penismightier.com

Hi there, and welcome to the new, improved Pen Is site, now with somewhat less hardcore porn. To celebrate the return of the main page, I thought I’d fill you all in on the latest in my office intrigue. As you may know if you read the forum, about two months ago the company I work for was sold to a private investment firm. Their stated intent was to fatten up our company’s revenues and IPO us as quickly as possible, which would make them bucketfuls of money, which is the point of the whole endeavor. This means I’ve been to a lot of meetings where guys in suits tell me how awesome this is going to be, but as a rank-and-file QA engineer, the new ownership hasn’t affected my job much. For all the talk of “vision,” and the new marketplaces we’re going to plunder, and the $50M/yr we’re going to add to our revenues, nothing concrete has actually changed for me… Until this week. In a bold action that clearly demonstrates the insight conferred on bearers of MBAs, our new corporate overlords began our inexorable climb to Profit-ville by downgrading our beverage service. This means that our break-room coffee grinder has been replaced with a box of pre-ground coffee grounds, and our selection of twenty varieties of inexpensive tea has been replaced with two varieties of cheap tea. Don’t even ask about the Swiss Miss. As you might imagine, this action has been the subject of much derision around the office; I even produced a vicious work of satire mocking it for the break-room bulletin board. But hey, it’s just coffee, right? I’m no coffee snob. “This doesn’t affect me, so I can live with it,” I (like a Gentile in Nazi Germany) told myself. It was then that the unthinkable happened: our new overlords cancelled our weekly donut delivery. That’s when it hit home. I may not care what kind of coffee I guzzle, but I take my donuts seriously, as long-time readers may remember. In fact, I’ve even made the argument that donuts are the only good thing in this world. So when you threaten my access to donuts, you may as well reach into my chest and pluck out my still-beating heart so I can watch you pee on it. Now, I’m no accountant, but according to my calculations this belt-tightening will save us about forty dollars per week, or $2000/year. This means that we should accomplish our stated goal of growing revenue by fifty million dollars in a mere twenty-five thousand years, which, you’ll note, is long before the Sun will exhaust its supply of hydrogen fuel. So in that sense, it’s a good plan. In the sense of keeping the employees happy, though, it’s not such a good plan. Goddammit, I work weekends when I’m asked, I work overtime when we’re in crunch mode – are some decent donuts too much to ask? I don’t know if I’d actually quit over something like this, but I’ve never been called upon to make the choice. For now, the crisis has been temporarily averted by the VP of Dev picking up donuts at Safeway. They were acceptable, but they were nothing like the high-quality donuts we were blowing our corporate profits on before. So listen up, fascist overlords: Bring back the donuts, and all will be well. When properly fueled, this department can churn out some pretty good code. When you fail to provide us with caffeine and sugar, however, you do so at your peril. I can’t make any specific threats, but don’t be surprised to see a dip in my ratio of actual-work-to-sarcastic-fliers-for-the-break-room.