Although the hours at work are starting to ease up a little bit, I’m still pretty busy for the most part, and I’m still unable to talk about the project until it launches some time in March. So how do I write about things that happen at my job without not actually writing about my job? Hmmm.
Engineer: … so there are 650 images from Korea and Taiwan that have to be sent to us. The images are larger than what we requested, though – they’ll have to be resized and sent to us by tomorrow.
Ernie: Uhm… are you serious? That’s not a good thing, isn’t it?
Engineer: No, they just use a program that we give them that resizes images automatically. Wait, you don’t think they resize everything by hand, do you?
Ernie: Um…
(The setting: a factory, somewhere in China. There is a wherehouse full of 11-year old girls, sitting at computer terminals running pirated copies of Adobe Photoshop. A giant picture of Chairman Mao sits on a back wall, along with a banner written in simplified Chinese characters that reads “Labor Brings Prosperity.” And yes, italics are in Chinese.)
Foreman: WORK HARDER! These graphics must be re-sized and cropped for Yahoo! by four in the morning!
Xiu Xiu: But our eyes heart – we’ve been working for 22 hours!
Foreman: QUIET! I will not tolerate such laziness – keep up this lack of productivity and your village will not get the bushels of grain!*
Xiu Xiu: But mama… papa… they need the grain. They are so hungry!
Foreman: Then you will scale these images to 100×150 pixels! High graphic compression rate! LABOR BRINGS PROSPERITY!
Exhausted Girl #2: (to picture on the wall) Chairman Mao, you are staring down upon us! What wise words of wisdom would you extend on us, the hero workers of your mighty nation?
Chairman Mao: Shiiet, girl. Y’all are fucked.
Ernie: …Of course not. Of course there’s an image resizing algorithm. An algorithm. Yes. Where am I?
Engineer: (slowly backs away)
* I don’t know why a village in China would get bushels of grain instead of rice. Deal with it; it’s my dream sequence.