Boring Stevey Status Update — a watercolour interior in a Wind-in-the-Willows register: a panda in a scarf and waistcoat sits at a small writing desk in front of a snowy window, a half-written letter and a steaming mug of tea on the desk, a brass lamp pooling light over the paper. 📚

2007 · Stevey's Blog Rants · Essay

“I had an exciting morning of not getting fired today.”
— From Boring Stevey Status Update
Read the essay

© 2007 Steve Yegge. Originally published at Stevey's Blog Rants.

Author’s note

True to the title. It's pretty quick though. I'd call this "Stevey Popcorn." I read it quickly, enjoyed it, and immediately forgot what it was about.

Looking back, it started off about a Reddit post that my Google blog site had been taken down, from which Reddit concluded that I must have been fired. Which was fun. But then the blog just rambles. Fortunately not for long.

AI Notes

Steve is on a couch in Google's Building 43, between meetings, glancing at Reddit, when he discovers he is apparently being fired — right now, in real time, "like OJ in his white SUV." The Reddit crowd had noticed his account was disabled and reached the most exciting possible conclusion; it turns out to be an automated-system mixup that friends inside Google quickly fix. Left with twenty minutes of unearned adrenaline, Steve writes a status update so he doesn't vanish for another year: JavaScript 2 is fighting itself in committee, he's writing a book on Mozilla Rhino with Norris Boyd, and he's building a full ECMA-262 JavaScript interpreter in Emacs Lisp — the project that later surfaces as Ejacs and seeds js2-mode. He calls it a "boring" update — from a man who just spent the morning being fired by Reddit and mentions, at the end, that he has taught his dog Cino to play guitar.

Related listings

  • 2007

    A Noogler's View of Google

    The two 2007 Google interior dispatches sit side by side. The Noogler post is the wide-eyed first-week version; this one is ten months later — same campus, same massage chairs, same Building 43, but Steve has settled in enough that even being publicly fired is a quiet day.

  • 2009

    Story Time

    The same voice fifteen months later, taken further. Where this post wanders into a stories-as-aside mode for a few hundred words at the end, Story Time commits to it for the entire post — nine true stories in a single sitting.

  • 2011

    Hacker News Fires Steve Yegge

    The sequel, four years on. Different aggregator, same gag — except by 2011 the not-being-fired routine has its own punchline title. Pair this post with that one for the full Reddit-then-HN arc of the internet repeatedly trying to dismiss him while he was still showing up to work.