Sunday morning, and thus my weekend closes (with the exception of sleep, which will come soon) with a sixer of Bacardi Silver and 10mg of Ambien. It has not been a good weekend.
Friday I found out that Gnutella developer Gene Kan committed suicide. Gene is/was a friend-of-a-friend -- my girlfriend is friends with most of the Winamp/Nullsoft crew and used to date one of its members. Death, even when it's far away and happens to people I don't know, affects me as if it were something that happened to people I talk to every day. When death strikes this close to home, as it were, I don't end up feeling paticularly good about it. You know how some people say that $DEADPERSON was in a lot of pain, is probably in a happier place now, etc. Well, that doesn't really do much for me because I find myself unable to deal with the crushing feeling of never being able to talk to $DEADPERSON again, no matter what John Edward would have me believe. And so when a friend of my girlfriend dies suddenly, you're damn right I'm going to be feeling just as awful as my girlfriend is right now, and just as awful as those who were close to $DEADPERSON.
I also found out on Friday that my girlfriend and I had racked up approximately $1300 in cellphone charges. My company pays for my cellphone, and they assume that it should be mostly used for work issues, like waking someone up at 3:30AM when one of the Gig-E cards suddenly fails and needs to be replaced immediately, which is what I normally use my phone for -- to call and wake somebody up and get them on their way to the datacenter. However since I found myself with a conveniently free cellphone, I thought I could get away with spending 4,704 minutes since May on the phone, mostly during off-peak hours. The thing is, I'm mostly working during off-peak hours, or I should be. So I can't really use the off-peak excuse as any kind of leverage because I was supposed to be working and not talking on the phone for three hours at a whack. The punchline here is that I'm going to nearly double my workload. I'll shortly be going from working 45 hours a week to perhaps 70 hours a week, just to pay off that large phone bill I incurred on their phone. It's not that the work I do is hard, it's just that it's so boring and tedious. My work reminds me of a line from the film Hedwig & The Angry Inch:
The communists gave my mother a job, teaching sculpture to limbless children.
Teaching sculpture to limbless children is precisely what I do at my current job. The limbless children come to me, and I tell them things that they cannot possibly make any sense out of, so they keep coming back, begging me to dumb it down for them, all the while they're brandishing their retail-purchased copies of Microsoft FrontPage 2000 or Macromedia Dreamweaver, and then they bleat, on and on, I NEED A PHONE NUMBER THIS LIVE SUPPORT STUFF ISN'T HELPING ME BECAUSE I AM AN IGNORAMUS PLEASE LET ME TALK ON THE PHONE KTHXBI!!!!!11
So basically my increased workload will include approximately 40% more hand-holding/dumb-downing/mindless repetitions and a neverending supply of knock-kneed internet newbies wanting me to put them in their place.
I don't have the option to not do these things because I can barely pay most of my bills. All of them are at least 30 days overdue at this point, and if I don't switch to working many more hours than I already do, then I'll be Grade-A Fucked and I'll likely lose electrical power in my apartment (and, ergo, DSL/phone line, so not much to do with a powerless computer), and I'll lose my car, which has been on the verge of being repossessed for most of this year.
I wish society would evolve beyond the need for money, already. Like Star Trek.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard: The economics of the future are... somewhat different. You see, there is no money.
Lily: ...You mean you don't get paid?!
Picard: The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives...
(etc.)
So, now, with the Ambien kicking in and a tear in my eye, I write:
R.I.P
Gene Kan
1976-2002