Having the port removed was a nonevent medically, but I did it when I was beginning to think I might not need it again, which was fairly huge.

Pretty much this.

I am just going to roll around and bask in the pleasant environment of a company run by a woman and working for a female CIO, as well as having a female manager.

I have worked in female run companies before, but this time it coincides with a positive working environment, so there's that. Also, I'm 85% sure that the first women I worked for were pretty much dry humping the male technical experts in their employ. It's not that they dismissed me because I was family--they were perfectly capable of jizzing over relatives. But they would look me in the eye, turn and ask the same question of the less senior male technician next to me, and then yell at him "You're spending too much time with ita !" when he agreed with the really basic answer.

The folk here are pretty much skewed so that the current developers are men (there are a fair number of female former programmers in many jobs), but there's no real intimation that your gender is something you have to get past when you're pitching your case.

And that day when the CIO almost cried during an all-IT meeting pretty much set me off too (I was reading Mockingjay and there was the whole thing with my mother's cancer) and there was no sense of it being anything other than sad.

Yikes. I just had to convince my boss that it was a bad idea to run a comment in our publication comparing straight women writing slash fiction to white actors performing in blackface.

Thinking about that comparison makes my brain hurt.

I mean, yes, I've heard criticism of the whole women-writing-gay-men thing, but...I don't think it generally carries the same cultural and historical weight as blackface!!

meara, precisely! Also, this is for a brief column that has neither the space nor a particularly good reason to get into definitions of and debates over slash fiction, so the comment would have been almost entirely without context, and read almost entirely by people lacking any context for or understanding of fanfic or slash. Just... seemed like a really bad idea.

My brain isn't working. What's the name of the effect that observation has on phenomena?

Gentlemen, what we have here is a terrifying example of the reindeer effect.

OK, I dunno if anyone else has read Joel Stein's IDIOTIC tweet on YA book readers, but I am writing a rebuttal in a white-hot state of WTF? and would love a beta over in GWW. It's a rough draft; I just finished the draft.

He's an idiot, and it was in one of those idiotic NYTimes.com point-counterpoint roundups.