Ultramarines

Eh oui, je suis un fan de Warhammer 40,000. Faute de temps, j'y consacre peu de mon attention depuis environ un an et Il me tarde à dépoussiérer à nouveau ma large collection de figurines. Mais je me suis remis récemment à relire le 'fluff', qui a toujours été plus intéressant pour moi que le jeu proprement dit. C'est un univers très complet et engageant pour qui s'intéresse à la science fiction (à noter que des guerriers-moines surhommes de 8 pied génétiquement modifiés et ultraviolents fait appel à l'instinct puéril de chacun de nous qui est facilement impressionné par tout ce qui a plus de biceps, de fusils et d'explosions qu'un film de Schwarzeneger boosté aux stéroïdes).

J'ai reçu (finalement) et écouté Ultramarines. Ce film est la première production autorisée et directement financée par Games Workshop. Après quelques problèmes avec des créateurs indépendants, il semblerait que GW ait finalement décidé de passer à l'action et de faire faire par une jeune équipe son film d'animation portant sur le chapitre le plus omniprésent du 41e millénaire (et de toute la franchise): les fameux Schtroumpfs.

Dan Abnett, auteur de nombre de romans, nouvelles et bandes dessinées de la franchise, est aux commandes du script. Son expérience incroyable fait de lui le conteur désigné pour cette première excursion dans le monde de l'animation 3D.

Pour les fans, le film parcourt du terrain connu. Rien de nouveau. Le récit de Ultima Squad est bien étoffé, plutôt crédible (en omettant quelques détails louches comme des recrues toutes fraiches qui rejoignent la prestigieuse 2e Compagnie au lieu de gravir les échelons des compagnies de réserve (6e et 7e), et ceci surtout dans un chapitre aussi régimenté que les smurfs = wtf lolwut = nerdrage), mais surtout divertissant avec des revirements de situation très Abnett, très satisfaisants, de quoi mettre un sourire sur les lèvres de ceux qui comme moi connaissent déjà la chanson. Les personnages sont puissants et détaillés, également, avec des personnalités bien définies. J'aimerais les revoir en action.

Dialogue sérieux. Voice-acting engagé, mais traitement sonore des voix un peu... malapproprié? Des cordes vocales d'Astartes, ça devrait sonner plus grave que ça en tout temps, peu importe l'âge. Une simple passe d'égalisation et d'ajustement du ton (pitch-shifting, pour les intimes) pourrait règler ce problème sans salir la signature sonore de chaque voix humaine.

Si le détail graphique est joli, le niveau d'animation des personnages est un peu figé et robotique (sauf la capture des visages, qui selon moi est très bien faite). L'équipe d'animation 3D québécoise (Hey, Pop6, go guys!) avait du pain sur la planche pour rendre un produit fini crédible. La prochaine itération, si prochaine il y a, sera encore meilleure, j'espère. Aussi: n'ayons pas peur d'augmenter la taille des épaulettes et d'en arrondir la forme ;)

Le film a une saveur très "jeu vidéo" (tout le long, je ne faisais que penser à Dawn of War) alors je me demande quel était le besoin de recréer à nouveau des modèles 3D alors que THX/Relic avait au préalable très bien fait le travail dans ses jeux de la récente décénie.

Opinion tranché: Un produit final livré un peu vite, donc imparfait, mais grandement satisfaisant, surtout s'il crée un précédent et de l'intérêt pour des productions semblables à l'avenir. Est-ce que ça pardonne le rejet du film allemand Damnatus? Pas encore. Pas encore...

Awesome people

I can never get over how the office I work in is filled with awesome people with very diverse skillsets...

We have graphic designers, programmers, sound guys (that's me, hehe, but I'm not alone!), historians, linguists, bad film experts, good film experts, AutoCAD-proficient designers, comedians, exotic culture scholars, fencers, musicians, martial artists, photographers, people with MBAs, people with other diplomas, people with quirks, people with hobbies and what have you... And I'm hardly even mentionning those that have left us in the past year. Geeks all around.

And our office tasks have nothing or nearly nothing to do with these specialisations.

What do we have in common?

We're smart, ressourceful people who display broad communication skills, analytical thinking and a desire for efficient collaboration. We may not be working in our chosen fields, but we're living with the times.

