two-pot screamer dot com

For my job, I work in very corporate environments and move from company to company frequently. I think it’s starting to have an effect on me because I find that I’ve started using words like “quality outcome” and “work-product” without irony.

Working in an environment where anyone can be fired (right-sized? let go?) for violating one of HR’s workplace behaviour policies makes you especially sensitive to actions that leave a clear audit trail - like anything that happens on your computer. You can tell when someone strays onto a website that wouldn’t be considered worksafe by the frantic slapping of the alt-F4 keys to close the web browser before the site can launch an array of pop-up windows that will make your website access log look as if you have just visited multiple porn websites in a row.

I briefly worked at a company that wanted to show in their marketing material that they were all about being young and vibrant, and having fun (they sold insurance). The screensaver on all the computers would run a slideshow of all the images from their ad campaigns. One shot was of 3 young twenty-somethings playing on the beach. The two girls were wearing shorts and bikini tops, but the image could not be considered overtly sexual. Even so, every time I saw that image on the computer monitor I would start to feel uncomfortable, and my fingers would reflexively reach for the alt-F4 keys.

Another thing I find is that my sense of humour completely disappears…well, almost; I still find it funny that a local tobacco company accidentally named a software project after the river that forms the border to Hell in Dante’s Inferno (or after a satanic heavy metal band, either way, it’s pretty funny).

One company I worked for had all of their meeting rooms named after dead musicians (Hendrix meeting room, Morrison meeting room etc). Rather than finding this amusingly quirky, I found it morbid and creepy. I did find it funny that when a new meeting room was created, it was clearly named by someone who wasn’t very good at understanding patterns - it was called the Williams meeting room (although maybe it was just wishful thinking on the part of someone who didn’t like Robbie).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 12th, 2006 at 1:05 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.