Video Games Junkies
We’re sticking with the theme of computer video games after yesterday’s post on which there was a comment which directed me to this link.
So let’s get this straight. It seems, from this web page, that some games aren’t bought, they’re merely “rented”. (This reminds me of a nice piece of graffiti staring out at me from the wall of the gents urinal in a pub while relieving myself - “You don’t buy beer. You just rent it”.)
To me, the company who owns this WoW game can be considered in two different lights. If I’m kind, I’ll say they are equivalent to the owner of a golf course or a squash court, to whom you pay money in order to play the game, which is fair enough.
However, I believe a better and more accurate analogy is that of a drug dealer preying on the vulnerability of punters needing to feed their addiction. In fact the student who wrote the article admits that he is a “WoW junkie”.
Either way, it helps to explain why the video games industry is so lucrative, ($9.5 billion in 2007 according to our old friend Wikipedia).
But all this is several billion light years away from the way things were in the 1980s when this cartoon was published…..
(Cartoon taken from the Education section of Microholics)
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Working the streets as a contractor
The cartoon today is taken from the Education section of Microholics:
I once worked for a software house. The Chiefs were pimps and us Indians were prostitutes. They used to send me to work “on the streets” for months at a time in exotic locations like Milton Keynes, hire me out to the client for some undisclosed exorbitant rate and pay me a pittance for a salary.
Unfortunately, when you’ve got the word “contractor” stamped on your forehead, the permanent workforce invariably assumes you’re rolling in cash, which tends to affect their behaviour and attitude towards you. So you have all the disadvantages of working as a contractor, with none of the advantages! I believe I lasted about twelve months in this job.
A few years later I became a “proper” contractor, but working for a different kind of pimp - the Agent. The difference was that I got a slightly bigger slice of the pie for each “trick”!
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