I went to the big art deco bookstore last night and was absolutely flabbergasted by the number of books like The Lazy Husband and various other Here's-What's-Wrong-with-Your-Man- and-How-To-Fix-It-without-Him-Ever-Noticing titles that were out on prominent display. Although it has no direct bearing on my life, I feel like I should give the finger to women who regard their significant others as fixer-upper opportunities out of solidarity with my heterosexual brethren.

How 'bout you find Dr. Laura and give her a good, old bitch slap for writing The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands. I married a man, NOT a cocker spaniel.

The whole manipulative side of that book market gives me hives. If your husband is an ass, he's not likely to change. If he beats you, leave.

How to draw "fu" (good luck).

My previous company does job-description-related profiling. My profile was absolutely nothing like your average programmer's. I sighed with relief when I saw that, because I didn't feel guilty anymore. Somehow, I was sure I should hold programming up as a holy grail of technical acheivement and do it absolutely effortlessly, plus orgasm on every 50th line of code written.

See, if I liked computers, and could code well, I figured I should love computers, and code effortlessly. With only myself to blame if that weren't true.

I draw my lines very simply -- geeks are on one side of me, dabblers on the other. I am the dividing line. Which means I actually do think things like "You're technical but can't write HTML? Get off!" and "You can recite the OSI model layers in ORDER off the top of your head? Loser." before the censor kicks in.

I am confused. Why is it better to have these hanging around your neck than to have plain old readers hanging around your neck?

I am confused. Why is it better to have these hanging around your neck than to have plain old readers hanging around your neck?

Because your glasses aren't sitting on your chest? Would be my guess, anyway.

I will say, one of the odder/funnier work issues I get into is the "yes I am a humanities major, but that doesn't meant I am helpless at computers" thing. There have been several occasions when I had to jump into the wayback machine and call up my incredibly rusty and outdated geek lingo just to get various computer people to take me seriously.

I have found that claiming any kind of relationship with SQL does the trick, but it sometimes takes a couple of iterations of "poor wittle you, how can I ease your wittle wittle woes?" before it gets to that. I have been working here 9 months, and only Friday could I get a warm body to look at my machine and admit that I had a version of the company email software 4 releases out of date. Hey, maybe that is why emails with attachments from Mac users sometimes disappear! Whaddya know!

It's Allyson Appreciation Day at TheFuselage.com.

This is surreal, because no one there really knows who I am, so it's all, "I don't know Allyson, but I sure do appreciate her!"

I've been laughing all morning.

If someone reports a problem, we'll at least take a look since even if it's user error we can attempt to show them what they're doing wrong (though if you keep calling us for the same user-error related problem you get relegated to the bottom of the list) but sometimes we can't get there right away.

That's pretty wacky, Allyson.

My husband is a Network Engineer and second from the top of his IT dept. I don't think he's taken a single CS class in his life. His degree is in history, I know he taught himself Perl on the job, and he just realized in the last year or so that he no longer has to exagerrate his experience to get the kind of jobs he wants.. OTOH, he was around computers and tinkering with them from a pretty young age - his dad bought Tandy kits that they'd build, stuff like that.

interesting talk. especially since I am looking a possible career change and I am hoping to find a position that relies on on-the-job training for teh specifics.

lunch today was supposed to be a salad from home, but instead it is a bean and cheese burrito from 7/11. At least I resisted the slurpee and am drinking water.