Ben's Bitter Blog

Maintaining the World

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I had a really great babysitter when I was young. I have nothing but glowing reviews, literally. I loved my babysitter so much that I will recommend that my kids and grandkids even use my babysitter. If you’ve ever seen Cable Guy with Jim Carrey or numerous other shows or movies when you were young, you know exactly who I’m referring to, ironically. Or rather what. Of course, I’m referring to TV.

What a great babysitter TV was for me. TV introduced me to the Transformers, my all-time favorite cartoon. It introduced me the Simpsons, Knight Rider, ALF, Cheers, Miami Vice and Friday Night Videos. The first music video I ever saw was “Beat it” by Michael Jackson on Friday Night Videos. MTV also introduced me to artists like The Police, Phil Collins, Madonna, and Dire Straits, who sang the line, “I want my MTV….”

Now Michael Jackson is no longer with us, MTV is a station without any music videos, Phil Collins has a daughter that is more famous than him, The Police is now Sting, and Madonna, in the words of Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, “is transforming into Jar Jar Binks and no one is talking about it.”

These people were big influences in my life at the time, and when I saw them, it inspired me to want to grow up and be like them. I would see movies like the Matrix that changed the way I thought about the world, and then later there were people like Al Gore that invented the internet, Mark Zuckerberg starting Facebook, Jack Dorsey founding Twitter and the Chinese bringing Tik Tok to the world.

The problem with all these people changing the world is that they never stopped to help clean up after themselves. The world needs a little change, but they need a lot more maintaining.

Stop trying to change the world please, because people like me end up having to clean up your messes. Huge changers just leave messes everywhere. They are like earthquakes that everyone else has to deal with. They create the earthquakes, but after the earthquake they expect lots of money, praise by everyone and they think they don’t have to clean up the mess afterwards.

Too many people want to change the world and not enough of us want to maintain it.

The morning janitors that wake up at 4 am are sick and tired of having to clean up all the 1’s and 0’s you leave all over the floor. The warehouse people are sick of having to ship the bullcrap you sell to everyone. After all, it’s hard to find boxes that keep the smell out.

The people that maintain the websites of Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Tik Tok, didn’t learn coding from the Matrix and their computers only type horizontally, not vertically, and their screens aren’t green. The actors that are creating the illusion that VR works in Mark Zuckerberg’s head are getting a little exhausted.

The people that squash all the bugs in the code of video games about squashing bugs are tired of working millions of hours or overtime, squashing bugs so the creators can get all credit of their amazing vision, while the programmers get bugged about there being so many bugs in the game when it is released.

The people that are the most bugged about maintenance are the ghost writers that maintain this blog, while I get all the credit.

I didn’t even create any of the Giftures for this post. I steal them from people that maintain Giphy…So with further ado, I present…this week’s Giftures…

I’m guessing that Andy…

…didn’t have to clean this up.

The Rock might have said he was cooking something…

…but it was his personal chef that was cooking.

Michael cleaned up the criminals…

…but someone else had to clean up aisle 5.

Squidward was the artist…

…but Spongebob the maintainer finally got some applause.

While Mark Z. and others are trying to pretend a VR world exists…

…the rest of us have to act like there is a VR world.

While some people making stacks of cash…

…others are cleaning it up from the living room.

While professors are busy trying to teach math…

…the janitors are out here doing it.

While my son is out tackling kids with footballs…

…my wife is busy driving him, cleaning his uniform and making sure he’s taking a shower after.

She got all the glory…

…but someone had to write that speech.

Lincoln may have said four score and seven years ago…

…but his speechwriter had to figure out how much a score was.

It might be fun to get a hat trick…

…but someone’s got to clean up all those hats.

Just remember, for everything you create…

…there is someone who is miserable cleaning up after you.

Stop trying to change the world. No one asked for all this change. We don’t want to clean up all your messes. Stop creating for a minute and clean up after yourself for once.

ARRRRGGGHHHHHHH

Bitter Maintenance Ben

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