Nathan Hall's Wired Kingdom

Well, once again my job is sucking the life out of me. After receiving a horrible raise which comes out to about $22 a week before taxes, I thought that was it. I was sure I had finally met my fill of frustration. This entire year, my boss has kept my value to the company down my quickly moving me from one small job to the next, never allowing me to fully work on any projects, be they interesting or just mediocre (there is of course the exception of the social networking site that we’re building but that’s another post). I’ve also been repeatedly blocked in my attempts to transfer into the editorial department, something that I would much rather be doing and in fact, got a degree in. This has been the worst year for personal growth I think I’ve ever had.
I had more personal growth the year I spent drinking in Milwaukee, recovering from a broken heart and being jaded with activism.

I thought that my frustration had peaked. Then everyone in the office received a nice little note from our boss informing us that we had to fill out some self-evaluation forms. The forms had multiple check boxes based on a 1-5 scale of rating your performance and “mandatory essay questions” including this gem:

4. What are the employee’s career goals over the next 12 months?

Hmm… my career goal is to get the fuck out of here and hopefully salvage the concept of my career, because after the better part of 2 years here, I think I am actually less marketable than when I started.

Anyways after that email, I started looking out the window and daydreaming. I was brought back to memories when I was still in high school, hanging out at Nick’s house. He had just picked up the new Windows 95 OS and we were digging around looking at all the neat features that it had. One of them was an interface for calling people… through the computer!

What a novel idea, we dialed my home phone and my dad answered, said ‘hello?’

Holy Shit!

I tried talking to him but for some reason it didn’t work… whatever still neat.

My dad cursed and slammed the phone down.

Hahahaha.

Then we tried some other things out, recorded a Butthole Surfers song and mixed in some sweet-ass sound of crashing lightning… right at the peak, when Gibby Haynes was screaming… awesome!!!

So yeah, as much as I hate windows now, what fun we had back in the day when all of this computer stuff was fresh and new (at least for me), and the internet looked like a database or something someone had created on notepad.

And that, that is what I’ve been doing rather than working today. Shit, maybe I’ll turn this in as my self evaluation.