+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Writing exercise: hero does something awful +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Summary ======= Timmy and I go to Columbus for a big software conference in 2008. I'm suffering withdrawal symptoms because I couldn't get a refill on my prescription antidepressant. I do a tech talk and hardly anyone shows up. Timmy and I meet with another biz and show how to connect their system They love my idea. I go back to my hotel. I spend next two hours writing a big email to Mark about the meeting. He replies he doesn't see an opportunity. I realize he didn't read the message. Nicole comes over at like 7PM. We fuck. We go out to dinner at 9PM. We go back to my hotel again. She and I cuddle on the bed and watch TV. She likes shows about home makeovers. She leaves around 11:30 PM. She kisses me, hugs me, tells me I'm her absolute favorite. I shower. I feel at peace with the world. I look at my hands. Steady as a fuckin rock. I check my phone. No replies from my wife. I text her. Story ===== I'll lose y'all with this one. ------------------------------ I remember going back to my hotel room during the conference. Timmy and I had gotten back to the hotel after driving to meet the timeclock dudes. There were technical talks I wanted to see that afternoon, but my hands were shaking too much and I was feeling too emotional to be in any public space. I did push ups until my arms stopped obeying orders from my brain. Then I stared at my reflection. I was crying. I felt dizzy too. My hands were shaking like I drank a pot of coffee on an empty stomach. I knew what it was. I counted on my fingers how many days had gone by since I took the last pill in the bottle. Pretty sure it was Wednesday when I took the last one. So by now, on Saturday, it made sense that I was feeling all messed up. The withdrawal for these pills fuckin suck. ------------------------------------------- I put several messages in Dr Gottesman's voice mail box asking him to reply to the pharmacy so I can get a refill. I see him every three months for a new prescription, but I don't run out of the old prescription until like a month or later after the appointment. I'm always running out of these pills. Well, not always. But at least once or twice a year. And Jesus Christ, the withdrawal symptoms are fuckin ferocious. I don't understand why a drug like this was developed and given to people with panic disorders. Anyhow, I fell apart in that hotel room that afternoon. I was surprised it was one thing I didn't have to argue with Mark about. I said I wanted Timmy and me to go to a conference and the company oughtta pay for it. He said it was no problem. -------------------------- He said company would cover it. Now, thinking back, I don't think Mark was being generous. I think he was already abusing the company for needless travel and other perks, and so getting us to participate in travel kind of got more fingerprints on the gun, so to speak. But I didn't realize it then. I thought it was a sign Mark liked me and approved of me, and was a good boss. It's funny how involuntary it is to like your authority figure when they approve of you. My affinity toward Mark improved because he told us to go on this trip, and comp all our meals. Anyhow, I did a presentation on the funky logging stuff I wrote for error handling. It was the kind of thing that I expected to fight with Mark over, but again, he said he understood open source ideals. Again, his stock went up. And then that lead to a situation where I somehow felt a need to get him to appove of me. Again, the fucked up desire to win over an abusive authority figure. Thanks mom! OK back to the story. I'm in the hotel room. Sobbing and curled up on the bed. --------------------------------- Knowing that it's really because I'm crashing and dizzy because this pill I take daily triggers these withdrawal symptoms. And then I start hearing from that guy in my head that says they are literally drugging us to get us to work for them, and you're falling for it. When he says "you're" he means me. Not you the reader. Yahh, so he has been around forever. The last thing somebody already prone to paranoia needs is to feel like their own mind is glitchy. It takes three things going wrong at once for me to fall apart like this. running out of citalopram is the first one. But I run out from time to time and I can usually white knuckle it through this. The second thing is realizing just how much Mark is screwing me. On the bed, I kept thinking about those guys from the breakfast, the guy hearing about how I was the cofounder, and me realizing where he worked (eventbrite) and him mentioning they're starting senior devs off at $120k. I'm working for half that. Hell I didn't even get paid at all for three months last year. Fuck me. What's the third? I don't know. What is the other thing that's not OK? Something else is out there and tipping me over the edge. I tried to get a refill last week. ---------------------------------- This time, the pharmacist said they wouldn't fill the script because it was more than 30 days old, so they needed my doctor to verify it. The guy misunderstood the