innerspaceboy

Sorry for the confusion TH - I wrote all these posts as the events transpired. All are past tense and refer to my old job. Fear not - I love the new gig!

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innerspaceboy

Note: the following, like all entries, was written while these events transpired. But this is all in the past and I am now gainfully employed elsewhere where I’m not working for an absolute doofus.

Last week our CEO forwarded me several notifications that our apps were each in violation of Google’s terms as we’d failed to include a privacy policy for the information we collect from our users. Of course, I’d mentioned that this was required a year and a half ago when we created the apps, but our CEO waived it off saying, “we’ll wait and see if they notice and deal with it then.”

Well, they noticed, and now our apps are going to be taken down if we don’t act quickly. Our CEO said, “It’s easy - just copy a privacy policy from some other site.” I had to explain to him that the terms of a privacy policy are specific to the information a company collects and how they securely store that info, as well as with whom they share that information. I explained that he could likely face legal action if ever the info he collected was compromised. He responded that it didn’t matter and told me to just “get it done.” Unfortunately as I am in no way familiar with the security measures which are in place by our web host, nor do I have any knowledge or experience drafting legally-binding policies, I did my best and Googled the task.

Thankfully, I found a site which poses a series of questions to the user and emails a corresponding privacy policy based on your responses. Guessing the answers as best I could, the site was ready to send us our new policy. Unfortunately, our CEO had recently come up with another penny-saving idea and had terminated my company email account. (Consequently, this action cut us off from over a dozen of our affiliated third party websites which used that email as a primary login and contact, so I was glad to find out that he’d terminated the account.) With no other option available, I happily entered our CEO’s primary company email as the contact for the privacy policy.

After explaining this to our CEO, he asked, “Wait? Does that mean they’re going to share my email with advertisers and bombard me with junk mail?”

To which I replied, “Yes. Yes it does.”

After reminding him a dozen times that the task needed to be completed or else our apps would be pulled from the app stores, he finally checked he email on the last day we had to submit the policy and found he’d not received the email. With only an hour later left in the day he shrugged and told me to get to work rebuilding the privacy policy from scratch. In the end, he finally posted our completed policy - at five thirty on that final day, further detaining me to have me explain it to him so he wouldn't have to read it. (And as per usual, I was not paid for my time.)

The apps remained in the app stores, which is critically important, considering that none of our apps have ever actually been downloaded by anyone in the eighteen months they've been available.

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innerspaceboy

Selling apps to clients has been difficult, primarily because our CEO failed to tell anyone that we exist. He seemed to think that creating a website was all one had to do and that the clients would just roll in. What he failed to realize is that, over the course of two years, Google Analytics reports that 100% of our site traffic has been bounce traffic, that is, visitors from Iraq and other countries who arrive at our site in error and immediate click away to another site. As these non-english speaking individuals are unlikely to be customers for a mobile app, we might need to consider telling people that we exist if we want more business.

Of course, we did produce one app - for a church buddy of our CEO’s. The app was never downloaded by anyone, and sat dormant for years. (Our CEO doesn’t realize that apps need to be updated with new content in order for users to keep them.) After receiving the notification about our missing privacy policy from ENTRY 7, I revisited our dormant apps and found that the primary contact link within the app utilized a form service which our CEO had terminated our account with six months prior - (another cost-saving idea!) Fortunately, no one had ever downloaded the app, so it didn’t seem to have affected the church.

I inquired as to whether or not I should invest the time to repair the damaged contact link and republish the app to restore its function. After a brief pause, our CEO checked the church’s website and found no mention of the app anywhere. Apparently, they had stopped telling people about it long ago. “I guess you can just delete it?” he replied.

Why do I even come into work?

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innerspaceboy

We’re now approaching four straight weeks without any actual design work for me to do, and it’s been over a year since we’ve had any business for our so-called “app company”, so for the next 3 days I've been instructed to join our janitor in hand-counting 23,630 laminated discs, (actual figure), and grouping them into boxes of 600. (College degree really working for me here.) The mindless inanity of monotonous, manual, unskilled labor is honestly psychologically crippling. And there is no end in sight - no way to measure any of what little progress is made in eight hours’ time. Just as I begin to see a glimpse of the bottom of a pile of discs I’ve been tallying for what seems like an eternity, someone walks over and pours another, larger pile atop my own and the whole cycle begins again.

