For me, developing applications was a joy … but only when I was left completely alone to do everything by myself. Such opportunities were just becoming rarer and rarer.

Most of my career was spent working for small shops that provided custom software for small-ish clients. The absolute number one skillset required was the ability to talk to clients, understand their business and figure out what they needed the software to actually do. Not only are these skills not taught in Computer Science programs, it’s never even suggested that you might possibly need them at some point in your career. In my opinion, this is why CS types cling so tenaciously to a rigid division of labor in software development: they want somebody else to do this and then hand them a well-written requirements document.

I spent a big chunk of my career going through mountains of incomprehensible human-generated code. I eventually learned that it was generally easier to just start over from scratch. At the same time I learned that nothing makes corporate bosses’ heads explode faster than telling them that their codebase sucks and needs to be rewritten from scratch. My solution to this fundamental dilemma was to become a school bus driver.

folks had to keep eating like the Luftwaffe was still blitzing London

To be more precise, they had to keep eating like the Kriegsmarine’s U-bootwaffe was still sinking the ships with the food.

And open all the windows sometimes!

^ This … it lets all the pot smoke out, too.

I’m a school bus driver and I obey speed limits religiously (and somehow I’m almost alone in this among my coworkers despite the fact that our buses all have GPS monitors installed and our boss can see exactly how fast we’re going at all times). Almost every day I have people behind me blasting their horns at me for this. Like, just imagine getting road rage at a fucking school bus driver.

My favorite thing is when they tailgate me, apparently oblivious to the fact that I can’t see them at all when they do this, not even in my mirrors.

I was tricked into all my cats by girlfriends. The cats lasted way longer than the girlfriends. Better mousers, too.

There’s a family a couple of blocks from me that could be called this although I don’t think it’s intentional on their part. They operate more or less a free range cat colony and the cats keep getting run over because it’s a busy neighborhood with narrow streets and cars parked all along them. I drive very slowly here (there are also lots of kids around) but most people don’t.

Do you live in Media, PA by any chance? This sounds like the exact description of a woman that runs through my neighborhood and has to be in her 70s at least. It’s not even running, it’s more of this asymmetrical skip-hopping motion. I’ve never seen anyone or anything look less healthy.

I have yet to meet “gorilla-looking dude who yells at his step-son and his lawnmower in public” who lives across the street, or even made eye contact with him. And no, this is not some variant of racism on my part – gorilla-looking dude is white but looks much more like a gorilla than any black dude I’ve ever seen.

Yeah, something to do while savoring my slice of moldy Wonder bread.

And I’m brown enough I’m sure I could be confused as being “Mexican”.

I have two half-Thai, half-white cousins. One of them looks vaguely Mexican / Latin American and the other looks Japanese, and they got lots of shit for that growing up in Florida. Fortunately, that experience really taught them to respect and value immigrants and non-white people.

Just kidding – they’re actually hard-core white-supremacists and trumpers. The only reason trump isn’t their favorite person of all time is that they like DeSantis even better.

Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2 is their worst song

I mean, The Wall isn’t even close to being their best album. It’s not their worst, at least – thanks to Syd Barrett and The Final Cut.

When I was in the 8th grade I had a friend who had two kids already. TBF he should have been a high school senior but he had been held back four times (this was before school districts had really grasped the concept of passing kids to get rid of them).

His favorite song was “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” by Pink Floyd which was very popular at the time and featured the lyric “We don’t need no education”. Even at the time I remember thinking “Tracy, you might in fact need an education”. I think it’s under-appreciated how much that one line from that one song had to do with the success of that album.

Even men’s jeans which are size by the actual waist and inseam measurement can be wrong.

They’re not generally sized by the actual waist measurement. I wear 33W and my pants all measure about 36" around the belt line. The “waist” measurement derives from many decades ago when men wore high-waisted pants where the waist was a few inches smaller than the circumference around the hips, where waistlines are today. Men were also generally a lot fitter back then, too!

Not Levi’s lol.

One relevant fact about men’s pants is that the W (waist) size dates from the 1930s and 1940s when men wore high-waisted pants. The actual waist measurement was always about 3" smaller than the circumference around the hips; as the waistline of men’s pants migrated downwards to where it is today, manufacturers kept the nominal W measurement of how big the waistline would have been if it had still been higher. I generally wear pants with a 33W but the actual circumference around the belt line is always around 36". It’s not vanity sizing so much as anachronistic sizing.

There was a comedian a few decades ago who had a routine about how the aging process in men means your pants start migrating up towards your neck, but in reality it was just old men continuing to wear the kind of pants they had gotten used to as young men. It’s a common phenomenon - I work with a bunch of women in their late 50s and early 60s and they all still have feathered haircuts like women did in the late 1970s and 1980s.

damned near every shirt assumes medium means 5’7 twink with a shoulder width smaller than my chest width

I’m 6’0" and muscular with broad shoulders and most of my shirts are M. None of this sizing stuff makes any sense.

My body is a machine that transforms absurd requests from technically illiterate managers into overpriced bloatware.

I used to work for Comcast at their corporate HQ. One day while walking around waiting for my Blackberry app to finish compiling (this could literally take upwards of an hour because every module incorporated had to be digitally signed by a different RIM server - sometimes it would never finish at all and I would go home) I discovered a sick room with a very comfortable long couch. I started taking 30 minute naps here and my post-lunch productivity skyrocketed. I made the mistake of mentioning this room to one of the Infosys employees and that was the end of my naps. That room was permanently occupied from that point on.

I eventually started pulling a George Costanza and sleeping under the desk in my cubicle, hidden by a filing cabinet and my chair with a crocheted blankie draped over it. Corporate hatred of naps is just so fucking stupid and counterproductive.