I would like to apologize for my negligence in posting for the past week. I’ve been in transition, beginning with the drive for three interminable days across humid and twang’n’drawl-soaked regions I’d never otherwise frequent. If you want an idea of what it was like, play the movie and then multiply what you see by about 16,000:

After I finally arrived here, I spent far too long unpacking and sorting, sleeping in spurts, and I had to devote a whole afternoon to buying a couple of pieces of respectable looking clothing. Before the big shopping day, my footwear collection consisted solely of one pair of sandals, and I owned only two pairs of jeans, one without holes.

I’ve been spending my allocated computer time migrating the blog to a new server. Neither of my readers will have to look at ads anymore, which I’m sure they’ll appreciate. More importantly, I’ve got plenty of storage space to spare, and new services like PHP/MySQL support and streaming Quicktime, so you can look forward to an ever-expanding array of goodies from yours truly, depending on how long it takes me to make friends here. If past experience is any guide, you can expect a lot of goodies. Please bookmark the new location, your home away from home, your shelter from the storm: http://www.strangeproportion.com.

I once wrote a panegyric to coffee. It was for a college language class, and I was required to write a persuasive speech. I decided to persuade the class that everyone should drink more coffee. Who could argue with that? Piece of cake. The relevant excerpts went like this:

Coffee. Mystical black beverage. Hot, thick, and bitter—steaming, filling the room with its unique scent. Coffee. A swarthy pirate returning home victorious from a battle at sea. Or a quick-tongued serpent in a damned big hurry to get wherever it is that serpents go. Jazzy, yet serene, slithering along to its own internal groove and rhythm and rhyme.

But leaving aside for a moment the poetry of the drink, let’s come to the matter at hand: Everyone should drink more coffee. Now, as self-evident as that statement sounds to me, I realize that I have spent more time thinking about this particular subject than most. And I hope in the few minutes I have to share with you some of the wisdom that this, as I said, mystical black beverage has imparted to me.

When I sat down at my desk to begin writing this speech, my pot of Sunday coffee was brewing itself, gurgling like a neighborhood gossip with too much to say. You should realize that Sunday coffee is different from weekday morning coffee is different from evening coffee spent with friends is different from post-dinner lethargy-combating coffee. This is due to the various ways that the ritual of coffee can unfold itself. Granted, at times, one just grabs a cup of coffee as a pick-me-up on the way to somewhere to be. Sometimes those not prone to reflection fall into the habit of assuming that this is the sole role of coffee in our lives, but that is cubicle-drone mentality. To cubicle drones, coffee equals functionality times efficiency. Now, this is true, and not to be underestimated by any means, but it doesn’t stop there. For coffee doesn’t just counteract the negative; it fosters the positive.

At the time, I was quite proud of the speech. There was some other horribly clever stuff in there from which I've chosen to spare you. I have dragged it out of the archives tonight because I remember explicitly making fun of what I referred to as “cubicle drones.” Today I began my first day as one of them. It may be nothing but Stockholm Syndrome, but I have to say that it wasn’t too bad. In fact, it was a bit boring, and I literally did nothing all day long, which is only slightly less surprising to me than the fact that the other, more experienced cubicle drones did little more than I did.

Can I mention my sadness at realizing that there are 308 Google references to that phrase? ’Cause here I was thinking I was all clever, only to be slapped in the face yet once again by my own overwhelming lack of originality.

To get back to the point: My position is an internship at a very large company, and the nature of the internship consists almost completely of training in things that I yet know nothing about, so I didn’t expect to be solving problems and cranking out theorems on my first day. Nonetheless, neither did I expect to spend two hours of my morning on the phone with tech support getting my log-in and password. Nor spending an hour of my afternoon on the phone with the network administrator resolving an issue with my home directory, nor two hours waiting for our instructor to finish something else he was doing in another office and come back to teach us something. In the end, I finally received my first UNIX factoid at 4:30 p.m., and that UNIX lesson continued for almost 20 minutes uninterrupted until someone stopped by the office and announced that he was the ride for another one of the interns and that he was leaving now, and did the other intern want to come with? All that momentum lost, a sigh and a hanging of the head, and we decided to call it quits for the day and try again tomorrow.

geez. you could break it up a little bit and give a girl just one or two things to hold in her wee, tender head until she gets to the comments.

first:
have you heard/read "red dwarf: better than life"? there's a bit in there, where a guy prepares a cup of coffee, and it's SO GOOD, and then he prepares a second cup, "even better than the first" and that's when he realizes that he's not in reality, because the second cup is just never as good.
although i think the 10th cup maybe has some magic all its own.

second:
if you were here again i would make coffee for you every day so i could watch your Big Ginormous Head do its zinging around with brilliance thing.

third:
the paperwork crap at the university will soon start to seem so wee as to be almost quaint. welcome to the cubicle big top. bwah-hah-hah. maybe someday they'll let you get a whole day's work in. i do not envy you.

"Neither of my readers"? What about the Google-bot, or don't we think it has achieved sentience yet?