Emchap's Shit from the Internet 07/21/21 🍠
On Monday I finally got to meet a few of my coworkers in person for the first time, which was a delight. I’m nearly 8 months in at my current job, and it’s the longest I’ve ever gone at a place without actually physically meeting folks. (I’ve been remote minus a two year stint in NYC since the end of 2014, so coworkers are rarely physically around.)
It’s a little bit of a joke for remote tech folks that part of the benefit of meeting coworkers in person is finally learning which ones are way different heights than you think, because there’s always at least one. (At two separate jobs, it was a 6’4” Hawaiian-resident man named Brett.) And obviously it doesn’t really matter—people are the height they are—but as a short-ish person (I’m 5’ 5”, which puts me at average height for a cis woman but below-average height for a tech company employee), it is always slightly surprising to go from having eye-contact conversation with coworkers on Zoom to suddenly craning my neck. I distinctly remember being in the ocean with work friends in Mexico at the last pre-pandemic meetup for my previous job, and having a coworker notice that I was struggling to stay upright when the rest of the cluster wasn’t. They of course very politely moved to shallower waters because nobody wanted to take on writing documentation if I died, but there is a slight indignity in half-drowning next to PHP engineers.
It was funny when meeting up with the current folks to realize the ways in which the pandemic has made my already weird experience of that first meeting weirder. A female coworker was in the group, and—despite having known ahead of time that she was my height—I was surprised that that was the case. (She has been at the company longer than me, and so should be taller than me. No, it doesn’t make any sense.) Both men were tall but not outlandishly so, and as I was hugging them I realized that I fully haven’t really been in close proximity to more than a few men in more than a year. (Shoutout my realtor.) They seemed sort of overwhelmingly tall! Which is deranged! I have been at home, not locked in a cellar, and yet I’ve apparently fully forgotten that I am part of a sexually dimorphic species.
I took the group to a Filipino restaurant near my house, and the food was great, and it was lovely to see them. I’m going to be missing the next work meetup for my sales team, which I’m super bummed about (the sales team is like 90% of who I talk to all day), but hopefully if covid recedes to the level of endemic bullshit plague rather than active horrifying one, I’ll get to meet the rest at some future date. I’m excited to discover who thinks I’m a different size than I am. Perhaps I can convince them all I’m 5’10”; people sometimes think I have tall energy when what I really am is loud.
Shit to read
Imagine fucking up at being a parent so badly that your child has to sneak behind your back to get vaccinated.
This supports my already latent distrust of dentistry.
An absolutely fucked-up look at how long it was until we knew how eels had sex.
An absolutely wild tale of a digital stalker.
A Danny Lavery piece that had me googling King Arthur mythology at 9am on a workday.
This article on the Hey Arnold episode about the Vietnam War made me cry a whole lot. (It’s wild to realize what pieces of media from your childhood stick in your memory; I absolutely remembered the scene that’s included in the article and specifically the image of Mr. Hyunh holding his daughter up.)
Shit to eat
Toast a hamburger bun
While that’s happening, heat up a knob of butter in a pan.
Toss in a chopped up roma tomato, a cumbled-up handful of dorritos, and some cubes of cheddar.
Cook for a moment.
Add an egg.
Cook until no longer super wet.
Toss onto the bun.
Eat your dirtbag migas sandwich.
Shit to watch
This Oh My Dollar live stream about Free Britney, money, and disability.
Shit to buy
I want these orange birkencrocs.