Category: It Happened to Me

I just realized that yesterday was the six-month anniversary of The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century. I’d like to thank all of you for your readership and kind words; I hope you’ve had as much fun reading it as I have writing it (and, where applicable, living it). I’d also like to thank all of you who recommended this blog, especially Will McLean for telling everyone he knows in Toronto — which makes up most of the city — and Cory Doctorow, whose influence and reach is rivalled only by that of Chancellor Palpatine.

This blog owes its existence to twerpish management at the company for which I used to work. The management had reduced the company to a skeleton crew — I was the only programmer remaining in the Toronto office — and installed new people in charge. The New VP R&D hand-picked a team of corporate cubicle drones to be his new programmers and as their numbers swelled, my role as UI Programmer diminished from oversseing the entire design to working on the “About” box and correcting the most minor of bugs. I was being paid to spend a good chunk of my day twiddling my thumbs. Out of boredom, I hit the Blogger site and created this blog.

2001 was full of big plans scuttled, career disasters and heartbreak; I found myself dumped, re-relocated from San Francsico back to Toronto after a mere four months, working for a company teetering on the verge of collapse, seeing most of my co-workers get laid off and watching the best job I’d ever had get whittled away by a self-serving, self-aggrandizing assholearchy. I wasted an hour and a half each day in a mind-numbing commute. I was put on the programming equivalent of chalkboard eraser-cleaning duty. I had more shouting matches with friends in six months that I had in the previous six years. The girl who’d dumped me moved back in with the postman I’d stolen her away from fair and square, and after September 11th, they got “terror engaged” (Fuck you, Osama, now it’s personal). If there was an upside to all these events, it’s that it gave me the fire to keep writing. While I rarely wrote about how far down to Hell things at gone (and in at least one case, I did it very elliptically), the act of writing, no matter how impersonal the topic, was cathartic.

As the days passed and the archives grew, I took the time to read what I’d written. I read some of the entries and think “well, that was an off day”, while I’d read others and swear that the writing was too good to have come from me. Good or bad, the act of reading my own writing gave me a chance to step back and look at myself from a more detached perspective. It became clear to me just how bad my current situation was; it should’ve been obvious, but I was too busy keeping my head down and trying to pay the rent. I would’ve figured it out eventually, but thanks to this blog, I did it that much sooner.

Maybe it’s one of those Heisenbergian “the presence of an observer at an event changes the event” kind of things, or maybe it’s just coincidence, but soon after I started writing the blog (and reading it, as it gained more entries), things changed for the better. Getting fired is normally a very unhappy event, but in my case, it felt as if I’d been paroled. It certainly looks that way, judging from the differences in my writing before and after I got sacked. The really fun stuff in The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century — the true adventures — started happening after that day. My examined life felt more and more worthy of living, starting with a Saturday night and expanding into new musical collaborations, travelling to San Francsico to experience CodeCon, the Lusty Lady and the Stagette, making a wealth of new friends, and various other adventures. While I was pulling down a much larger paycheque six months ago than I am now, I much prefer my present condition and the future hasn’t looked this bright in quite some time.

As I type this entry into my computer, I am also packing for another trip down to the Bay Area for another conference that I’m looking forward to. I’m in the process of starting my own consultancy, and the clients are coming in with little effort on my part. There’s one client in particular that’s working on a project that’s a lot of fun, and the story of how I landed that client — I’ve only told that story in a very cryptic way, but let’s just say there was a girl and an accordion involved — is quite funny. I’m back in a great city, well-established as a Queen Street fixture, reunited with old friends and making a lot of new ones.

I’m exactly where I want to be, and part of the credit has to go to this blog.

Yesterday, I decided to drop by a career expo at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. With the expo a short walk south of my house and with sponsors like by the Globe and Mail and workopolis, it seemed like a good idea to attend.

There was the usual maze of registration booths at the ground floor of the Centre, but it turned out to be for a conference for estheticians and people who work at spas. The career fair, a sign pointed out, was in a single conference room in the basement. The sign also had a noted hastily taped to it that read “No IT firms today”, which left two categories, “Business” and “Engineering”. I could say that curiosity is what kept me interested in taking a look inside, but truth be told, I was more interested in seeing if Laura was still there.

