Raev.net
A Collaborative Media Project.
Competition Not In Your Favour
09 days
Well, here I am again, writing another story. Sorry for the lack of promised posts, I’ve been busy.
This tale is probably inflammatory, and will piss some of you off – note that it was 5-6 years ago, and I probably could have handled it differently, but what’s done is done, and it’s now a story.
I arrive at work one day, and the boss calls me in. They’re hiring a newbie – a guy my age, maybe a little older. He’s starting next Monday, and the boss wants me to orientate him, show him the ropes, etc. I agree, and go about my work. Come Monday, the newbie arrives – he’s a big Linux/OSS advocate, and about the first thing he says after meeting him is “this place would run so much better on Linux”.
Ok, I think, I’m not a huge fan of Linux, but I’m competent with it, and I know it has a place in the computer world. I tell him we don’t use Linux because we deal with a lot of home users who are familiar with Windows. We have a deal with Microsoft – we can install Windows 2000 + Office 2000 on the computers we sell, without paying for the licenses, as long as we record our data into an Access database for Microsoft to audit every 6 months or so. I also add the fact that he and I are the only two techs under 45. The rest of the workers are mostly unpaid volunteers on age pensions. They know how to use Windows, and replacing the systems with Linux would frustrate a majority of them. “That’s stupid, they can learn Linux, it’s not that hard” he says. I frown at him, and explain that they can probably learn Linux, but it’s time consuming, and we don’t have the men or hours to spare training them. He sort of accepts this, but doesn’t shut up about Linux.
Newbie, after being there for less than a month, goes to the boss and tells him what we’re doing is inefficient, and we need to switch to Linux – both for our office machines, and for the user machines, because it’ll be easier and cheaper in the long run. Boss doesn’t like this idea, but Newbie brings it up every couple of days. No one in the office is on board with his idea. He is insistent. He causes friction between us who resist his efforts (most of the office). He tinkers with Linux machines behind our backs, wasting time and resources. I have to fix most of his stuff-ups. This bugs the shit out of me, but I stay reasonably quiet.
A few weeks later, the boss tells me he wants me to grab a few spare 80gb hard disks we have lying around and build a server machine to hold all the hard disk images from the machines we were fixing. We would get 20-200 of the same make/model machines donated, so we would install windows + drivers + Office, and image the drive to a CD, thus making it easy to setup the next 19-199 machines. We have a copy of Windows Server 2000 to use, and so I get to work.
Newbie hears about this, and decides he’s going to put together a Linux server for the same thing – I tell him not to waste resources, as this machine is going to need to be used by all of the other techs to catalogue/burn hard disk image ISOs. He doesn’t listen to me, and starts anyway. Me and the Old Tech get an idea to sabotage his efforts. When he isn’t looking, we switch out working parts for dead/dying parts over a couple of days – first the RAM, then the PSU, then the hard disk. Meanwhile I’ve finished building my Windows 2000 machine. It’s a magnificent beast. He hasn’t even got the OS to install properly yet. The boss tells him to abandon his project, and get back to work. Newbie ignores him and continues to build the machine.
By the time Newbie has finished his Ubuntu server, I’ve had the Win2k machine running for a good 2 days. Half the ISOs have been loaded to the hard drive. They’ve all been catalogued. I tell him it’s over, break the computer back down into parts and start on a stack of machines that need to be rolled out. He goes red with anger, and loses it yelling at me. He seems to have worked out I was sabotaging his project. He calls me everything he can think of, including every Windows “fanboy” term he can think of. I just laugh at his futile attempt to anger me, knowing I was victorious.
A few minutes later the boss walks in and sees him yelling at me, and me standing there silent, arms folded, looking bored. The boss calls us both into his office seperately. We both give him our stories, and he suspends us both for a week. The next week I return to work, and the boss told me he had fired the newbie, due to irreconcilable differences. Most of the techs were glad to see him go, myself included.
The Two Worst Things
025 days
The second worst thing in the world is the truth. It’s never what you want it to be. And the truth is, you were probably asking the wrong question.
Let me elaborate.
