I used to work for Comcast and one of my responsibilities was making sure their mobile apps passed their annual accessibility tests. The company faced enormous FCC fines for failure to pass these tests, but somehow the only person aware of this was me and I was only a contractor. Comcast has thousands of vice presidents of this and that, and one of them should have been on top of this stuff, but their turnover rate was so high that they never usually even lasted a year in one position, so it was up to me to explain the situation to each new one and try to convince them that it was even important.

You wouldn't think that a person at that level would ever say "who cares about blind people?" but they almost all said that or something to that effect, until the reality of a million-dollars-per-month fine set in. They even at one point hired a vice president of accessibility -- a man who was himself blind and obviously never said "who cares about blind people?" -- but he quit after less than a year because of his frustration with getting the company to give a shit.

There's a ton of new housing construction where I live (Philly suburbs) but it's almost entirely these $800K "town" houses (in the middle of a fucking field). One of the main companies building them is named "NV Homes". I wondered who the initials "NV" stood for until I got it: "Envy" homes. It's depressing to imagine people borrowing a fucking million dollars to buy a big cardboard box because they imagine other people will be jealous of them.

Post something controversial like "Stalin killed some of his own people" on .ml and you'll see plenty of them.

"When your pee hits the urinal ... it sounds feminine."

Layoffs are a natural part of the corporate world. You hire masses of people to create the illusion of growth, and you fire masses of people to create the illusion of ruthless competence. Line go up no matter what.

I had a job as a programmer consultant once making $50,000 a year and I was being billed out at $185 an hour so I was making like 1/7 of my bill rate. And my bill rate was only that high because I have an advanced degree in a field utterly unrelated to programming. I want to say the company I consulted at was getting screwed even worse than me, but I was actually good at programming and cleaned up a mess they had already thrown millions of dollars at in-house.

No, Depeche Mode sang "all I ever wanted, all I ever needed, is here in my arms." I don't love you any more.

My uncle used to go to timeshare sales pitches 2-3 times a week. Never bought a timeshare, just went for the free dinners. He was so bored with life that he didn't even mind sitting there listening to them babble. The only other thing he had to do was to call up my dad and discuss how gas prices were slightly different at different filling stations.

Your dad did the right thing. I got mine 95% done at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars and arthritis basically everywhere, just for the honor of paying $100 a month to park it at a U-haul lot. I know how to weld and rivet now, just as useless as the bus.

Skoolies for me. A few years ago I bought a used school bus and started converting it into a motorhome. I made an account at the main forum (skoolie.net) because there were people there that actually knew useful stuff, primarily about metalworking (which I'd never done before) and the mechanical aspects of bus ownership (which I still don't know shit about).

Surprisingly (or maybe not) skooliers heavily tend towards being right-wing, trump-loving, gun-toting, immigrant-hating wankers. There are exceptions but they always end up being driven away. The thought of going to one of the annual skoolie gatherings is nightmare fuel for me.

Spain. The Man

North America

Chicago Metropolitan Statistical Area

Kids today will never know the joy of writing apps for Blackberry. You wrote them in Java, which was cool and the gang, but when you tried to compile your app and deploy it to your test device, every library module you incorporated into your app had to be signed independently by RIM's signing servers. If you were lucky this took a few minutes; if you were unlucky it took 45 minutes to an hour. If you were really really lucky it never happened at all because one or more of these signing servers were completely down, and then you could just tell your manager that the signing server was down and go home for the day.

And this would happen even if you'd only changed a single line of code. I got in the habit of making an enormous number of changes before running and testing anything, which is obviously not an ideal practice but was completely necessary in this case. I would also sometimes roll my own code to avoid having to include a particular module. My custom UI, for example, needed to use trigonometry functions but these were part of one of the cryptography library modules which were especially notorious for taking forever to sign. So I wrote my own sin() function instead.

This was probably the main reason Blackberrys were murdered by iPhones, even more than their tiny screens with 16-bit color that RIM refused to upgrade until it was too late. iPhone app development also sucked thanks to its antiquated C-style language, but it was still lightyears beyond Blackberry. RIM was going around offering cash bonuses to developers to write apps for them (my company was offered $30,000 by them) but it still wasn't even close to being worth it.