Perhaps I could muddle through it if it weren’t for the fact that our janitor delights in listening to "Gospel Talk Radio" on the company cassette deck/boom box while she works. The sermons are astonishingly ignorant, and a slap in the face to any reasonable or rational being. But of course, this is a Christian company, so turn it up! There was the briefest moment of hope when I watched her hand reach for the dial to change the station, but my dreams were quickly dashed when she rested the tuner at a "NUMBER ONE HIT MUSIC STATION!" playing Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe." Please, god… please kill me.

I’m so close to freedom… I’m just awaiting a response from any of my senior IT position leads. Blessed is he that readeth the Job Listings... and they that hear the words of this prophecy of higher income brackets, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand.

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innerspaceboy

(Once again, this tale of misery is related as it occurred, but thankfully is now in the past. Enjoy my agony.)

This afternoon I was presented with a manuscript and told to typeset it for publishing, to proofread, and to correct capitalization, punctuation, sentence structure, and glaring grammatical errors in order to “smarten it up and polish it.”

The document I received was a Microsoft Word file, with the entire manuscript set in all caps with rampant underlining of every word the author felt needed emphasis. Punctuation was nonexistent, nor was even a glimpse of what might be mistaken for cohesion of thought or literary intent.

But it was the subject matter which truly closed its fist upon my heart like the tight and relentless grip of death squeezing the life force from my body. Befitting of our Christian company, this was an all-caps vomitous outpouring of schizophrenia, bash-keyed into Word with all the refinement and poise of an AOL chat speak transcript. And the author’s voice was clear and consistent throughout as he repeatedly denounced evolutionists as being “ridiculous fools blind to the world around them.” And I was charged with the task of “smartening up” the verbal defecation of this man for twenty four pages rife with circular logic, self-reference, demonstrably-contradictory claims, and spooky supernatural warnings to those who do not commit to his wisdom.

The book opened with its strongest argument for faith. The author shares a gripping tale of his being awoken suddenly by his slack-jawed yokel wife who, in a drunken stupor, has stumbled outside to discover a miracle of God waiting for her in the heavens. She barked naggingly for him to join her to gaze in amazement at its beauty. It was a cloud, that if you kind of squinted a bit, and were already drunk, might look a little bit like the number “3” to a man who is clearly maddeningly obsessed with the numeral. This was definitive and undeniable evidence of the good Lord at work.

And so for the next twenty pages, our miracle witness professed every single example of the number three he could think of, particularly those which weren’t actually the number three, but sod all, he’s going for them. “The Bible has a beginning, middle, and and end! THREE!” He proclaimed. “Father, Son, Holy Spirit!” “The pen is mightier than the sword… and it takes THREE FINGERS to hold a pen!” “Trees are made of THREE parts!” (Wait a minute there... ) The word “eye” and “DNA” each have THREE LETTERS!” “Water is H-2-0! - ANOTHER THREE!” Space has THREE dimensions!” “Matter exists in THREE states!” “Atoms have THREE indivisible parts!” (Let me stop you there fella…)

After countless proclamations of truth given to phrases simply because they appear in the Bible, and after repeatedly claiming his statements to be true because, “any fool can plainly see…” he began to wander into the demonic significance of 666 (ANOTHER THREE!) and observed brilliantly that there are three 666-es in a barcode… (somewhere…) condemning all products to bear the mark of the beast… but thanked the Lord that the Bible never bears a UPC code. (?)

This wasn’t the worst manuscript I’ve been told to “polish.” I’ve dealt with everything from Jehovah’s Witness recruiting manuals to guides to vanquishing demonic possession, each of them preaching that man is a worthless being unfit for the benevolent Lord’s love. These texts universally denounce rational skepticism, critical thinking, logic, reason, scientific understanding, knowledge, and any sense of morality, instead wailing that the reader must grovel at the feet of a spooky sky god or else suffer eternal damnation.

After over 15 years of this garbage, I’m carefully and strategically planning my exit. Mine is not a psychologically sound environment for any reasonable man to work, and I’ll have no more of it.

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The Batlord

I think you need a time machine to make that reference. Luckily you have one, so carry on.

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Aloysius

A lot of your past job sounds difficult to bear, but this is particularly brutal. Nobody should have to go through that.

The Batlord

**** you nerds. I'm not even a big Carly fan but that song is pop gold.

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Frownland

Imagine if you had taste and were unwittingly forced to listen to it all day though.

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Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

The Batlord

If I had taste it would be the bee's knees.

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