Passing Worlds

Sadly, the title of this post puts me in mind of flatulence.  But what it’s actually supposed to refer to is how times change – such as the closing of Yahoo! Geocities, where my modest homepage has been hosted for nearly ten years.

Bandwidth shot up, storage space shot up, user expectations shot up, websites became increasingly elaborate, script-heavy and media-heavy; and Yahoo!’s simple, no-frills services were left behind.  Briefcase, an early take on cloud computing, has already been closed in a nod to how storage capacity and requirement has changed over the last decade; now Geocities will follow in just three months.

I learned to hand-code HTML because of Geocities.  Its low capacity and the occasionally slow connection - it’s a free service, after all – taught me the value of minimalism.  Keeping design elements fuss-free was crucial when you were manually typing in every single hyperlink, table cell, font format tag and image link, and keeping image and sound files small was an unavoidable necessity when the sum total of the storage space available to the site was 15MB.  One music file can be more than that, these days.

Geocities was my first introduction to the new media (new in those days; contemporary now).  I fumbled my way through the basics of web design – you need content, you need a theme, you need organization! – while building my homepage on Geocities.  I developed a short but highly educational passion for my little website.  The thrill of writing a new story or CG’ing a new drawing was matched by the kick I got from posting it to my homepage, framed in a template I had created – theme, style, CSS, everything decided by me right down to the colour of the scroll bar.  Living in a HDB apartment where I didn’t have a room of my own and my parents wouldn’t even leave me enough privacy to personalize so much as a notebook, the ability to customize a little space (even if I did a lousy job of it) was priceless.

Looking around now, however, everything seems to come pre-designed.  Blogs come with templates far more attractive and readable than my amateur themes; even the Google Sites service offers pre-structured pages whose layout can only be marginally customized.  Of the free web hosts – there are thousands out there – who allow you to upload your own custom HTML, they come with restrictions that I don’t really want to put up with.  Example: Free Web Space Inc has a 0.25MB limit on file size; but I want to be able to upload high-quality images.  And of course, there are ads – banners which do odd things to seamless 100%-height/width layouts of the sort I favour and which make frames impossible to use, which can only be removed by converting them to pop-ups.

I am, like the majority of users, inert.  I like to stay with my original service provider unless a new offer passes by that is tremendously better.  Or until the provider goes down.  So when I saw that Geocities was leaving for the mists of history, my first thought was to port my content here – to WordPress.  Then I thought of alternatives, and discovered the abovementioned restrictions of design and advertisement.

I guess I’ll be moving my content here after all.  Home sometimes isn’t where the HTML is – it can be where the words are.

Until en bloc happens, that is.

The Ape From Outer Space

The face of an ape from outer space
stares at me from a glass window in a metal door.
We dream of man-eating squids from the stars.
Do the squids in their flowing aquatic depths
a thousand light-years away
imagine the bipeds who serve them up at restaurant tables
fried into calamari rings?
Ah……
Alien is alien only because it is not familiar.
Alien is food only because its objections are not familiar.
The apes from outer space will eat the world some day.

The above reads remarkably like a schizophrenic rant, a comparison I can draw because I recently read a book – Soon She Will Be Gone by John Farris (?) that featured the text of emails written by a schizophrenic character.  That book, by the way, struck me as having certain touches of the cheap romance novel, such as an attractive female protagonist with an exotic name and bits of unnecessarily maudlin description, such as “The light of the setting sun glanced beautifully off her rich red hair” – not the exact wording, but close enough.

Fortunately, it was a thriller of reasonable but not great quality.  Something suitable for passing the time without particularly engaging me but also without making me puke blood, in other words.

Back to the schizophrenic rant – it started with the phrase “the face of an ape from outer space” that occurred to me while I was staring through my reflection in a MRT door on the way to work.  (I still hate my job.  I can’t wait to get out of here at the end of the month.) The rest followed without much inspiration.

I treat this blog like a monologue
Soliloquy to the World Wide Web and its
worldly annoyances like pop-up ads and its
unworldly strangenesses like sites on the power of Marduk’s name
Luckily, there is no audience.