Pretty impressive for a bunch of desk-clerks, huh?

Regardless of what I think of my job or salary, I love interacting with these people. You can have any kind of conversation, from light banter to deep philosophical discussion and even highly technical detail. I'm fucking proud to be here.

When they say that variety is the spice of life, they mean it. Total homogeneity creates the most dull working environments. I've worked in places where you were limited to 2 or 3 topics of conversation, and the slightest mention of anything else was met with raised eyebrows, passive disinterest and occasional ridicule. Those were the places where I have worked the least amount of time: the shortest stint of which was initially supposed to be my dream job!

But I obviously speak for myself. The aforementionned diversity and exchange is not always what people look for in a workplace. Some may enjoy near-anonymity: punch-in, punch-out, no chitchat, no social interaction, no questions asked, thank you. And their coworkers expect the same from them. The idea being that you should be able to share the same general mindset and work ethic as your colleagues.

You want to be left alone? Don't seek a supersocial workplace. Are you a social animal looking for interesting conversations between tasks? Seek a place without cubicles and populated by some friendly, casual people.

It goes to show that -who- you work with is more important than the actual work you do.

On progression, variety and "seed genres"

"You spin me right 'round"

Music changes. A lot. Right under our very noses. It morphs and spawns and grows and multiplies. As I say often: music is a meme, and a particularly virulent one, at that.

I personnally love this fact, but it seems a lot of people resent it when their favourite artists "change" their sound. Musicians can come under fire from their fanbase for "selling out", "branching out", "going this or that way". But the only truth in such affairs is that musicians are supposed to be creative individuals. As far as I am concerned, if you refuse to accept this kind of natural progression, you might just be into this band or artist for the wrong reasons.

The proverbial "When it changed" is not a finality, it is a stepping stone.

Allow me to editorialize: If your comfort zone is too small to encompass the full spectrum of available music, then you're getting less bang for your buck. I'd encourage anyone to ask around their entourage and try to find out why they like the music they like. Where's the hook, why bother, why is it interesting? It's one of the best ways to connect with new music without feeling lost or disconnected.

I'm not here to sermon anyone into thinking the way I do. It's just an honest proposition. Listen to more and you'll learn to like things you'd never thought you'd appreciate. Discovering new music is a very stimulating form of mental gymnastics.

Musicians strive to create that special something that will sound fresh, new, and unique enough to be their popular identifier once broadcasted. It's nothing new, and it's also what record labels have been actively seeking for decades. "Who's going to be the next [insert previous groundbreaking artist here]?"

New sound

The number one gateway to establishing a new sound is new technology. Would rock'n'roll have evolved from its folk and jazz roots without the advent of the electric guitar and accessible amplification systems? Would Emerson Lake and Palmer have sounded the same without their iconic wall-of-Moog modular synth station? Would we have witnessed the birth of Acid House without the Roland TB-303's glurpy-durp sound? Would a rocker like Billy Idol have been capable of creating a concept album like Cyberpunk without access to the early ProTools systems? No. No, and no again.

Point in case: Consider the waves upon waves of music spawned at the advent of MIDI back in the 80s. Or even closer yet, the recent slew of songs with Antares Autotune-enhanced vocals as their point of focus.

I could go on and on but you get the idea: New means -> new experimentation -> new material -> new genres.

Another very popular method is creating a hybrid. Crossover carries the near-guarantee that you will explore new grounds with your music, bridging the gap between the old and the new. If you like something but find it could do more, mix it up and see the result. A little from collumn A, a little from collumn B.

And sometimes, a fluke is simply a fluke. A few years ago I was composing an electronic track and near the end, I added what you could nowadays call a slower, 2-step/dubstep beat, completely unaware of what it was. I have a tendency to 'layer things up', particularly with my beats, and it was just a way to create a heavy emphasis on the 1st and 3rd beats of the bar (in this case a low, booming kick and a 'chucky' 80's-style reverbed-up snare). It's not called two-step, buuuuut.... "a rose by any other name", right? I didn't know this beat by name (except maybe uh... "slow heavy support half-time backbeat"), but I was tapping into the pool of composition possibilities regardless of its label. In essence: a rythmn is a rythmn is rythmn.

