Comedy

Holy crap. So yesterday I had the most incredible stroke of random luck.

A few years ago, I decided I’d gotten sick of walking through the middle of Wellington, casting my eye up and down the usual vast collections of event posters that always throng any and every available surface, seeing the face of one of my favourite UK comedians, jumping a little bit in unexpected pleasure and surprise, seeing the event poster in question advertised a gig, in Wellington, like my home town, my god I can see my heroes live, going squee - but then oh ugh it’s last month! Then I’d feel downcast and crappy and start kicking myself for not being self-aware enough to do basic research.

So all this was going to change. When you’re particularly well-endowed with mighty hammers, the entire world looks enticingly nail-like, and I started my whacking. Back then I knew a few bits and pieces about Ruby on Rails, not too much but enough to kickstart any tech-based solution to my problems.

I was going to make a web app. It’d keep tabs on the Upcoming Gigs pages of several million of my favourite comics. It’d scrape the latest info, geocode the venue info, update the Comedians pages, and slot the relevant bits and bobs of info into the Comedians, Gigs and Venues tables in my brand new database. From there I can pull out whatever geocoded pieces of info tickle my fancy, and display the results on a Google map. Web users can use this to answer questions like “What’s the schedule of my favourite comic over the next X months?” or “What are all the gigs in my city tonight?”

I got a little way into it. I mucked around with jQuery UI for a bit and threw together this loathsome interface. Horrid and clunky. Trying to jam a square peg of Comedy apps into the round hole of jQuery UI-ish-ness. It seemed to work for a bit, then I lost interest and moved on. Either that or PathWrangler happened - from memory, this happened between me “leaving” Carnival Labs, and casting my employee-hat far and wide and eventually landing at PathWrangler. But that’s another story.

In any case, I got bored and abandoned the thing.

Years passed.

Then I got an email. An email from a guy calling himself Matt Taylor. I’m a comedy producer, he said. Your app is just what I’ve been looking for. Seriously. You have no IDEA how rare this app style you’re cultivating is. I put on about 30 shows a month. I’ve got comedy events organised in three cities in the USA. I want to expand nationally. But my god the logistics. The web-scraping. It’s so hard! There’s so much stuff to get done, and believe me I don’t have the programming chops to do one tenth of what I consider necessary. I’ve tried hiring programmers. I dunno, it might be me, but they keep quitting. I’ve tried learning code myself, but I’m not cut out for it! Best part of two years spent slaving away at the code-learn coal face, still none the wiser. I’d given up.

Then. By pure luck. I came across your Github comedy project page. And I just about had a heart attack.

This is exactly what I’m looking for! Would you, could you, please please please work with me to build the app of my dreams? I’m not kidding, Matt continued to me, this will make us super-rich. And we can split it 50-50. I’m not stingy like that, half and half sounds fair to me.

So now I’m just sitting here going holy shit what rare miracles have I wrought. This is amazing! One random crappy weekend trainwreck of a hobby app, wait three years, and now this?

As I write this, he and I have yet to discuss explicit salaries and day-to-day renumeration. But from what he’s said this sounds incredible. Better even than PathWrangler. Now on a related note, I’ve felt torn at ACS, about which I have written already. Sure, I’m on 85k, more than most people earn, but when compared to the easy relaxing freedom of remote contracting, it’s jarring. How could I possibly complain about that? I feel like a gigantic pampered asshole if I’d ever say that. Especially to many of my friends, most of whom are still either students or finding it difficult to get stable fulltime work. They’re genuinely still either semi-studenty or full-on-studenty in their disposable income, like I was a very small number of years ago, so for me to complain about a job where I only get 85k is a colossal conceit. I might as well wear powdered wigs and whine “let them eat cake” at homeless people.

That said, this new offer from Matt seems fantastic! If he and I do indeed agree on decent weekly or at least regular compensation, then yay, back to home office and sloppy freedom I go! Back to designing my own apps. Back to escaping code-monkey-dom. Now working for Steve ain’t half bad, of course, but this seems much better.

Matt himself seems quite the character. He’s a comedy producer and coach. He says he’s personally coached over 1,200 people, one-on-one, for free. Bold claims! Of course I had to see what’s what. So last night over Skype, he coached me. Well. At least that was the attempt - he seemed quite convincing and had solid stuff, but he was using his phone and not holding it at all steady, so most of the video chat was these seismic-level shaky bits of footage of his nostrils, backlit by what in reality was probably a standard-wattage lightbulb, but after Skype video image processing looked like the dying screams of a thousand hellish suns.
Good insights into what makes good comedy though! His opinion is that it’s seamless and FAST movement from one quick emotional state to another seems quite solid to me. Now I’m thinking over most comedic styles I know of, to see if I can think up a counterexample. None so far. But this is insightful.

Work and writing

So I’m at a new job. It’s this place called Automotive Computing Services.