The train of thought following that random phrase led me back to Alterstar, simply because the Farris book was part of a batch of novels I randomly borrowed from the library, and in that same batch was a great action thriller which made me think of my little fantasy city.

And thinking of Alterstar reminded me that Yahoo! Geocities is closing down, and the new design I was patching together for my long-neglected Geocities homepage will now be useless because I’ll have to port the content here or to a Google-hosted page – neither of which allows custom design unless I pay for it.

Since I don’t have a credit card (a consequence of the lousy pay in the job I’m leaving), I have no means of paying.  End of discussion.  Exit the ape from outer space, stage boredom, for no more reason than that the train of thought ended.

I treat this blog like a monologue, but I have nothing better to do.

10 Ways Feelings Change

Looking back over the long and incoherent rant about my job which I wrote two days ago, I suddenly remembered that two years back, I had said I loved my job.  So how, exactly, did my opinion take such an about-face?

Some essayists compare a job to a marriage, and cite the imagery of the seven-year-itch as one of the similarities between the two.  A study I read some years ago, however, mentioned that the allegorical itch will develop not after seven years but after just two – in other words, the relationship is stable by the seventh year and an itch is highly unlikely at that point in time.

What applies to a marriage applies to a job in certain senses.  And so out of boredom, I compiled a list of the things that contributed to making my feelings change, in no particular order of importance – just in the order I thought of them.

1) Lack of exposure, development or advancement.  The work became brainless for me midway through the second year (this is my third) and management’s idea of giving me more exposure is to have me take up cross-departmental duties without any increase in salary, support or benefits.  I’ve learned barely anything, except how to skimp on the budget.  There are no promotion prospects.  There is no career path.  There’s nothing to learn.

2) Poor salary and benefits – more like no benefits, in fact.  Even the freshest of graduates with the weakest of grades is only just beginning to consider the kind of pay I’m drawing right now, and that only because of the recession.  I work a freelance job on evenings and weekends, and I earn more just during those few snatched hours than I do in an entire month of working days.

3) Lack of social company and role models.  In a tiny office and tinier department, there’s no one of my age or intellect that I can discuss anything at all with – I hesitated to mention intellect, but the fact is that my colleagues talk about things like church, soap operas and magazines – in Chinese.  I don’t go to church, I don’t watch TV and I don’t read pop magazines.  I don’t object to small talk, but to me, this kind of small talk has always had the effect of stupidification rather than edification.  I’m willing to believe that my IQ has dropped by a good 40 points since I took this job.  And there is no one at all in this office that I want for a role model in any sense.

4) Overuse of goodwill.  A certain amount of goodwill is expected to exist between employer and employee.  My supply of it has run out, and nothing in the working environment is replenishing it.  I have teamwork rammed down my throat daily as the reason why I should work outside my job scope and beyond my working hours for no compensation – as compared to the fact that I can earn a quarter of a month’s salary in those outside-work hours that the company claims.

5) Uncomfortable working environment.  As I type this, the image on my monitor is occupying about half the screen – a 12″ screen.  It’s jiggling and expanding and contracting, and giving me a headache as well as worsening my vision.  If I wasn’t good at touch typing, I wouldn’t even be able to keep track of the text I’m setting down.  It’s 33 degrees Celsius or so outside, and the cubicle I’m sitting in is so stuffy that heat is tangibly building up in the air around me.  The monitor won’t be changed because the company can’t afford it.  The air conditioning won’t be upgraded for the same reason.  I can’t even bring my own monitor in because the computer is so old that it’s not compatible with contemporary hardware.

6) Excessive fluidity – financially and planning-wise.  Flexibility in a job is one thing, but I will always remember a time when pay cheques were issued and everyone was told not to cash them until the next week because the company was waiting for a payment from a retailer.  The same reason explains why my malfunctioning monitor hasn’t been replaced and why it won’t be.  And planning-wise, this company’s product release schedule is constantly being changed according to the preferences of the management.  Half-completed projects are pulled, shelving all the work that went into them.  New projects, sometimes clearly impractical ones, are forced through because the boss took a shine to them for reasons that have nothing to do with business and everything to do with personal preference.  The specifics of projects already underway are suddenly changed to fit said personal preferences in ways that will only end up alienating the target customers.

