Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

Appointment in Samarra

I have a coworker who doesn’t like the drinking water coming out of a taps on campus. Not even the bottle filling stations where there’s a filter. His explanation is that he ultimately cannot trust the water that are in the (he supposes) old pipes. What does he do to sustain life? The coworker buys bottled water from the campus Peet’s Coffee.

I guess he does not know about the dangers of microplastics. Conventional wisdom is that we should avoid plastics as much as possible when it comes to things that can enter our body. Food and drink containers, specifically. Haven't we stopped leaving the plastic wraps in when we microwave our food?

Sadly, it looks like my coworker is avoiding a (potentially non-existent) harm by embracing another harm. An Appointment in Samarra situation, without the dying.

For a company as successful and beloved as Costco, why is their website and app situation so pitiful? It’s a complete chore to get it to show me whether an item is in stock at a local warehouse. And even if it does show to be in stock, it is not a guarantee to be true. Last week I was looking to buy some fish oil that was on sale, and the two stores I went to that showed to have it on the Costco website, did not. What a royal waste of time that was.

I get it: with all those delicious membership fees that Costco is charging us, what incentive is there to improve online shopping? I’m not sure they feel the need to chase those sales. Besides, the in-warehouse experience is where they can feed us samples to entice us to impulse buy. How many times have we gone to Costco with a list, but came back with twice as many items?

Death of a coworker

It’s a tremendously sad day indeed to find out that one of our coworkers has passed away. We’ve not heard from her all last week, so on the behest of HR, SFPD paid a wellness visit to the coworker’s address on file. Our worst inklings were unfortunately confirmed. The deceased has been battling chronic health issues for as long as I’ve known her. To die so incredibly earlier than you’re naturally suppose to is an absolute tragedy.

I think the news hit the older coworkers more intensely. Seeing someone close to your age die so suddenly is a rather rude wake-up call. You start examining your own mortality, questioning whether you’ve forsaken long-term health for more immediate pleasures. Us Knowledge workers who sit in front of a computer all day have a steep hill to climb in terms of combating the deterioration that comes with age. A majority of my coworkers in their 40s and 50s are not the paragons of health, I’m sorry to point out.

For me, the fear of death is about the sensation of not being here (rather than fearing the agony of death). It’s the ultimate form of fear of missing out. That's why I’ve long been on the exercise, eat right, sleep plenty plan ever since I’ve graduated from university. While aesthetic improvements are nice, the actual goal is longevity. I don’t want to be gone prematurely! I want to be around for all the fun and not so fun that a full lifetime has to offer.

I hope the deceased did not suffer. To have worked with you is a privilege. Rest in peace.

Red in the morning, blue in the evening sun.

So close yet so far

Hey, remember the COVID pandemic is over? We don’t think about it anymore, right? No news of frightening new variants, no daily death counts. There’s people working in hospitals that no longer wear masks! That last one is kind of stunning when I went in a few months ago for my annual checkup. Things are truly back to what it was at the end of 2019. If we don’t counting the millions dead…

Just when I thought we would end the year at work with no one getting truly sick from COVID, a coworker caught the disease last week. (So close.) Unfortunately for him, COVID absolutely knocked him out. Every single flu-like and cold-like symptom you can come up with, he got it. The coworker was out for the entire week. Compounding the misery is that he can’t pinpoint where and how he contracted COVID! He would’ve felt slightly better if he were able to offload the blame somewhere.

I am fine, by the way. Very unlikely the coworker contracted COVID at work as the rest of us were business as usual. I still have not knowingly contracted the thing, though I maintain it’s because I don’t show any symptoms (thank god if that is indeed the truth). No symptoms, no tests, less chance of positives. Didn’t the smart people say that it is statistically likely that all of us will get COVID at some point?

Nothing will make you appreciate good health like coming out of a serious bout of sickness. The recovered coworker is filled with gratitude today in his return to work. He definitely do not want to experience that again. I bet if his COVID vaccine schedule isn’t up to date, it will be shortly!

It's nap time

You know things are slow at work when a coworker falls sleep while watching a YouTube video. Granted, the snoozing is probably not due to boredom. Rather it’s likely insufficient sleep. Sure we tend to yawn when we’re bored, but then we’d go find something to un-bore ourselves. Nobody goes, “You know what, I am bored. Let me go take a nap!”

Indeed, the workday does go by quicker when there is more stuff to do. This workload ebb and flow comes with the territory of one, working at a university, and two, being on the service side. People call us when shit goes bad, so if we’re busy all the time, then something is horribly wrong. We are smack dab in the middle of the Fall semester, so not a lot of things are going wrong at the moment (knock on wood).

The weather in San Francisco has finally turned cooler, a real autumnal feeling. That coziness probably adds to the drowsiness factor (I definitely sleep better during the winter months). The coworker did just return from a heavy lunch, too, so all the pressures of wanting-to-take-a-nap were working against him staying awake. Sadly, a public university is not the Google campus: there aren’t any nap pods around here.

