Someone recently asked me why I don’t update fthe.net much. Three magic words. Meetings meetings meetings. It might surprise you but fthe.net isn’t my day job. I am one of those guys who lives in conference rooms and on the phone. Hell, I’m so talented in my meeting attendance skills I am getting an extra office in another building so I am more efficient at going to meetings. Yes, I’m that good at it.

A lot of people claim they go to a lot of meetings, but I’m one very large step above most people. Don’t believe me? Check out this screen shot I took earlier this year. This is what happens when a good calendar goes bad:

Click to enlarge

If you’re not into counting, that’s 50 hours of meetings in 5 days. What could you possibly need that many meetings for?! I cannot fathom why I need to be in so many meetings. I get invited to everything. People think that because I know stuff I need to hear about every vaguely similar project or idea that they can concieve of. I have meetings about projects, people, hell I have meetings about meetings. If there’s more than a few participants on an invite people have to book things often times 2 or 3 weeks out on my calendar just to find an open slot with no conflicts.

Our company even goes so far as to offer to select employees, such as myself, a concierge service so that I don’t have to be inconvenienced with innane tasks like making reservations or looking up movie times. All this so that I can attend more meetings.

Like a dumbass I’ll get an email and I’ll respond with a concern and suddenly I’m a subject matter expert and people are calling meetings with me. If I could only keep my God damned mouth shut! So how do I manage to get work done with all of these meetings? Well that’s a stupid question, I work until 7PM and on the weekends of course. Duh. I know what you’re thinking and you’re not the first person to remind me of the best movie ever.

So now you know why I’m not super quick on updating fthe.net. Now quit your bitching. I’m in a meeting.

-RSnake

Sometimes people ask me why I don’t drive a sexier automobile. People suggest things like Porches and Corvettes - I think they assume I need to compensate for something. But there’s no way I could have a nice car anywhere around here. Why you ask? Because California roads suck harder than a $2 crack whore.

Yup, Californian roads blow. You know how I know it’s just California? Drive across the California/Nevada boarder into Reno sometime. On the California side you are driving on some of the crappiest weather beaten roads ever made. Then ten feet further on the Nevada side it’s pristine.

So on the way to visit ID one day I noticed a particularly bad road and took it upon myself to take a short video with my camera phone showing how crappy California roads can be. This was taken in my 4×4 with the super burly sports suspension package. I’m not even trying to be funny here with how crazy the video gets, I was seriously trying to hold my phone stable and had my hand on the wheel, but even still. You just have to see this for yourself (if you can’t see the video you need to download the DivX codec):

That was in a 4×4, for Christ’s sake. What you are hearing is a box of tools in the back of my SUV bouncing up and down. I can’t own a good car because the shitty roads here would destroy it. I can just picture two guys who are super high drawing crazy plans to patch roads betting money that no one will notice how fucked up they can make it.

If you look at some places in San Francisco it’s like a frigging archiological dig. You see some layers that date back to the Paleozoic era, then a few lighter patches that were filled in during the Mesozoic era, and then five or six more on top of it. Why can’t Caltrans do it right the first time? I bet if we forced Caltrans to insure a road for 30 years, like some European countries do, you’d never see another jacked up road in California again.

The worst part is I’m paying some fat peice of shit’s salary with my insane state taxes to fill in holes with essentially gravel and tar just to pay to have him go back and do it again in a week when it needs re-patching. As Scotty would say, “She won’t hold together much longer, Captain! One more hit and she’ll blow for sure!” Bastards.

-RSnake