Simplify my life

The reverberating prophecy of my uncle manifests in the most painful of moments.  I had overheard him describing to his wife the results of a study he had once seen with monkeys.  The details are foggy, sadly, but the conclusion always makes my gut hollow out.  "...and the abused monkey clung to metal, preferring it over socializing."

I sit here now, alone, in front of my audio electronics and my computer hardware as if they were technological spoils of war.  I am surrounded by a vault full of gadgets whose only purpose is to "simplify" my life.  The only technology that I can think of that will truly help me simplify my life in the face of turf warring higher-ups creates loud percussive blasts and leaves damning DNA evidence everywhere.

Oh, but what a wonderful marketing gimmick it is!  Please, sir, make my life simple, as it was too complex before your passing!  Give me that new toy so I can be a cut above the rest.  Drown me in these fancy contraptions to simplify my life so much that I won't even need to be around to live it.

You can't simplify a life with a tool.  All that approach does is bind the worth of the person to the tool they rely on.  There will never be a social movement of media-approved altruism designed to make distinctions between the technician and the technology.  After all, we are coders.  We aren't people who code.  The difference is insignificant to the layman (or are they people who lay?) and most project managers.

How many dreams by other people have I helped bring into the world?  I've gotten so used to it that turf wars follow me in my wake just so I can preemptively help manifest dreams people aren't even having yet.

Manager: Oh, we need A, B, and C...
Me: ...which leads to D, E, and F, which negate B and C.
Manager: How dare you tell me how to do my job!

Project Manager Cat has overseen
over 7,000 New Media innovations.

Occasionally, a "Me: Drink shots of men." will find its way at the tail of that conversation.  This depends on how mythically incompetent the manager is.  In the end, even those whose managerial styles are nothing more than a glorified chain-letter relay are all saying the same thing: "Make my life simple."

Life cannot be made simple.  There is no single quantum life particle that acts as the essence of the Universe.  Life is possible through a collaborative effort of biological systems.  Some systems are codependent while others have a healthy BSDM relationship.  Some are democratic in resource sharing while others are anarchic.   It is a gradient splatter of complex technique.  To simplify that means to remove flexibility.  It means to choose the now over the later.  When you are on your knees, begging for simplicity, you aren't trying to be shielded from the unknown.  You are asking for permission to be willfully blind to other variables.

No, spastic Project Manager, I cannot make your life simple.  For every one variable I automate, I will create a higher-order Black Swan that no one is qualified to handle.  Furthermore, your budget does not scale to address those Black Swans, which means all available staff must work overtime to keep the infrastructure that allows the initial automation preserved.  Therefore, this reactionary attempt at automation will be rendered moot by its own momentum and, thusly, does not qualify as automation.  You have created more difficult complexity during the pursuit of short-sighted simplicity.

You asked for A, B, and C, but that causes D, E, and F, which render B and C useless.  Let me guess, you're going to wage a turf war tantrum now.  How.... automated.  They don't want architects.  They don't want systems thinkers.  They don't want competition.  The only thing that project managers want are fear-powered sycophants who are nothing more than elaborate macros that cut-and-paste code found from Google searches.  I gotta stop working for Old Media companies.  Their sloppy transition to New Media is so fucking petulant it comes with its own nap time.