2024-05-06: Anger, Spats, and Uncentered text
(If you work at FF/FFDW 🄽 links will send you to a local, editable page in the Filecoin Foundation Notion. If you are in the Filecoin ecosystem, you may be able to join the #monologue-danny Slack channel where I answer questions, take meeting bookings, talk to myself and the other voices in my head. In the glorious decentralized ocap-enabled future, such data-hoardings will be a thing of the past, but we live for now in a fallen ACL world.)
Three Things I Did
1. Lost my temper
“Do people at your work know that when British people apologise that much it means they’re really angry?” Well, look, one, I wasn’t really angry, and two, I have mixed feelings knowing that, from certain angles, the madder I get, the funnier I sound: the national curse of John Cleese. I was expressing frustration in a Zoom call where many people had frustration but no-one clearly to blame. What I feel about anger is that you do have to express it sometimes, but you must direct it at anything but people: you need to point it out of windows, or into the sky. Not at others, not (I belatedly have learned) yourself. At fate! You must fume against fate! Like in Shakespeare.
2. Had some work therapy
A few conversations afterwards were therapy — not entirely for me, thank God. I’ve been in workplaces with people that you have to spend the next six months tiptoeing around the Anger Spigot, or everyone group hugs you to death trying to finesse your pain away. These wer mostly “yeah, I 100% see your point… but also,”. And then something else, some other hidden pain they had which, fortunately, did not make my pain seem silly and selfish (the worst kind of Other People’s Pain!). The kind that made worklife more of a mutual consolation.
3. Talked to strangers
So, after that rollercoaster, I realised that I had an 8PM call with somebody who I thought was going to be angry at me, where I had deliberately set myself up to be a lightning conductor of sorts. And they were actually lovely, and we had a nice conversation, and he thanked me for reaching out. I found out Liz takes the workmen downstairs a jug of iced water every afternoon at 4PM. And I thought: I would never have thought of that, and then I thought: I would have thought about that, but wouldn’t know how to pull it off. Then I thought: I bet I would think about doing it, and then forget. So I need to put more random conversations on my calendar.
TIL
- I knew about the most famous spat in British fontography, when some of the finest typefaces of the early 20th century were chucked in the Thames as glorious (possibly misplaced) revenge. What I didn’t know is that someone found them again! A tale of business partnerships, diaries, and modern mudlarking.
Links Du Jour
- You will hate me for sending you this link, but the chain must not be broken. How hard is it to center things properly?
- And I’m still mad that they’re going to try and shut down TikTok. Here, have songs from automated checkouts, millennial tattoo trends, and, to cleanse us all from this, the angriest email, here is the sweetest kid on Fortnite.