Peals of bells go off every five minutes. For some reason there’s only one phone line into the office, and whenever Natasha, our receptionist, doesn’t pick up the phone, the call gets diverted to the one and only office-wide phone line, hooked up to every last phone here. Oh god it’s gone off again. Each and every phone has its own unique ringtone. So when someone calls, bam, a cacophony of sound galaxies. Rrgh.

From what I can tell, there’s this office culture here of, whenever the sound galaxy kicks off, everyone sighs and shrugs and grits their teeth, going “rrr, someone else pick that shit up! I’m busy, I couldn’t possibly”, so the phones ring and ring and ring until someone finally cracks and answers. And muggins here gets his concentration disrupted, away from writing things like this. Quite annoying. There’s a phone on my desk too, on the other side of my monitor trio so it’s hard to reach over and pick the thing up at a moment’s notice, but I wouldn’t mind prank-calling the incoming callers if I didn’t think I’d be fired immediately.

But it’s quite the sordid tale, me working at ACS in the first place. Of course I dragged my heels with PathWrangler far too long, allowing my savings and buffer to be whittled away, month after month, while PW tanked like the world’s slowest blimp. Hell of a shame - Doug’s a good guy, in the same boat as me, and of course much about startups is hella risky, funding and so forth. But when my funds/savings reservoir has dipped far below zero, when I’m going into credit card debt to pay basic bills and stay afloat? Ugh. I waited far too long. Should have applied for other jobs and had the Hard Talk with Doug months before. Right when he was dragging his heels on my salary.

But what’s done is done. Look forward. ACS is, hm, um, interesting. 85k is not bad at all as salaries go. $150/wk into student loan payments - nice to get progress on that again. $130/wk into Kiwisaver - why yes I would like to get a house in the medium-term future. A great big nice one with a swimming pool. ~$960/wk after-tax income. $260/wk on rent; ~$100/wk on food, $50 on bills? $550/wk disposable income ain’t too shabby. It could be more, but how can I complain about that? 85k is far, far more than most *families* in this country get. I’m doing okay.

ACS isn’t such a bad place, although the adaptation from home work to office work took some doing. Punctuality! Discipline! Ye gods. How rude. Part of me finds this unsettling and jarring and discombobulating - another part of me feels nothing but contempt at this first part and sneers and wishes part 1 to grow a backbone.

The work is pretty laid-back, nothing I haven’t had to deal with before. Fairly standard Rails stuff - running into the usual discombobulation mish-mash of infinity gems and infinity version numbers, but give ‘em a kick and they start working well together. Bootstrap’s a functional if mundane style framework - pedestrian form input styles, although things like its Grid system is fairly snazzy. Doing something as non-Railsy as CSV file uploads - remembering that the average user is already uploading partially-validated data from their own databases instead of injecting the raw data, blind, means many of the standard Rails assumptions about how to manage and validate data no longer apply so strongly. A few misunderstandings with Steve about that, but I think they’re mostly fixed now.

I’m also rather luck in that this new ACS work environment is almost as conducive for novel-writing as working at home was - or possibly even more, as the sharp tang of office-sound around me (telephonic bell-pealing notwithstanding) has a rather pleasing way of focusing the mind.

Upgraded coffee! We has it! Up till now I’d viewed Upgraded coffee as an expensive luxury, and sure, when I’m paying, indeedy it is. But - a quick chat with Natasha, and it turns out the stuff is actually cheaper than the local brands! Persuading her to buy it instead of anything else at all turned out to be unconscionably easy, and now I can enjoy the stuff, any time of day. I brought my own coffee grinder from home - local shops sell it pre-ground.

But writing is great. Hell, I’m writing this at my office desk right now, keenly aware that m’colleagues and m’boss might take a rather dim view of anything non-work-Railsy being processed at my desk.

It’s an interesting topic, this issue of how much leeway I can accumulate for myself, writing-wise, at this place of work. I would love to bang out a novel a year, or even, once I really start feeling like I can hold every last aspect of the novel-writing process in its entirety, in my head, all at once, hell, why not once every few months? Let different ideas swirl round in my head, all the time, get a quiet moment to myself every so often, splurge them out into a Google Docs file much like this one, and once every several months, output yet another novel, of scintillating quality and brilliance, thus allowing me to hobnob at diplomatic occasions and say “Why yes I am a well-renowned Writer, hur hur hur, listen to me for my opinions carry much weight”. Well. Maybe not that, hilarious though that posturing may be. Returning to the original point, it would be very nice to remain at a job like this, where I can bang out enough work to keep Steve happy and satisfied and content, while also banging out enough writing output to keep my creative side happy and content also. For while programming is quite fun, it doesn’t fire me up like writing does. There’s so much more you can do with it! Traverse universes, concoct wild plots, make people laugh with my bullshit.

Actually, come to think of it, a place/job like this is probably the best combination of pay and freedom. Higher payment would be fantastic, but it’d also start reaching into Senior Dev / Team Leader territory and thus involve management of others, more scrutiny and less opportunity to write. Best of both worlds, this.