punkwalrus

punkwalrus , 1 day ago

Scissors and knives.

I used to sell high end stuff like that, and let me tell you, there’s a trope about crafters considering murder when someone uses their, say, fabric scissors or sewing scissors to cut paper or something that ruins them. For scissors, however, nothing is more expensive and delicate than a decent set of haircutting shears used by professional hair stylists. Fuck, some go into the HUNDREDS of dollars or more. And then some clown wants to cut some box open with them.

Knives, though. Good set of chefs knives goes into the thousands. Like the kind used by professional chefs. I had some chef clients who tell me horror stories about some kitchen yokel using a $350 hand forged Santoku to stab open a can of tomato paste or toss into a cutting board like a throwing knife.

But even basic knives. People using them as prybars, hammers, screwdrivers, and tossing them in a drawer with other metal rattling around.

punkwalrus , 1 day ago

In Scouts, when we got issued our first pocket knife, they had a whole thing to go with it about care and responsibilities. One part that still sticks to me this day is, “never ever loan your knife to someone. There’s a reason they don’t have one, and it might be a good reason. Either they aren’t allowed to have one, or not responsible with their last knife and lost it, or broke it, or had it taken away. The same will happen to your knife if you give it to him.”

punkwalrus , 15 hours ago

“Most people don’t carry a knife because it’s just not necessary in everyday life.”

See? There is a reason you do not have one, and would never ask for one.

punkwalrus , 1 day ago

I grew up with pretentiousness like this. Lot of upper middle class twits who wanted to be upper class. I used to get their goat with a kind of backhand kindness.

“You know about ABC?” Where ABC is a question about a topic he claims to be an expert in.

“If you don’t know how to ABC, you aren’t very educated.”

“Ah, I see you don’t know either.”

“I never SAID that! But I have neither the time nor patience to explain it to you.”

“Let me ask around, and we can find the answer together.”

“I KNOW the answer!!!”

“Not well enough to explain it, though. But that’s okay, we can learn that, too. Let’s ask this guy. Hey, my colleague and I were wondering if you could explain ABC…”

Oh my god, this makes their pompousness positively FUME with rage.

punkwalrus , 1 day ago

Depends on “how dumb?” I had a Motorola RZR before my first iPhone(2), then before that, some camera flip phone (Motorola E815), and before that, an SCH-3500 flip phone. Before that, land lines only.

punkwalrus , 1 day ago

Being poor. In college in the 90s, my lead sysadmin couldn’t afford Minix for this system we had, so we tried to compile Linux on it. Three days later, we still failed, and gave up, but this was kernel 0.93 or something, so it had a ways to go. But I learned so much from that experience without paying for a university course or something.

Years later, I bought a copy of Red Hat 6 at a Costco. Windows 95/98 was big, I didn’t know how to pirate it, so I went back to Linux and it worked great on my “franken-puters” cobbled together from spare parts dumpster diving. Steep learning curve back then, though. Then I brought it to my workplace, went from UNIX admin to Linux admin, and soon I preferred it to Windows. Been my daily driver for decades, now.

Am I an evangel? A little, but I find that “right tool for right job” is a better approach. Linux is great for everything, BUT a comprehensive system like MS Office AND Active Directory simply does not exist in FOSS space yet; everything is cobbled together and a kludge still trying to catch up.

Obsessed? Kinda. I just assembled some ansible scripts to roll my own distro. Why? To see if I could.

punkwalrus , 1 day ago

There might be some kind of critical ratio formula of party size, alcohol distribution, and damage by one single idiot. I have seen so many stories like these. Usually “a friend” of another guest.

punkwalrus , 1 day ago

Was part of an oceanography class who had just arrived at a local mall. We were returning from a field trip where we were studying river currents. This is done, in part, by a super concentrated dye that starts out black but eventually thins out to either hot pink or a weird high visibility yellowish green. Some of the students might have kept some of those packs. Some might have even emptied them into the mall fountain. Funny thing, large amounts of hot pink dye, in a closed loop recirculating fountain, never really gets pink, but more of a… blood red.

In our defense, we didn’t know the fountain was a closed loop. Thankfully nobody saw us, and it was written up as a “Halloween prank,” in the local paper despite it being early December.