Some cases are obvious. You are never happy learning that you’ve been cheated. But if, say, after a long bit of investigation, you find out that you aren’t being cheated… the truth there is that you were paranoid, and you’ve cheated yourself.
It’s true of things both big and small. Do I have my car keys? You check the pocket of your pants or purse, and you know the answer. And it’s a comfort. But the problem remains that you can’t remember with certainty.
But there is a thing that drives us all into the light. A thing far worse than knowing the answers we seek will not enlighten us, but only draw the shadows deeper…
The worst thing is not knowing.
You can’t really escape from the horrors of ignorance. From the fallibility of the human mind. From basic failures of those you trusted to give you all the tools you need to survive in the world. There are things you, as any sane and sentient being discovers, do not know. You live in a shallow puddle of gas clinging to a rock, spinning around a star on the edge of a rather average galaxy.
That impulse that makes us check for our keys, double check expiration dates, look both ways for cars… that sudden awareness that we cannot trust our memories absolutely… that drives us to ask questions of the world, and test it. To see if it behaves as we believe it should, or whether we are wrong, and must deal with a painful and uncomfortable truth.
We are not always aware of how much we don’t know about the world. Our minds do many things very well on autopilot. We only occasionally suspect something is amiss and check. We all do this. We all do the same common sense tactic of testing reality.
One term for such testing, the challenging of what we were taking on faith… is experiment. We use our intelligence, our vision, and we learn. We make certain. Sometimes, it is merely to calm our fears that we are standing on solid structure, and not a bridge built with shaky foundations over a nasty chasm. Sometimes… we discover that things are worse. And by testing, we save ourselves from embarrassment, pain, and loss. Nothing quite like your loved one dropping you off at the mechanic before discovering you’ve left the payment in the passenger’s seat, and stranded yourself. Or swelling up after learning you were, in fact allergic to those nuts.
But I did say that the truth was the second worst thing. If it’s better than the hell of not knowing, why don’t I describe it as a wonderful thing? Because you, dear reader, are not an idiot. Everyone has experienced, or witnessed, a reluctant test. Does the baby’s diaper need to be changed? Was that a spider? Is there no god?
Once you are aware that the question exists, you are in the hell of not knowing. From there, you can either test and know… be comfortable with all possible answers, or delay testing to remain in the hell of not knowing. And at times… this is economy. Of time, money, of opportunity. You cannot ask every question in a finite lifetime. You cannot afford to test everything. And if you insist on testing a woman’s virtue on the first date… you don’t deserve a second.
People do fear losing their faith. No matter what that faith is in. Be it a person, an organization, a religion… it matters not even the fart of a gnat. The discomfort of discovery is real. Consider how someone reacts upon discovering that their trousers have split. There is a period of time prior to their recovery, so to speak, in which they are aware that they have this gaping hole in their protections and are scrambling to acquire the means of acquiring a better fitting replacement.
Forcing awareness, or allowing another to go on unaware… neither is a kindness. One is merely going to result, after some confusion, in fewer exposed assholes. That is the benefit of pushing people through the hell of not knowing, and into the horror of the truth.
A Tale of Efficiency
062 days
When I first began at the company, I was shown how to do a full 7-pass erase on hard disks we were donated, to make sure they were always totally void of data from the company that donated them. They were using a single Celeron 400mhz, set up at the back of the office, attached to an ancient monochrome monitor. This machine was expected to erase hard disks pretty much constantly, and had done so for about 12 months or more. From the moment I set my eyes on this machine, I wondered to myself “what the hell am I doing working here, everyone must be idiots”, and to some extent I was right.
The celeron 400 would take around 6-8 hours to format a 4gb hard disk. We ran it overnight, it was so terribly slow. The program we were using was TuffTest, and it was on a floppy disk. The floppy disks would tend to degrade after a week or so, because, for some stupid reason, we were using the same couple of diskettes over and over, and they were well and truly buggered.
A few months later, I was looking in the back-room for computers fitting a certain description, of which were needed to restock the supply of refurbished machines for sale, when I ventured deep into the abyss, and found myself face to face with about 20 Hewlett-Packard [4] E-Vectras . I grabbed two for testing, and told another guy to find the machines for restock, because I had an idea.