There was a line of about 50 or 60 people leading to a single registration desk. You couldn’t enter the conference room without regsitering first, but I had no interest in putting up with a wait for something I wasn’t really interested in. If this were a conference and I had my accordion, I could do what I’ve done a couple of times: claim to be part of the show and that I was running late. It’s worked at a couple of Linux expos and DefCon.

I pulled my laptop out of my knapsack and walked up to the attendant minding the door. She looked me over. I wasn’t wearing a suit like everyone else at the show, but a vintage work shirt, skater-boy pants and running shoes. I also didn’t have a file folder full of resumes like everyone else.

“Hi. Nortel tech support,” I said, picking a likely company name. “Problem with one of our display computers.”

Please please please don’t ask me for some kind of ID, I thought.

“Can I get in? I’m running late, and if I don’t get that computer up and running, it’ll be bad karma.”
The attendant waved me through with a terribly disinterested look.

I went inside, and there was no Laura, and not much in the way of companies either. In the area for “Engineering” companies, there was a total of five companies. The pickings were evn slimmer for “Business”, where there were only three. I’ve seen livelier booths at a high school science fair. Nortel didn’t even have a booth here.

I decided to look around the “Engineering” section. It was a room full of people in ill-fitting suits carrying portfolios and drafting tubes. Nobody was looking particularly happy. I haven’t seen a room full of people this glum since I sat in the waiting room of a towing company a few years ago.

General Dynamics had the flashiest booth and the highest turnover. Being a weapons manufacturer, their security requirements couldn’t accept anyone who hadn’t been a Canadian citizen for at least five years, which apparently disqualified most of the people in the room, which skewed heavily towards middle eastern and south Asian.

“Damned bin Laden, he is screwing us all out of a job, eh?” said the only guy in the room who didn’t look morose. He must’ve thought I was also applying for work.

“I don’t know about you,” I replied, “but if the career fair’s like this, I’m thinking about opening a hot dog cart.”

A Google search for the word accordion currently puts me on the fifth page of results.

So for now, my Google claim to fame is that I have the Google search for the word accordion currently puts me on the fifth page of results.

A Google search for the mispelled version, accordian, places me on the first page, seventh item down. This would indicate that while my readership is a little low on the spelling skills, their taste is impeccable.

Here’s I photo I’d never seen until I ran a search for pictures from Burning Man 1999 using the non-word accordian:

So for now, my Google claim to fame is that I have the number one entry for stagette.

My friend Anne works for Aerial Communications, the PR firm behind the Toronto dates of Jackie Mason’s latest stand-up comedy show, Prune Danish. She always gets tickets to any show promoted by her company and invited me along to see this one.

Mason comes from the great tradition of the comedians of the Borscht Belt, a vacation spot in the Catskills that became a popular destination for Jews starting in the 1950s. The hotels and resorts in the area hired Jewish entertainers to match their clientele, a lot of whom were stand-up comics. From the Belt came the great comic staples of observational humour (think Jerry Seinfeld and even Cory Doctorow) and aren’t-WASPs-funny jokes (think BET) that we take for granted today.

(I was probably the only Asian in the audience. Most of the audience looked as though they came from North York, which means their only encounters with Filipinos are usually with their housekeepers and nannies. I wondered if they thought I had the night off. “Did you press my shirts and get the kids’ lunches made already?”)

Mason put on a good show, starting with his traditional jabs at audience members in the front row and then going straight for the observational humour. While there’s nothing terribly ground-breaking in his material — the standard items from the news and ethnic jokes (there were moments he really sounded like Krusty the Clown, but then again, Krusty’s probably modeled after him, right down to the bit where he quit being a rabbi to go into comedy and making fun of foreign accents) — he still got a laugh out of the audience, who ages ran the gamut from university students to seniors.

I really liked the bit where he said that “only Gentiles think they have to sit in the airplane seat assigned to them”; it’s funny because it’s true.