My primary address is 192.168.0.1

punkwalrus , 1 day ago

I was part of a Reddit gift exchange ages ago, before they separated domestic from international. I had to ship a $30 coffee mug to Brazil and it cost $220. Oof.

punkwalrus , 3 days ago

Well, they may like the attention and validation it brings. I knew someone who was asexual that had a lot of dotcom money. He loved to go to Vegas and gamble. He knew the house was stacked against him. He knew that the girls who sat on his lap only liked him for his money. He still loved the attention he got when he tipped big. I saw him tip a waiter $200 on a $150 meal. He LOVED it. And why?

“I used to be poor. I was a nobody. Now I make people happy with my money, and I feel good about myself.”

Can’t beat that.

punkwalrus , 3 days ago

I would rather deal with the (often exaggerated) care of a cast iron pan than deal with non-stick Teflon or similar. And have. But stainless steel is a comfortable favorite for common jobs like cooking soup or quickly frying an egg or two. Light, easy to clean, and practice usually means it won’t stick if you know how to grease a pan and keep the temperature right.

punkwalrus , 5 days ago (edited 5 days ago)

I worked in a job with build scripts. Developers would list what they wanted in a drop-down menu on a website, with very few “fill in the blanks.” This would create a template, which was sanity-checked.

One of the “fill in the blanks” was “home directory of user, if not default /home/username.” Some people filled it in, some didn’t. A lot of “users” might be apps with /home being “/opt/appname” “/var/www/html” or something. We checked to make sure that directory existed, if not, create, and set permissions. Easy peasy, all automated. Ran this lots of times.

Then one day, the script failed. Borked the whole box. Sometimes the VM was corrupt, so delete VM and try again. Usually worked. But this time, the build kept failing. The box went down. Wasn’t even bootable. This happened several times with this one build. So we mounted the borked drive under a new VM and checked out the logs. Just like the dessert stage of Willy Wonka chewing gum, it always failed at the last stage: making /home directories.

It would create them, then halt that it could not find bash. We looked for bash on the bad drive, and it was the usual /bin/bash shortcut to /usr/bin/bash and we were truly puzzled. I did a chroot to the drive and NOTHING worked. It just hung. That was the first clue.

The second was looking through the build script (in bash, which we didn’t write) and checking the steps. Looked it the logs. Always died at creating some user named sapadm, the user for the HANA database. Eventually, I checked the configure file, and noticed it was the only user with the odd home directory “/usr/sap.” Then it hit me: the permissions.

The script, thinking it was a home directory, did a chmod - R 755 for all directories and chmod - R 644 for all files! That meant, while creating home, it made everything under /usr not executable anymore! Holy shit, no wonder nothing worked! So we commented out that user in the config, ran the build again, and we were good! We created the sapadm by hand, and then later fixed the bug in the script.

SANITIZE YOUR DATA. Or you might turn Violet Beauregarde into a blueberry.

punkwalrus , 6 days ago

I have found that it’s like having a junior programmer assistant. It’s great for “write me python code for opening an in file from a command line argument, reading the contents into a key/value dict array, then closing the file.” It’s terrible for “write me a python code for pulling data into a redis database.”

I find it’s wrong 50% of the time for certain command line switches, Linux file structure, and aws cli.

I find it’s terrible for advanced stuff like, “using aws cli and jq, take all volumes in a vpc, and display the volume id, volume size in gb, instance id it’s attached to, private IP address of the instance, whether is a gp3 or gp2, and the vpc id in a comma separated format, sorted by volume size.”

Even worse at, “take all my gp2 volumes and make them gp3.”

punkwalrus , 7 days ago

I did too… In Chrome on Linux. I’ll check my use agent, it might be set to something else because I use it to check some stuff with developers.

punkwalrus , 8 days ago

Alligator - oddly enough as fritters at a Margaritaville in New Orleans. Like most say, flaky like fish, tastes like chicken.

Horseneat served and packaged like baloney in Sweden, eating with crisp bead and breakfast cheese. Was not a fan.

Moose in Sweden. Like beef, only the “grains” of the meat were really large.

Reindeer in Sweden. Like venison, but I am told “less gamey.” I say I am told, because apparently I cannot taste the “gamey” in meat. That is, I have had gamey venison and non-gamey venison and can’t taste whatever gameyness is.

