makz survives the apocalypse

I managed to avoid typing up any of my thoughts on my last two work assignments, which is probably for the best, as they were so jam-packed full of activity that my head is still spinning, even though I've been home for almost a week.

I still don't know if I'm any good at the majority of my new job, but I'm trying to be diligent about everything. That's all I can do. I'm used to being good at things right away (I'm sorry if it's rude to admit that — feel free to take it as a sign that I stay inside of my comfort zone more often than not), so it's a bit of a hit to my ego that the learning curve is this steep.

There are parts I'm good at.

It turns out, I can reassure the engineers who work in my old department — the freelance engineers I haven't even met before — fairly competently, just because I'm familiar with their workflows. It seems that most of the people who jump them suddenly in the dead of mid-morning to talk about what IT networking paradigms are being sprung on them mid-show don't really know what they do, so I think they end up feeling undervalued and put-upon. Because I worked in that area for a long time, it seems they mostly trust me, once we get to talking.

That's a huge relief. I'm always the most concerned with not fumbling the social aspects of my job, way more than I'm concerned about the technical aspects. You can always become technically proficient, but human beings form opinions of others quickly and don't revise them often. I always feel more afraid of the condemnation of others than of failing at a routine task.

I don't feel like it's oversharing to admit that. I think it's probably more common than engineers generally let on.

I'm working on trying to be more honest with myself about what's bothering me and what I like. I spent my entire twenties trying to answer the question "what do you like?" and my entire thirties asking "what do you want to avoid?" and I'm on the cusp of my forties, so I'd like to start thinking about "what environments support what I like and minimize what I want to avoid?"

I want to greet the morning with anticipation more often than not.

It's not like I greet the morning with dread, but I'm dead tired a lot of the time, lately. I fall asleep with a lot of worries buzzing around in my skull. Most of them have flown away by the time I'm ready to start running around, but not all of them have.

And there's a part of me, one of those buzzing worries, that thinks that all of the other concerns are pretty small beans, compared to what everyone else is dealing with. But it's no use to be down on myself for being in a better position than I was a year ago, even if the world is falling apart at the seams.

I like having intellectually challenging tasks ahead of me and I hate being unemployed, so isn't this the environment I should be in, right now? If the world was a really simple one and the narrative centered me, that's how it would be.

I've got my wheels spinning in some different directions on how to be a more integrated member of my community, but all of them are a few years out. It's depressing to admit, but until I have a stable base where I don't feel like I'm financially endangered, that's the best I can do.

I wonder if I'm making excuses. Once you reach a certain momentum, reacting at a certain rhythm, it's impossible to tell, anymore.

I came to the cafe to translate today, so I'm gonna do some of that, then tuck in. I spent all day devising some new monitoring dashboards, and trying to figure out how our alerting software works so I can design better alerts. I need to troubleshoot our logs presentation, and maybe the actual production computers will be online tomorrow. Buzz. Buzz buzz.

Is it pink noise…? Maybe it's more like the sound of machine chatter…?

So, what's been happening with me?

I'm once again on a work trip. A fancy city. A lot of my extended coworkers are here — the ones I usually only see during brief windows of setup before the events for which my closer coworkers have prepared assets. I'm an "extended coworker" in the making, perhaps.

I have no idea what I'm doing.

That's not exactly true. I'm being hard on myself. You can't be good at something you haven't done before, unless you're a Newtype or something. I'm only really good at computers, but I "smell too much of sweat" to be a Newtype. I work hard. Nothing has come of that hard work as of yet.

I'll get there. I have that much faith in myself.

My industry is pretty forgiving in a lot of ways. Really, the main thing is to be able to hang. I don't know that I'm the world's best "culture fit," (in any setting, really), but I'm good enough at being personable and hardworking. I'm doing my best not to complain, even if I get cold and sore and hungry.

I'm making this all sound miserable, but it isn't. There's a reason I got into this line of work; I love seeing the machines make stuff happen. I love thinking of all the little ways we can improve a process and implementing those little things in the background. I love seeing people have an easier time this time than they did last time.

I do like what I do.

But I can't help but wonder if I'm here because of something like "fate" or "inevitability."

Sometimes you'll see, in interviews with technologists or creatives — the ones who do sort of weird, not particularly lauded work in niches that aren't high-brow, whose actual paychecks aren't particularly fat — comments that they "work this job because it's the only thing [they] could do." They had no other choice. They ended up in the only place they could have, because of who they were, fundamentally, as human beings.

That's kind of how I feel about what I'm doing right now.

If I could have joined an industry that had broader citizenship in the world, perhaps I would have. As it stands, I'm suited to this industry in a bunch of ways, both good and ill.