*
* *

Okay, so I've poured the first part of my brain mélange into the sink. Now onto the main topic:

"Versions 1.0 and 2.0"

Believe it or not, a lot of well-known music we hear today stems from another lesser-known genre from which its component elements are derived: essentially, a 'prototype' of itself. Just one step behind in the musical family tree, there is always a not-quite-so-famous-anymore bigger brother who taught lil' bro the ropes. Generally, the older of the two genres will have waned in popularity a bit, leaving the newer to expand where it tapered off.

The examples come in copious amounts: 50's Rock'n'Roll has Swing... Heavy Metal has Psychadelic Rock... Hip Hop has Funk/Soul... Trance has Acid House... Drum'n'Bass has Oldschool Jungle... House has Disco... Dubstep has 2step Garage... Grunge has Punk and New Wave... Nu-Metal has Neothrash... Reggae has early Ska...

And so on and so on.

Often enough, the 'seed genre' (as I've come to think of it) will declines for the duration of its offshoot's rise in popularity. Then as the new subgenre matures and begins to hit its own peak, the parent genre starts to make a comeback. It's an age-old play on offer-and-demand: What we've had for too long, we discard. What we no longer have, we request. Basically a huge sine wave.

I'd venture as far as to compare the passage of a new subgenre of music into its own genre to the establishment of a colony. People A send a few representatives of their nation off to a new land, they gain insight from their newfound surroundings and necessary isolation, and begin to transform into a new culture: People B... All this within a few generations. Easy parralel to trace, really.

Over the decades, crossover, remix, dubbing and mashup have all helped spawn countless musical styles by revisiting known tropes and refreshing them through varying adaptations. This is appropriate because the same way a remix of a song is a new version of it, a subgenre is often a 'remix' of its parent genre.

(For those wondering: a 'cover' is a song played anew through different instruments while a 'remix' or 'dub' uses the original song material and plays with its constituent parts)

This information age means ideas travel fast and there are no secrets. It's only a matter of time before someone discovers your stuff, likes it, and decides to take it in a whole other direction, lengthening the lifespan of your idea and creating a new plateau for other offshoots to develop. It's a self-perpetuating cycle.

You will notice a lot of "back to basics" movements spawning here and there, focusing on different past genres, generally in the form of an hommage to the long lost pioneers of what has become "in" today: the same way old clothing styles come back in fashions 20-30 years later.

Music parenting: Adopt a beat today and raise them in your image. ;)

Cheers, Avian out.

These dubs are made for steppin'

And like a steppin razor don't you touch their sides: they're dangerous. Dangerous.

It's been a while eh?

Well, the barely-suffused office angst has faded and I'm here to talk about something quite pleasant, for a change of pace.

Over the past 10 years or so I’ve become progressively enthralled with all forms of electronic music. The hard adolescent edge of my punk and metal years having dulled a bit, I turned to other styles for the sake of variety and freshness. And quite a journey it’s been: From the abrasive textures of industrial/noise, the hopeful melancholy of EBM, to the simple, organic visceral joy of house and expressive, uplifting trance, tribal-yet-robotic Detroit techno, groovy, empowering hip hop and landing most recently upon my shores with the infectious energy of breakbeat and its many many many descendants.

Recently I’ve been slowly but surely discovering the expanding world of dubstep.

Let me say I’ve been bitten by the bug. Hard. My blood pulses to the 2step beat of a deep drum and tingles with the scattered triplety-syncopated high-hats and tiny shuffled percussion-cells of the dubstep beast-thing. It’s a wonderful feeling. I want more of this substance.

And…

I’m a sucker for wobbly bass. (Whoop-whoop-wob-wob-wob-bwa-bwa-bwa but I digress) Okay, so it’s a bit overused, it still sounds killer if it’s well done. LFOs need some love too.

Nowadays, dubstep is actually an umbrella term covering a very diverse range of styles. The genre is more than old enough for its participants to branch out and create some wildly innovative tracks while remaining in the same broad category. For a genre that originated with the practice of producing weird b-sides/remix/redubs of more successful garage and drum&bass tracks, it’s surely come a long way since.

I already have a bunch of favourites.

Distance bears its name well. It’s very ambient, very cool. The music has that dark, urban, jazzy kind of Blade Runner feel that just won’t let go until you actually begin to feel the acid rain falling on your head as the neon signs glow and you’re looking for Rachel. It’s great. It’s profound. It tugs at the heartstrings.