Cicada - tastes like weak shrimp.

punkwalrus , 9 days ago

I have shrapnel in my leg, it’s copper and brass, and I have had MRIs with no ill effects. Fucks up some CAT scans and xrays, but only if they are scanning that leg. It’s so small, though, that modern metal detectors don’t register it anymore.

punkwalrus , 12 days ago

I bought a $3 mini hook knife for my keychain off Aliexpress. I was tired of getting my pocket knife or Leatherman confiscated or stolen “for security reasons” at ever increasing (and surprising, like libraries, bars) venues. The majority of my needs was to cut open boxes and plastic packaging anyway. It’s the size of half a stick of gum, pops open with a button, and only the inside of the hook is sharp, making it pretty safe for wet hands. The handle is part carabiner clip. Not sure how long they last, since they get confiscated, but at $3 each, I don’t care. Keep it on my keys. The clip makes it easy to take off my keys if I need to leave it behind, but if I end up getting it stolen, meh.

It cuts through cardboard really well, and also opens that hard plastic packaging, burlap sacks, plastic strapping, and that weird material large dry dog food comes in.

punkwalrus , 15 days ago

I have been partial to Proggy fonts for over a decade

proggyfonts.net/index.php?menu=download

punkwalrus , 15 days ago

“He certainly has a fertile imagination,” said by some upper class twat trying to sound intelligent while using an intellectual dog whistle to alert other highbrows I was a liar, and passing it off to stupid little me as a compliment.

punkwalrus , 17 days ago

As if they care about the real data…

punkwalrus , 18 days ago

“The one thing about working concom is that fen sometimes enjoy freaking the mundanes.”

The one thing about working as science fiction convention staff is that your attendees sometimes like being weird to outsiders, just to see them react in amusing ways, and that can be annoying to deal with.

punkwalrus , 21 days ago

I had an older cat that had broken hips that healed wrong. So when he laid down, he did this weird sploot on his belly that cats normally don’t do. One of my younger cats imprinted on him, and also did the sploot. The first cat died, the other one splooted that way the rest of her life

punkwalrus , 20 days ago

Still gotta go with Streetlamp LaMoose.

punkwalrus , 22 days ago

I worked for a large computer company in the late 90s, early 2000s. When XP came out, they said there would be no site licensing. This meant we had to keep track of license keys for thousands upon thousands of systems, costing millions. This was before KMS or anything.

“Nothing we can do,” Microsoft said. “We have no gate key.”

Our server farms at the time were 40% Windows NT 4, 55% Sun systems, and 5% Linux. So we said, “okay,” and called Red Hat. In a year, our back end was 60% Sun, 35% Linux, and 5% Windows NT. We were already in talks to start switching to Linux workstations for desktops.

“Oh, you mean this gate key,” said Microsoft.

Asshats. They lost our server business, but let us use XP with a site license.

punkwalrus , 22 days ago

In high school, we had a science fiction club. I was vice president in my senior year. A year after I graduated, I was hanging out with some fellow graduates and one of them said, “How come you hated Christine so much?”

“Who?”

“Christine Smith. The blonde girl?”

“The blond girl who wore all those surfer shirts?”

“Yeah. Whats so bad about her?”

“Nothing. She was always so quiet. I barely remember her.”

“Yeah, well she practically threw herself at you, and you treated her like she didn’t exist.”

“She did?”

“Yeah. We even tried to make it easy. We set her up at parties to talk to you, and you just acted like she wasn’t even there. You were so rude.”

“I literally had no idea. I totally would have dated her.”

“Yeah, well, too late. She got so depressed after you graduated, that she ended up dropping out of everything and tried to kill herself. Shes been hospitalized and her parents moved away to be with her. Like, couldn’t you gave even said hi? Just because you made vice president of the club didn’t mean you were better than her or something.”

I literally had no idea.

punkwalrus , 22 days ago

I only have one machine using Windows because I don’t want to be “left behind” in the corporate desktop world, but it’s on my “left hand monitor” while my center and right of three monitors are Kubuntu. The specs won’t let me use 11 on any of my systems. My company laptop is still Windows 10 as well because some of our security software doesn’t run on 11 yet.

If I didn’t have to work in the corporate space, I’d quit Windows in a fast second. I have been using Kubuntu as my daily driver for almost 10 years now.

punkwalrus , 22 days ago

I’m old, but “The Mephisto Waltz,” a1971 horror film about a dying pianist (and Satanist) taking over a young piano players body. Lots of murder, lots of screaming, and decanters of blue liquid. My parents took me in a drive in to see it, and I guess thought I’d be okay with it at age five, sleeping in the back of the car.

Nope.