I took one into the bosses office and told him my idea: to make TuffTesting faster. He agreed that I could try it, as the machines were unable to be sold – you couldn’t fit a dialup modem in them, and every machine sold HAD to have a dialup modem (we were paired with an ISP, who gave us a certain amount of money per person signing up through our company).
I took the machines into the work room, and pulled them apart – 800mhz Pentium 3s with 256mb RAM. They also had no floppy drive – only a CD-ROM, of which I quickly put together a TuffTest CD using the diskette image and a bootloader. Awesome, these would make great machines for the hard disk testing. I inquired whether we could get a KVM switch to hook up several machines to the same peripherals, and setup 6-8 machines in the same space the single Celeron 400 was using. I was told there was a KVM in the back room under a bunch of cisco routers, and sure enough, I found two 4-port hardware KVMs.
I quickly put together 6 TuffTest CDs, dismantled the Celeron 400, and setup 6 E-Vectras. I also removed the archaic monochrome monitor, and replaced it with two smaller form-factor flatscreen CRTs. Both KVMs had 3 computers rigged to each.
This setup worked out beautifully – we could churn out 6 hard disks every 4 hours. The box of unformatted, untested drives shrunk, going to about 120 hard disks to less than 40 in a week. I had improved the efficiency by about 800%.
My boss was impressed, as was the Old Tech working there, who for some reason, never had the idea to increase the hard disk testing efficiency. I was rewarded with a bump in seniority, from lowly computer tester, to being more hands-on with software and hardware, and 4 of the remaining E-Vectras. I also got a free lunch out of it.
Tech Savvy Pensioners
065 days
Every now and then we would get old-age pensioners (actually, all sorts of pensioners, but the old age ones were the most impressive) who were quite up to speed on computers, and were generally self-sufficient, however, if they needed computer work done, because we catered to pensioners, we’d charge them about 1/4 of what it’d cost to take their computers to a retail outlet for repairs.
One day an old guy comes in with his computer, which is a HP 1.4ghz Pentium 4, about a year or two old. He had removed the old OS (which I can’t remember) and put a pirated copy of Windows XP Pro on it (the RTM volume license version which I’m sure everyone has run). However, when upgrading to SP1, the key was rendered useless, and he was locked out of his computer.
The boss offered to either order him a new copy of Windows XP, or he could buy a copy of Windows 2000 off us for a ridiculous price (we got them free from Microsoft – we had a stack of about 2500 key labels to attach to each computer – Microsoft also audited every computer we sold with 2000 on it, so we had to keep a database) which was against the agreement with Microsoft.
The old guy had come to us for a reason – he was old, broke, and on a pension. He was a very nice, understanding guy, didn’t get angry or raise his voice, he just seemed so let down. He didn’t offer us a sob story or try and convince us, he just accepted his fate, and said he had a copy of whatever his computer came with at home. However, he asked, could we take the data from his computer, and burn it to a DVD.
I told him I’d do the job, and boss was happy with that. He told me under no circumstance should I fix his pirated copy of XP unless he could produce the original disk or a key. I told him no worries. I take the computer into a backroom, set it up so no one can see the monitor, and boot his computer up with a WinPE live CD.
I then ask him if he’s currently struggling with money. He tells me that yes he is, he recently spent a lot of money getting his car fixed because someone pulled a hit and run on it. He told me he was only third party insured, so repairs cost him almost the worth of his car, which was about $2000. I told him I’d get his Windows XP working again, but on the condition that he tell no one, as I would be immediately fired. He agreed.
A year earlier I was attending college for computer networking (which taught me nothing. Biggest waste of time ever), and while I was there, I ran a key-checking program on one of the computers, so I had the government’s VLK for that college. I text message my dad to send me the key, and then pretend to back this guys stuff up. A few minutes later I receive the key, put it into XP and activate it. Goes without a hitch, everything boots back up, and is back to working condition.
The old guy is ecstatic, hugs me and says I’m a computer genius (if only he knew the non-complexity of the task I had just performed). I tell him to honour the agreement and not tell anyone what I have done. I hand him a blank disk labelled “backups” and send him to the boss. The boss asks if he’s happy, and the old guy goes back to acting sad, but thanking the company for backing his stuff up for him. He pays about $25 or so, and is on his way.
