Hey... for me, there’s more than a little personal history in that little bit of cinema; when it came out I had just realized the error of my choice of careers and fled in terror of the endemic batshit crazy of the places I was permitted to practice my vocation.
That entire short-lived show was a serial confirmation of all the reasons I’d left; I had my own narcissistic backstabbing coworker who was only slightly less satanic than Dogbert (Thank Ifni I’d been reading a fair bit of BOFH for survival strategies) and a succession of pointy-haired bosses at a succession of corporate gristmills.
The NirvanaCorp episode was eerily familiar too; my first gig straight out of tech school was a really interesting niche company that made replacement sub assemblies for legacy air traffic control systems whose original manufacturers had gone belly-up. The pay was great, the whole place, from the management team to the facilities to the other engineers & techs had a Jobs-esque “what-if” altered-reality bubble around it, and everything was decorated in like-new 70s post modern that I think was just left over from a previous occupant of the campus. Even had those horrible chrome and chocolate upholstery lounge chairs & sectionals that everyone joked about but were the most invitingly comfortable furniture to sit and read for hours or play cards.
That gig lasted just long enough for me to get a nice apartment in a suburb of Syracuse and buy a new Corvette before it literally burned inside-out when the first Bush administration decided that for the sake of domestic security, all such manufacturing and engineering was to be done solely by defense contractors with direct ties to some ambitious general.
Overnight, our idyllic little manufacturing firm was assimilated by Raytheon, and everything turned into a twisted demonic parody of the place I’d started working at. I made it through 3 rounds of layoffs before one day, without warning, they just locked the doors on my whole building and made us wait in the parking lot while armed security we’d never seen before took us inside one-by-one to collect our personal belongings.
*sigh* Most of the rest of my career was spent searching for someplace half as awesome to work; eventually I lowered my standards to “not working for a complete asshole” and still my dreams went unfulfilled until I went back to work for myself.
I was still working for a complete asshole, but it was one with whom I could “come to an understanding”.
*mnem-ories*
Home
Help
Search
Login
Register