Blue liquid still freaks me out.

punkwalrus , 24 days ago

The stupid thing is that they could have approached this in a much less dickish manner. Seriously. First, they are making money off us as it is with their demographics and the fact they are not utilizing this cash cow as before means they have gotten too greedy for their own good, or mismanaging funds which is a completely unrelated problem. Long ads, unskippable ads, expensive premium. This is the beginning of the end of something they used to offer as free, resting on their laurels as a monopoly, like the airline industry. When they are now practically forcing the cobra effect. Eventually, it will get so silly, it will go the way of the dod like Angelfire. AOL, and Geocities. Or, soon, Netflix.

I would have started it similar to Patreon, like, “by donating $1/mo, you can support artists like this,” and incentivize the publishers with monetary gain and higher search results. Nobody is gonna miss $1 or $12/year. You multiply that by millions of viewers, that’s millions of dollars on top of their demographics. Second, they could have had a 5 second bumper, similar to PBS, like “This and other find content is brought to you by Exxon and the Chubb group” or whatever. Five seconds. Front and back. Not enough to cause outrage. Skippable, but not so annoying, everyone skips.

punkwalrus , 27 days ago

You’re probably right, however, you can also be not profitable because of shitty business decisions, ineffective management, embezzlement, and inventory waste. It could have been the two kitchens and various levies and taxes in that location. If they had lines, it also means they had a finite cap of serving customers per hour, and if cost or any other of the things I mentioned could still outweigh what they made per night.

The unionization could have been a scapegoat, when they secretly declared bankruptcy, sold the assets and name to another owner, and reformed in a second location. That happens in nightclubs a lot in popular districts.

punkwalrus , 27 days ago

If that were true, they’d speed away from us at about 900mph.

punkwalrus , 27 days ago

The rich don’t want to impress you, they want to impress other rich people.

punkwalrus , 27 days ago

I lack that enzyme genetically. I am allergic to alcohol, and so when my stomach can’t digest beans corn, or even eggs, they sit in my intestines, start to ferment, and I am in a world of hurt.

punkwalrus , 27 days ago

No age limit in this household. I’d say “just show up with a bag,” but I just gave treats so some 4yo with no bag. If an adult asked? They’d get them.

I just want to be kind. I wasn’t allowed to trick or treat as a kid. I did as a teen, and you know what? Nobody cared how old our group was. We got candy like the rest of them. God bless those neighbors.

And God bless Halloween.

punkwalrus , 28 days ago

I’m not saying you’re wrong, never worked there, but if you’re not worried about job stability personally, it doesn’t matter. Do your best, learn everything you can, take no criticism personally, get fired for bullshit reasons, and learn from the experience. Just use them. They don’t care about you, you already know you could be fired, and ride the wave as far as it takes you. The lifestyle is not for everyone, but a lot of younger people know this these days. They see the companies like stepping stones. Any company probably won’t last ten years, anyway. Loyalty is bullshit on either side.

punkwalrus , 27 days ago

I suspect a lot of younger software engineers are doing this. I was talking to one who made it a point to latch onto companies in their death throes, usually by word of mouth, so he got laid off with severance, and thus can explain short job hops with the “fast paced industry.” He lived frugally, being in a country where a $200k+ USD salary was ludicrously wealthy, and he said he did very little actual programming except personal projects that he did just to make his github account look active. He was just hopping from company to company without any real love or attachment to where he worked. I was both appalled and impressed how matter of fact he was, plus his perspective on the US job market was dead on. He had it all figured out.

punkwalrus , 28 days ago

It did, and I was also doing that in some of our software in a previous job. Other terms we had to stop using were black sheep, white washing, and even gorilla.

vice.com/…/we-need-to-stop-saying-blacklist-and-w…

punkwalrus , 27 days ago

Doubtful it would be a pipeline exception in Jenkins

punkwalrus , 27 days ago

This. I was eight when I found out. My mother was in denial and kept using santa as a manipulation tool for good behavior until I was maybe 13, but she was an alcoholic with the tentative grasp of reality. I got super bitter about Christmas until I was homeless as a teen.

Christmas was the first major attempt to wrestle back what I felt I was owed as a child. I refused to be bitter, because I saw that as giving in to the people who wanted me to fail. I enjoy Christmas as punk as fuck.

Still hard, though. I can’t find anyone as into it as I want to be and don’t have the energy to really go all in as I want to.

punkwalrus , 29 days ago

I have used Kubuntu since 12.04 and had few issues. I get everyone has favorites, but don’t understand the visceral tribalism present. Maybe I’ll hate Kubuntu when 24.04 comes out, I dunno. I have 20.04 as a daily driver and run into very few issues that are specifically Kubuntu related. I could use debian with KDE someday, I dunno.