As a purveyor of consistent, quality sleep, you won’t find me doing the head-nod into slumber whilst doing a sedentary activity. I haven’t done something like that since my college days of falling asleep in class. For obvious reasons, my sleep schedule was all over the place back then. No, professor, your lecture isn’t boring! I’m simply running on fumes.

These days, I no longer sacrifice sleep to the altar of continue playing a video game, or keep watching a TV series. I purposely leave social gatherings early in order to preserve the amount of sleep I get. It is too important for brain health to forsake.

Not enough juice

We are about two months away from the annual new iPhone launch in September (typically). I cannot wait to get a new one this year, because the battery life on my current iPhone 14 Pro has been the worse I’ve ever used. (And I’ve had every single iPhone since the 7.) The iPhone is famous for robust battery life compared to the Android competition. In my experience, this has been very true. I’ve never had to plug my iPhone in mid-day to top up the battery ever. It’s never gone down past 20% at the end of the day even in my heaviest usage days.

That is, until the iPhone 14 Pro. 10 months in, the battery life have not held up to standards. These days I’m down to 20% by the time I get home from work in the early evening. Mind you this is without any heavy usage of social media apps whatsoever. I’m only chatting with friends on Signal and reading ebooks on Kindle. I joked to my friends that I’ve become just like them: having to charge the phone battery during the day, otherwise risk running out of juice.

The forthcoming iPhone 15 Pro could have zero new features - only improved battery life, and I would still happily do the yearly upgrade.

Obviously, this is the most first world of problems. Here’s some quick perspective to bring me back down to earth. A new coworker of mine recently remarked that in all of his previous jobs, he’s never had the major holidays off. In the typical service industry-type jobs, the holidays is when you definitely have to show up for work. That’s where the money is made: restaurants needs tables filled, shows need to go on, and parcels need delivering. That coworker’s remark is a humbling reminder that I’m so lucky to only have had jobs where major holidays are actually a thing.

It reminded me of my younger (than me by 10 years) brother. He’s currently working his way up from the bottom at entry-level service jobs. There are no holidays off. And should he wish to take any time off, he has to find others to cover his shift. A two week vacation? He can certainly take one, but just don’t come back to work afterwards. It’s tough work for not that much pay. Fingers crossed he can eventually find a job that provide proper benefits and time off - like my coworker did.

Don't kill my vibe

Ever since I deactivated my twitter account, these days I’m largely cut off from the latest news. This is of course a very good thing. The news is nothing but tragedy and sadness. There’s never any good news, is there? The only reason even I knew about the missing Titanic submersible from last week was my friends told me about it.

That sort of news is at least interesting and fascinating, worthy of a lengthy discussion that stretches multiple days (I guess our friend group doesn't have better things to do). What I can’t give a crap about is the daily political stuff that my coworker prefers to talk about. I literally don’t care what Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is doing or not doing. I live in San Francisco, California; I’m more interested in what our own mayor is doing.

But I have to maintain some modicum of politeness, right? I can’t exactly shut them down immediately soon as a coworker comes to me with a latest news topic. Do that often enough and none of them will talk to me again ever. Or perhaps that’s really what I want: to be left alone. (Which I do.) To be congenial with the officemates, however, I would listen half intently, then say something glib in response. The goal is to listen, then say things in a way that ends that particular conversation topic quickly.

Please don’t ruin my zen, people. I’m quite okay with not knowing what’s going in the larger outside world. I’ll simply watch the local 6 o'clock news to get my fix of what’s immediately pertinent.

Sonny

It was a somber workday yesterday. A coworker got the news that her mother is diagnosed with cancer, and not the good kind. Not to say there is a good kind of cancer, but you know what I mean. My own mother has had breast cancer, which while scary, is imminently survivable. She’s in remission to this day (god willing).

Obviously, my coworkers was in a bit of shock. As a coworker, I was at a lost of what to say, other than how sorry I was to hear the sad news. Was there more to be said? I’m not so sure. It’s tempting to encourage him to take the rest of the day off, but people handle bad news differently. Perhaps being at work and actually doing the work is a needed distraction from the difficulties to come.

It’s never fun when human mortality surfaces right front and center. Most of us go through life running away from contemplating our mortality. That in turn governs how we act each day. We think we have all the time in the world, but reality can snatch it away in a quick second. A normal workday will be utterly interrupted by the news your mother has terminal cancer. What a cruel joke! Just a minute before, another day was going swimmingly.

Sometimes you wish there’s a button to turn back the time. Like there is in a role-playing video game.

The constant contemplation of death should influence our actions. To not sweat the small stuff, be quick to forgive, and say the things you want to say now. Because it can all go away in an instant.