Slang and Nomenclature

Hurt Feelings Report:  The appropriate form to use when dealing with butthurt individuals

butthurt; adj, \ˈbət-ˈhərt\
1.  To be in an inappropriately indignant state over a perceived personal insult or over something trivial and petty.

After being called out on his lies, Timmy was in an egregious state of butthurt.

Down the rabbit hole.

Not to be confused with the 80s band.

So some army dude out at the Patriot missile site called up Network Management and was like "Yo, man.  there's some beepin' comin' from the thang thang out there by the tower with all the wires from a black box.  Two air force guys came out earlier and replaced something in the thang thang and it's still beepin'."

The NETMAN guy, SrA Johnson (named changed to protect the person's identity), bewildered, was like "what's a thang thang?"  Eventually he figured out that it was the UPS that was beeping.  An UPS is basically a battery backup for electronic equipment and when the batteries run low it usually emits high pitched beeping that drives everyone in the building crazy.

Johnson tells the army guy to call our CFP (the equivalent to a helpdesk), and the CFP was like "why did you tell him to call us?  This is a CE issue."  So CFP just creates the ticket and sends it to NETMAN to deal with it.  Johnson gets the work ticket and transfers it to my shop with no annotation.  So when I get it i'm like "what the hell?"  so I annotated it by typing in under "work info", "this is not a CST issue.  this isn't even a comm issue.  have the user call CE." and I transferred it back to NETMAN.

Johnson got the ticket, thought about it, and then transferred it straight back to me with no annotations.  So I transferred it back to him with a note that said "see last update."  A few minutes later, the ticket shows up AGAIN from Johnson with no annotation. Irate, I called up NETMAN.

"Johnson."
"Sir?"
"What the fuck."
"uh..."
"UPS batteries running low is NOT a comm issue.  It's a CE issue.  Have the user call CE and put in a ticket."
"Got it."
"Never send this ticket back to me again."
"Yes sir."

and then I hung up.  It was pretty close to awesome.  Or at the very least, amusing.  To me, anyway.

In regards to the previous threat of impending government shutdown...

People were a little worried about the Republicans threatening to shut down government over issues that had nothing to do with the deficit, job creation, or the economy (like funding for Planned Parenthood). 

On Growing Old and Dying... well not so much the "dying."

"NOOOOOOO!!!"

I want to make a short film and write a play.  You know, do something creative.  Those are my two goals before i get old and jaded, and work a 9-5 office job that I hate.  and get fat.  and bald.  and have a future wife who cheats on me because i'm emotionally unavailable and sexually impotent.

I don't think that's too much to ask.

"I guess that's why I work at Initech."

I always think of it like this:  Okay, so the guy doesn't know shit about computers and network issues.  But then again, I don't know how to fix a jet engine, and this guy does.  We all have different skill sets.

But then again, if I magically had a jet engine in front of me and I needed to fix it, I wouldn't call up EMXS and be like "hey.  so I have a jet engine and some avionics equipment that stopped working.  Can I throw them in the trash?"

btw, the answers to the questions are no; hell no; I didn't ask for YOUR name, I asked for the computer name;  think about what you just asked me.  no.  really.  reflect on it.  now go away.

And Now, a Metaphor.

So I was eating some "multi-grain pringles" that came in some random care package from some random part of the American midwest.  They're one of those random packages, where unknown elementary school kids pack a box full of random sundries and candy, along with badly drawn hand made cards that starts off with "Dear Soldier" and says stuff like "thanks for killing the bad guys" or whatever.

Anyway, so the packaging on the Pringles can makes it look really healthy, like "oooh.  multi-grain!" and it looks and tastes oddly like a very salty oblong Wheat Thin.  But then I looked at the ingredients and apparently "multi-grain" doesn't necessarily mean "whole grain."  It just means they have different types of flour, like corn flour, wheat flour, flower power, or whatever.  Basically three kinds of processed garbage flour packaged in a yellow can with a picture of a wheat stalk on it.

So yeah.  I'm still eating garbage.

It's just garbage that tastes healthy.

Forward Deployed, Forward Deployed

"Where I live, there are rainbows...  life in the laughter of morning, and starry nights."

Back home, there are beaches.  There are trees.  There are hot chicks in bikinis.

Things aren't monochromatic.  Things aren't dead.

Dreary, dreary, dreary.

Leaving a piece of Americana wherever we go.

"Goooooood morning Viet...  Iraq!"

Nameless.  Faceless.  ____less.

"Keoni wuz hea!"

Leaving our marks wherever we go.  Because in the big picture, we are all transient personnel.  "I existed too!"

Wah wah wah.

Just in case Charlie is outside the wire, ready to start shit.

"It ain't me, it ain't me.  I ain't no fortunate..."

Actually, it IS me.

"Welcome to the 4077th."

 Semi-permanent structures for semi-permanent people.

But there's more than just gray aircraft and desert colored buildings.

The converted shipping containers behind the 12+ foot blast walls house people.

To Roethlisberger's credit though, he did not rape a child.

People who like to watch football and follow the Super Bowl.   

Sometimes I think my life here is an episode of MASH.

People with lives.  People who are interesting.  People who love.  People who are funny.  People who smile and joke around.  People who are assholes.  And people who are bored, desperate to find something to do.

I'm pretty sure those patches aren't authorized.

Sometimes I think in the middle of all this abstraction, analyses, and "systems," it's forgotten that at its most basic level, the people who constitute this system (or any system) are individuals.  Not nameless, faceless, robots in tan flight suits and desert colored uniforms that mindlessly march around. Unfeeling.  Uncaring.  Maybe they conform, but also maybe they resist.  And they assert themselves within the framework that they're in, because ultimately they occupy multiple frameworks, even if they're wearing a flight suit.

It's something to consider.  This doesn't invalidate abstraction and theory, be it Marxism, or feminism, or screw the military-ism (which I'm a big fan of), or any other type of -ism.  But at the same time, maybe people are complicated.  And the abstractions and theories describe "reality," helps to interpret and contextualize it, but does not define it, in and of itself.

Maybe life is complicated.

And maybe behind this blank empty picture, which gives off a certain impression,

Is this.

Or this.

Because I guess people can be defined by the relationships they forge with each other. 

In the film SLC Punk, the main character, Steven "Stevo" Levy, has a decision to make:  stay true to his "punk" roots, sticking it to the man, and maintaining his notions of ideological purity, or cut his hair and go to Harvard law school.  Basically, he has to choose whether or not to "sell out."  The implied answer (according to the film) is that the question doesn't really have any meaning.  In most cases you can't "sell out" to anything because there's nothing to "sell out" to.  People are individuals. 

Or maybe I'm just rationalizing, hand waving and going "abracadabra."

As the van got dirtier, more things were written.  Some had to be censored.

But whatever.  Ideological purity is overrated.  It's all gray areas anyway, some are closer to black and white than most, but it's still all gray, depending on how you define it.

"Deuces," Iraq.  It's been fun.

Two months and eleven days left until freedom (and not in the overtly patriotic fox news way, but in the sense of "I get to go home.")