Kode9 and the SpaceApe make one hell of a duo. I remember seeing them live at the Mutek festival in Montréal one year (I was volunteering for them at the end of my sound studies) and didn’t even know what they did was dubstep. The announcers simply referred to their act as ‘spoken word’… sheesh. Hearing them on album now is a much different animal than it was back then in a live setting, but the mood is very poignant still. The music is dope and the lyrics are playfully deep.

Burial’s approach has me completely amazed. Unlike just about everyone else in the electronic music world, he works (nearly) entirely in Soundforge, which means no generic synth programming and without a sequencer. It’s all collaged together in some sort of weird witch's brew that doesn’t cease to surprise the listener. As a result, the music is beautiful, haunted, minimal but by no means reduced. The mix is straight, and the appearance of a lack of polish only serves to enhance the sounds themselves. The ‘no sequencer’ thing is very refreshing. I imagine this guy would have a legion mashup artists lining up at his door for tips & tricks if only this single fact were more advertised.

Pendulum, a personal drum & bass classic, has begun its first forays into the shadowy world of dubstep. So far so good. While the examples available are never exactly what I would call ‘full-on dubstep’, the elements they mesh into their music are recognizable and add a new interesting. dimension to some of the best tracks on their latest offering, Immersion. Since crossover is the mainstay appeal of Pendulum’s music, I say these new dubstep-inspired ideas are on par for the course.

***

Dubstep is usually played in the 136-142-bpm range, though as is often the case, this rule is easily broken. Not too long ago, I was reading about the emergence of the Funky scene in London (at least that’s what it’s called now, you know how that goes) which is a bit of an evolution on the whole thing, but dropping things down to a smooth ~130-bpm and incorporating latin beats. It sounds attractive and I definitely have to check that out.

Electronic music is very often a very ‘live your music’ experience, enjoying spur-of-the-moment developments and necessitating a local scene to flourish (think Detroit techno, Goa Trance or UK Garage as easy-to-grok examples). I am not much of a club-goer, and therefore can rarely be considered an early adopter of any specific genre. When interesting musical news reach me, the wave is usually passed and the particular scenes of interest have moved on to new sonic adventures. Not that I’m phased by all that, it just means my patience is rewarded with each listen, and there’s always something else coming up.

In this sense, music is a meme which spawns divers offspring of divers colours. It just keeps growing and spreading. I love it.

Mountains out of molehills

As is customary with any other previous company I’ve ever worked for, this current job never ceases to find new ways to irritate me and contradict my sense of ethics. After all, that’s the nature of the corporate world: it’s made of FAIL... convoluted pathways crisscrossing wildly across innumerable levels, stairwells and obnoxiously slow elevators of FAIL.

The corporate world is a world of backstabbing, finger-pointing and blame-transferring. It’s a disgusting cess-pool of hypocrisy, me-first, not-in-my-backyard, gotta-look-good that I can’t in any shape or form dissociate from its sister world of politics. Some people think these two universes are far apart, but honestly, I see no difference here. This machine feeds on bullshit. That machine feeds on bullshit. They were born and raised from the same mother: Greed.

Fail... Fail... FAIL, motherfuckers.

Idiotic clients are nothing new. We deal with those all the time. In a single week, we have to put up with a great deal or irate small-fry fools. We get union representatives trying to get their word out about how they’re pissed off against something or any other hypocritical shit-talking, we get pushy born-again-christians with silly regressive agendas to push, no money to do it and no idea of what the newswire is, we get penniless individuals-with-a-cause who complain about wire distribution prices when we inform them, and hell, we even get douchebag record producers with zero business etiquette, bad phone manners and a horrible sense of nitpicking over useless shit (I’m looking at you, Mr Mysterio, you shameful, shameful grease stain on the music industry’s apron, you) to name a few.

Those are just examples of what we can get. And hell, we’re not even the Sales Department, so imagine the kind of retards and fuck-ups that go knocking on their door.

