You leave Visual Basic alone!

I used to work at a big cable company whose name rhymes with bombast. One day I (M) found myself in a meeting with a bunch of female vice-presidents (Bombast has thousands of vice-presidents). The presenter couldn’t get her laptop to connect to the big TV so I pulled out one of my gadgets and got her set up. She said “wow, you’re pretty handy to have around.” My brain decided that it would be a clever thing indeed to say “well, I’m pretty well-endowed in the dongle department” but when I started to say it my brain realized how completely insane a comment it was. So my brain cut me off and I ended up just saying “well, I’m pretty well-endowed” which was not exactly any better.

To their credit everybody ignored this except for one woman who actually guffawed briefly. I wasn’t fired immediately so there’s that.

I’ve had many coworkers over the years who made their greatest contributions to the company by doing nothing. In programming, the amount of damage some people can do by actually doing stuff is almost inconceivable.

Edit: I had one programmer colleague whose code fired a 125 mph knuckleball a foot above a ten-year-old kid’s head. I had to physically intervene to prevent a fistfight between my boss and the client, certainly the only time that even happened to me.

Uh … yuck.

Uh … he’s tall?

I once dungeon-mastered a DnD campaign. For the map I just took a map of North America and rotated it 90°. Not one person noticed.

Thank god for GPS. Even now people keep trying to give me directions and I’m like just shut up, I have a phone that will tell me where to go.

I took piano lessons for many years and I could sight-read sheet music … sorta. As long as the notes were within the staves, I knew exactly what key to play. It was when notes were above and below the staves that I had to stop and count how many little lines were attached to each note to figure it out. Obviously that messed up my rhythm a bit lol.

I’m a programmer and I’ve spent thirty years writing music composition software and I never once even thought about incorporating traditional sheet music representation. It’s just so clunky and poorly designed for the job. And when you start getting into microtones it’s completely hopeless.

Escort carriers?

Hot Dog Self-Harm Assistant

No, it wasn’t WMMS (unless my memory is even worse than I thought). It was a different station although I don’t remember which one. They called themselves “the End” (hence the song), maybe WEND? I dunno. They had that one DJ who had relocated from LA for the gig.

I stopped listening after that one Barenaked Ladies song started getting played once an hour. “It’s been” had me changing the channel so fucking fast it even happened when it was used in their promos. Good god do I hate that fucking song.

According to this it was 107.9 WENZ. A comment says they kicked things off in May 1992 which I guess is about right.

obviously the product of too much booze, coke, and resultant self-confidence

And that’s exactly how Toto got the gig doing the soundtrack for the 1984 version of Dune.

sare-en-get-EEEEEEEE

A radio station where I grew up (Cleveland) switched formats to alternative/grunge/whatever in 1990 or 1991 and they kicked this off by playing that song over and over for three straight days. It was a surreal experience to hear it on the radio every time I went to drive anywhere. For me, this was the real moment the '90s began (the other contenders being the premiers on MTV of “Groove is in the Heart” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit”).

Apparently many stations all over the country switched formats the same way, by playing “End of the World as We Know It” over and over again.

I actually suspect they’re all handjob stores but I dunno.

Your work is beneficial

In my 25 year career as a programmer, I’d estimate that at least 75% of the software that I worked on never actually got used by anyone. It’s incredibly depressing to think about. And that’s not even counting the fact that I probably spent more than 50% of my time doing non-programming tasks like attending meetings and such shit.

I retired as a programmer (fancy way of saying “got laid off by giant corporation”) a few years ago and randomly bought a used school bus to convert to a motorhome. I got so much more satisfaction out of doing that than out of any work project I ever did, and even learned to weld and fabricate in the process. Also very happy that I never had to deal with the AI “revolution”. Managing a team of offshore developers got me as close to that shit as I ever want to get.

I just hate the feeling of chatting with something that is designed to sound human

My dad died at home in hospice last fall, and when I called the funeral home that we had selected to handle his cremation to come pick up his body, the answering service was AI. I could tell because of the weird artificial background noises, the strange accent that wasn’t from any language on earth, and the fact that when it read back my father’s name for spelling confirmation it said “Bob common name B O B Smith common name S M I T H?”. One of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t just hang up immediately and go with a different funeral home.

For extra fun, when we met with the owner of the funeral home later he kept cracking jokes. And he didn’t deliver the urn until the night before my father’s interment ceremony, after I had been frantically calling him about it the whole week before. LPT: don’t go with a funeral home whose owner shares a name with a character from The Sopranos.

Based on Hollywood’s current casting priorities, it would have to be a Subaru.

And Marty would have to be played by Zendaya. With Pedro Pascal as Doc.

Not quite the same timeframe, but that clip of the surviving members of The Doors listening to Skrillex is one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever seen.