New office supplies at Elizabitch Worldwide Industries global headquarters and European bureaux:

My ex, whose intellect impresses me less all the time, posted today, “All I can say is thank you Steve. You made the world a better place and will be missed.”

Better? Really?

Well, he gave boys great toys and what’s not better about that?

Glad you asked. Where do I start?

Let’s go back to 1976. I grew up surrounded by electronics. My father had an electronic music recording studio in the house. I was fascinated by it.

I entered high school at 13 and signed up for an electronics class at high school. Big mistake.

Whenever I entered the room, jumping, grabbing boys yelled ‘HEY GIRL HEY GIRL GIRL GIRL GIRL GIRL GIRL WITH THE PINK COMB GIRL GIRL GIRL.’ The teacher did nothing. I got no help from anyone. After six weeks, I dropped the class.

And that is the point where my life story and that of every male geek I have ever met, loved or worked with irrevocably part ways.

I took programming and math classes at a university when I was 15 and 16. But I never quite believed in myself and no one around me ever did either. No one saw the potential. I was a girl, at the age where the pressures to develop into a suitably fuckable cunt become crushing. I did not escape its effects. I abandoned tech.

I did come back to geekery after ten years of typing letters for a living, at the behest of my mother, amazingly enough, who had put together a satisfying consultancy writing database applications. I often assisted her performing surgery on computers, fixing up corrupted datafiles in the hex editor, and writing DOS batch file programs. It was her who urged me into IT and I am glad she did.

But over the years since I, as an adult returning student, graduated in the mid-90s, the tech world has remained a white-boys-only club. In every shop I’ve ever worked in there was a core clique of white males who ran everything. They got the good jobs, the promotions, the good work and everyone else in the IT department, the Chick, the Black Guy, that Guy Whose Name We Can’t Pronounce, The Lower Status Non-Warcraft Playing Males, got the crumbs. People with no more intelligence or talent than I rise in IT through the compelling power of the trouser snake.

So back to Steve Jobs. Jobs built a technological and business empire on the firmest of foundations, the narratives that structure our world. He was able to harness the archetypes of white-boys-with-toys, the male wizard bending the physical and social world to his will, the lone visionary. None of Job’s unique catalyzing talents would have made the least difference if he hadn’t had a dick and were he not, to white peoples’ way of seeing, drained of ethnicity. (I saw a friend today who knew him personally. She told me, “Did you know he was Syrian? He was adopted.” No, I did not. Jobs, like Ralph Nader, was socially bleached.)

They say Steve Jobs had a ‘reality distortion field.’ But he did not distort mine. There is a glass ceiling in my field, one that all of my male friends and colleagues floated through, supported by The Narrative and their lower-earning, non-techie, totally unthreatening wives. On the job I was the Perl ‘queen,’ the PHP ‘queen,’ the regular-expression ‘queen,’ the go-to person to solve thorny problems, but I was marginalized and made 10% to 20% less than the men (and those are just the cases I know about.) The past 25 years have been presided over by the likes of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds and Mark Zuckerberg, men who are held up as the geniuses and the leaders. I feel the effect of that every single day.

Jobs, by all accounts, was an amazing human being and definitely will be missed by friends, family and colleagues. But let’s not exaggerate. He did not make the world better or even much different. He (however inadvertently) reinforced the narratives and the archetypes that hold me and millions of others back. It’s still a sexist, racist, homophobic, imperialist oppressive shithole of a world…and all we got was this lousy iPhone.

Prolly overused, but fuckit.

Lyrics:
This is a public service announcement
With guitar
Know your rights all three of them

Number 1
You have the right not to be killed
Murder is a CRIME!
Unless it was done by a
Policeman or aristocrat
Know your rights

And Number 2
You have the right to food money
Providing of course you
Don’t mind a little
Investigation, humiliation
And if you cross your fingers
Rehabilitation

Know your rights
These are your rights
Wang

Know these rights

Number 3
You have the right to free
Speech as long as you’re not
Dumb enough to actually try it.

Know your rights
These are your rights
All three of ’em
It has been suggested
In some quarters that this is not enough!
Well…………………………

Get off the streets
Get off the streets
Run
You don’t have a home to go to
Smush

Finally then I will read you your rights

You have the right to remain silent
You are warned that anything you say
Can and will be taken down
And used as evidence against you

Listen to this
Run

This seems appropriate today. Go Occupy Somewhere.

