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In 2014 we looked at Twitter, with its tidy little 140-character ceiling, and we thought: that is not nearly enough room to be properly annoyed about something. So we built the opposite. On Rantly, 140 characters is the floor. You cannot post until you have at least that much to…
At 9:14 this morning somebody in Facilities sent a note to the entire company about the second-floor microwave. That is fine. The microwave is a shared concern. What followed was not fine.
I am standing at gate B14 and the agent has just called boarding group nine. Nine. When I started flying for work there were two groups: people who needed extra time, and everybody else. Then there were four. Then there were zones, then there were groups and zones, and now there…
I clicked on a link that promised the best weeknight lentil soup. Before I reached a single ingredient I learned about the author's grandmother, a trip to Tuscany in 2011, the particular way the light falls in her kitchen in October, and her feelings about her kids going back to…
Every October the same thing happens in this house. The first cool morning arrives, and somebody, I will not say who but she has been my wife for forty-one years, walks past the thermostat and nudges it to seventy-two.
There is a sign. It is on the door, it is on the ceiling, and it is on the back of every seat at eye level. It says QUIET CAR in letters two inches tall. The conductor announces it at every stop, in a voice that grows a little more tired each time.
I build distributed systems for a living. I can make a thousand servers agree on the order of events across three continents. I cannot make the office printer print one page.
My daughter plays soccer. She is seven. The games are forty minutes long and nobody keeps score, officially, although every single child knows the score.
Signing up for the streaming service took one tap. One. My thumb barely touched the glass and I was paying monthly for a documentary about competitive cheese rolling.
Somewhere along the way I became a cashier. Nobody interviewed me. Nobody trained me. I just walked into the grocery store and the grocery store handed me a scanner and a small screen that yells at me.
I have typed the word "kubectl" roughly four times a day for six years. My phone has seen it at least eight thousand times. This morning it changed it to "cubical" and sent it to my entire team.
My flight landed at eight in the morning. I have been awake for twenty-two hours. I am standing in a hotel lobby holding a coffee I do not want, and the gentleman at the desk is explaining, with real sympathy, that check-in is at four.
Every autumn someone at a dinner party tells me, with a small knowing smile, that soup is not a meal. That it is a starter. That it is what you have before the real food arrives.
I blocked out nap time, the one sacred hour in my week, to join a call titled "Quick sync." It was not quick. We did not sync.