Let’s make something clear. I’m an IT Technician. I’m not a Hacker. And I’m certainly not the “Lead Hacker,” like it says on my business card.
Hacking is illegal. Any idiot knows that. But when I told the morons that run to change my job title to something that doesn’t make me sound like a felon, they told me to relax.
They said it’s the same thing.
But it’s not the same thing. I even said that. I said, “How would you guys like it if I stamped “Murderer” on your business cards?” and one of them said I should cool it because Lindsey’s dad was murdered.
Oh good. So Lindsey knows what I’m talking about.
In a nutshell, my job is to provide technological assistance to an office of about fifty completely worthless idiots. That means phones, computers, anything that requires thinking. It’s not exactly what I want to do, but even Van Gogh had to paint the occasional fence.
I’ve been on a freelance basis for roughly five years, but lately, they’ve been talking about hiring me on as a full time employee. I told my mom that. I told her I marched in there and said that I’m done being under-appreciated by a bunch of half-wits and if they don’t hire me, they can kiss my ass goodbye and have fun trying to replace me!
She said, “You said that?”
And I told her, “No, I didn’t say that. I was just saying that I should say that.”
And my mom said that I was absolutely right. She said, “You should say that.”
But my mom doesn’t get it. You can’t just go in there and say that.
As a freelancer, I don’t get medical insurance. I don’t get investment opportunities and I’m not eligible for company discounts. Also, I have to park in the street. But who needs it? Because what my employer doesn’t know about me is that secretly I’m a video game designer and when I finally sell my game to a major company (and I will), my status as a freelancer will make it impossible for the company to collect a cent.
Whoops. But not really.
The game itself is an amazing RPG about a family of humans that start a colony on the sun. I even had a meeting with a game design company about it.
They said that the temperature of the sun was too hot to have life on it.
So on the way out, I made sure their stupid bowl of mints was too empty to have mints in it.
The problem with being ahead of your time is that you have to wait for the morons to catch up. So until they do, I’m stuck fielding some of the most insanely idiotic requests known to man. It’s actually impressive when you consider the amount of stupidity that is jam-packed into this one small region. It must be how God feels when he hovers over Florida for too long.
The boss of the company is this overly optimistic D-hole named Mark, who tries way too hard. He reminds me of this guy my mom used to date who would take me fishing and then tell me that public speaking classes were really helpful for him and that they might work for me too.
Every morning, Mark has us meet in the conference room so we can listen to him drone on about whatever horseshit team building strategy he happened to read about while thumbing through the business books at Kinko’s. Teamwork is big with Mark and I’m beginning to think he actually believes that we’re all equals, which is hysterical. I’m part of a team here the same way you could say that Einstein was part of a team when he got a tick on his balls.
Obviously, the advances in technology and society make it difficult to compare myself to Einstein, but you know the number pi? Well, spoiler alert: It ends with a “4.”
Another part of my job is that I have to update computers. I dread it because nobody here trusts me. I can tell they don’t trust me by the way that they look at me. They think I’m reading their email or tracing their web history as if I suddenly care about the personal lives of people who spend their evenings eating Lean Cuisines and watching sitcoms starring Jim Belushi’s diarrhea.
I have better things to do.
In fact, that’s what I’m going to say if they ever invite me to one of the stupid happy hours I’ve read about in their email.
I’ll say, “No thanks. I have better things to do.” And then this girl will pick me up in a car and they’ll wonder about it.
Maybe they’ll even talk about it at happy hour. And maybe they’ll do it in a way that’s so obvious that even someone standing in the bushes across the street can tell what they are talking about.
I am well aware of the correlation between isolation and mental decay. But I’m also aware that humans have a tendency to adapt to the company they keep. To congregate with my coworkers would come at the cost of my own intellect. So, what to do? The ordinary man might settle on choosing the lesser of two evils.
But I am no ordinary man.
By attaching simple mirrors to the walls of my living room, I have created a place where infinite versions of myself can exist. They mimic my movements, but I know that each image is a lone representative of the multiple nuances of my personality. And in this simple way, I am able to fulfill my need to socialize.
There will be a day when I am in charge of everything. Evolution demands it. I know this.
And so do I.
Photo by Niavuli licensed on Fotolia