One of my co-workers got into serious trouble recently because of a client. She’s one of the really efficient ones with an incredibly clean record. Compared to her, I’m the king of screwup-topia. Yet one slight little mistake from her snowballed and came back to bite us all in the ass, not that it should have, and not that it’s entirely her fault. I’ll explain:

To put things into perspective, my employer is a wire company that receives news releases from clients, which formats them in an ugly 10pt Courrier New font (which incidentally does not allow for bold italics and underlined text… any formatting at all, in fact) and then redistributes them to various specialized networks worldwide so the news media can read’em’n’weep and/or ignore them (which I could never fault them for doing, because this shit induces massive snore-dom). In other words, we will ruin your well-prepared, well-presented Word documents... for a price.

One of our big things is quarterly financial earnings distribution (news directly from the Kingdom of Boredom) which gets sent to a bunch of analysts who actually know what to do with the data. We have some clients that almost only use our services for financial distributions. Some can be high-profile but most can be high-maintenance.

We do boring-ass work, because we can’t even profess to remotely enjoy the contents of the documents we send. It’s very technical, though (lots of distribution details to keep track of, all of which are absolutely necessary) and we have to be very alert not to let anything past our scrutiny. But we’re also human. We like to cut corners because our favourite shortcuts make us efficient in our work and they give us a better turnaround time, which everybody loves to boast about (we have a really fast turnaround, thanks for asking). But some of these “non-regulation” techniques can manifest as an increased possibility of making mistakes. I guess that’s how it goes when you’re not 100% by-the-book. (and by-the-book usually means wasting time and effort on things that could be done faster and with less effort... fuck...)

Client X send us his boring overly-long financial document. My colleague formats it. She makes a small copy-paste mistake in a column header that mixes up the years 2009 and 2010. It’s a tiny thing so it goes completely unnoticed as we proof-read the bore-fest, unnoticed again as the client proof-reads the approval copy he receives and again as we do a final check-up before distribution. At this point Client X doesn’t know a thing. We don’t know a thing. If we did, we could fix it in a jiffy and no one would care, especially not the media who receive it. This sort of thing can happen and we have procedures in place designed to help smooth it over while distributing the correct information. We do have safety nets, you know. That’s why we’re #1 in the country.

They approve the copy. We distribute. Time passes.

Turns out some analyst somewhere cared hard enough to notice, thought it made the data confusing, decided to make a fuss and gave a call to Client X. Client goes in a panic and calls us, BUT…

Instead of behaving like a normal person and calling the actual Montréal team that worked on his press release and who can easily fix the mistake... he acts like a chimpanzee on crack cocaine and calls our CEO…

What the fuck?

Our CEO?

Our distant, uncaring shrew of a leader, whose job description consists of something along the lines of "look good, stall all development on the software tools that bring the bread and butter, smile for the cameras, rake in the prestige cash and cut more jobs as we drive this skeleton-staffed operation into bankruptcy."?

That CEO?? Mrs "Embrace Change"?

Listen buddy... She’s hundreds of miles away from where the actual work was done, is totally in the dark as to the specifics of our job (I’ll bet my ass she’s never even looked at any of the software we use) and has zero knowledge of the daily technical challenges her casually-dressed workforce can face in the office. Opening Excel must feel like hardcore hacking to her... How can she be equipped to handle that kind of case? Short answer: she cannot.

When something goes wrong with your news release, you contact us directly. You know, the people that sent it out and know how this stuff works? If it was a big fuckup, we escalate to our team leads, if it was a big-ger fuckup, they escalate to sales and regional management for some quick damage control, but it rarely gets there. We usually fix things rapidly enough before any foreseeable damage can even occur.

But instead of doing things the right way, Client X pulls a total Wilson and does everything backasswards. He goes to complain to our head-honcho, who shits down on a few heads until it trickles down to us. By that time, the thing has gained so much momentum it’s completely bewildering…

And thus begins the witchhunt.

So now we’re in "crisis management mode", our team leads are taken away from the news centre, having to sit through meetings instead of being with us. We get warnings against screwing-up in case it happens, because you know, this shit must be contagious, oh man oh man… Everybody’s in a riot over sweet fucking nothing and the working atmosphere (required to actually, you know... not make more mistakes due to unwanted stress?) is completely shattered. It’s an open-heart surgery without anesthetic.

My colleague gets the actual "you fucked up" talk from her own team-lead. Then the same spiel from the superior right above… and then she gets an email going through the same points over again in case she forgot... Motherfucker! I can empathize because I’ve been there myself (remember I’m already Mr King Screwup here.)

