All about the chains

Yes, it’s a work entry. But never fear, I can make it dirty.

A few weeks ago, I was working on that super secret project that I could have told everyone about, but then would have had to kill you. Well, then it ‘leaked’ and then it got announced; macs with intel chips. Now, some citizens of the land of hightechistan were unaffected by all this, being uses of lesser platforms (*cough*windows*cough*), or of linux. But for many, this was big news. Mac users wondered, what does this mean to me; but the industry as a whole wondered, what does this mean for all of us?

The answer to that is still an open question of course. Even inside, we don’t really know unless we need to know, and if we do need to know we’re placed under a strict Silencio charm and rendered mute outside the confines of hogw… I mean, outside Apple HQ.

But inside the company, it meant a lot of change; work we had been doing in hardware engineering changed focus. Some projects got postponed. Some engineers wound up needing to find new work to do. We had many, many more jobs in certain areas, fewer in others.

My team, 100% focused on support of chip design, suddenly got re-purposed to support a wider user base; not just chip designers, but boards, systems, etc. We wound up with a new director, a new upper-level manager, and then a while new stack of names.

I don’t care, generally, what my team is called. You know, I’ve been in this industry for a lot of years and you get used to new managers wanting to re-define a group by re-naming it. It confuses everyone, and we all need new web site names and sometimes we have to get new business cards, but my job is my job and I don’t care what they call it. So when they started to toss around new acronyms that had some vague relation to what we do day-to-day, I skipped the meeting and went to eat sushi instead.

My boss and my group came up with something I could not remember five minutes after I was told it. And that was fine since our top man decided it wasn’t what he wanted.

Last night a new name came down from somewhere above (I have a vague suspicion somewhere above has the initials J.D.); thus our new name is Design Chain Management.

And of course I had only one thing to say when my boss asked me what I thought. ‘Got chain in it, s’ok with me.’

And you see? Here’s where it gets dirty. Because of course in my mind, chain has only one meaning. And I’m picturing a couple of the interns in my group, in, well, you know.

I get to have the word ‘chain’ on my business cards now. I’m so going to enjoy handing these out in the right circles.

No one gets a piece of your heart
It’s over ’cause you won’t let it start
You keep your love in chains, love in chains
And only fear remains and keeps your love in chains