Author: niv

when i first started at my current job, a lot of the code i was working on was written by a company in india that we outsourced work to. it was awful, awful code. like, incredible, in a way, because they did things that were so stupid i didn’t even know they were possible. it’s slow, it’s buggy, it’s prone to failure, and that’s why the first few months were so freaking awful for me – every weekend was fixing this shitty code, this vavni (that was the company name) code that blew up at the slightest input that these indian asshats didn’t consider.

so their american contacts were actually in the office with us, which is why we started using them in the first place. and beyond the fact that their indian cohorts wrote terrible, terrible code, we knew them for their food – awful combinations of indian food that made the common hallway smell like a third-world country. we knew they all bought shitty tiffin lunches from cheap places near their homes because they were all single men who didn’t know how to cook like mom and now were at the mercy of some indian lady in a strip mall somewhere, but that didn’t change the fact that they stunk up the office and we hated it.

(a tiffin lunch is basically a complete indian meal – 4 dishes, roti, etc, in a metal tiffin container that is really f’n cheap. basically old indian women make them after they don’t have kids to feed in the house anymore but still want to make food as if they do, and guys who just moved from india and don’t have women to cook for them consume this stuff in droves. my parents have asked me to get tiffin meals a few times, but given all this, i have passed. it’s not that food isn’t good, though i’m sure it wouldn’t meet my standard of “did my mom make it?”, but instead it just seems too sad.)

they moved out a few months back. their sticker is off the door. we stopped working with them. their name is the equivalent of shit.

which is why, in the last 2 weeks, when the toilets became unusable, their name came up time and again. “someone vavni code’d the toilets”

which means they (in one example) apparently crouched above the toilet seat, put no cover on the seat (there are plenty of covers in these stalls) and sprayed diarrhea all over the seat, and then didn’t flush, or at least clogged the toilet so bad that it wouldn’t flush.

there are two sit down toilets and 2 urinals in the men’s room. they have killed the plumbing, whoever ‘they’ are, to the sit down toilets, and now the entire hallway, instead of smelling like a tiffin lunch, smells like shit, to the point where we miss the tiffin lunches.

i share this story not to make you all think of this disgusting situation in my office, but to state once, clearly, in the open, that no, it is not ok to do this to communal toilets, and if you have ever done anything like this to a communal toilet, the reason better not have been less than a medical emergency.

yesterday i bought new brown shoes. my new go-to, in between black shoes with a suit and sneakers with everything else. completely bland and un-newsworthy, except for the fact that these are the first new brown shoes i’ve bought in over 11 years.

these shoes replace the brown shoes i bought when i started 10th grade in cleveland.

i remember going to the mall with my dad to get the shoes these are replacing. i remember talking to the salesman who i had seen around before and i had seen help my dad before. i remember the way my dad looked at me when i shoved the shoes on without pulling out the back properly. i remember the way he sheepishly told the salesman “, kids” (that comma is no typo, friend). i remember the excitement of wearing brown shoes and starting private school and living in a new city where i knew no one. wait, not excitement, dread. terrifying dread.

and here we are, just over 11 years later, and i’m over a year into california and i work for the goddamn death star and i know only a few more people than i knew 11 years ago but i am going to marry one of them. and the year starts with a 2.

happy new year.