7) Lip-service appreciation.  I’m supposed to like being praised, but, unfortunately, the praise I receive is invariably showered upon work that I did not enjoy doing and took no pride in.  And it is just as invariably paired with an assignment of more of the same type, justified by the so-called good job I did.  I sincerely dislike compliments being heaped upon my work when I KNOW that work was substandard.  It says volumes about the reason behind the compliment and the judgement of the person doing the complimenting.  And…yes, it’s always the manager giving that praise.  From my “team members” – not a word.

Coming to the smaller, pettier reasons: the daily commute is revolting.  I spend at least one hour and as long as one and a half hours on every trip – that’s up to three hours just travelling back and forth on a bad day, and it’s not even a direct trip where I could sleep or read.  I change from bus to train to train and spend as much time waiting as I do in actual transit.  And then, people complain to the manager that I get to work late – not a word to my face.

9) Presenteeism culture.  I do all the work assigned to me, I do it promptly and I do it well.  But it is more important to management and colleagues that I am sitting at my desk promptly at nine in the morning every day and that I stay there until at least six in the evening, regardless of whether I am actually working, surfing the Internet, blogging (like now) or just drooling at the screen.  Flexi-time, telecommuting and working from outside the office exist only in verbal claims.

10) The title of the post suggests ten reasons, but I’m tired of whining.  I’ve got the letter ready, anyway.  Looking at the eight listed above, I did put up with them for a year or so, while there were still things to learn and still a little excitement to the position.  My patience, however, has run out and nothing is replenishing it.

In a year or so, I expect to look back at this list, compare it with my new job, and laugh.  The reason for laughing won’t be known until then.

Rant Time!

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I am a souless corporate zombie with an IQ of 60,
I do my work one task at a time and I do it slowly,
Go go zombie, go go me…s-l-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-w-l-y…

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This is probably a common complaint the world round – being judged not by your actual work performance, but by your personal habits, such as how fast you work, what time you clock in and out, how long you spend sitting at your desk (it doesn’t matter if you’re actually being productive or if you’re just drooling at the monitor), etc, etc…

I draw the line, however, at people objecting to me working fast and multi-tasking to get it done – and what’s more, accusing me of doing something other than office work simply because I switch between programs in a hurry.  Get this straight, dickheads: when I AM doing something other than office work, I DON’T SWITCH SCREENS.

Oh yes, that’s what happens regularly in my workplace.  People walk past, see my screen changing between a Word document, a browser screen and the email inbox, and straight away think I’m doing non-company work.  Do they ask me about it?  No, they complain to my manager.  Despite the fact that what I’m switching between is a combination of not only my own work, but a little extra this and that which THEY asked me to do.

So multi-tasking and finishing my work quickly is an office crime, and I get disgusted looks even as I hand over the extra set of marketing materials they requested and which happened to be one of those switching screens.  I’m turning in a resignation letter at the end of this month, leaving the company at the end of July, and I DON’T CARE WHO KNOWS IT.

Oh, I’ve done my share of slacking, like coming in late, skipping events that are outright outside my job scope (out of actual memory lapses, not deliberately) and once or twice outright skiving off several hours of work.  But my work performance has never once suffered, and not just my regular work, but all the extra little this and that which got dropped on my desk because there was no one else available who knew how to do it.

Yet I get landed with complaints that I switch screens.  And while they’re being spread out in front of me like a hand of soiled cards, my manager tells me that I’m supposed to be part of a team.  Therefore I must put up with emotional blackmail (everyone else has worked so hard and yet you get off so easily!) being the butt of office jokes (I jump when people walk past my desk!  Shouldn’t I be the one who notices whether I jump or not?) a salary that the freshest of graduates are only accepting now that economic times are really bad and as if that’s not enough…

Here it comes.  I can earn a third of my full-time salary in one single weekend of freelance work.  How’s that?  One of my weekends alone is worth more than one WEEK of my working days.  So I keep quiet about it out of common courtesy, and the end result?  My weekends are taken for granted and I get slapped with emotional blackmail whether I “volunteer” them or not.

