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OhioResident20
September 13, 2010
Standards
Last year I managed to get a contract writing job with a company called Zynga, which makes all those games people play online. I was still living in San Mateo so the commute up to their San Francisco office wasn't too bad. I was renting the same place I'd moved into when I first came to the area five years earlier. That wasn't exactly something I had anticipated at the time. But life works out that way sometimes.
The funny thing was that Lee had been working at Zynga for more than a year when I showed up. We had lost touch after things got bad with an old girlfriend of mine and friends were forced to pick sides. All of that was long in the past, though. We greeted each other like old friends when we ran into each other in a break room near where the writers worked.
"It's good to know they're hiring more writers, " Lee told me after we exchanged the usual pleasantries.
"I won't be here for long, " I said. "They have me working on some standards documents, and then I'll be gone."
"Maybe they'll find a permanent home for you after that, " Lee said. "We need more people doing that sort of thing around here. This place has exploded, but that means a lot of chaos."
"People keep telling me how great it is to work here, " I said. "That's been the common theme whenever someone introduces themselves."
"Well, you know, people say that even if it's not true, " Lee said.
"So are you going to give me a more honest appraisal?" I asked him.
"I'm happy enough here, " Lee told me. "Some of the senior managers they brought in to oversee product development, you know, they're a bit clueless. That's the way it always is. People who are too high up to be of any practical use."
"I've been trying to avoid office work, " I said. "I hope I can manage it this time around."
Lee leaned back in his chair and put his hand under his chin. "I remember you going on once about a town you visited. Somewhere in Germany, I think."
"I went to lots of places in Germany, " I said.
"This was when we were all together in some smoky bar downtown, " he said. "You know, you were there with Sarah and I don't even remember who I was with. Maybe this an area where you don't want to go."
"It's fine, " I said. "I don't even think about Sarah anymore."
"I hardly see her anymore myself, " Lee said. "She was thinking of moving to Los Angeles, you know. She kept going on and on about it. There was a job offer waiting for her there, or something. She never ended up going. But the thing is that she's sort of cut herself off from a lot of her friends here. I've talked about this with some other people. It's like she committed herself so much to the move that she has to pretend that she's there, which means cutting off communication with the people she knows over here. It's a strange theory, I know."
"It does make some sense, " I said. "If the job fell through. Maybe she wanted to start an entire new life. So when she couldn't leave, she had to improvise. Maybe she has a whole new group of people she hangs out with that you don't even know about."
"I suppose, " Lee said. "But I want to get back to this thing, because I'm starting to remember it better now. You were going on about documents and standards. I don't know what the name of the town was, though."
Suddenly I remember the conversation Lee was referring to. It took place shortly after I'd returned from a trip to Central Europe that had lasted a little over a month. Sarah had not come with me, and things were never really the same between us after that. Actually, I could probably designate that trip as the turning point in our relationship, if I were forced to do so. The thing is that I had some extra money and the trip was something I'd been planning for years, and I had to go. Sarah was working and couldn't get the time off. She told me to go and have a good time, but I know I should have stayed. If I had really wanted to commit myself to the relationship, I would have stayed. It's as simple as that.
"I think you're talking about Nördlingen, " I told Lee.
Lee thought about that for a moment. "If you say so, " he then said. "That might be right."
"That's where I got to see the town's old records, " I said. "I tried everywhere I went to get in to see that sort of thing. You know, everywhere I went I'd go to the town hall and I'd beg them to let me see their collections of old documents. But Nördlingen was the only place where my efforts met with success."
"You would know better than I would, obviously, " Lee said.
"It's a real mess of a place, " I told him. "Buildings with steep red roofs packed in tight but arranged seemingly at random. That's not to say that there weren't streets. There were, of course. But especially when you climbed up the church tower, it just looked like someone had scattered some seeds and these buildings had sprouted up wherever one had happened to land."
"You said a lot of this same stuff back then as well, I think, " Lee told me.
"It was an important part of my trip, " I said. "Probably the most important. But I wasn't expecting it to be."
"It's this standards thing that got me going about it, " Lee said. "Because that's what you're working on here, right?"
"It's a compilation of best practices for keeping a code repository of some sort, " I said. "Really, they've given me all the materials, and I just have to make it make sense. It won't take long."
"They've been trying to crack down on us for a while, " Lee said. "People squirreling files away on their own machines and that sort of thing. It'll never work, though."
"I just do the writing, " I said. "The enforcement is up to them."
"But that's what you were going on about with this town, right?" Lee said. "What was the name?"
I grabbed a napkin and took a pen out of my pocket. I wrote "Nördlingen" down on it for Lee to see. "It'll be easier to remember if you see it, " I said.
"I probably won't need to remember it after this conversation, " Lee said.
"Well, there it is, anyway, " I told him.
"So what's the connection, then?" Lee asked me. "Between this place and the work you're doing now?"
"I didn't imply that there was a connection, " I told him.
"But there is a connection, isn't there?" Lee said. "If I remember what you were going on about back then. It was documents with standards written all over them."
"They had their own weights and measures, " I said. "That's probably what I was talking about. They had volume after volume describing various weight and measures in exact detail. It was something they updated every year. They'd been doing it even before they could print it. But of course the books were printed after a certain point."
"Weights and measures, " Lee said.
"They kept their own, " I told him. "And it infuriated merchants from other towns. This was a source of great controversy, apparently. I saw court documents, as well. Stuff from back when the town ran by its own laws. There were cases when outsiders would come in and dispute the prices they were being offered for their goods. This went on and on for a long time. There was outside pressure to conform to certain standards used elsewhere. You know, their system was much more complicated than the usual thing. They divided standard weights up according to the item being weighed. So, for example, the weight of a piece of gold would be different from the weight of a piece of silver, even though they technically weighed the same. It's hard to explain."
"It doesn't even make sense, " Lee said. "Why be so complicated?"
"There were local customs that date back even further than the laws themselves, " I said. "That's where these things get messy. People have all these rules that they've been keeping in their heads and passing down from generation to generation, and then they try to codify it. So that's the way it was. If you gave them an ounce of gold, they told you that it was two ounces. If you gave them an ounce of silver, they told you it was three ounces. Of course they didn't use ounces. That's just to give you an idea of how this worked in practice."
Lee thought about that for a moment. "I guess it has nothing to do with what you're working on now at all, does it?" he then said.
"Not really, " I said. "I can see what you were trying to get at, though."
"Of course someone in the future might run into your little manual and not know what to make of it either, " Lee said. "Standards for maintaining a coding repository. Who knows if that will make any sense to anyone?"
"I doubt it will, " I said.
Except for that one conversation, I didn't talk to Lee all that much during my time at Zynga. As I said, we weren't great friends to begin with. It was just that we could go on about the right topic for a while, if the circumstances were right.
Zynga's now doing better than ever, from what people tell me. I haven't worked in the city in a while, though. My rent is cheap and it's not too hard to find odd jobs in San Mateo to keep me afloat. It would be nice to take another trip, I suppose. I think about that sometimes. Maybe if I'd done things a little differently, I could afford to take trips like that all the time.
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