I recently had the problem with my Galaxy S8 that my camera won't focus. Searched for solution. Found one which said: "Just hit the side of your phone when the camera is on."
Problem fixed, camera focuses again.
I like this kind of problem fixing.

A room full of mostly old male stressed out engineers sat in chairs, and the presenter said:

"So who watched Judging Amy last night?"

The presenter went on to express her surprise that nobody in the room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.... and wasn't going to drop the topic.

The meeting, if it ever had any, now had no chance of going anywhere good.

By the end of the meeting someone would walk out and "retire" shortly there after, and it certainly wasn't going to be the presenter....

Backstory:

The company built on the IBM model of sell pricey custom hardware (granted it worked really well) and sell expensive support contracts wasn't doing as well as it had hoped. Granted it was still doing better than most of its neighboring companies, but it was clear that with the .com bust the days of catered lunches every day were over.

The company had grown fat and everyone knew that while the company had a good enough product(s) to survive, there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone to survive.

In the midst of this an HR department that took up nearly 20% of the office space at HQ felt it needed to justify its existence / expenses.

They decided to do this in the same way they always had, by taking funding from other departments, this time not by simply demanding more direct budgets for themselves.... they decided to impose mandatory 'training' on other departments ... that they would then bill for this training.

When HR got wind that there were some stressed out engineers the solution was, as it always is for HR.... to do more HR stuff:

They decided to take these time starved engineers away from their jobs, and put them in a room with HR for 4 days. Meanwhile the engineer's tasks, deadlines and etc remained the same.

Support got roped into it too, and that's how I ended up there.

It would be difficult to describe the chasm between HR and everyone else at that company. This was an HR department that when they didn't have enough cubes (because of constant remodeling in the HR area under the guise of privacy) sat their extra HR employees next to engineering and were 'upset' that the engineers 'weren't very friendly and all they did was work'.

At one point a meeting to discuss this point of contention was called off for some made up reason or another by someone with a clue.

So there we all sat, our deadlines kept ticking away and this HR team (3 people) stood at the front of the room and were perplexed that none of these mostly older males in this room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.

From there the presentation was chaos, because almost the entire thing was based on your knowledge of what happened to poor stressed out Amy ... or something like that.

We were peppered with HR tales of being stressed out and taking a long lunch and feeling better, and this magical thing where the poor HR person went and had a good cry with her boss and her boss magically took more off her plate (a brutal story where the poor HR person was almost moved to tears again).

The lack of apparent sympathy (really nobody said much at all) and lack of seeming understanding from the crowd of engineers that all they should do is take a long lunch, or tell their boss to solve their problems ... seemed to bother the HR folks. They were on edge.

So then they finally asked "What are your stressers?" And they picked the worst possible person they could to ask, Ted.

Ted was old, he prickly, he was the only one who understood the worst ass hell of assembly that had been left behind.

Ted made a mistake, he was honest with folks who couldn't possibly understand what he was saying. "This mandatory class is stressing me out. I have work to do and less time because of this class."

The exchange that followed was kinda horrible and I recall sitting behind Ted trying to be as small as possible as to not be called on. Exactly what everyone said almost doesn't matter.

A pedantic debate between Ted and the HR staff about "mandatory" and "required" followed. I will just sum it up that they were both in the wrong for how they behaved for a good 20 minutes...

Ted walked out, and would later 'retire' that week.

Ted had a history and was no saint. I suspect an email campaign by various folks who recounted the events that day spared ted the 'fired' status and he walked with what eventually would become the severance package status quo.

HR never again held another 'training', most of them would all finally face the axe a few months later after the CEO finally decided that 'customer facing, and product producing' headcount had been reduced enough ... and it was other internal staff's time for that.

The result of the meeting was one less engineer, and everyone else had 4 days less of work done...

Let's see...
It made me anti social. It got me thinking in a very logical way, I can't connect with people.
I'd spend a lot of time (and still do) coding that I didn't make many friends and made me have social anxiety.

Nobody respects what I do or even understand it.

The one girl I would've happily fucking died in the most brutal way for with a smile on my face, wasn't interested at all... I was a geek to her and my lifestyle wasn't compatible with hers.... I wasn't good enough...

