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| The lobby lounge at the Element Reno |
Yesterday on our last day in Reno, I was in the lobby of the hotel waiting for Jessica to come back from her last session of her drawing class, for which she had flown to Reno to attend, and which the official point of our trip. Jessica had called our hotel "Millennial hipster", and the description seemed perfect. It was a brand new modern place, with Deep Elm style furniture, located amidst similar new apartment complexes, in a mini-walkable neighborhood on land in the center of the city that I recognized as having once been an old shopping center. I have enough of a history in Reno, going back 40 years as of this year, that I know places by what used to be there.
In the lobby, with its deep backed couches that force one to use pillows are to recline back, I had been working on my laptop for my dayjob, as if I were in the office. I have enough freedom that I can take off for a couple days and tell my boss "I'm working from Reno for a couple days", and everything is cool. Part of it is that I am very good at what I do, and provide tremendous manifest value to my company.
I have believed nothing about recent Millennial and Gen Z work trends about having all sorts of privileges. "You guys have no idea what it will be like when the pendulum swings back." My strategy is as it always has been---pure Generation X---I am as valuable on my job as what I provide day to day. So I will so fucking valuable that my leash gets longer and longer, by earning it. "How would we get along without him?" I want them to ask. Of course they would get along without me. I'm not indispensable, so that keeps me humble and focussed on work. I am survivor of multiple rounds of layoffs in a tiny company down to a skeleton staff putting out and supporting a complex platform of sensitive data transmitted over the Internet.
The last time I was in Reno almost three years ago for Dick's funeral, I worked for a horrible company (Satan Inc.) of 1000 employees where almost everyone was remote. That meant the Longhouse controllers (the young women in HR) also worked remotely and this ruined remote work for everyone. Now remote work is as bad as the prison of the office, but the young women of HR know only slavery. They are born slaves, and in the Longhouse everything trends to towards the feminine values of accepting slavery and submission and being happy about it, and in turn getting be the enforcers of all the rules. (see "What is the Longhouse?" here)
I remember working from the airport and getting scolded by my boss for it, for no reason at all. All they could do was scold me. I was made to feel awful. They tried to put me on a performance improvement plan to get to me to quit, so I did just that. Within an hour of my resignation, the laptop they had supplied me via registered mail when I began working restarted itself and "bricked" itself, removing all my accerss from everything company related immediately.
The company was a billion-dollar startup. Within six months of my leaving, the company laid off three quarters of its staff and all but shuttered its doors.
In reality I'm convinced it was a CIA-funded spook operation designed to hook into the data of all the hospital systems in the country and gather all the patient data from their databases. It was a Deep State scam. Good riddance to it. The low point of my recent career.
My new job is demanding but much more rewarding than the billion-dollar operation I worked for in 2021. As much investment money my current company eats up, it can never be as big of a boondoggle as Satan Inc.
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