Fed up with school job cuts dictated from above, the village government of Tournan-en-Brie decided to strike back by voiding the lease of the local office of the National Education service (charged with implementing the job cuts) and tossing them out into the street. Now it’s calling for other municipalities who are landlords to the ministry cutting their teaching staff to do the same. (Charlie Hebdo, No 1006, 28 Sept 2011.)

Since I’ve been awake for 2 hours and don’t need to be up for another hour.

Yesterday a coworker and I walked down to the little corner shop. I wanted to by the office manager a bag o candy, since it was her birthday and no one had gotten her a cake. She decorates everyone’s desk and gets cake for their birthdays. She is also in charge of the office candy bowl and sneaks handfuls onto to desk when I’m not looking. So bag o candy was a nice way to return the favor.

Outside the store was creepy tarot card reader dude. Not content with just taking our “no thanks”

This is an awesome article about Implicit Bias and the Harvard Implicit Bias Test FTR, I took the Race IAT a few years ago and scored with a slight bias towards black faces. So there’s that. Also, there’s is a throw away line at the end that made me chuckle. You’ll find it.

Hey, you know if the Fed has to choose between having an actual conflict of interest and just looking like it does, I’d prefer it to have the appearance and not the substance of conflict. But what do I know, I am probably a low info racist.

Unions finally, after 3 fucking weeks, have decided to join Occupy Wall Street. Better late than never. Yet still ahead of the whinging Obots and their “But what do you waaaaaaaaaaaaaaant. You have to have a plaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan” Fuckers.

I was gonna find a funny to put here, but I have hit the exhaustion wall with my face and must now go make myself one with my pillow. It’s a high level of zen required to truly make yourself one with the pillow. You must give up all notion of self (if by self I mean person who like to eat real food and have clean laundry that actually makes it into the closet and not the floordrobe, and maybe spends some portion of the evenings with loved ones) for the greater good (of gainful employment plus Thank-a-union-overtime.) Now you know.

Occupy Wall Street News: Over 100 cops refuse to work in NYC

Well I’ll be (sceptically) damned. I have heard that the shitheads doing the most abusive stuff were the white shirted police, and that the blue shirts (everyday patrol officers) were not part of the pepper spraying and beatdowns. But this is all rumor and I am in Seattle, not on the ground in New York.

I keep reading all these objections to the Occupy Wall Street people that center on “what’s their message? Why can’t these bored kids pick something and focus on it? You’re never gonna accomplish anything if you don’t have a message”.

What, exactly should they pick? I mean, it’s kinda an old tool of the kyriarchy to narrow the focus of complaints down to the tiniest of things so that real change never really happens. “Don’t focus on gay marriage when people are dying in Iraq”, “We have to ignore women’s equality so we can elect Democrats and then we’ll all be safe in happy abortion land” blah blah blah blah.

But really change don’t work that fucking way. It ain’t piecemeal, decided by the polite folks over afternoon tea. It happens when the system is dragged, kicking and screaming (or more likely billy-clubbing and pepper-spraying) into something better(ish).

What we know is this: the system is fucked for all but a handful of old white men. It’s fucked for non-men, non-whites, non-rich, non-straight, non-able bodied. It’s fucked for Americans and Greeks and Spaniards and Moroccans and Egyptians and and and and and. It’s fucked economically, environmentally, judiciously, politically.

To narrow down the message to a single, or even a dozen demands would water down any change to nothing.

You don’t tear down the master’s house with the master’s tools. Concise lists of demands are a kyriarchial tool. Besides, we all know what the current President thinks about bargaining. He starts from the center right. Progressive requests will be ignored, unless you chain yourself to the White House fence or the Wall Street pig.

So of course going to the grocery store and dropping off the boyfriend’s car in a free parking place is going to be about as much fun as dealing the Obot Fanboyz. Well, maybe not that bad. I generally don’t get rape threats in traffic jams.

(Also please note the the President’s first stop was in Medina, to pick up the not-taxed money from the wealthy douchnoodles who are bringing us into Great Depression 2.0. FUCKERS)

(And as another aside, TOE and I had a little convo the other day about how you can tell a pol by who his/her most ardent supporters are – and also of course by what they actually say. But isn’t it funny how some of Obama’s most horrid fan boyz voted for Bush Jr. the first time around cause Al Gore was too socialist or something. Shit, Kos was a republican, Andrew Sullivan was a republican, Ariana Huffington was a republican, etc. etc. etc. The didn’t change their beliefs, they just changed their party).