On his way out I hand him my business card and tell him if he has any more problems, just give me a call directly on my mobile, and I’ll sort it out for him. He thanked me once again, and was off. Never saw him, or heard from him again, but I felt happy to have helped him out.
Of course, not all pensioners were nice and sane like this guy, but I’ll leave those tales for another time.
Addendum: I realise piracy is generally frowned upon, and these days I insist that people buy a copy of Win7 (I do not distribute pirated software, due to a legit copy being so cheap) however, I was 17 or so back then, so being a broke fucker myself, I could understand why people wouldn’t shell out $280 (the price for XP pro in Aus 7 years ago) for it. Thankfully MS have more than halved their prices for Windows. Makes talking people into paying for it so much easier.
EOF
Nothing Goes To Waste II
073 days
this story is before the policy was changed, and set the old tech who worked there off on his crusade against using shitty components.
I came into work one day and found we had been donated 120 Pentium 3 machines with 256mb of RAM, and discrete graphics cards (I think they were S3 Savages, or Trios), and Asus motherboards (most of this info is irrelevant, but I remember it well). We had the task of cleaning out every single machine, and refitting them so they could join the line as one of the more powerful computers we were selling (this is back in 2005 when a Pentium 3 was actually decent). The machines had to be tested using a program called TuffTest, which would sweep through the RAM, videocard, test the motherboard and all ports and could do a 7 pass erase on hard disks (which is another story I have) amongst a bunch of other things.
So we started to TuffTest each machine slowly and painstakingly. Most of the RAM checked out, the videocards were fine…but about 3/5 motherboards would totally entirely fail every test. Of that 3, about 1/3 wouldn’t POST reliably, and take a couple of reboots to get into the program, and 1/3 were just dead and would not boot. Of course the ones that wouldn’t boot were thrown out, because there was no way we could sell them. The other 2/3 would be tested with Windows 2000 to see if they would run it, and if so, would be sold with 64 or 128mb of RAM and a 4gb drive as a “cheaper” model. This equated to around 70 machines that were faulty, and about 25 that just would not boot.
The other 2/5ths were sold as premium machines, 256mb of RAM, 8 or 10gb hard disks, Windows 2000, and some even sold with an LCD monitor. This was baffling to us techs, as we knew that the failure rate on this motherboard was so high, that the machines would be coming back eventually, or die not too long after being sold.
Myself and the old tech grabbed a good machine, and a failing machine each and took them home to do a little analysis to see if we could prove to the boss that we should not be selling these machines. A little googling of the model number showed that pretty much everyone was complaining about the same problem on their motherboards – they’d bluescreen or lock up, wouldn’t POST, would take several reboots before they would start, etc. I got out the canned air and a screwdriver, and took both boards apart to see if I could rebuild them to both working order. Try as I might, the dead machine wouldn’t POST but the good one ran fine. I called up the other tech and asked if he’d found anything that I may have missed.
Well, the old tech used to be an aerospace engineer at Lockheed Martin in the UK, so he was used to digging around circuitry and MacGyvering solutions to problems. He told me he had noticed that some of the capacitor caps were bulging, and some had started leaking on the dead boards. He had unsoldered the dead caps and replaced them with similar ones, and had got one of the dead boards to boot. I hadn’t noticed this, because it wasn’t a problem I knew could happen (at that time).
The next day at work, he presents his findings to the boss, and the boss is impressed. However, he tells us to assemble the machines as best we could so he could sell them anyway. We protested and said they would all come back, but he wouldn’t listen to us, and so we ended up building about 90 machines over the next week to sell at premium prices.
It took about a month for them all to sell, and we were sort of glad to get rid of them…but within a month, at least 50 of the machines had been returned for us to ‘troubleshoot’. Of course we knew we couldn’t troubleshoot them without resoldering all new capacitors onto the boards, and no one was willing to do it, so we ended up doing a straight swap with cash back for the people who brought them back. This cost the company a very large amount of money, and the boss ended up getting grilled by the CEO for selling such dodgy machines.