The job I’m in is going nowhere, except down the route of more work for less pay, all of it completely unrelated to the job scope laid out in the contract I signed.  The company I’m in is going nowhere, except maybe into the red.  The industry I’m in is going nowhere, and my manager had the nerve to tell me that.  I take it that she wants me out for being a bad influence.

Well, I’m out.  I’ve even written the resignation letter and dated it ahead to 30 June.  I’ve started applying to a slew of interesting-looking jobs.  And I noticed, while filling in forms and updating resumes, that the full-time work experience I have in this company takes second place in every single instance to the freelance experience, references and qualifications which I acquired on my own time (recall: time which has over the last year become worth more than my office time, and which the company that underpays me is trying to claim more and more of for “teamwork” reasons – some team!)

I’m actually embarrassed to cite the nature of my full-time job for fear that it will devalue me in the eyes of potential employers.  If I do, it always seems to come up paired with “Reason for leaving: lack of potential and opportunity”.

I repeat: I’m quitting my job.  I don’t care who knows it.  And between now and then, I shall be exactly what the little jingle on the top says: a soulless corporate zombie who clocks in and out punctually, does one thing at a time, does nothing more than exactly what I’m told to do, and above all is only part of a team insofar as one colorless corpse looks the same as the rest.

That should make them happy.

The Cousin From Dar Tower

Back to Alterstar, where Jet de Melzaio is demonstrating thick-headedness, a sad lack of common sense and a real knack for getting into trouble! I love that crazy city, especially when the characters populating it develop alarming lives of their own. Between the last bit posted and now, I found the story’s title and wrote four new sections, but three of them are of dubious relevancy…so only this one is here. For now.

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In direct defiance of his father’s orders, Jet stormed to his rooms and called Dar Tower.  Or tried to.  There were only two numbers listed in the directory: the general line and Lord Visterra’s direct line, which Jet did not have either the authorization or the inclination to use.  He spent half an hour hunting in vain for any other numbers, then gave up and went to change out of his damp and by now very smelly clothes.

Bath, breakfast and a handful of painkillers later, Jet felt considerably more clear-headed.  Someone had left a stack of files in his study, probably his father’s secretary hinting that he ought to read up on the laws of the noble houses.  Jet poked around in them for a while.  Then, rubbing the bruise growing on his jaw, he slipped out the back gate and went to call on Dar Tower in person.

Dar Tower stood at the southernmost point of the inner city, looming over the bridge it guarded with as little personality as the blank-faced guards who marched up and down before its gates.  The gates were very heavily barred, Jet noticed, and the walls were very high.  Needle-like spikes bristled from the top of walls and gate alike.  There were no windows anywhere in sight—not in the walls, and not in the bluish-gray façade of the tower itself.

Telling himself there was nothing intimidating about the place, Jet marched up to the tower gates and looked in vain for the guard captain.  There seemed to be no officer in charge here—just six guardsmen with no rank insignia whatsoever.

“You over there!” he snapped at the nearest one. “Where’s your commanding officer?”

Six blank expressions turned towards him, and turned away again.  The way they all reacted in unison was sufficiently unnerving that Jet took a few steps back before collecting himself. “I asked you where your commanding officer was!” he repeated, his voice rising.

Six blank expressions looked at him again and looked away again.  He might have been talking to a collection of clockwork dummies.

Jet’s temper started to rise again.  He stamped forward and demanded right into the first guard’s face, “Do you know who I am, you bloody idiot?”

“What he knows is not important,” a voice said lazily behind him, and Jet leapt right off the ground. “Turn around when I speak to you, boy.”

Jet was already turning, grabbing automatically for the enamelled pistol at his belt.  His fingers closed around it just as he saw the tip of a stun rod right in his face.  His eyes crossed.

Behind the stun rod, a pair of thin lips curved into a smile. “Are you trying to draw that gun on me, boy?”

With an effort, Jet let go of the pistol, stepped away from the stun rod and made a jerky bow. “Good morning, Lord Visterra,” he said, trying so hard to keep his reaction under control that his voice came out in a barely recognizable squeak.

Lord Helios Visterra did not acknowledge the greeting or lower the stun rod.  Behind him, another squad of six guards had emerged from the guardhouse and spread out into a line covering the gates.  It was a formation that Jet had seen in bar fights, just before a large group beat the crap out of a smaller one.  In fact, he had seen it just last night, when the priests of Damni-Dar tried to corner him and Mirror in the Purple Rain café.

