A) It’s not an analogy, it’s a summation of facts.

B) I would put heavy money says F Tony finds this person fairly attractive and bizzarely, this situation hasn’t arisen with an unattractive female friend.

C) I’ve been that asshole, I get it. But personally, a huge part of maturing from a boy to a man was learning the difference between friendship and romance, and that a friendship with an attractive woman who seems super compatible doesn’t mean a romantic relationship is the next or best step. (Also, how fucking shitty is this to our lady friends?) It’s a weird lesson and not one that everyone learns but my God, the world opens up once/if you do figure it out.

I’d like to be friends but only if we can have sex.

Doesn’t really sound like a rock solid friendship there.

My folks have done this maybe 10 times without issue. There are whole websites etc, happy to pass on the one my parents used if you’d like. (I’d have ti ask etc or I’d just share it.)

I can only give my experience and I think mine is a bit unusual but here goes.

Like the Office Space folks, I’m a dev in a large (admittedly, non profit and really good) organization. Since covid, I’ve worked remotely but my day to day hasn’t changed.

We have a help desk where people send questions/issues. Someone on our team generally splits those roughly based on workload, skills, knowledge etc. Our goal is about half our work should be those one off requests.

I also have client units within the organization. They usually come to me with wild, bold ideas that I help make a reality or explain (gently) why what they are asking for is insane. Some of thr projects are based on what folks have heard are best practices in our industry, others are about cutting down manual work/seeing what we can automate.

Any of those projects can take anywhere from a couple hours to a couple of months. Some require buy in from other units, so on those I end up on a lot of meetings and email threads answering questions, hearing suggestions etc. I then (usually) coordinate with my manager to make sure I’m not stepping on any toes or there aren’t considerations which I had yet to consider.

Today for example, I spent about half the day working on help desk tickets, about 1/3 of my time was clarifying “what the hell are you trying to say?” Or pointing out logical gaps etc (much easier to do this upfront than write a bunch of code and have someone realize they meant something else entirely… People are dumb.) The other 2/3 was coding.

On my major projects, I spent an annoying amount of time emailing around to get approvals so a project manager would accept that my clients were fine with something I built, even though it was a bit unorthodox. Then a couple hours actually working on another project.

Plus, y’know, Lemmy time, cat skritching time and a bit of cooking.

Admittedly, my experience is unusual. I’m hihhly skilled but slightly underpaid in a non profit, so folks compensate by giving a lot of leeway. So a nice work environment plus I think what I do makes the world a better place, I’m pretty happy. I understand most office jobs are not quite like that but I don’t think they’re far off.

Honestly, a lot of days make me feel satisfied. I work on the comp side of a fundraising department for a large public university. I’m good at what I do, enjoy it and have earned enough of a reputation that people generally let me tackle whatever comes my way however I want.

So, if I have a good productive day, I feel like maybe more students got scholarships because of my work that day. And I work from home so if I did well at work, found time to do my “old man refuses to stop playing sports with kids in their 20s” exercises AND had a couple good homecooked meals, well yeah, I feel pretty accomplished and satisfied.

But yeah, doing something I like for a cause which I ferverently support, I have more good days than bad. Working from home is a heck of a cherry on top though.

I’ve wondered and never thought to ask. Thanks, the resulting conversation has been awesome.