Over the next year every one except about 15 of those machines were returned with the same problem – bulging or burst capacitors. Even the good machines died within the year. Having to strip down machines you knew were stuffed in the first place was pretty irritating, and it was the main cause of the old tech starting to destroy parts he knew were faulty, instead of putting them in machines and pretending nothing was wrong.
Nothing Goes To Waste
076 days
I was working at a computer refurbishing company which sold old corporate computers to pensioners/low income earners, and the boss there would make sure every part got used, and nothing went to waste. If he saw something useful-looking in the bin he would fish it out and demand we test it in front of him. If the computer didn’t immediately lock up from it, it was “still good” and he would instruct us to put it in a machine.
Of course, 7 times out of 10, people would come straight back after buying one of these dodgy machines, and complain that they weren’t working, and we would have to replace the part we knew was stuffed with a good working part.
After a while, what an older tech at this company would do with anything broken that looked like it was still useful, to deter the boss fishing it out of the bin and making us re-use it, was to absolutely destroy it.
If it was a keyboard, he’d snap it over his leg, or cut the cable off with scissors, mice he’d tear the buttons off, any PCI card, he would snap the pins off and bend the metal parts up with pliers, hammer pins in on CPUs, bend the power connectors, and cut the cables on monitors, or stab a screwdriver through the LCD ones, snap RAM in half, drill through hard disks (which was actually policy for hard disks anyway, but he used to love doing it), snap trays off CD drives, old laptops would get thrown against the wall (there was a brick wall in the storage room, which was down the other end from the bosses office, and well insulated), and cut the cabling off PSUs.
When the boss would find a bin full of utterly destroyed stuff he would ask us techs (there were around 10 of us) who had damaged everything. Of course, no one would tell him, and eventually we all started destroying parts we knew were stuffed so we wouldn’t have to use them in machines.
Eventually the boss decided he couldn’t win, and started trusting our judgement that the parts really were stuffed. A couple of weeks later we had amassed such a large amount of low-quality or questionable looking stuff that we had to have a skip bin brought in for it.
EOF
Perpetual motion of verbal diarrhea.
0I really don’t have any idea as to what I should write about. I was chose a title before I even knew what it meant. BASICALLY, whoever reads this, prepare for a long ramble with a lot about absolutely nothing. I neither entertaining, nor funny. I’m also not very informative. I have nothing interesting to say, and nothing really spectacular ever comes out of my mouth or from my fingers.
That being said, I feel like I should talk about one of the problems I’ve been having at work lately. That problem would be keeping my fucking mouth shut. It’s a simple concept, no? Don’t speak, smile and nod, go about your business. For me, apparently not that easy.
Let me walk you through my average day. I graduated college in the Computer Networking field. Ooo, ahhh, glamour and glitz. Well, somehow I found myself thrown headlong into a job where I’m a jack of all computery trades. I don’t mind, not a bit. Hell, even my previous librarian experience came into play. Essentially, I work for a Canadian Native Tribal Band, and yes, it’s as exciting as it sounds (it is not exciting at all). I, being a very bit brown, am not as brown as the people who surround me. I have no Indian status, and am therefore seen as pretty much everyone else is (not brown… Or, white land rapist). That wasn’t too hard to deal with – another whitebread lady works with me. Obviously I gravitated towards her. The worst part about it, was I couldn’t tell if she was native or not. I finally asked one day, and she said no. I pondered, unfortunately, out loud, “Well, figures I find the only white person around here.” Ahh, brain filter, you fail me again.
My job is easy. What do I do most of the day? Respond to the various problems (of which some days there are none). “The internet isn’t working.” Flush, release, renew. Did that work? No? Turn it off and on again. Printer reacting slow – turn it off and on again. Computer doing funny things – turn it off and on again. You get the idea. I basically do nothing.
So what do I do in my downtime? Reddit. Reddit. Reddit. Email. Facebook. Reddit. IRC. Reddit. IRC. Reddit. Email. It’s kind of like playing, “What can I fill my day with while I get paid a sickeningly high amount compared to my fellow graduates to sit on my ass?”
