Post-Modern Drunk: Gods and Cats
I am an outlier in my job at [Large Arts Non Profit]. A rare straight man in Development, an unrepentant nerd, in my mid-thirties, working primarily with women and gay men in their mid-twenties. I like my job and I love my coworkers. I just occasionally forget that, in addition to all the other things I mentioned, I'm also a member of the IT staff and my brain works entirely different than my coworkers.

Case in point: at an End of Fiscal Year party yesterday for the Development Staff, I started to talk about the different naming conventions I've had through my life to name my different computer hard drives.

I don't know what's wrong with me that I thought people would respond, "Yeah, you HAVE to have good naming conventions for hard drives. Otherwise they're just going to be 'My Hard Drive.'" Because this is a serious issue. "My Hard Drive" is fine when you have one hard drive, but you need back-up drives, and expansion drives, and your network accessible drive. It's a truth universally acknowledged that your hard drives are going to die on you, so you are going to go through a steady supply of names. if you don't want to sit there trying to come up with a name for your new hard drive after you've swapped the dearly departed out, or, even worse, reusing a name, you have to have a strong naming conventions.

Apparently in a department full of bright people who work on the computer all day, I'm the only person who has considered this, much less had naming conventions.

The final nail in the coffin for me feeling old and out-of-touch with my coworkers was the recent shift I made in my naming conventions. Like many young nerds, in college, my naming conventions for hard drives was entirely mythologically based. I started with Greek Mythology: Elysium, Hades, Memnosyne (for the backup drive), Tantalus. I cycled through all of them, eventually expanding to Norse mythology with Valhalla and Yggdrasil. Because that's what nerds do: We nerd it up.

Now, in my old age, I've turned into a crazy cat person. My hard drives are all named after cats I've taken care of, Dora, Lulu, Buster, or types of cats: Tuxedo, Tabby, Jellicle, etc. I suppose that's an arc of sorts. From lonely pretentious nerd to crazy cat person.

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