I just want Linux, bash, and a decent browser at the end of the day.

punkwalrus , 29 days ago

I can answer this: my son was born in 1990. We were extremely poor.

We had midwives help us out as best they could, to the tune of about $3200 at the time. The birth got complicated due to a variety of health factors, and both my son and wife almost died (not because of the midwives). Luckily the midwives had a direct line to Georgetown Hospital, and the cesarean was done there. The total hospital bill was $58,000, or $138k in today’s money, although hospital costs have rose much higher vs inflation, so maybe it would be in the $200k range now. She was in the ICU for a week, hospital for another week, our son for about 3 weeks.

My wife job didn’t have health insurance, because it wasn’t required back then. Because she was gone a week, her job fired her for an unexcused absence. Oddly enough, this made her unemployed and Washington DC had some law (or rule or something) that immediately dropped the hospital bills because of her unemployment. In the end, we had to pay $15k to about two dozen practices who individually sued us, which took 7 years to pay off and a lot of court visits and wage garnishments. It financially ruined us, pretty much. Both suffered a lot afterwards because we just couldn’t afford minimal care. It was hellish. I can’t imagine how much worse it would be today. We got evicted from our apartment, and lived in government housing for six years.

So, yeah. Don’t have a baby in America unless you can guarantee it will be healthy and you have a lot of money. Most of my friends don’t have kids, they simply can’t afford it and look at it like the previous generation looked at concepts like summer homes and yachts. Nice luxuries, but way out of affordabilty.

punkwalrus , 29 days ago

Because we made too much (over minimum wage, dual income household). I was making $13k as a sales manager, my wife was making $8k as an assistant manager, and minimum wage was $3.35/hr or just under $7k/year back then. After taxes, we made about $1200/mo, and our rent was $650 for a single bedroom apartment. No car, we took the bus, barely had enough for food and utilities.

But we were considered way too over the “poverty line,” which was I think less than $6k/year then. We had been using birth control but when they say some form of birth control is 99% effective, the DO mean 1% failed. I have no regrets our son was born, because it turned out we couldn’t have kids later when we tried. And then later my wife died when he was 22, so if we had kids later, I would have been a widow with younger kids.

I feel awful he grew up poor with us until he was about 10, though.

punkwalrus , 1 month ago

Worked a job where I had to be a Linux admin for a variety of VMs. To access them, I needed an VPN that only worked inside the company LAN, and blocked internet access. it was a 30 day trial license on day 700somthing, so it had a max 5 simultaneous connection limit. Access was from my heavily locked down laptop. Windows 7 with 5 minutes locking Screensaver. The ssh software was an unknown brand, “ssh.exe” which only allowed one connection at a time in a 80 x 24 console window with no ability to copy and paste. This went to a bastion host, an HPUx box on an old csh shell with no write access to your home directory due to a 1.4mb disk quota per user. Only one login per user, ten login max, and the bastion host was the only way to connect to the Linux VMs. Default 5 minute logout for inactivity. No ssh keys allowed. No scripting allowed, was like typing over 9600 baud.

I quit that job. When asked why, I told them I was a Linux administrator and the job was not allowing me to administrate. I was told “a poor carpenter always blames his tools.” Yeah, fuck you.

punkwalrus , 1 month ago

It really depends. Autographs can seem very tangible, but photos are a better option IMHO, because I can show them off as “See, I was there, I didn’t buy this off eBay,” or something. But it really depends on what you want. IMHO? Neither appeal to me. Now, it may be because I used to run these things, and have met celebrities on and off the show floor. I see them as people in a weird profession, and feel a little… skeevy? Like I don’t name drop until it’s vital to the story, because I feel like I am using them. I have friends among these ranks to this day, and sometimes we hang out and shoot the shit, because they know I won’t ask them for anything. And they know I won’t spread gossip. Now, some people have wanted to take photos with ME, as “omg, that’s the president of Katsucon Entertainment” when I was that, but it was rare. I think celebs did it more than my attendees. Maybe as a scrapbook thing for them. So there are photos out there with some of the Power Rangers, for example, that I don’t have a copy of, but one of the actors has in his or her personal collection.

Embarrassment: I am in some of these people’s photo albums, and I don’t know who the fuck they were. Just a selfie in the green room. Because when I am at the con, I am working, not schmoozing. So the photos are probably pretty bad: just sweaty old me with a confused “uh, okay” stare in the photo.

