and taking ten minutes to write a damned sentence. (Think I could have written this blog back then? Nah. I’d have had to give up breathing just to find the time.)

It was about that time that a friend of mine from high school wrote me and changed my career path. He was transcribing public-domain texts into HTML for Project Gutenberg, or some offshoot thereof. I had a lot of time on my hands; how’d I like to help out? So I looked at his list of texts to convert, picked out a Sherlock Holmes story, and went to work.

There were a lot of other stops along my path, of course. I didn’t leave grad school to volunteer fell-time for Project Gutenburg, of course. (Though the money would have been just about as good.) I helped to set up a web site on campus, and loaded content onto it. I took on some freelance projects. I did some more work with my friend, this time for cash and under the the umbrella of his one-man startup company. I picked up skills, and started typing with all my fingers, not just the indexes.

Actually, though the experience above was key to my becoming a software engineer (the web site I helped with turned into my first programming job), it probably wasn’t the main factor that improved my typing skills. No, for that, I can thank another enormous time-sucking activity that I got into during graduate school: MUDding.

If you’re not familiar with MUDs (and MUSHes, and MOOs, etc.), I think I can explain them pretty easily. They’re text-only virtual ‘worlds’, where people hang out and chat and kill stuff and buy shit and go on quests and pretend they’re warriors or soldiers or aliens, or whatever. Okay, mainly, they go off in private areas and pretend they’re having sex with each other. But that’s not the point, dammit. The point is that they’re online escapes, where bored kids like me could slay dragons and pilot mechs and earn points and rise up through the ranks of the other dingleberries playing at the time, and make a few friends in the process. And they were actually kinda fun, at the time — try to imagine Ultima Online, if Infocom were in charge of it. All text, so all typing. Nothing but typing. Typing to move, typing to talk, typing to eat, typing to sit down and rest, typing to go to sleep in the damned game, for the love of Christmas! And I played a lot. For a couple of years there, I had little better to do in my free time. (Oh, all right, fine. There were a thousand better things I probably could have done. But I didn’t do them, all right? I did this. What the hell can I tell you? I’m a moron.)

And now, ten years or so later, here I am. I’ve got eight years of honest-to-goodness programming under my belt. I type at work (when I have work, that is), I type at home, and I type in my free time. I probably type in my sleep. I’ve been typing for so long, and so often, that I can finally (as of about five years ago) type without looking. I can listen to music while I’m typing. (Look! I’m doing it right now! Look! Look!) I can talk while I type; I can even look over my shoulder at something else while I’m typing, with relatively few issues. Here — let’s try it. I’ll look out the window and type something, and then just leave whatever I produce right here.

DSwe fse;w sev cfs3j0k bwe3 stha sv09 shj3;1.

See? Wasn’t that… um, oh. Hmmm. Look at that. Damn, I’m a doofus. Guess it’s back to school time for me. Bitches.

All right, I’m yankin’ your chain. Lemme try it for real, just for my own curiosity:

Sge sekls sea shgells by the sea shore.

Okay, so that’s only marginally better. Dammit. So if I’m ever in a horrible disfiguring accident, and my neck is permanently twisted so that I’m looking over my right shoulder, I won’t be able to type any more. I guess I’ll just have to keep that in mind. That’s just one more horrible disfiguring accident I have to try to avoid, now. The list is getting pretty long. I should probably be writing this shit down somewhere…

81

Charlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”

#81. I joined a fraternity in college.

Now, before you get the picture of me as the quintessential frat boy jock — which I’m fairly certain would be impossible if you’ve actually read any of my stuff here — let me explain.

I went to school in Kentucky, at a small liberal arts school in a tiny town in the middle of Central Fucking Nowhere. Well, a little south of CFN, actually. So technically, it was South-Central Fucking Nowhere. You know, for you geography types out there. Also, to ice this particular cake, the county housing the school was ‘dry’. If you’re unfamiliar with dry counties, the way they work is this:

First, some asshole gets up at a county meeting and says something like:

‘Hey, I don’t drink, and I think it’s evil and God doesn’t like it and it’s a sin or something. I think we should outlaw selling alcohol in the whole county. And anyone who disagrees is going straight to Hell!‘

Now, of course, in most places, the countyfolk would pat the Jesus freak on the head and murmur quietly, and then the council members, or selectpeople, or whoever the hell is running the show, would get on with the business of getting a stop sign for Main Street, or declaring August 12th to be ‘<insert local hero’s name who saved little Timmy from the well> Day’, or whatever. And the Holy Roller type who caused all the fuss would stamp their little feet and storm out of the meeting in a huff.