And then we hear that our main competitor is really putting some pressure on Client X to negociate their new wire distribution contract with them instead. Fucking hell…

So the bottom line is: What could have easily been fixed and kept hush-hush got blown out of proportion by a panicked middle-management-type who got mad with power… classless, inconsiderate motherfucker that he is. Hey big-shot! Want to actually feel important? Start acting with some composed professionalism for a change.

Talk about mishandling information… How serious was the mistake. Not very, all things considered. A little date confusion never killed anyone. That’s right: Did anyone die? No? No one died? Ohhhh... Okay, well then I guess you’re just a total asshole then.

Mountains out of molehills, I swear…

. . .

Which brings me back to an observation I once made about humanity.

When one member of a group screws up, we have a bad habit of responding by:

* First, isolating that person and totally preventing him/her from redeeming his/herself

* Second, making everybody else in the group pay for the individual’s mistake, just so they can hate him/her better

Somehow it’s the accepted standard….
But where is the logic in that? No one is treated fairly and everybody ends up frustrated.

"Meh"

It's funny how I only blog when I'm really enthusiastic (or really angry) about a given topic.

Which makes me wonder how many steady writers actually feel like writing ALL THE TIME, or if they develop a "get-it-done" mentality to get over the creeping feeling of apathy. Don't they have those same in-betwen moments? Those dry-spells? The dreaded 'white page' syndrome?

I see steady writers blogging about everything and nothing, even a short burst of meaningless ideas or just sharing some links... but always on time. How do you develop that kind of momentum?

What about the need to have something worthwhile to write about. Y'know like... ummm... "not having anything to write about", which is still something to write about.

Or am I just lazy? Might be that too ;)

Catch you when I'm wordier.

"Case of the Mondays" Monday Bitchfest Special

My work ethos is under siege...

It's been a while since I could say I was in trouble with my boss. In fact, I can't exactly recall ever being in 'trouble'. In all previous instances, any 'trouble' was mainly various flavours of 'gentlemanly disagreements', so to speak. But recently things got a little more serious. Serious enough that they had to mention less-than-offhand the thinly-veiled threat of 'disciplinary measures'. In geekier terms: the dreaded banhammer.

I'm guessing the main reason for this is that I'm too casual about everything.

My mindset when I punch in is mainly “Do your work. Don’t show up late. Be nice to colleagues. Endeavour to not daydream too much.” But the Creed also includes some other commandments: “Don’t ever let work get between you and a friend. Don’t bring work home. Don’t let work get in the way of work. Don’t take criticism too personally”.

Just to be clear: this is not my career. There are two reasons that keep me in this job: money and my teammates. I like my salary and schedule well enough (fits the lifestyle) and most of my co-workers are friends I already knew before getting here. This is where my loyalties begin and end in regard to this line of work.

Which means I have no true commitment to the company. Additionally, I always had trouble pushing a product or service I wouldn't use myself, so we're off on a strange footing. The fact that I'm not at all passionate about this work also translates in being detached from it, which means inevitably my mind will wander during my shift. I just can't get 'involved' in the work the same way I would in a more creative job (which is actually a euphemism for ‘interesting but unstable, uncertain, underpaying and resolutely untenable job’).

Errors are common occurrence in an office environment. Most of them are recorded and fixed as soon as they are found out. Where I work, this process is appropriately dubbed 'quality control' and is an essential part of the company's business model. Precision is the main selling point, the care of which falls to we, the operators', hands. Beyond that, there can be the occasional slip up that we don't have time to fix before the clients notice and come calling. That's when the company's reputation suffers.

I'm more than okay with all this. In fact, I support it. When we discover a problem, we fix it instead of denying it. It's great. I'm proud of working for a company that doesn't play ostrich with its own flaws.

I'm a really fast worker. I'm talking Speedy Gonzalez fast here. I clear out more work orders in a week than anyone else in the office. But that also means they can get... well... botched in the process… Sometimes…. Okay. more than 'sometimes', but less than 'often'. The exact figure stands between 8% and 9% errors out of hundreds of work orders per month. Most of these mistakes are corrected before the documents even go live.

