Interlude (Break Room)

Me (Lead Developer), HR lady (HR)

Enter stage right ME

Me > "Oh hey HR lady, how was your vacation?"

HR lady > "Well, we didn't end up taking the kids to Disneyland after all."

Me > "What? Why not? Come on, I have to hear this!"

HR lady > "Long story short my husband and I are getting a divorce."

Me > "Oh shi-"

iOS is rotting my soul.

I've been a user of iPhone for 6 years now. For the first couple years, I wasnt really mindful of software I use, or I guess I didnt really care. As long as it did the bare minimum, I.e. bank app, call, text, browse, watch youtube vids, I didnt really care. However, in the last couple years, ive become very interested in tech and have worked on small developer projects, spent a lot of time coding in my free time, found really inspiring software and apps on my regular computer that just blow my mind on how advanced they are, and how I, some dumb guy with internet access, can just download it on my PC and use it.

This led me into a kind of software honeymoon phase, where I created a shiny new Github account and started exploring what other cool tools are just out there, available to me for free. My software honeymoon was spent on the beaches and resorts of the open-source software ecosystem. Exploring the gem-bearing caves and beautiful forests of anything from free open-source OCR programs(I needed it to convert my dads manuscript from scanned PDF .jpeg's to actual UTF8 text) to open-source RGB lighting/keymapping software to escape the memory-and-CPU-hungry(and most likely advertising-ID-interested) proprietary software that comes with the brand of mouse/keyboard/controller/etc.

It was like I was a kid exploring Disneyland for the first time or something. But then... then... I got off my computer. Picked up my phone to check notifications. Ew, tinder is blowing up notification center with marketing shit. I go to settings. Notification settings. Tinder's at the bottom so I just want to use a search bar instead of scrolling. There's no search bar. Minor inconvenience. Dark mode isnt dark enough for me. I guess thats just too damn bad, because for the next two hours, I'll have to figure it out by messing with accessibility settings. Time for bed, and I'm just getting plum tired of having to turn on my alarms every night for work the next morning. So I used the 'Automations' app to do it for me. For the next two weeks, at the time specified, 'There was an error running your automation' until I just delete the automation. Browsing through the FaceID settings, I see 'Attention Aware Features'. Cool, maybe now my phone won't automatically dim the screen when im in the middle of reading notifications on my lock screen. Haha, nope still does it. After turning on my alarms, I go to sleep. I wake up an hour late for work because those handy 'Attention Aware Features' silenced my alarm immediately because I fell asleep watching a youtube video.

I could go on and on. Its actually making me feel depressed typing this on my phone, fighting with Apple's primitive autocorrect and annoying implementation of Swype to type.

When the advertisement team makes a demo on the production tools.

I just don't get it. I've done web stuff for 20 years, but these days I'm expected to learn god knows how many command line tools just to stay relevant in the field. I fear the day I have to leave this crummy company making small websites, I just don't have what it takes to learn all that shit and get a job elsewhere.

Webpack, NodeJS, Angular... when I look at their docs I just get lost in all the jargon and I think to myself: I would rather stock shelves like a chum then learn all this goddamn shit over and over and over, my generation can't afford shit anyway so there is no point in doing the absolute minimum to survive.

Meanwhile the recruiters on LinkedIn all talk like the jobs they have are like a visit to fucking Disneyland compared to the soulless mindfucking grind a job entails. GAHHHH!