Blog 4.0

I haven't written about work since September . The short of it is that our new website went live and was... surprisingly functional, considering the tight deadline for its creation. That said, in the back-end things were less great: there were write-offs due to messed up orders, and our customer ratings started to plummet. We all figured that it would be the business's number one priority to get our house back in order, but no... Instead they immediately dumped another project on us, to help with the migration of another website that we weren't at all familiar with, for another country and in a language most of us don't even speak. Can't say that particularly enthused anyone - but okay, we figured they thought we'd done such a good job with our own website and wanted us to help these other guys now that we knew how to do it. Except - we never got to talk to said other guys aside from one or two people. We repeatedly asked about this, because how can we help whe...

While talking about World of Warcraft's 20th anniversary , I've been finding myself thinking back to my university years (since I was in my early twenties when I first started playing WoW), which is a time period I generally avoid thinking about. In many ways those years were good times - I made friends online who actually shared my nerdy interests for the first time, and I got to visit different countries across Europe because of that. I was also still living with my mother and generally pretty carefree in terms of everyday things I had to worry about. However, over all of that loomed the shadow of causing parental disappointment and being filled with existential dread. You see, I was the Austrian equivalent of a straight A student, always succeeding at everything in school without having to put too much effort in. Then I graduated from high school and life suddenly got complicated, because I was supposed to pursue a career, and one that required a university degree please, as...

I was a Twitter user for over a decade, not because I truly loved the site, but because as far as social media went, it kind of felt like the best of a bad bunch to me. It still allowed you to just see a chronological feed simply containing the posts of people you followed (if grudgingly), it focused on text (even if images and videos were available) and it had a clean layout that wasn't cluttered with ads, games or other "features" I didn't give a damn about. Then Elon Musk came in and things degraded rapidly. An acquaintance gave me an invite code to Bluesky in July last year. It felt more like the Twitter of old again, but was very quiet. Still, I persisted and continued to post there, even if I was still checking Twitter as well. About three months ago, my Twitter account got locked down for not having a birth date tied to it, and since I was already annoyed with the site, I didn't bother to unlock it and switched to posting on Bluesky exclusively. There were...

I feel sorry for my American friends. More than anything though, I've got to admit I just don't get it. I watched a video of some analysts discussing the result and one comment that stood out was to me was something along the lines of: What everyone always gets wrong is that most people don't care about politics and don't pay attention to it. And I do get that to some extent. I'm not blaming people for not keeping track of all the crimes Trump was convicted of for example. But when someone goes out there and openly talks in his speeches about how he wants to let the armed forces loose on his internal enemies, roll back women's rights etc. - that's not complicated or niche. That stuff was broadcast globally and should have given people pause. How so many people can be either totally oblivious to what's in plain sight or just not care, thinking it won't affect them personally, is beyond me.

On the whole, it makes me sad to see my elderly mother diminish, get slower and weaker every year. However, there's one strange upside to her no longer being capable of doing anything that requires a minimum amount of strength or dexterity: I get to feel like a bloody hero for performing all kinds of simple tasks. Need a match struck to light a candle? A box with a slightly stuck lid opened? Batteries in the small torch need changing? Not to worry, I am here to save the day. It's a good thing I'm only visiting for a few days or it might go to my head.

Overheard our social media person at work trying to explain Gen Alpha slang to our brand person today. The latter, who is the older one, was entertainingly confused ("But what does Ohio mean?"), but what was really amusing to me was that I had heard pretty much all of the terms she was explaining before - which was weird in so far as I'm an elder Millenial and among the oldest people there (most team members are younger Millennials or older Gen Z). I guess it's something about my degree of online-ness? I'm not really sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I like understanding what people are saying, even if they are using terms I wouldn't necessarily want to adopt myself, but on the other hand it kind of makes me feel like that "How Do You Do, Fellow Kids" meme .

Tomorrow is the big day, when the new website is supposed to go live. You'd think with the event being mere hours away, I'd be able to speak with more confidence, but well... Last I checked, payments were still not working correctly. Just a minor thing for an e-commerce business. At one point during the testing, literally only one guy could get his payments to go through. At least my colleagues still had a sense of humour about it. "All future sales will just have to go through him then." "You'd like to pay? Please hold while we connect you to George." I wonder what I'll wake up to tomorrow.

The big project is still targeting the 1st of October for launch. With less than a week to go and everybody scrambling like crazy, somebody up top decided that this was the perfect time to announce an internal reorganisation including a bunch of job cuts. I can only guess that this was driven by a desire to have all the redundant people gone by the end of the year (as I think most of them probably had a three-month notice period). I get to stay employed, but my little team of four will basically cease to exist, with two people's roles being made redundant and me and one other guy getting shunted off to somewhere else in the org chart. The talking points were about what great growth plans the company has for the coming years, what agile innovators we are, and what amazing new opportunities this will bring for all of us. I guess I should be grateful that I get to keep my job, but I just feel bad. I'm simply not good at this capitalism thing. All I want is to earn enough to get b...

I finally opened my mail-in ballot for the upcoming Austrian national election today and actually had a laugh-out-loud moment when I finished fully unfolding it. You see, the final of the eleven options states: "Keine von denen - KEINE", which means "none of these - NONE", so my first thought was: Wait, did they add an "official" way to spoil your ballot if you want to take part in the democratic process but don't like any of the available choices? But no, it's an actual political party. Their whole thing is that they do say they don't feel represented by any of the current parties, so I guess their mission statement is in the name... but it does seem like a bit of a legal loophole and like they could potentially get a good chunk of votes simply out of confusion. Very Austrian, is all I'll say.

I work in what can only be described as a pretty cushy office job. Since the pandemic I only need to actually be in the office once or twice a week; the rest of the time I can work from home. The job is engaging but generally not hard - since I've been performing similar kinds of tasks for several years now, I'm pretty good and efficient at them. My co-workers are all a lovely bunch. And my employer is pretty decent, as far as evil global megacorporations go. However, earlier in the year they decided that our e-commerce website would move to a new platform. This doesn't have any immediate benefit to us as the people managing it, nor to our customers - if anything, there are quite a few downsides at least in the short term. Mainly the project seems to be something to satisfy bean counters and higher-ups who want to save money by having more brands run on the same kind of software, that kind of thing. It's not the most inspiring goal, but understandable. What was less und...