This is my job, seriously.
For those of you who don’t know, I work at Cheezburger.
We are a geographically distributed team which is just a fancy way of saying that we don’t all work in the same location. Some people work from the office, others from home, and some of those homes are in other cities.
We have an internal chatroom which is sort of like the water cooler or hallway is in an ordinary office. The chatroom is used for a bunch of stuff…informal meetings, asking questions, etc. And, of course, there is your ordinary water cooler talk.
Except for some times the water cooler talk is really, really random…I suppose because, to a degree, our work is really, really random. For a lot of the day we do ordinary stuff like manage servers and respond to customer e-mails, etc. But, a fraction of our jobs are to know about all the stuff that’s going on out there on the Internet.
To illustrate this point, and the impetus for this post, here are some videos that were posted into the chatroom this morning with a little bit of commentary. (The commentary is the completely unedited text from the chatroom immediately after the link to the video was posted.) Enjoy!
Scott P. Good monring Donna D. Mornin' ScottScott P. So, I'm watching this video. Are there people really like this? I mean, is this guy for real, or does he know that he's a complete poser? I will give him credit for one thing though... he has the nerve to be out there doing it, and that counts for something. Donna D. I was under the assumption that it was satire. Otherwise my head would asplode. Scott P. serious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa_(Karl_Wolf_song) "Africa is the first official single by Lebanese Canadian singer Karl Wolf from his third studio album Bite The Bullet." I can only imagine how bad his first two albums must have been. Donna D. Thanks Scott. Now my faith in humanity is officially dead. You couldn't just let me HAVE my delusions.
Scott P. For real. It just goes to show how far perseverance will get you.
Donna D. That bird hates the commercialization of his genus
Scott P. is that the official Mayor of Simpleton video?
Kiki K. yes I believe so
Scott P. in other words, in 1989 anything could pass for a
music video. just do any random thing on camera
and call it a day.
life was easy back then.
Kiki K. add this to Mayor of Simpleton and you have the
mashup i woke in my head
Wow. Our chat room looks so tame in comparison. How do you get anything done when you’re chatting with a dozen people creating time-wasting content.
Galen
31 Dec 09 at 11:15 am
Yeah, trying to be productive when your job is to create things that are counter-productive is sort of a challenge.
Anyhow, it’s not always like that. Mostly it’s stuff like this:
Toby M. Anyone have any idea how long WP caches stuff? My new stylesheet isn't showing up on cheezstaging yet Martin Are you 100% sure it's not client-side cache? I'm developing against wordpress locally and I'm not seeing any caching behavior (but I haven't set up any, either) Not sure how Cheezstaging is configured.and so on. Pretty mundane stuff.
scottporad
31 Dec 09 at 11:19 am