situation. He said the doctor could do a 3-day supply. I said it wasn't that I couldn't afford the refill. I needed the refill because I was running out of pills and I needed to avoid the withdrawal symptoms. I told hime how if I go right away to get a refill right after the appointment, sometimes it works, but other times they say they won't refill it since there was still pills left from the last time. There's a lot of pop culture awareness of withdrawal from opioids. Movies like Sid and Nancy. But where's the sympathetic treatment of all of SSRI folks? We take these pills and we go to our jobs and we work hard and we make the world run. I imagine a meeting where some MBA listens to some scientist in a white lab coat explain how this drug unfortunately creates a physical addiction where intense withdrawal symptoms hit within 48 hours of missing a dose. I imagine the scientist saying how they're working on a slow-release formula, or some other way to make it not fuck up the people that are on it so bad when their supply get interrupted. And then the MBA just saying "let's ship it as is. Withdrawal symptoms boost compliance." And so here I am, on a drug that gives you "brain zaps" if you miss a dose. Yesterday, I did a tech talk at the conference. ----------------------------------------------- Voice over while the memory plays out visually, of me at a potium in a hotel room with like 50 chairs, and only 8 of them are occupied. At like the 10 minute mark, one dude says "wait what??" and it turns out that an obscure puzzle I spent way too much time solving is something he tried to fix and gave up on. I explain where I got this: I got a reply in the python-dev mailing list but only after I rephrased the question a few different ways, I got this reply: atexit.register Read the source, Luke! And then fuck it, I did, and I found in the actual python code in the module, in a docstring, there was the exact code I needed. How to pass So I didn't figure it out myself. I found where it was. And now I'm telling you about it cuz this is why they hate us. So yahh, it was disappointing to talk to a small crowd. Timmy and me drove across Atlanta that morning. ----------------------------------------------- We met some guys that run an independent time clock business. It was a Saturday. We met at their office that was in a nice new building. Nobody else was there. I said to Timmy how they're at the place in the business life cycle where they can afford offices with glass doors with their names on them. I don't remember how I even got in touch with them but I wanted to see if there was a way to sell our product to their customers and give them a cut. In retrospect, I get now why everything else happened. But at the time, I was too naive. I didn't realize how Mark saw this as a threat. In his mind, if I learn how to sell the product, I don't need him. I didn't think that way. I had enough to do figuring out how to pass sys.environ into my logging handler registered with atexist. But yeah, if this deal got off the ground, and I kept doing it, Mark's whole team of idiot goons is gone. Back to the meeting. We talked about company history. They were bootstrapped by a rich old guy and they'd been positive cash flow for years. They mostly sold to fast food chains. They were just starting to get into internet-connected time clocks. Those are the ones that we could e I showed them the web page that showed my own bogus schedule on my laptop screen. Their guy copied in the URL into his system. Then it took a few tries before we got the typos fixed. But we printed out my schedule on his timeclock device. It was simple really. Their timeclock made a request like https:/lab.bazmansms.com/my-schedule And a plain-text formatted file spat out. Earlier, we were stuck. But the guy said how the timeclock could print the weather forecast. I asked to read the code in his system that did it. Then I saw it was only doing "http" requests, not https, and I realized my app would auto redirect http to https, and then I read the rest of the code and realized his client stuff had no concept of how to do a redirect. So I did something I wouldn't do in prod. I turned off the http->https redirect. I told Timmy to make notes of a few things. We'd carve out this handler and make it have its own auth policy. We'd whitelist their IP subnet. We'd check the user agent header. Of course that can be spoofed, but I wanted to do anything easy to reduce the likelihood of bots or vandals figure out how to trash these time clocks. "How would that happen, if the timeclocks are making the request? If somebody can trick the timeclock into making the request with the employee ID and starting date and duration to another server, than that server could reply any way it wants. Just print a black screen that's a million rows long, for example. Or worse -- maybe put a payload in the reply that crashes the timeclock. I wanted to hint to these guys that there were a few open security risks in their product, but I didn't want their dude to get defensive. I used some of the old text template stuff I learned years ago, writing those reports. We walked out of there with plans to get back in touch. I asked