That’s how it’s supposed to work. However, in a few isolated spots, way back when, just a few counties got just enough like-minded liquor-bashers together and not only took a vote on the issue — they actually passed a frickin’ law outlawing the sale of alcohol! Bastards!

So, my college was smack in the middle of one of these backwards-ass God-fearing no-drinking hellholes. (Which the school does not advertise in the brochure, thank you very fucking little…) All of which is to say, there was precious little for me and my nine hundred or so school chums to do at this place when classes were out. Or when we were skipping classes, for that matter, or blowing off a Wednesday morning chemistry lab.

But, of course, there was one group on campus who always had alcohol, and parties, and people to sit around and play cards and watch TV with on Wednesday mornings. The Greeks — fraternities and sororities. So whereas most schools — of decent size, in real towns, and with readily-available alcohol — might have ten to twenty percent of the student body living la vida Greeka, at our place, it was more like eighty percent, or higher. There was just no other convenient way for burgeoning layabout slackers and apprentice alcoholics to practice their craft. So, like most of the other sheep in my herd, I signed up.

And in retrospect, I have rather mixed feelings about the decision. I like to think I was a little less ‘clique-y’ than most of my ‘brothers’, and so I had some pretty good friends in other houses, and several ‘independents’. Also, as it turned out, quite a few of the guys I was now stuck living with were unmitigated assholes. (Gee, who’d have thought that? You get thirty men together in a three-story house, and some are going to be dickheads? I can almost hear your collective *gasp*.)

Anyway, by my junior year, I really wasn’t enjoying it much anymore. We had Sunday evening meetings, which my like-minded roommate and I would attend just until the Simpsons came on. (Or Herman’s Head, if we could get away that quickly. If we missed meetings altogether, it cost us extra dues, so we at least showed up for roll call.) I went to the parties, and drank the beer, but the novelty was gone, and in the end, I disliked more guys around there than I liked.

On the other hand, the first two years were pretty okay. Sure, there were some assholes then, too, but especially as a wide-eyed freshman, it was pretty cool to belong to something for a while. I don’t make friends terribly quickly, so it was nice to have something in common with a few dozen other people right away. It might have helped my early-college love life if some of them had been chicks, but still, it was probably more of a confidence booster than I normally give it credit for. If only we could have found a way not to boost the assholes’ confidence while we were at it…

So, anyway, I don’t mention the fraternity thing very often. It ended up leaving a bit of a bad taste in my mouth, I’m afraid, and not just from the week-old stockpiled skunky beer that we served at the parties. By the time I greduated, I’d had more than enough of the fraternity life, and was ready to get to grad school. Where, um, I went to class, drank beer, hung out with another grad student who lived in my apartment building, and blew off Wednesday mornings. Ah, but I didn’t have to pay dues for the privilege of doing all that. Oh, and we had a bar right on the corner of our block. So, as you can see, it was way better!

80

Charlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”

#80. I have, however, seen several severed limbs and internal organs.

I used to work in the pathology department at a large teaching hospital. Now, in case you’re not familiar with what a pathology department might do, I’ll explain:

The ‘path docs’ get whatever tissue or sample that comes out of a person during a biopsy or surgery, and they study it. It’s their job to know what ‘normal’ looks like, versus ‘horribly, horribly wrong’, for whatever type of human meat or juice they’re looking at. They’re like the Mr. Blackwells of the disease world.

Most of the stuff that comes through the pathology lab is pretty small, of course. The surgeons might take off a wart, or dig out a cyst or a small tumor, or take out an appendix. All of these things first go into the ‘gross room’ — and no, I’m not making this up. As appropriate as the name sounds to those of us not used to looking at people’s insides, the ‘gross’ in ‘gross room’ refers to the relative size of the specimen, not the gag-me-with-a-stethoscope factor. Most samples that come in are ‘gross’, and then they’re processed and sliced and made into microscope slides, or ‘microscopic samples’. (Or sandwiches, depending on what the cafeteria’s serving that day.)

Anywho, as I said, most of the gross room material is pretty small. It sits there in Petri dishes until someone takes a picture of it for the records, and then it gets processed. But sometimes, a more radical procedure’s been performed on the patient, and you end up with a kidney. Or a liver. Or a leg, from the thigh down. This is when ‘gross room’ lives up to its name.

