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Cake day: June 30th, 2025

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  • Got pulled off all of my R&D projects and told by the CEO in a meeting with all of the team leaders (who enthusiastically agreed) to focus entirely on this one project as it was critically important and mandatory whether we liked it or not before we could go to market with our product. Said OK, got it ready in record time, none of the managers wanted to approve testing. Got told a generic “We need more info.”

    Fleshed out everything I could. Did all sorts of bench top testing with full reports, did thorough budget analysis for the entire thing, a complete gantt chart with every contingency accounted for.

    Two years later I’m in the latest of god only knows how many approval meetings with management. I’ve dialed back how much I expect out of them and I’m just trying to get an official project initiation form signed so at least I have a record of them acknowledging the project’s existence. One of them asks, for the nth time, “Why do we need to do this again?”

    Boss looks at me expectantly, like “Yes, why do we need to do this?” as if I was the one who put myself on the project. I said “I can forward you the email where you told me to drop everything and work on it. If you changed your mind I’m more than OK to drop it and work on something else, but I refuse to hold even one more meeting to get agreement that I should even be working on this.”

    He says “I think we just need more information.” I ask “Such as?” knowing full well there wasn’t a single more thing I could add. “We just need more information.” All of the team leaders just stared at me. So I quit on the spot and walked out.

    Talked to a friend who still worked there and they still haven’t moved forward with that project years later, and the governing body still refuses to allow sale of the product until they do. It’s a 2 year timeline for testing so I have no idea what they are thinking. It’s only $100,000 too, they paid me more to try and get approval for two years than it would have cost to do it in the first place.




  • There are lots of stories like Last Starfighter where someone is recruited through video games for some fantastical job and some General or something is like “You have the highest score ever, only you can save us!” Always seemed pretty far fetched to me.

    But if we were going to another galaxy and they wanted someone to lay out production infrastructure? I could totally see recruiting based on most playtime on steam for Satisfactory.


  • My math teacher in high school had one of these, though he never mentioned what it was to us. I used to stare at it off and on during class, and eventually it clicked “Oh, it’s a clock!” After that, with some intense staring, I figured out the pattern and was satisfied. Asked the teacher about it later, and apparently I had taught myself binary.

    That knowledge displaced whatever he was talking about that day. Hopefully it wasn’t too important.




  • Tabletop games are good because you can trust your DM to guide the failures in an interesting way. Unless it’s a bad DM and you can’t.

    I had a DM who believed strongly that failure was what made it interesting, he loved to say “The characters in Star Wars failed almost every time and that’s why it was good!” But actually watching the movies, failures bad enough to result in grievous bodily harm are relatively rare.

    One time during our first session of a new game we were somewhere dark and a creature was there. He had me roll athletics with no explanation and I rolled high. Then he had me roll acrobatics, high again. Athletics again, high. Constitution check, high. Athletics 11. Then he cackled and eagerly described how a dragon cut off my arm.

    My character was built entirely around two handed weapons, this made me borderline useless. Based off of his comments, he didn’t have any plans to provide a way for my character to recover his limb, he just thought it would be cool to mutilate me and decided to force me to roll until I failed.

    Needless to say I didn’t go back.