Vegas odds
Sorry about the mini-blackout. I've recently constructed a new Frankenstein machine from parts of my old Dell and discarded parts from one of Kevin's demented projects. Anyway, my machine now is twice as fast as it was. Yay me! And thank you to Kevin.
However: there are work stories to talk about.
Yes, it's review time again, and the date of my humiliation has been set for tomorrow, Thursday, 10AM. I'm a betting man, so I'll put it this way:
Odds of trying to scare me straight, bloviate about how I'm not following the myriad protocols that waste testers' time, bring up the surfing I do sometimes, minimize my successes, feign concern while I get slightly combative and meekly bring up my hard work and willingness to go the extra mile, and ending up giving me a 3 (and no raise, even after 3 years) with the tacit assumption that I'm just lucky to have a job, so I should quit the whole bad attitude thing and suck it up to get a product out the door, so I can get ready for the next crisis that hits, and the crisis after that, but they need me, they need me because I know where things are, I know how to do things, and I know things it takes too long to document, and they know I know in all this sick whirlwind of paranoia:
2 to 1.
Odds of my being fired outright, in which it is asked whether I enjoy this stuff at all, and I respond with a near lie about how I've disliked it -- at times, mind you -- because even now I feel I'm set up to fail, how all of us are set up to fail, about how we've fit into this convenient narrative where all of us are simply disgruntled and nothing more, born disgruntled, cast out from the Garden of Eden in our disgruntled surliness, when it could all be so easy if we just did the work that was in front of us, the work that seems to multiply as the hoops we jump through seem to waste our time, the weekends gone, the hooky days we (or maybe just I) have just to know our loved ones again and replace the neurons and axons lost with worrying and obsessing, replace them with lying back in the sun in Half Moon Bay with a seafood lunch and 12-year-old humor about a place called Barbara's Fishtrap, but then this answer is too socialist-sounding, too angry, too complaining-whining-this-guy-can't-hack-it-"maybe he isn't a good fit for this company" kind of answer, and I'm let go since the Sneaky Manipulative VP has had designs on being an employment agency for his entire former company anyway:
8 to 1.
Odds of my getting a raise, since by some miracle the powers that be take a break from the private jokes, or the unfunny public jokes about work that reveal more about empty lives than anything else, the closed-door meetings where the workplace caste system is fully designed and sometimes enforced, the salad and yogurt lunches in brown bags, the staying late not out of a desire to see the company succeed, not out of a genuine love of the work, but to show everyone else that you're more hard core, since you have to show the upper castes that you're willing to give up more, to work hard and play hard in a vast striving that is automatic now, where you become part of the machine, but my part in all this is recognized, the three years there without raises and without occasional weekends atoned for, the incompetent, evil boss before atoned for, my piece of the greed, my guilt, my guilty recognition that many other people spend nights away in the orange office just as angry as me, just as alienated and just as slapped in the face when the CEO says that "the salary freeze has melted" to give himself and the boys the cover story they need:
10 to 1.
And, the ultimate Vegas rule: the house always wins.
(It's not as bad as that. But I need to get it down.)