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Originally Posted by m1rr0r dash
....of course there's a grey area there, and any "generation" or "category" is a generalization.... but i knew plenty of people older than me - real "slacker" type gen X'ers who were in the process of slowly dropping out of grad school when it occured to them that if they actually took the money their boss at the Kinko's was offering to help him build a computer, they would be able to buy groceries for the group house with a bunch of psychopaths in demi-famous punk bands... next thing you know they're doing the same thing for ibm.... BIG BLUE... they'd never admit it... if you ask them they work for The Atlanta Arts Cafe (web design start-up - No Art, No Coffee - The Arts Cafe) or Macquarium... and they did... before IBM bought them up. now they wear suits and are "vice-presidents" or this that and the other, but what they do is build cutting edge interactive display units - R&D for Big Blue.... picture a touch screen like an ATM but built in to a projection unit... 2d image on the wall - any wall it's pointed at, but you can point at the wall and the projection registers a click... and there's a 3d space in front of the projection - how far away you point from the from wall registers as a different click than pointing directly at the wall....
how different is corporate R&D from welding some crazy contraption made from a car and a toilet and a catapault together in in the backyard of the group home for the amusement of the psychopathic punkers?
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exactly.
i'm taling about the Web 0.5 set... we were using telnet message boards before the internet had been invented... telnet was great for instant messaging also, since cell phones hadn't been invented either.... "which computer lab are you at? i'll meet you over there - we should go out later."
i mean, what does Rob I. do for money? helpdesk for a law firm. everyone i know who's not in school or an architect does that... "oh, i fix the computers and scanners at the Kinko's" ... "oh, i do IT for an architecture firm." .... "oh, i do the digital x-rays at the hospital." ... "oh, i run the server at an independent political library." ... "oh, i manage the database at a co-operatively owned video rental store." ... "oh, i work for IBM." ...my brother manages the video confrencing setup and voice-over-IP at an investment firm.
give a slacker a computer and they're just gonna slack digitally... and occassionally get paid a fuckload of money. short of that, why bother working at all?
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Fair enough, plenty of my friends went that route too. I somehow just missed it by djing '80s hits until I woke up one day as a supervisor for a state Attorney General's Office in the Consumer Protection Division. Which sounds so much more important than those jobs at Intel and Microsoft that pay three times as much.