I know with Stan Lee, and I name drop him because of the controversy of people taking advantage of him in his later years, I saw him at a Comic Con, practically being dragged to imbalance by a staff that was churning through attendees like an assembly line. This was about 4 years before his passing. He looked so old, tired, and frail. I was not working that con, I was working my table, but I just… felt so bad for him. And they were so strict about the rules. They actually walled him of with pipe and drape over 6 feet high so people couldn’t snap a pic of him while in line. You got something like 15 seconds with him, he was allowed to sign one thing, one snapshot, and answer one question. Then ZAP you were ushered out of the area. I recall it was something $210 for those 15 seconds.

One guest I worked with said the Marvel booth was terrible about how long she could spend with attendees. That’s why she often had her own table, to sit and chat with her fans. And some celebrities, like Mark Hamill or Patrick Stewart, are fucking pros at this. I never worked with them, but I have seen Mark, sleep deprived and exhausted, be as kind to the first person in line as the last. I feel like despite it all, he’s GRATEFUL of the opportunity. I can’t imagine the crazy either of them has to put up with. I saw a video where Patrick hugged an abuse survivor, and while that is amazing and kind, I bet con security just cringed in anticipation.

So whatever you pick, I guess my point is, be kind to them. They work hard, and they put up with a lot. It’s such a weird and surreal experience for a human to endure as a job.

punkwalrus , 1 month ago

I had a boss who did this! He just abruptly hung up when he was done with the conversation. People used to call back, worried they’d been cut off, or my boss was mad at them. Nope, he’s just overly autistic-efficient.

punkwalrus , 1 month ago

Concussions. Especially when they are used as plot vehicles where someone is knocked out, and they wake up in a jail cell or whatever.

If you got hit THAT hard on the head that you’re unconscious and unresponsive for hours? You are going to wake up dizzy, nauseated, and disoriented with a huge headache, loss of motor control, and a disorienting tinnitus. Possibly permanently. Your brain swelled up and cut off blood flow. You might look like a stroke victim. You will not wake up, rub your head, then pick a lock in a dark room and construct a bomb with a gum wrapper and a smoke detector battery. You will weep, vomit, and be unable to walk straight until you get real medical attention.

Some action stars get knocked out almost every episode. I think MacGyver would have been mentally incapacitated after just a few shows.

punkwalrus , 1 month ago

I work at furry cons, and have done security at Bronycon. There is far more money in that fandom than people realize. A lot of it is IT of course, but you’d be surprised how many young and attractive women are in those suits with real professional careers in law, business, and medical. Furry fandom lets them be themselves.

punkwalrus , 1 month ago

Drywall patching spade that is a stain scraper.

Many years ago, I lived with two slobs. They often left dried food on the counters, floors, and other flat surfaces (like the stove top or floor of the oven). In addition, one of them fed their dog with human food that gave it the shits, and was not attentive towards talking the dog out to poop. So the floor would have clay-like puddles of drying dog diarrhea. This scraper was used to deal with the dollop of whatever organic matter was dried onto the counter, floor, or otherwise. Then washed in the next dishwasher cycle.

“But you’ll scratch the [surface material]!!!”

I don’t care. My house, my problem. Clean up after yourself, for fucks sake. Plus, I was always wiping down the counter with cleansers, so any cross contamination was not a concern. I am a voracious cleaner.

Those slobs have left, the dog passed away, and the dogs my wife and I have now are mostly housebroken and don’t have diarrhea. The scraper only rarely gets used these days. When she moved it, I had to explain to her what it was, though.

punkwalrus , 1 month ago

This right here. I have worked with a dozen PMs in 30 years, only two were any damn good. One managed an IT team, and she didn’t know tech worth squat, but God damn, did she keep the flow going and know how to get shit done without being an ass about it.

On the other hand, I faught with a PM once because he didn’t understand the concept of priorities or how to manage a crisis. “You want me to fix the outage or attend a meeting about it?” “Both.” “Pick one. You have a choice. I can fix the issue in the data center, or join a blame session in the meeting room. Which one?” “BOTH!” I got to the meeting room, and he demanded we put down our laptops and pay attention. He invited EVERYBODY regardless of whether they were needed or not. Twenty seven people all bitching about the outage and not a single person fixing it. No meeting moderation. Just chaos until he had a panic attack. Just useless.