if they had a customer that would be willing to guinea pig this for a while. On the drive back to the hotel for the conference, Timmy said something like how Mark could not have made that happen. "He doesn't even use the app really when he does demos. He gets them to talk about what they need, and what they don't have, and then he makes up a story for how Bazman is exactly that. "It's deceptive as fuck! And then he comes back to us with a sheet of bullshit, poorly thought out ideas that we have to build. "Remember shift groups? Remember how that was an urgent feature? That was for this six-home chain he just signed up. "They haven't even used that screen. I check the logs from time to time. Adam worked like a crazy person to get that done, and Mark paid him like $30/hour, when he used to make $70/hour. Timmy and I the night before had gone out with some guys that were from Ohio too. Nicole knocked on the door. --------------------------- We fuck. We go out to dinner. We go back to my hotel again. She and I cuddle on the bed and watch TV. She likes shows about home makeovers. She got in, we talked for a while. I told her I wanted to watch her crawl around the floor for me. When we fucked, it took a while for me to get really hard. I realize it ain't such a turn on as it used to be to watch her in all these acrobatic positions. At one point, I was she was face down on the couch, I was behind her and I realized she and I were grunting and breathing in an intense rythm. I watched the side of her face, eyes closed tight, her hands grabbing on my hands. I wanted to freeze this moment in my brain so that I could return to it later. The feeling was so intense. This is the fourth time we've hooked up now. I don't know why, but I deep down feel like I'm not allowed to get off until I've done everything I can think of do I'll write more about what it was like later, but I tell stories out of order. Then I asked if she wanted to go get dinner. It was late. We walked out the hotel and walked a few blocks away to a corny chain Italian restaurant. Well, I could tell she was into it. It's an expensive place. It's the kind of place that people go to when they have money but don't have taste. Everything on the menu has been designed by focus groups to be as innofensive as possible. I remember sitting across from her in the booth, watching her eating her dessert, and I realized she was really having fun. She told me about a guy she met in Las Vegas. She said really rich people are building arks, she called them. Spaceships to live in after the Earth is destroyed. I remember thinking in my head that something about this didn't make sense. Either the dude was fucking with her, or She told me she broke that spaceship guy off for $15k. I guess her and friend spent the weekend with him, doing coke and fucking his brains out in any way that hey could imagine. I felt bashful for the $500 I had put in the bathroom for her. She maybe knew what I was thinking. "You and me would be friends in regular life though," she said. I nodded and kept watching her eat her cheese cake. Nicole has lots of tattoos. I had found her online a while ago. It was an account she made in high school, years ago. She was a cheerleader in a small Ohio town. I met her when a year ago when I was in Columbus. I stopped at her hotel after texting. She and I fucked that day. Sometimes she drives to Cleveland. She does a thing where she texts me the weather report for Cleveland and that's how I know she is in town and wants to see me. I love that she does this. I told her to do it on our first meeting. I made it up for a couple of reasons. 1. she changes numbers constantly 2. there's nothing suspicious about the message 3. It means it's really her. And she really wants to see me. I hate the idea that she's not into me. I don't mind paying her. One poor kid to another, if I steer a little of the money from the investor class into the sex worker caste, that's just being a good comrade. One time she told me how pimps have tried to get her to work for them. One dude hired her for a session. When she got there, he then tried to get her to work for him, saying she would need him to protect her from worse pimps. I remember how she left me that night. She kissed me, hugged me, tells me I'm her absolute favorite. I shower. I feel at peace with the world. I look at my hands. Steady as a fuckin rock. I text her "I already miss you doll." It doesn't really matter if it's an act. It could be. But I don't feel like jumping off the roof of the parking garage any longer. There's no other way I know of to turn off that sensation. I picked up my phone. --------------------- No message from Lindsey. I scrolled back through the history of the texts since I flew out Friday morning. Nothing but one word responses. I texted her again. "Hey! Day here really went well. Thanks so much for taking care of the kids so I can do this." She did the thumbs up emoji back. I texted her again. "Hey, do you want to talk? It would be fun to hear your voice." "I'm in bed and watching TV." A minute later she wrote again. "It's late! Find somebody else to listen to you." I realized it as I fell asleep. This is the third thing.