The Most Amazing Things Ever Said to Me

The following items are direct quotes of things said to me or a group I was in. No rumor, hearsay, or third-party accounts here. I'm not usually short of words, but when I heard each of these things I was speechless.

Sometimes I have trouble beginning work in the morning. (Sure, it's just me...) At my first job, I'd go chat with people to kill time and try to work up some motivation. Mind you, this was before the web. Early one morning, 6:30 or so, I went with a friend to talk to the secretary and the first thing she said to us was...

``You guys have to smell my rear end. It stinks!''

She actually meant the rear end of her car, she just forgot to say that part. It turned out that she had driven over a plastic garbage bag, which wrapped around the car's rear axle. The friction started burning the plastic, and it did indeed stink.

A company that I worked for was going to go public. This was in 1990, maybe 1991, still before the web and big dot-com money. Our boss introduced one of the principal investors to us at an all-hands meeting. He spoke a few sentences about how he saw the company's future, then closed with....

``You guys are gonna make me rich!''

Oh, that's why we were working so hard. ("If you want to see what the Good Lord thinks of money, look at who he gave it to." -- Dorothy Parker)

Same job. One morning I arrived early, as I was trying to finish a demo in time for an important show. Going through my email, I saw a message that began something like "I've been at {company deleted} long enough now to feel comfortable. So I'm ready to share something. . . ."

"OK," I think. "He's going to tell me that he's gay. No problem. Anything between consenting adults is fine by me."

But I was leaping to the wrong conclusion. The email continued something like:

Physically I'm a male, but psychologically I'm a woman. So I'm going to become a woman.

Reading that stopped me short. Deadline or no, I spent about half an hour just staring out the window thinking about it. Notice he didn't say dress like a woman; he said become a woman. Now I don't care how liberal a guy you are, thinking about that transformation is going to make you wince for a bit.

At another job, the boss used to buy bagels for everyone on Thursdays. Which was pretty generous, given that the company had 200-odd employees (parse it either way, it's fitting). Then one day Bagel Thursday turned back into regular ol' Thursday. No announcements -- the bagels just ceased to show up. A few weeks later, at a group meeting attending by the boss, someone asked him why no more bagels. To which his reply was...

``Because you guys are a bunch of lousy, ungrateful fucks!''

Apparently no one had ever said thanks. Which I have a smidgen of sympathy for, but isn't this the sort of thing that a boss does to show appreciation of his/her workers, not the other way around? Yes, we appreciate your appreciation of us. Do you appreciate our appreciation of your appreciation?

For the record, ever since then I try very hard to thank my bosses for company perks. For my troubles, most of them give me a look as if I said something profoundly retarded. So I gather that they agree with me that me ex-boss was a bit out of line.

At yet another job, my boss and I were going through some poorly-documented code written by a third party. I made disparaging remark about the code's author and said that uncommented code is worthless. Though nothing more was said at the time, later on he told me that he was really stung by what I said, because it meant...

``If I wrote the most beautiful 3-D engine ever, and it didn't have any comments, you'd think it was worthless!''

Well, yeah. I mean, putting comments in your code is pretty basic, CS101 stuff, right? The scary thing is that my boss was a pretty smart guy. He was the first person that I ever respected as a programmer that disagreed with me (and dare I say a great many other computer jockeys?) on something so basic.

Weirdly, later on he did start commenting his code. I'm still not sure why he did so -- did he see the point of it all, or was he just browbeaten (shamed?) into it?

I've got a Catholic friend that I like to tease about her religion. She gives as good as she gets, as she finds my atheism inexplicable. It's all pretty good-natured. But the weekend after the repugnant terrorist attacks, she asked me:

How do you, as an atheist, get through something like this?

I found this odd because it seems to me that acts of unspeakable evil pose more of a challenge to those that believe in a god worth praying to. Are people really convinced by clergymen futilely trying to make some sense of such a tragedy? What higher purpose could be worth the loss of 7,000 innocent people? The cognitive dissonance must make a true believer's head explode.

Conversely, while I found the attacks thoroughly outrageous, they didn't shatter my worldview. Human beings are animals, responsible for their own fates, and there's no higher purpose to anything. We're responsible for our own evil.

In my experience, humans seem to need very little help in that regard.

Dave Townsend / townsend@patriot.net / 21 Sep 01

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