I already have my team-lead to go over those with me when they happen. But when work-related issues are deemed important enough to be escalated to a higher level of management, it blows everything out of proportion.

And I don’t mind being told I made a mistake. That’s how you learn. What I have trouble absorbing is the “Hah! Gotcha!” overtones that come out of people’s mouths sometimes. It’s insulting, and it carries the subtle message that they’ll never tire of reminding you about that ‘one time’.

An honest mistake is an honest mistake.

Even a downright stupid one (in my case essentially a copy-paste mistake. I was so hell-bent on obtaining a certain information for the dossier I was working on that I completely forgot to include this other important information, which led to the client noticing said missing information. Emphasis on the client noticing part, because otherwise no one would have made a big deal of it. I would have simply been asked to correct it myself, something I am entirely for - your fuck-up, you fix it).

But corporations are soulless entities. They do not forgive. They do not forget. They do not know empathy. They do not have a sense of humour. They do not know how to deal with employees like me that happen to be human beings first and professionnals second.

But work is serious business.

When you fuck up one task hard enough, all the other trivial things which you thought were perfectly... well... trivial... tend to surface up and bite you in the ass. Meaningless things like forgetting a few minor details here and there, or a harmless and obscure in-joke written by hand in the margins of an old work order. These things, no matter how idiotic and insignificant at the time, have a way of sneaking up on you later on when they suddenly become important. It’s what we get for working in the digital age: not much escapes scrutiny. Stuff that even you forget you did may appear again on someone else’s radar. It’s like the system itself accumulates frustrations and things it can hold against you when you finally push the Wrong Button. Past that particular threshold, be prepared for a shit-storm of little ‘misses’ regardless of your more numerous ‘hits’.

I have no problem ‘fessing up for my mistakes and working to eradicate them. Aiming for the brass ring of “not going to do it again” should be enough of a burden to bear, because this is a performance-heavy job and I need my mental real estate. But being slammed just this once more for the very same issue that was already addressed a week ago sounds like overkill, and only contributes to make me more jaded and depressed about my work. Can’t I just concentrate on not screwing up again instead? I’d love to be able to concentrate, but someone’s trying to guilt-trip me and sadly, it’s kind of working…

Now the hard part.

This is really rough to bring up because I know it will make me sound like a chauvinistic motherfucker (which, you guessed right, I am obviously NOT and do not wish to be associated with). I can just imagine the snipers taking aim, but I have to say my piece.

From my experience (read: from my experience), women in a position of authority have a hard time staying emotionally neutral about it. If you make a work-related mistake, instead of getting an "Uh, okay, so what happened and how can we fix it?", the message they send often is "what the fuck is wrong with you?". If you’re male, the fact that they respond with their emotions (no matter how they try to mask it professionally - which actually shows their level of dedication) will still make it sound to you like a direct attack on your person. I try to not let it show too much, but I'm a deeply-emotional person (they say still waters run deep) and that makes me vulnerable to this kind of assault. That and a propensity for doing everything by-the-book which, sadly, really gets on my nerves (I’ve always postulated that if you always refer to procedure, it only means you can’t think on your feet, but that’s for another debate, and this trait might only contribute to widen the gap between my brand of thinking and the corporate world’s brand of thinking).

My direct superior, (let’s call her A.) is actually very good at suppressing this phenomenon. She's very fair with any and all of her colleagues, and always looking to improve the workflow without sacrificing anyone's sanity. I am insanely glad for that fact. A’s own superior, C., however, is more of a panic-prone, gotta-look-good, middle-management type. Preserving the sacro-sanct Reputation means everything in her job, and I can understand her position well: when nearly the only feedback you get from the office is bad news, it must be kind of nerve-wracking. Also, having to report said bad news upstairs must feel like shoveling shit. So okay, I get it. My little mistake snowballed and made you work twice over. No need to rub my nose in it out of spite. All I should be concerned with is the details of my mistake and how to ensure it doesn’t happen again. And when I’ve gone over that with my direct superior, I sure as fuck don’t need a second lecture from someone else who just got the memo.

I just don’t get how big deals can be made out of little nothings. The moral of the story is probably: never fuck up, no matter how slightly. Also, become a robot. Robots can’t be blamed for their behavior, only their programmers. They also have this cool dance that they do.