Which brings me to my main problem. On the internet, I don’t need a filter. I don’t have any reason not to say what’s on my mind. Unfortunately, this makes me (not saying it happens to anyone else, so don’t take it that way) sort of lose my interpersonal filter skills. The girl I’m close to at work fortunately finds me hilarious, albeit a little revealing, and the head boss finds my personality to be quirky, with a hint of darkness. She said that, to one of the website designers I was working with. “There’s a dark little personality under there”. I would have been offended if she wasn’t absolutely correct, and yet obscenely under exaggerating.
Little things slip out now and again. I’m not racist, but racist things come out. I’m obviously an overly sexual person in private – I’m from the internet, how could I not be – but somehow it’s wandered over to my everyday life. The verbal diarrhea is an ever-constant flow, and I’m starting to think eventually my “quirky” personality is going to get me reprimanded.
Until then, I’ll just remain cute. Seems to have worked for 22 years.
I, the Accused: part 2
0288 days
So, the last rant was everything you can find in the news about my arrest. I’d like to talk about what you don’t know. The effects.
Prior to this mess, I could look at an arrest report in the paper and think “Well, if he’s innocent, he’ll… probably be alright.” Or maybe, “I hope that scumbag gets what’s coming to him.” Always language that shows my lack of real faith in the judicial system, now that I think about it.
Now, I know something about the process. A lot of the time, the police are guessing. They want a confession. I knew intellectually that I didn’t have to talk to them. But I knew I was with my grandmother when one of these bank robberies occurred, and I figured they would just check my alibi and we’d be done.
My first clue that this was naive was when they didn’t want to check. “This is you, Daniel, in the tapes. Do you really want us to bother your grandmother to make her provide you an alibi?” Saves them a lot of work if I’d confess. Doesn’t matter if I’m guilty or not, if I confess. Or if I give them the wrong date. I couldn’t remember which day I’d gone to visit gran. My uncle’d pointed it out. The lady cop was saying “Well, if you’re so sure of the date, Daniel, just tell me the date!” because odds are in her favor that I’ll mess up, and they can use that in court to suggest I didn’t have an alibi. Whole thing was recorded. I got to see the footage and re-live the experience.
So you learn that the police don’t want truth, justice, or the American way. They want just enough dirt to get a conviction. You also learn just how far down the rabbit hole they go with this.
See, I got visited by the detectives around 2 in the afternoon, Friday. I figure it’s only going to take an hour or two to clear me, so I ride down to the station with them. After taking my shoes, (they thought they might match a print to another robbery) getting my roommate to show them enough of the closet I keep coats in to get a search warrant, and finding out grandma’s senior living place doesn’t keep security footage more than a week… they decide they have enough to arrest me. But they keep me at the station until 9 pm. I’m starved by now. The prison has to make a special effort to give me a lousy leftover bag lunch.
The prison guards were quite pleasant and respectable, to my surprise. But then, they didn’t have to do anything to make the place miserable. There’s a lot of institutionalized horror. You are isolated. Your phone privileges are random. And after that first frantic bout of calls, you’re on the prison collect call system. Cell phones cannot accept them by default. So if your family hasn’t set up for it, and doesn’t have a house phone, you are screwed, and they’re following the letter of the law.
I was thrown into “suicide watch”. You do not actually find anyone in there who is suicidal. You find people who threatened a cop during their arrest. The worst I called anyone was a bastard, specifically over keeping my shoes. This wasn’t why I was in there. I have a large family. Some of my family are cops. One ran the local prison system for a decade. Nobody wanted me to end up in general population where I’d be at risk. So I got the suite outside the security room, with a little window in.
Of course, I was actually kind of happy to get thrown in there. I’d initially been given a solo cell. And no mattress. I’d be issued one after seeing a judge remotely the next morning. A Saturday. I had concrete and a thin blanket to lay upon. And I could hear people who wouldn’t shut up… and they were keeping a retarded man awake down the hall. So when I got moved, I got the camping mattress at last.
I got to meet my cellmates. One was a young guy who’d gone in for a mutual crowbar fight with someone mouthing off on facebook. He’s 18, just become a father, and he’s actually got to try and sort his shit out if he’s going to be there for the little one. He’d never heard of temp agencies, or the other dozen ways to look for work online. With luck, he’ll get into a work-release program and be able to rejoin his family in a couple years.
