Arien vs. The World

Archive for October 2008

When you work on a company that is known to a certain degree on the internet world, you can find people who like it and people who don’t. The extremes (love it/hate it) are usually the loudest, specially the haters (e.g. Microsoft) although the lovers can also be quite loud sometimes (e.g. Google, Apple).

But what do you do when you work in one of these companies (no, I don’t work for any of the mentioned above, uh) and meet a hater? When they say, “pff, that company is just a bunch of scammers trying to get your money”. You know that’s not true, because it almost never is. Companies exist for money, yes. But successfully companies don’t raise to the top by scamming people. They do by providing services, which some may consider more or less useful, but that’s subjective.

Look at Microsoft. Many Windows haters, but where would computer world be without it? Would be either restricted to geeks who can use Linux or people with enough money to buy Macs. How lovely.

Anyway, I digress. What do you do when you meet one of these haters? Whenever I read or hear someone dissing my company like that, it just gets on my nerves. It doesn’t really matter what they say, since they are not users, just outsiders with big mouths. But still, it pisses me off so much. They don’t understand that people in these companies are just normal people, like you and me. That their work isn’t to scam anyone, but try to help by providing a service. And that we need to pay our bills, so we don’t mind if we can get money while providing such services. Is that so bad, I wonder? Is it??

Sigh.

At work we can ask for formation, courses, etc. to expand our knowledge in our areas of interest. Finally we have resources dedicated exclusively for this task, and woah, they’re out of bubblegum! They want us to take the MySQL Certification exams this year, to know PHP5 as if we had coded it ourselves and so on. It’s nice to know that formation is now really a priority in the company, although it comes with small nasty surprises.

Like today’s. We were told a month or so ago that there would be an exam about PHP5 and MySQL Soon(tm). And that “Soon(tm)” was actually this morning. We have a meeting scheduled, and when we get there, bam! “Hi guys, enjoy the exam, k?”. Would have been a great moment to make us a pic, I bet.

Oh well, I never liked surprise exams, but the purpose of this one was more like an autoevaluation, so it wasn’t that bad. I got to the conclusion that I should reread the theory and the documentation of PHP again, because even though I knew what some of the questions were refering to, I couldn’t find the words to describe them. And yes, much to my dismay there were a few things I couldn’t answer because I didn’t know or had completely forgotten… So I hope I have some time to study, I surely can use it.

On a less self-depressing note, tomorrow the English classes start again at work! I love to have this small break. On hard work days it’s so relaxing to go there and have fun while polishing my English skills… Tiny things like this make this job worthwhile in the worst moments 🙂


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