That thought got him back into focus.  Forcing his voice back to a normal pitch, he said, “I apologize if I have interrupted anything.” Over the shoulders of the guards, he could see an official car drawn up at the curb, the Dar Tower insignia swirled across its half-open door in twisting gold and gray.  In his annoyance with the guards, he hadn’t even heard it arrive.

“Jet de Melzaio of House Infernarr,” Lord Helios said thoughtfully. “What are you doing here, then?”

The stun rod was still pointed right at Jet’s face, and he couldn’t move to either side without bumping into the gate guards. “I—was looking for Mirror,” he said, and then, rather stupidly, “I owe him a drink.”

Lord Helios’s expression changed so swiftly and suddenly that Jet’s eyes, still fixed on the glowing tip of the stun rod, crossed again.  Then it was back to normal, and in the same lazy voice, the Lord of Dar Tower said, “Keep your hands off my property, boy.  And that includes my guards.”

“Your property!” Jet burst out, all his anger coming back.

The stun rod moved forward like a striking snake.  Jet recoiled, and the guards flanking him seized his arms.  There was a moment of frantic scuffling on his part—the guards barely moved—then it ended with the tip of the stun rod so close to his face that he could feel his nose going numb.

Lord Helios was smiling now. “Your father excels at shouting and throwing things,” he said. “I don’t doubt you do too.  But shouting at me is not a good idea, boy.  Or are you too dense to have realized that yet?”

With a tremendous effort, his eyes now watering from the stun rod’s field, Jet made himself say, “I apologize, Lord Visterra,” and clamped his mouth shut before anything else—like censorable language—came out.

“You seem very reluctant to do so,” Lord Helios said.  He extended one long finger, as slim and delicate as a woman’s, and touched the bruise on Jet’s jaw—not gently, but prodding hard. “One of my sons used to be very much like you.  Stubborn, defiant, given to physical action.”

Jet was fighting an urge to cringe away by now, and not just because the prodding hurt.  There was something indefinably nasty about the way Lord Helios was leaning over him, not only leaning but looking very closely at his expression.

“Very much like you,” Lord Helios repeated. “Breaking him was…very enjoyable.”

He stared into Jet’s eyes for a moment longer, then stepped back and nodded to the guards.  With a powerful heave, they shoved Jet forward and released his arms.  Jet staggered several steps forward, fell off the edge of the curb and landed on his face in the road.  As he pushed himself back up, spitting out dust, he heard the car door close and Lord Helios’s voice say through the open window, “Run home to your father, boy, and enjoy the freedom he gives you…while it lasts.”

The car started.  The gates of Dar Tower opened to admit it, then slammed shut.  Jet stood in the middle of the road and stared at the barred gates, and wondered if, in the heat of the moment, he had only imagined the sudden hate and fear that passed across Lord Helios Visterra’s face at the mention of Mirror’s name.

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Writing this section was delicious.  I’d never met Helios Visterra before it.  Creepy bastard!  If he faces off with Casten de Melzaio, my money’s all on Lord Casten being the one to land in the ornamental pond.  Although I’ll cheer for House Infernarr, because now that I think about it, the personal habits of the not-so-good Lord Helios are not the sort I want to support.

One has to wonder just what happened to Mirror’s mother…

Some years on from the time of this story, Mirror is going to develop tendencies very similar to his father’s.  Talent runs true in the noble houses of Alterstar, but so do the less desirable personality traits.  Fortunately – and almost miraculously considering his upbringing – Mirror isn’t as psychotic as his father.  But certain people will regret crossing him.  Very, very much.

Along with inherited personality traits, it is also a cliche that the ruling families of the Four Towers end up walking the paths of the gods their respective families were founded (by?) (to appease?) (to serve?) (in honour of?)  Thus Dar Tower is often involved in bloody scandals; Ka Tower suffers familial tragedies every generation; there is constant infighting in Kerrind Tower; and Tenn Tower produces more mad scientists and demented artists than all the other noble families put together.  Why?  No one knows.  They’ve always been like that.