The other guy was an old pro. He was in for Jerry Springer BS with his family. His parents were trying to keep him away from his kids. And understandably, he’s a heroin addict who steals for a living. High-end shoplifting, abuse of exchanges for store credit, selling gift cards for half value at a pawn shop… his big score was robbing a drug dealer. The kind of score where a guy like him can, with a little smokescreen and paperwork, buy a house.
He had lived in the same apartment complex that I did, when I’d moved in. We both remembered the idiots in a nearby building that had been caught building a meth lab. I’d heard a few things he hadn’t. Like the initial tip-off was when they buried paraphernalia in the yard. We have dumpsters. Extremely anonymous dumpsters. The cops had gotten a warrant, got in, saw the setup… and left it that way for a week. Nobody was home. So they had a patrol car parked out front. A marked patrol car. And these chuckleheads came back from wherever, came home, turned on the lights and got arrested.
I also bonded a bit with the guy over a prior assault matter. He’d had to defend himself from a hothead I grew up with. One of my middle school bullies had stabbed him with a butter knife. He’d been packing a butterfly knife and while they both needed stitches, you could probably have removed an appendix from the hole he opened in that idiot.
I learned all this about these guys because I was in there until Monday. See, because I was on suicide watch, and that’s actually used for people who resist arrest, when I went before the judge, he looked at me, figured I was the worst sort imaginable, and raised the bond to the maximum. $100,000 cash. My folks found that the local banks didn’t carry that kind of currency. We had to wait until Monday to pay this, because banks are closed on Sundays.
And the arresting officers know this. They wanted me to be formally arrested way too late. They wanted me to spend as much time in that miserable hellhole as possible.
I haven’t really gone into great detail about the place, but I’m trying. It’s a room with a toilet/drinking fountain. You get a plastic-coated camping mat, a blanket, and your velcro tunic. Yeah, you don’t rate prison oranges on suicide watch. Your balls are hanging the whole damn time. No pillow. The blanket is too thick to be comfortable. The cell is too cool to sleep without it. You don’t sleep well. The lights are on from 5 am to 10 pm. Then the softer lights are on for the 7 hours of “lights out”. You can’t tell how much time has passed since you last dozed off. You can be told the time when a guard comes around, if you ask. That’s it. That’s your connection to reality. When I got out, I had to set the alarm clock by the bed, and move pillows so I could see it all night.
Lousy food, lousy sleep, nothing at all to do, no clue what time it is… I was in for three nights of torture. Even if I win my court case, I don’t get that weekend back, and I don’t get an apology for being thrown in there.
Afterwards, I’ve spent some time feeling very vulnerable. I was looking forward to weekly gaming with my good friends. Except that the GM’s wife doesn’t want anything to do with a criminal. My roommate doesn’t either, but won’t explain anything. One of the gamers works at a bank, and, well, they would fire him if they heard we associated. Some of that may change after I get my name cleared, but… honestly, I have lost most of those friends already. If they don’t even want to hear my side… or think I’m a different person now… fuck them. I trusted these people. I’ve pet-sit for them. I’ve taken them to doctor’s appointments at the crack of dawn. And when I needed my friends and the assurance of their company… they turned their backs on me.
My grandmother’s retirement community has barred its doors to me, because the police bothered them to try and substantiate my alibi. They asked for a criminal trespass order. The cops screwed up issuing it, but the fact remains that I’d be arrested if I visit my grandma. She’s moving to a place that offers better amenities and costs $1,000 less a month. Like a baws, grandma.
Now, if my friends aren’t willing to have me around, and a business is going to bar me visits to my grandmother… what do you think this has done to my employability? Googling my name will turn up a mug shot.
After all this is over, my sister is offering me a room in Alaska, where I can help babysit my niece and nephew, and take classes at the college. I lost my job, my friends, my sense of security, my trust in the government… And I don’t get that back even if I win the fight for my freedom. I’m in limbo, and suffering loss.
