Operators Are Standing By!

I'm systems engineering on-call primary this week. There are four of us who cycle through the roll so I'm the backup on-call or the primary on-call one week each with two weeks off.

When I first noticed that I'd be on-call during the peak of the holiday season, I was a little miffed, but then I realized that this is the slowest part of my employer's business calendar and a huge percentage of our in-house staffers & developers were going to be on vacation. Enlightenment: with neither customers nor developers to mess up my apps & servers, this is the single best time of the year to be on-call!

Still, I'm faithfully in my bunker basement computer cave home office, catching up on email, dealing with the occasional automated alert and generally cleaning up my files:

Operators Are Standing By!

I'm systems engineering on-call primary this week. There are four of us who cycle through the roll so I'm the backup on-call or the primary on-call one week each with two weeks off.

When I first noticed that I'd be on-call during the peak of the holiday season, I was a little miffed, but then I realized that this is the slowest part of my employer's business calendar and a huge percentage of our in-house staffers & developers were going to be on vacation. Enlightenment: with neither customers nor developers to mess up my apps & servers, this is the single best time of the year to be on-call!

Still, I'm faithfully in my bunker basement computer cave home office, catching up on email, dealing with the occasional automated alert and generally cleaning up my files:

My Latest Television Outrage: Bridalplasty

I've been meaning to write this for a while but I was busy focusing my outrage at other television obscenities like "Tabitha's Salon Takeover," "Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares," "Jersey Shore" and many others.

I'm largely out of higher priority targets at the moment so I'm going to rant on the obscenity that is "Bridalplasty."

If you haven't been exposed and/or tortured by this program yet, the basic premise is too bizarre for me to describe effectively. Let me quote from the producers: "brides-to-be compete in challenges to earn plastic surgery procedures in a quest to win their ultimate dream wedding."

What. The. Hell.

How sad & pathetic does one have to be to design a competition like this? Hey, let's get a bunch of women together to perform in arbitrary and degrading competitions. Better yet, the prize won't be money 'cause that would give them an 'out' by letting them say on camera that they'd use the winnings to pay for great-aunt Martha's dialysis or something like that. Nah, let's make the grand prize plastic surgery! That'll ensure no one can even think of weaseling out of confessing before the entire planet they are so incredibly vain that they'll do anything for a crack at liposuction, bigger boobs and a facelift! And just to ensure the audience doesn't miss what horrible people these contestants are, we'll make them brides-to-be so we can compete with the bridezilla reality programs too!

If you watched more than ten minutes of an episode and didn't experience an overwhelming sense of nausea and/or a compulsion to immediately take a shower, then forcibly toss your television through your living room picture window into the front yard, you should seriously consider therapy. Lord knows these contestants should be forcibly hospitalized & medicated. The producers, however, are beyond help: they should be exiled to a small island in the northern arctic so their remaining families can recover their dignity & hope by telling themselves they're orphans.

My Latest Television Outrage: Bridalplasty

I've been meaning to write this for a while but I was busy focusing my outrage at other television obscenities like "Tabitha's Salon Takeover," "Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares," "Jersey Shore" and many others.

I'm largely out of higher priority targets at the moment so I'm going to rant on the obscenity that is "Bridalplasty."

If you haven't been exposed and/or tortured by this program yet, the basic premise is too bizarre for me to describe effectively. Let me quote from the producers: "brides-to-be compete in challenges to earn plastic surgery procedures in a quest to win their ultimate dream wedding."

What. The. Hell.

How sad & pathetic does one have to be to design a competition like this? Hey, let's get a bunch of women together to perform in arbitrary and degrading competitions. Better yet, the prize won't be money 'cause that would give them an 'out' by letting them say on camera that they'd use the winnings to pay for great-aunt Martha's dialysis or something like that. Nah, let's make the grand prize plastic surgery! That'll ensure no one can even think of weaseling out of confessing before the entire planet they are so incredibly vain that they'll do anything for a crack at liposuction, bigger boobs and a facelift! And just to ensure the audience doesn't miss what horrible people these contestants are, we'll make them brides-to-be so we can compete with the bridezilla reality programs too!

If you watched more than ten minutes of an episode and didn't experience an overwhelming sense of nausea and/or a compulsion to immediately take a shower, then forcibly toss your television through your living room picture window into the front yard, you should seriously consider therapy. Lord knows these contestants should be forcibly hospitalized & medicated. The producers, however, are beyond help: they should be exiled to a small island in the northern arctic so their remaining families can recover their dignity & hope by telling themselves they're orphans.