Two Stars and a Wish

Welcome, motivated reader, as this week I take you on a journey through the petty irritations and first-world problems I've dealt with this week. These are tough times and a lot of people have genuine problems that are truly difficult and sometimes harrowing to deal with. In comparison, we're lucky enough to live a highly privileged life with very few genuine issues. But hey, I know our readership likes the ones where I get all ranty, so let's see if we can summon up some ire.

This week I went to the office for once. Now this seems like something fairly normal, but we've just moved buildings, so I was faced with all those classic moving-in snags. Firstly, I was met with a conference room where the video conferencing unit didn't work. Having been in this business for the best part of 30 years, I have finally honed problem-solving skills, and as y'all know, there's one thing that never fails: have you tried turning it off and on again?

Well, of course, you can do that, as long as the cabling and switches and power supply and everything else haven't been helpfully plumbed into the wall so you literally can't turn it off and on again. All that experience, all that subtle understanding of how these things break and can be fixed, was stymied by the desire for neat cabling (and, I suspect, a desire to stop people like me mucking about with things that they shouldn't). I thought this might be some elaborate practical joke, but apparently that's how they're doing these things these days. So instead I had to wait for a tech to do something remotely, which, to their credit, did actually work. One minor irritation dealt with.

Now this is a "big tech" office in the 2020s, so as well as desks and meeting rooms, it's full of areas which look like a high-end psychologist's waiting room: lots of expensive, comfortable easy chairs arranged in relaxing ways that are in no way intended to amplify your sense of impending doom. At one point during the day I decided to take advantage of one of these areas and enjoy a different place to work.

That's when I realised that at this particular spot in the building, the floor was vibrating. Now, in one of these cavernous office blocks, it's not unusual for there to be the tiniest perceptible wobble when someone walks past sometimes, but this was a regular and continuous vibration of the sort you might get, well, during a small earthquake. I'm not overly sensitive to these things (unlike the colleague I had in my first job, who insisted they could feel the radiation coming out of their monitor and hitting them in the face), but after 30 minutes of it, it was uncomfortable enough that I wanted to move.

The response I got when I raised a concern on this was "the building's perfectly safe", which I've got to say, is a bit of a low bar.

Later in the day, we were able to make friends with the folks in the next building - the City of Sunnyvale fire brigade - when the lifts in the building stopped working with some folks trapped inside. It also got warmer and warmer, apparently due to the air conditioning not working - I'm sure lack of circulating air doesn't raise the risk of respiratory illness at all. The building is perfectly safe. Oh, and then it took me an hour to travel the 11 miles home on public transport.

Sometimes I feel like I'm doing this wrong.

The other thing I'm doing wrong is trying to live in this country, despite not having been born here in the first place. Yes, my visa renewal has been delayed, with the USCIS requiring more information that I actually hold a management position, and did so for at least a year before moving here. You would think that there would be standard ways of proving this, and even if the USCIS didn't have those, the lawyers helping me through the process would have a well-worn formula. You might also think that public services would work here and you'd be able to do most administrative tasks online. What's more, I'm pretty sure we were promised flying cars by now. You would of course be wrong on all counts.

And that leads me to the cryptic title of this week's post (you see, reader, I do actually think these things through). Rather than just complain about everything all the time, junior school teachers are trained to give out two pieces of positive feedback (two stars) for every bit of, er, developmental feedback (the wish). I've got to admit, this week I've given out an awful lot of wishes. To paraphrase Lord Darlington, "we are all in the gutter, and sometimes it's difficult to pick out the stars".

Apropos of nothing, here's a picture of Helen looking at the wonderful barista kettle she bought me for our wedding anniversary. Two stars right here!