ChickenLadyLovesLife

I used to work for Cisco ... or so I'm told. What happened was that my original small-ish company (25 US employees and 100 offshore employees) was acquired by a larger company (about 1000 employees mostly in Scandinavia) that made network equipment and was a minor competitor of Cisco. My original company provided programmer consultants (like me) to various companies and was acquired by the Scandinavian company because they had written a client-customizable Skype clone app that clients were actually unable to customize to their satisfaction.

I had a fun couple of years customizing this app using a language and framework I had no experience with, while battling with the Scandinavian programmers who hated me and everything I stood for and not only refused to help me but actively sabotaged everything I was doing. Fortunately, these custom versions were for various ISPs and cable companies who offered them as free come-ons to their customers and they were never actually used by anybody. Also I worked remote from home the entire time, which my cats appreciated.

Then the new company was allegedly acquired by Cisco. I got a new work laptop in the mail, but never visited any kind of Cisco office in person and was never assigned any tasks whatsoever. After six months my manager called me and said that I and everyone else from the original small company was being laid off. I laughed and said of course we were. He was shocked that I was so accepting of it and surprised that I seemed to have known it was coming; apparently my co-workers didn't think doing fucking nothing for six months was a bad sign. I did actually get a severance package for the first and only time in my career. However, it was almost to the penny equal to the value of the unemployment I could have collected, but the severance meant I wasn't eligible for unemployment. Oh well, saved me the hassle of pretending to look for another job.

It was pretty clear that Cisco bought my second company just to dispose of a minor competitor.

Later I learned that my mother thought I had been working for Sysco (the food services conglomerate) the entire time. I had to go back and check my emails to see if that had actually been the case.

You leave Pete Townsend alone!

I prefer the youtube channels where the person somehow talks about a single tweet for ten minutes. And gets twenty million views.

Well OK, but it will take awhile ...

I’m learning metal working including welding

I learned metal working and got myself a welding machine and riveter as part of my skoolie project (converting a used school bus into a motorhome). It's a great skillset to have, in case I ever build a second skoolie -- which would require me getting Alzheimer's first.

I bought a used school bus for $3600 on eBay to turn into a motorhome ("skoolie"). Best $50,000 I ever spent.

You don't have to tell me -- my main rider is a hybrid from 1998 that I bought on Craigslist for $50.

I can hardly think of a more wholesome hobby!

I would agree except for the $15,000 bicycle. It's just comedy how much these things cost these days.

Planets Fitness

I walked into a Subway one time after a ride wearing my lycra bike shorts and jersey. Some little boys saw me, hiked their shorts up to give themselves wedgies, and started dancing around me like the dwarfs in This is Spinal Tap during the "Stonehenge" scene. Everybody in the place was laughing. I laughed as well and never went into a store again wearing my bike shorts. Kink-shaming can be a force for good.

He's a New York sculptor, which means it was $100,000 of his parents' money.

I was part of a stable of about 50 programmers working for a company that manufactured lubricants circa 2000. For about a month at one point, the entire roomful of programmers spent the entire day calling into Who Wants to be a Millionaire? to try and get on the show. Absolutely nothing happened to the company -- lubricants kept getting manufactured and sent to customers on schedule. The entire operation ran on mainframe applications that dated to the 1970s. I'm not even sure what any of these programmers did other than myself, and all I did was write IE6-based web frontends that sat on top of the mainframe apps (and they're still running to this day lol, which means the mainframe apps are still in use).