Forward
The entries that follow are not only the day to day shenanigans within a small high performance computing shop stuck in the mid-west, but also a story of my own lessons as a young IT professional coming to terms with adult-hood. I will resist the temptation to submit you to the melancholy dribble that my fingers may wish to force upon you and keep the fun flowing. Because this is a day by day recounting of the operations of our computing center, there will certainly be days where nothing exciting happens. As such, I’ll do my best to keep their entries short.
Before we begin with the hell that is computers, I suppose we have to learn a little about the hell that is people. While computers are terrible and probably will eventually kill every last one of us in the goriest way imaginable, people will just annoy you to death; being annoyed to dead is far more gruesome than having the blood drained from my body through the corner of my left eye. I have a certain disdain for people that can't be explained. They smell, make noise, have opinions, more importantly differing opinions than mine. They have silly emotional reactions to events that one should be numb to... Computers do exactly as they're told. But, that's the problem, isn't it? People tell computers what to do... And what have we already learned? People suck. Therefore, computers suck too. But, I digress.
People: Rain Man is my boss who is one of the 3 smartest people I know. We've known and worked on various projects together for 8 years. Rain Man knows he's smart and sometimes it feels like he uses that to put people down. I still consider him a friend, but sometimes he's a little much. He's also usually well dressed and making me look like I live in a dumpster.
Noisy is the office assistant. Noisy and I have a professional history because she was the assistant at an fMRI research facility I worked for while I was in college. Back then she was 20 meters away from my office and I liked her much better than I do now. Now I hear every one of the 10 or so personal calls she has with her adult children and her man-child husband. The fact that her kids and husband are all legally considered to be adults and have survived in the wild boggles my mind. Noisy also has a knack for acting like she's a princess from a fairy-tale. She wants nothing and has everything. Her dumb-ass husband must be good at something other than being stupid.
Scrooge Mc*uck (I'll let you pick a letter) is the Executive. Supposedly he does things.
Spit Fire is our marketing and communications person. I have nothing negative to say about her. She's tiny and always so damn happy about everything. She's also really good at her job. But, it’s not clear why she works for us.
Merlin is a wizard. She heads up a lot of our STEM outreach programs and appears to never sleep or do anything other than work. Much like Spit Fire, she's very good at her job. She’s so full of happiness and energy. I guess they're basically the same people just 30 years apart.
There are more characters in this tale, but what we have should be enough to get us started. I'll fill in the rest of the blanks as we go.