So, I was an intranet programmer at the hospital I was at. But the office I worked in was down the hall from the gross room. And, of course, as I was walking by each day, I just had to look in, despite my already queasy stomach that I’d just shoved cafeteria slop into. Most days, I wouldn’t see much of anything at all. Either the samples were too small to spy from the doorway, or it was a slow day. Other days… well, there’s some nasty business that goes on in the operating rooms, folks. I’ve seen dismembered hands — with and without arms, feet, single toes, livers, kidneys, all manner of other unidentifiable (at least by me) organs, and several things that looked a lot like ground beef. I didn’t ask. There was also a lung or two, or at least large chunks of something that used to be a lung. Believe me, if I smoked at that point, I’d have never smoked again. (On the other hand, healthy lung sitting on the table in a metal tray isn’t really that much prettier, so maybe I was overreacting a bit.)

I even got to know a couple of the guys that worked in the gross room, so I could weasel my way in for a good look, or a detailed explanation, if the sample was really weird. I’d get to hear about how the arm got mangled in some machinery, or how a liver should be that color, but never this color, so that’s why the guy needed a transplant. So I learned a little along with the gore, and even got used to seeing most things that showed up there. Still, I always did a double-take when I peeked in and saw a hand or an arm lying on the table. I dunno — maybe it’s a horror movie thing, or maybe I watched the Addams Family too much when I was a kid. But I always wondered whether, if I just stood there long enough, the thing would start twitching and moving around. Luckily, though, it never did. Which was good — I was just barely able to keep the cafeteria food down as it was.

79

Charlie’s “100 Things Posts About Me”

#79. I have never been to a funeral, nor seen a dead person.

To be fair, I’ve been very close to both. I was just a couple of years old when my dad’s father died, and still young

enough when my grandmother died to beg out of seeing her in the casket. I did get dressed up, and I did go to the mortuary, but I stayed in the car and parking lot. I never made it inside; I had enough nightmares already at that age about Frankenstein and killer bees without adding dead people to the list. Have I mentioned that I was easily spooked as a child?

Anyway, I came close to death one other time. (Well, only once if you don’t count all the times my parents say that I almost gave them a heart attack. But that’s bullshit. Now you know where I get my easily-spookedness from.) But the one time I really brushed past Death was in Pittsburgh. My buddy and I were walking out of a bar. Okay, okay, we were stumbling out of a bar, and then only because it was closing. Happy now?

In any case, as we hit the street, we heard two loud noises. *pop* *pop* We didn’t think much of it at the time — we were right on Pitt’s campus, so we’d learned to tune out screams and booms and shrieks after a while. And loud pops, too, apparently. But as we reached the end of the block on our way home, we saw a guy huddled on the sidewalk. By that time — given the hubbub that was swelling around us — we had figured out that what we heard might have been gunshots. We figured the guy in front of us was just crouching behind a car, in case there was more action.

When we got closer, though, we realized that he wasn’t crouched, so much as slumped awkwardly against the car. Oh, and that we was resting in a pool of blood. Yes, that was an important clue, certainly. The cops got there as we walked past, and hurried us along. The ambulance arrived a couple of minutes later, and the EMTs started working on the guy as we watched. So it seems he wasn’t quite dead. Which was good, of course. For one thing, I really liked that bar. (Yeah, yeah, plus the guy didn’t die. Hey, for all I know, he deserved it.)

Anyway, I can’t really comment on his survival, becuase we didn’t stick around long enough to see what happened. Oh, my friend wanted to. He’d have taken Polaroids if he’d had a camera. Me, I’m not really the ‘morbidly curious’ type.

(I’m thinking one day of trying out ‘morbidly obese’, or ‘morbidly droll’, on a Vincent Price kick, but ‘morbidly curious’? Nah. Too creepy.)

So we stayed for a couple of minutes and milled around with the crowd. I remember leaving just around the time this enormous black guy said,

‘Oh, a black dude got shot, huh? I bet it was a cop that did it. A white cop! Man, I oughta make somebody pay for what they’ve done. I’m gonna kick me some honky ass!‘

Not that he had anything to do with us leaving. Of course not. Just pure coincidence. It’s funny what sticks in your mind as you grab your friend my the shirt collar and run screaming away from a possible homocide scene. Really. You’d be surprised.