Nothing quite like the feeling of your cell phone cracking into pieces under your foot first thing in the morning now, is there?

Now, you gotta understand I live by my cell phone. I do engineering support for a living. I’m the go-to guy for my group 24×7. I’m never off-call. When they can’t find key people, I’m on the short list of who do ya call.

I get sms text alerts when machines go down. I get sms text messages asking for help. And of course, I get texts from friends all day long.

I pretty much always have my phone in my pocket, and feel disconnected when it’s not within reach. I don’t know how I managed before cell phones. Really, I no longer need a land-line, I never give my regular number out anymore.

So after making coffee this morning, I went to get my cell out of the pocket of my jeans; only I was wearing shorts with no pockets and needed my hands free for something or other, and mindlessly tucked my hone in the waist band of my shorts, where it stayed securely for about 3 seconds.

I’ve dropped my phone a million times, and it’s beat up as hell, but still works fine. I tell ya, I’d buy another LG phone. They’re durable. And it was fine this time too; battery popped off, and the phone flipped open, but no big deal.

Only I was in mid-stride and… And.

I tried to avoid it. There was that split second and doing a bizarre off-balance tap-dance, like when you realize you’re about to tread on the cat, or boot the baby who’s not where she was expected to be. So I wound up doing a bizarre stompy dance on top of my fucking phone.

Surprisingly, the phone itself is in pretty good shape. I didn’t crack the display, nor break the keypad. All of it looks, pretty much, good as new. Only the top and bottom are now wholly autonomous units, no longer joined with a plastic hinge, or any sort of cable.

The super-fine ribbon cable that, til recently, made these things one integrated system now looks like it’s been rat-chewed.

I’m cut off from my world. No sms. No calls. No fuckin’ nuthin. AND, I doubt they’ll be able to download the contact list.

Do me a favor, k? Email me your cell numbers. I’m trying to scrounge a replacement phone as I type this, but re-constructing my contact list is gonna be the big issue now. On the other hand, if I can just get on the list for the new ROKR, maybe this is a good thing, soon as they start to be available…

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