Sometimes that makes me feel a little lonely in ways that I can't explain. There are other people who want to do similar work to this, who are very smart and capable, but because of a myriad of factors, I'm here. In order hold my head up in front of all of those other people, I want to perform well at my job. The fact that I'm not good at it (yet) makes me frustrated not just for myself, but for all the coworkers who might be here if I wasn't.

I don't want to be window-dressing. I feel like I have to prove something.

And ultimately, a lot is being expected of me, down the road.

…To be honest, I poured a lot of these feelings into the fanfic I've been writing. Usually I get nowhere near close to completing anything I write. I just write meta-fiction and daydream and the words don't end up making it to the paper. This time, it was almost like the dialogue just poured out of me, and every edit pass on the narration was easier than the last.

Maybe that, too, is a kind of "fate."

It takes a long time to learn how to communicate ideas to other people. Computers are also just communication methods, reliant on math, built on flashes of electricity. As a human, who tries hard to communicate in a world of physics, with a body of chemicals and synapses, I appreciate the similarities in the grammars of natural language and computer programming. I'm getting to a place where suddenly, things that were difficult for me aren't as difficult.

I know the same thing will be true for my nine-to-five job, as well. I'm just not there yet.

I'm never going to compare human cognition and whatever is happening with LLMs. I'm never going to say there's no point in me being here, looking for ways to improve processes for other humans, implementing those little things in the background, and enjoying seeing others have an easier time for my efforts. Rather, there's a lot of point in it! It's so pointedly pointful that I feel I have to become exceptional for the sake of all the other humans who would happily be cold and sore and hungry in my place.

My coworkers, both extended and close, are a great asset to one another, to my company, and to the landscape of this industry. I'm happy to be part of this fabric. Electrical impulses, chemical interactions, and all.

Writing in the science fiction genre is all about thinking through your own body and its relationship to the ordinary. In order to describe something extraordinary, you have to know how to describe the mundane. What makes it up? What defines it? What parts of it, when changed very slightly, would make something fantastical happen? How do all the chemicals and synapses in your own body react to those mundanities, and how would they react to the extraordinary?

I know parts of my industry, but I won't get to a point where I can imagine divergent paths into the future until I know it better, more holistically.

One day, it'll be like words flowing out of me; a bunch of derivative observations based on the work my coworkers did before me, to be built up by my coworkers who come after me.

I know the meme is that we "don't dream of labor," but I do! I dream of labor. I dream of the labor of hundreds of hands, coming together to create something and to build up processes and techniques that we can keep iterating on for generations.

I hope more equitable worlds come, for all those coworkers I've met, those I will meet one day, and ones I'll never be fortunate enough to know. For now, I need to become excellent.

For no particularly good reason, I'm doing a deep dive into David Bowie and his various stage personas, concept albums, and lyrical elements. I'm a product of American radio, just as much as the next person, so it isn't as if I have had no exposure to the man. In fact, I remember precisely where I was when I first heard his very last single.

At the time, I thought only, "just like the rest of his work, my religious schoolteachers would all have a field day whispering in corners about the decline of society," and secretly enshrined in my heart a small shard of solidarity. I think that's the core of rock music. It isn't anti-establishment sentiment, so much as it is the small knowledge that you've made them sweat a bit.

I've got to say, though, the entire experience of watching Bowie's final performance as Ziggy Stardust has been an interesting time for me, in my present circumstances. I'm sitting here — watching him, then later typing this — at a computer with more power than any I've set my hands to before, researching how to packetize audio and video and send it over network switches that would have made my child self blush at their sheer speed — and there he is, across time and space, performing at a level I can't even imagine reaching, every analogue sine wave traveling down a dedicated cable, getting a dedicated fader, being manipulated by human hands alone, traveling to a recording medium unmitigated by ones and zeroes at all… It's the world that built the world that I live in. My hair is bright red because of glam rock. My job was built on the back of those camera operators and lighting engineers, sweaty in a control room, with monitor mixers sitting near wedge speakers, losing their hearing bit by bit, while spotlight operators track movements onstage.

My first ever gig that I got any credit for, in any meaningful way, was doing spotlights at a rodeo. I got so motion sick I had to leave straight after. There's a physicality to that job. And now I'm bruising my knees on the concrete warehouse floor zip-tieing in fiber cables between switches so that, at point of show, a single Ethernet cable could carry more digitized sine waves than surrounded Ziggy during his Rock 'n' Roll Suicide by some exponential number; fader groups abstracted away, preprogrammed in their paths by osc signals, recorded here and sent there as a series of packets arranged by committees of electrical engineers… Ziggy Stardust is dead! They took pieces of him and became real, traveling down the wire!!

And I will sit, knees bruised, sweaty in a control room, and if I get motion sickness it will be from staring into a monitoring application too hard, surely.

I ended up becoming more of a computer monkey than a rock star, despite the color of my hair. Still, I hold onto that shard of solidarity. Maybe I'm a blackstar.