Quote of the day
JavaScript, making 1 + 1 = 11 since 1995.
Polishing the Brass on the Titanic
Brent, my friend and one of the very cool people I work with, uses the saying in the subject of this post. He was the first one who said these words and that when said they registered in my mind. This happened a couple of months ago and I’ve been thinking about this ever since. To find a little background on the saying, I decided to do a Google to the rescue… well, not this time. I couldn’t find the origin of this saying, but I did find this great quote:
Fuck Martha Stewart. Martha’s polishing the brass on the Titanic; it’s all going down, man. ~Fight Club movie, screenplay by Jim Uhls, directed by David Fincher, novel by Chuck Palahniuk
I was thinking about this (the saying, not Martha Stewart) tonight on the bus ride home from Santa Cruz and I came to accept that, yup, I’m a guy that polishes the brass on the Titanic. Sure I freak out, I rant, I swear, I cuss, I act like a dirty old man… I have human flaws too numerous to mention.
Despite my flaws, the quality of life despite the overwhelming circumstances of life has started to matter much more to me than it used to.
Say a nuke is coming in from the country run by [Insert new media sensationalized despot here], and is going to explode all over me in a half hour, what am I going to do? I’m going to find my wife and nail her one more time and give her the best 3 to 14 minutes of her life.
Say global climate change really is real and every person on the planet just decides to buy a hummer. Who fucking cares, my ass gets on my bike, and with the help of my legs helps me roll my flabby belly to the office.
What does that mean in real life? It means the little stuff matters to me because the details are all that I have access to. It means somedays I don’t release a product and instead spend more than a day QAing things even though it’s not my job to do so. Somedays I massage my wife after her hard day in the office even when I’m the tired one. Or maybe I call my dad when he’s least expecting me to call and tell him yet another thing that I realized he was right about, and I was wrong about.
Ask yourself, when was the last time you heard someone get divorced over only one big mishap?
The little things matter, at least they do to me.
Example of wonderful customer support
For my five fans,
For all of the ranting I have done about bad customer service, I wanted to show a great example of customer service. My friend Todd posted his transcript of a live chat with a Zappos agent on his blog. It is both one of the funniest, and one of the best examples of customer support that I have ever seen in my life.
http://www.sitelead.com/blog/zappos-live-chat/2009/06/01
Thanks for posting this up! And thanks to Zappos for setting a good example. If all goes my way, I will get to compare and contrast this with what I believe will be another bad service experience (if the seemingly bad place will ever respond to my customer support email-soon-to-be-emails).
Day ???: Post House Buying Review
It’s been all done for about a week. The seller’s agent has taken their lockbox to another home. The crusty plaster splattered over the plants and grass from the dry rot repairs has all been all but trampled into the ground. Wind blowing through the open (converted) garage windows has successfully cleaned the new paint smell out of what have become storage rooms. We’ve got hit with our first hefty electrical repair (it sounded a bit like this). The fig tree is getting bigger, and the jury is once again out on whether it will produce green or brown fruit. An invasion of mint (one “problem” I actually like a lot) helps move the nasty, dyed-red mulch into nice piles that Janna and I throw out bit-by-bit.
It’s definitely our house. How about some final pictures from my favorite way to do slide shows? That’s right! Zero narration. Enjoy them at your leisure.
