OK, so I'm just following the latest trend at Microsoft - even though my first post is conveniently dated several days
before this article. Now I'm just left hoping that I'm not the one that "blow[s] it
for everybody else" (as Joshua Allen succintly
put it).
This blog is a bit of a mix. It runs on hardware and software that I purchased with
my own dime and is physically located in my basement in an old armoire (which my wife
insists on calling a "chiffarobe," like some character from "To Kill a Mockinbird").
On the other hand, I'm naturally going to talk about what I spend a lot of my day
doing, and I will occasionally post on company time, like right now. So it's
going to be a delicate balance, and one that I've obviously been thinking about for a long time.
Back in my salad days of uber-geekdom (i.e. in my early teen years before I discovered
the opposite sex), I was a Doctor Who fanatic. As such, I naturally owned a highly
prized Tom Baker-esque wool multicolored scarf, to which I would affix various Doctor Who related buttons. One of the few
that wasn't Doctor Who related (and the whole point of this story) was one that read
"Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters." I think that about sums up my relationship
with my employer: I'm basically a semi-sellout who really enjoys working for
the Man and everything that comes with it, but who nonetheless likes to pretend that
he can also be his own man, with a little "m." Am I fooling myself? Depends on who
you ask, I guess...
[Ed. note: I am extremely frightened to find that a quick search on Google reveals
that an ex-Microsoftie has written a
book called "Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters." Am I really that unoriginal?
As it turns out, maybe. The author tracks down where the phrase came from, and... there's my button!]