A lot of financial loss too. I had to pay $0.50 a SHEET for the DA’s documentation. They are legally required to provide it to us, and they charge for it. $125 for the digital media, including footage of 1 of the robberies. They stiffed us on the other 3, because there’s no getting someone in trouble for this. We’re going to have to request it again, and wait, and pay. Because that’s the system. Oh, sure, if you win, you can sue to get the legal fees reimbursed. But until then, you have to pay. This is “innocent until proven guilty”. I am ostracized; forced to pay outrageous fees for access to the facts of the case against me; lied to by cops; and I get to carry some nasty emotional scars for the rest of my life.
I, The Accused
0291 days
The world loves an honest man. There is no greater resource to exploit. Politics knows it. The police know it. Car salesmen know it. Trump surely knows it. I get ahead of myself.
There is, in most every judicial process in the world, an inequality. If you have money and power, the police do not bother you. Trump has, through paying lawyers a good deal of money, stolen more wealth from banks than the devaluing of the dollar. Bankruptcy law, among other loopholes, has allowed the man to do more monetary damage to the economy than three hurricanes.
I find myself thinking about this a good deal, as I have been accused of literal bank robbery. This accusation has cost me quite dearly. My roommate moved out, knowing that this was going to make it impossible for me to pay rent. It’s hard enough to get a job in this town, in this economy, without a court case for robbery hanging overhead. My circle of friends has excluded me from our weekly gathering, as the woman of the house we meet at is quite willing to believe the worst of me. I thought she was merely the sort of friend who liked to tease… I didn’t realize she was no friend of mine in adversity.
The retirement community my grandmother lives at has declared that if I visit, it is trespassing, and I shall be arrested. They decided this because the police demanded their records of my visit the afternoon of the theft. I was with my grandmother at the time, and their records, if they kept them longer than a week, would have proven my innocence beyond all doubt. Because it can’t be proven with their cameras, they assume my guilt and don’t want me around. So my grandmother is moving… to a place that offers all the same amenities for $1,000 LESS a month.
My online friends have known me quite a while, and some do believe it could be true. The last time I had this sort of reaction from anyone, I was playing D&D Online on the UK servers, and my nationality was outted by my using the term “dollars”. You could hear a pin drop in that virtual pub. We had been bashing Dubya at the time, and once they were over the shock, realized I was the same intelligent, witty fellow they’d been enjoying having around as recently as a minute ago.
No, this level of distrust goes all the way back to elementary school, when I started getting bulled and distancing myself from others because I could and did read a great many novels, and my peers couldn’t match that.
The facts of my life, and this case, are mostly in the papers, and I can fear little reprisal from sharing what I know. Of course, conventional wisdom demands that one not share the details of a case publicly, as anything can be subpoena’d from anyone. Since all of my information about this case comes from the prosecution, I can’t imagine that they’ll care greatly. I won’t mention where I am now living, just because I am not alone here, and none here need be harassed by either well-wishers or assholes.
I am on bail. I have plead not guilty. I have a lawyer. My parents were fortunate enough to be able to afford to hire one. The facts are:
A man, 6′, heavyweight, white, and wearing a dust mask did rob a bank on my street, about 4 buildings down. I, like a dozen other men of matching description, were interviewed by the police. I was the first to own a jacket of the right color, so far as the notes indicate. I had 4, so odds were better than average that I would own one that was close. My roommate, not grasping the dangers of answering police questions, showed them the closet with my unused jackets, and winter coat. Evidently, my winter coat resembles one worn in robberies this winter. The police obtained a warrant and searched my home, locating, in my wallet, a $10 bill with serial numbers matching one from the recent theft.
This is the basis of the case, as I understand it; a denomination that stays in a change drawer for approximately as long as it takes for the next customer to pay with a $20. If I’d skipped fast food, I’d never have acquired it. I did own a few dust masks. Roomie has a mold allergy, and it seemed wise to give the windows a good cleaning annually. It builds up there.
If you read this carefully, you will find that I have stated what I plead, not whether or not I have committed the crime. And why should I? You have already made up your mind.
Next time: I go into a bit of a rant about what I have learned so far from this process, and what it’s like getting thrown in jail for a weekend.