ティージェーグレェ on Nostr: I once had a coworker who asked me if I was more of a Scotty (under promise, over ...

I once had a coworker who asked me if I was more of a Scotty (under promise, over deliver I guess?) or LaForge (try to give a best estimate rather than act as if he were pulling a rabbit out of a hat every time).

I was confused. I thought I was working a real job under the horrible auspices of capitalism in the early 21st century, not the post-capitalistic fantasy of the 23rd century and beyond as encountered in the fictional SciFi Star Trek paradigm or on set of a TV show or whatever at all, or an engineer for that matter (I have a B.A. in Language Studies, not a B.S. in any engineering discipline and shy away from demeaning language by misusing terms as a result). I think my job title was: "Network Security Specialist" and it mostly fell as if I was plugging leaks in other people's metaphorical sinking ships and being worked to death and blamed for others' mistakes even as I was essentially doing triage and fixing things as best as humanly possible (and better than most others on Earth in similar situations near as I could discern from my coworkers and knowledge of others in the field) given their completely insane understanding of reality and awful commercial technology choices.

Not much has changed. Star Trek has certainly featured some other folks beyond Scotty and LaForge (and Scotty even seemed to be self aware and parodied his repartee when he reprised his role later on in one of the franchise installments if I recall correctly) in engineering over the franchise's life, but I can't think of a single one to whom I relate.

It didn't help matters that my deceased maternal aunt was VP of Paramount, and I was on the set of STTNG (though no cameras were rolling) before they broadcast an episode. (I also saw one of Kirk's original series captain's chairs basically in tatters from moths or whatever, something that fans presumably would have lost their shit over seeing how it had fallen into disrepair. TL;DR studios suck and pretty much only care about the next money maker, not preserving the legacy of their past.).

I have more affinity with what I refer to as "reversers" (the sorts of folks who present at the likes of REcon [a Reverse Engineering conference]) but they're also very far removed from Star Trek and tend to present avant-garde research. Though, even as reverse engineering has evolved? I find myself increasingly spoiled by source code and really reticent to have to stoop to situations where I need to reverse something, because others were so short sighted as to perpetuate terrible currency constructs as if they were Ferengi more than they cared to contribute to more collaborative paradigms as found in the libre/free open source realms.

CC: 🇺🇦 haxadecimal 🚫👑 (npub1sk8…h5th)