Sam's Ramblings

Thankfully, I somehow landed a job at the eleventh hour of my university career. At least I didn't spend time unemployed, right?

Right?

Complaint Corner (AKA rightfully ignorable)

Sure, it all seems fine. I actually can make money and stuff. But spending most of my life in an office where I don't do anything is the opposite of what I consider a “fun day”. Why are we in an office in the aftermath of an era full of people working from home?

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I've worked here for just about six weeks, and I've been assigned what amounts to about three “projects”. One of them took me about a week, the second (most recent) took me less than a week but has stalled in the Byzantine land of corporate red tape, and the third one that took me less than three days. I spend the rest of the time doing nothing. Want to know what's boring? Doing nothing. I've asked for more work, which is usually promptly ignored. Sometimes they give me something that didn't even take an hour (which happened the day I'm writing this).

Adventures in Doing Nothing, or “Help me I'm Going Insane from Boredom”

There are only so many ways I can spend the ~frequent~ days doing nothing. Playing Geoguessr is fun but can get infuriating when you guess the wrong American suburb (THEY ALL LOOK THE SAME) and get 152 points. Reading Wikipedia is only so fun too. I considered bringing external things but that is probably an extremely bad idea. At least I learned Go :) (see my git for the stuff I have been working on in my “free time”.

Spending nine hours a day in an office that I spend probably most of the day listening to music or podcasts makes me feel completely and utterly useless. But existential dread is never a fun read so I will find something else to complain about.

Why the [explitives] do I work in an office?

Yes, I am repeating myself. But there is absolutely no reason I need to work in the company's office. Through dumb luck (and also external help) both my parents work in the same city but if they both become incapacitated (or the much more light-hearted they go on vacation together) I cannot go to work. That is what I get for living with them I guess, the middle of nowhere has some downsides too.

Back on track: there is absolutely no reason I need to be in the office. I do not have any meetings to attend. Any communication can largely be done (and is, exclusively) through stuff like email or, may Allah forgive me, Microsoft Teams. My boss maybe comes to my little slice of Hell like twice a week where I tersely tell him I have nothing to do before he immediately forgets it, talks to someone else and goes to his fourteenth meeting the past five minutes. Apart from one Azure Dev Ops (actually it is its predecessor, Team Foundation Services [PLEASE KILL ME]) I make 0 internal connections any more. My first project did (to an internal SQL server running on Windows Server 2003) but that is nothing a VPN could not solve. It is most likely what they did the one year that every office was closed, so why not do it again? ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I have gone multiple days without ever saying a word. Sometimes I have to cough whenever I leave because not talking for several hours hurts. It doesn't just hurt my voice, it just hurts in general. Like I'm basically getting paid to be a space in a company.

TL;DR: I get paid to go to an office for reasons I cannot fathom to do absolutely nothing for nine hours a day, five days a week.

Other Updates

I am in the (slow) process of migrating my massive collection of servers around, so expect downtime when I screw something up. I also rented some dedicated hardware for Pleroma (and my gitea's CI). 8c/16t and 64 GB of RAM is probably overkill, but it was a good deal so I do not care. Codeberg has a really neat looking static hosting service called Codeberg Pages (think GitHub's equivalent) and I got it set up on a VPS (it hogs 80 and 443 so I have to basically dedicate one server just to that). I also looked more into DNS, and added a fourth name server to my problem catalogue. Maybe one day I'll try pulling an OpenNIC and hoisting up a TLD (probably going way over my head, a simple recursive DNS server does enough UDP floods already).

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