I am very self aware of my shortcomings and working towards that... But generally, I'm too fucking late to dating and all that.

Programming put me in a disadvantage in dating and social life.

Oh wow, so many memorable co-workers, though typically not in a positive way. I guess the most memorable was this project manager who got his job solely through nepotism. He was a fucking moron, putting it lightly. He would rattle off buzzwords and jargon that he had randomly picked up in a completely nonsensical way, which made him sound even more ridiculous. He didn't seem to notice our blank stares.

Anyway, since he loved to show everyone just how awesome he was, he had to have the latest and greatest laptop. He had some top-of-the-line model which cost an insane amount of cash back in the day, but of course he got bored of it when something better came out six months later. So he decided to sell his old laptop.

Now, this was his personal laptop he was selling but we were about three months away from launching a top-secret project which had a seven figure budget and a lot riding on it. So what did this absolute goose do? He sold his laptop unformatted with a metric shit ton of confidential files and documents on it. As fate would have it... he sold it to someone who just so happened to work for a competing company.

Cut to about two and a half months later, around two weeks before the launch of this massive project, our competition comes out with something incredibly similar and beat us to market. Aghast, senior management then found out that they had obtained a treasure trove of confidential information from this numpty's laptop, handed to them on a silver platter.

The following Monday, with a sombre mood in the office, this guy cheerfully comes in through the door and is immediately yanked into the boardroom by management. What followed was around thirty minutes of brutal, relentless, non-stop shouting, table- banging and obscenities. When it finally stopped, the door quietly opened, this guy walks out as white as a sheet, turns towards the exit and left the building.

We never saw him again.

Easy.

I just worked a shitty manual labor job from 5am - 4pm Mon - Friday while going to night school. I told myself if I didn’t succeed in programming I would be stuck at that dead end job which would eventually lead to my own suicide. I kind of put myself in a position where getting good at coding was my only way out of a shitty/brutal lifestyle. It worked, as I now work from home and make twice as much money. It’s a funny thing to think about sometimes, two years ago I had to have knee surgery due to the physical strain of my former job job, and nowadays I sometimes get a neck cramp from not sitting up straight.

Moral of the story, sometimes growth can only happen when we put ourselves in uncomfortable situations.

Left and right unite! I've spoken with a boomer today about politics and got triggered more about politics than ever before. I thought that I didn't care anymore. We have to do something about the boomer! That privileged by TWO parents raised wealthy boomer said that everything is alright. Dude, my generation is raised bad because two parents worked and the zoomer literally has no houses left to rent OR buy anymore and there are no plans building new ones at all. It's the biggest fuck you ever. If I were a zoomer I would've been blind from anger. Maybe that's why people die, their attitude makes us extinct at a certain point. He said that they don't deserve a house with their 24h working attitude. That's debatable but I think the zoomer is right, we work too much. When I had a family for a while I realized that. It's only alright to work full time if you're single and maybe in a relationship, but two parents nearly full time is too much. Not sure if the zoomer understand they but only wants to game even more but that's not the point. The work less attitude is a good thing, even I as workaholic agrees to that. I'm only workaholic because I don't have a life. I just realized that if you have a life, the amount we work is crazy. I really couldn't give the attention I wanted to the kiddo and partner.

So again, left and right, we're being distracted! Unite and GET THEM!

If the zoomer still believed in voting, they would've been extinct by now.

We had sketches ik the Netherlands "Political party against the citizen. Vote for us and fuck you!". I swear to God, boomers would vote that if it existed under the idea of "Lives so good, it can be less, it's ok". He said before or after mentioning his two cars, moped, drone and bought house with quite a tummy. Caring about the climate but not about the children of tomorrow. The climate doesn't matter much anymore if people don't take kids anymore because it's too expensive, no place to live and not enough time to raise them. Also, kidding, they don't care about climate either. Totally blinded by the 70 years of perfect life.

I don't complain about life, but saying we're doing fine as a boomer, stfu! The milennials do also not have that much to complain, but the sooner, hell yes they have. Holy f. Why would you work at all if you can't get a place to live. Maybe this is the way we extinct. Egoism.

