Unilateral Undervaluation

My boss is on the BZ project again. I’m so frustrated that he wants to keep prodding at it, even when it’s clear no one cares. He’s worried in part because he’s sold this as my value to management, and so he wants a “win” to prove my worth. He also imagines that if you give people good information and guidance they will do the right thing. I know those are both silly plans, and not just from my cynicism – the data he claims people need is already available and no amount of pretty on my part will make them use it. I keep asking for a definition of what will make it be done. He tells me about features it needs and I point out it already does, or that some other existing does. But there is hope. He agreed to the idea that I could generate reports and email them to VPs, and that feels like a way I can get to “done”. I think if I can get that sort of individual attention to it for 2 minutes I can get my boss to back off and let this dumb project die.

I realized today that I’ve been having one-sided written conversations for a very long time. I had a number of pen pals when I was young. Few of them wrote back, almost none wrote more than once or twice. Which was what I expected – that I couldn’t have most people’s attention at all, and that almost no one could put up with me for very long.

One person I wrote to was as close as I got to a friend when I was young. For a few months they lived close enough to me that I could theoretically see them outside of school, and did a couple of times. They wrote back once, after they moved away, and even suggested I could visit. But I knew that was ridiculous, and said so when I wrote back, because even if I got to a nearby town somehow – maybe for a hockey game or something my siblings did – I couldn’t make it to their house. I don’t know if that 10-year-old was making realistic plans, but it would have been nice to live a life where it was possible to imagine getting a one-time ride across town to see an old friend.

Several pen pals later DecBot introduced me to their friend, who was moving away in just a few weeks. Perfect for someone to want my attention while in crisis and then slowly fade away. I wrote to them for a couple of years. They even wrote back 4 or 5 times times, with paper and stamps since it was the 1900s. One of the first things I did after I got access to a car was go to visit them. After which we basically never talked again.

People think I’m more tolerable when I’m remote, or when they’re in a crisis. Anything that gets me too close to recurring normal human interaction is a lot for people. In some ways this is a cruel lie my brain tells me, but in some ways it’s true. Lots of people think I can help when things are really bad. They can even come to trust me, and to sometimes respond, at least for a while. But it doesn’t keep once their life gets better, or once I get closer.

I don’t mean to complain. And to be clear, this isn’t a comment about any of you. It’s an observation of patterns in my life, and my response to them, from long before we ever met ¹An easy point of distinction in my life, since I don’t keep anyone. I wouldn’t have kept myself if I knew how to get away.. Mostly I’m thinking about how sad and lonely I was my whole life, even given my lowest of expectations. How I still imagine that my utility to others is only in dealing with the parts of life that are too sad or lonely or hard for them to handle alone, and that I’m too dangerous to tolerate at better times. How I imagine that any other connection is too selfish to tolerate, even if it were available.

My time at robots was spent converting 2 servos to 5k pots, which we should be able to consume directly as game pad pots. They’ll only give us half range output but should work for like 300+° and can be plugged in directly with the same PWM cables they already used. So I’m pretty satisfied with that. I also help HT with a python library issue, which was pretty tricky. They are clearly tweaked to within an inch of breaking most of the time, and it makes them unable to focus, but they’re very smart and when they aren’t too frustrated quite capable as well. I will have to see if there’s something I can do that produces calm. Twitchy people always imagine this is impossible, but I do it all the time.

There was also some #EatTheRich happening at robots, which is hard for me to stay out of. I don’t need to avoid it but I should be careful to ensure that no one being reasonable feels too unsafe (people being unreasonable can fuck rightly off). There was some reverse-engineered nonsense, like “is there even enough land for everyone to have housing”. But the main point of conflict was one person who was convinced that the world would fall apart if we just murdered rich people – among other things, that companies would cease to operate if their boards and execute staff disappeared. As if hierarchy is the thing that creates organizations, not a burden imposed on them by those looking to exert control. Corporate boards are tools for extracting wealth from labor. They need us, but we don’t need them. And I hear they are tasty.

I’m sick today. Not bad but enough to make me not want to do anything, and to make my face hurt. My morning meeting was canceled but not until after I was up, so I didn’t get the extra sleep. But I got through all my deadline work and urgent SRs before 1 PM so I can spend the rest of the day holding still and sitting in the dark and not thinking too hard. I should give a moment’s thought to how I’m going to handle therapy tomorrow – have a topic at hand – but otherwise I think rest, even though I’m feeling motivated.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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