My god. He was my example 😕 The former computer expert of the family before I got born and dominated him to the bone 😕 It was brutal 😕 He had no chance 😕 KARMA BITCH 😁

Absolutely brutal if you don't have 60% throughout ur academics and/or not getting campus selection. (Indian here).

The only way for me to get a job to begin with was to take a massive hit to my salary expectations.

I have only worked for service based companies and it really depends on what kinda colleagues you end up working with.

Now I feel like there are too many options to choose from whether it's only backend/frontend or both.

Going through my lore notes. And I'm playing a game with myself, so to speak: it's called "is this metal enough?", but with a side of quasi-metaphysical arcane technobabble plus mass wallmelting and nightmarishly psychedelic confusion.

For example... why are shadow gates a thing? Well, because of the undoing of time caused a multiplicity of parallel cycles that will, inevitably, slowly collapse upon themselves through a sequence of irreducible asynchronicities. But of course!

Now, as for the metal part, that's the undoing of time. You see, the Somberlain attempted to cast the most sinful signa in order to restore the desolate mortal realm as it stood on the brink of a world-ending cataclysm, this was after a decade of brutal, reckless litechnical abuse during the civil war fought amongst the first undecimvirate...

Now, he intended to roll back time itself as a way to avoid the cataclysm and restore life to the mortal realm, but the cost was immense: time was not rolled back, but rather __forcefully__ torn apart; it was effectively shredded, shattered, and undone.

Countless lives were lost as nearly six hundred years of Being were __erased__ in an instant, the most heinous large-scale blood sacrifice in history, spanning the entirety of the lower fragment of reality. I mean is this too dark, I'm not sure. How about I clarify: he didn't just snuff out their lives, no, they CEASED TO EXIST. THEY NEVER EXISTED. GONE. UNBECOMED INTO A TRUE IMMEMORIAL. OVER FIVE CENTURIES OF EVERY CONSCIOUS MOMENT ON EARTH DEVOURED TO FUEL HIS DARK MAGIC.

That's gotta have consequences, right? Well, obviously you'll get temporal distortions after that shit, I mean duh...

But wait, I'm lost, you say the undecimvirate deified themselves but were cast down after the whole superman spinning the earth backwards thing went full bathory and erased entire centuries from the fabric of the cosmos, so they were turned into the eleven thrones to guard over the eleven circles of the night eternal... but how is that linked to natural occurrences of teleportation?

First off, because *natural* teleportation is distinct from *artificial* teleportation. Failed experiments with (and miscasts of) mass transference of living matter are one of the leading causes of death among litarchs. It is not an instant transmission, just very, very quick, moreso than a mortal mind can process, that's why the "dilate" and "delay" sigils are added, so as to make the journey seem slowed down to the perceptions of whomever is teletransported, this is meant to ensure their brains don't __melt__ from the experience.

Similar reason as to why you have to give the _approximate_ total weight to carry when inscribing the ritual circle, you *do* know that it is __highly__ recommended to use accurate weighing scales to approximate this quantity, as under or overestimating it can lead to _FATAL_ consequences... do you not?

No, *natural* occurrences of teleportation do not have these constraints for two reasons: one, because both ends of the gateway are _fixed_ in both time and space due to the logic-defying occurrence of a future event being undeniably the cause of the past it revisited. Put on this toga. They are inextricably linked through the metaphorical and *literal* corpse of infinite collapsed timelines, which generates a conduit through the first circle of the night eternal, which *is* the domain of both forgetfulness and horror immemorial.

Second, the final layer on our stratified reality, that is, the final circle before the INVIOLABLE divine veil, wraps around the night eternal, which is why we call it "the shell". Or "Crisalida" if you dig Luis Alberto. It is a realm entirely outside of time, which is why the patriarchs can grant immortality, you see. By proximity to this sacred shell of existence, the timeline-corpse-conduit that links both ends of a shadow gate is, for all intents and purposes, approaching total chronostasis, therefore making it so bypassing physical space in a few seconds doesn't give you permanent loss of the sense of self as your brain turns into liquified jelly.

I don't remember what I was getting at and I don't care.