Don't mess with a programmer

One of the benefits of working for a large and successful multinational company is that they tend to give their employees a lot of free merch. 

So today I went onto our corporate partner website to place an order for yet another branded T-shirt celebrating our latest software release. Having selected my desired size, I then moved on to the shipping info. And here were the options presented to me for "state" (i.e. region):

This is not cool. I take a very dim view of some woke activist somewhere in the USA trying to use an innocuous business transaction to advance a controversial political agenda.

So, naturally I lodged a complaint with management. But I wanted my merch, anyway. And I refused on principle to fill in my address with the option supplied. So, I didn't.

I created a monster

image credit: conradbrunstrom.wordpress.com

In 2014, I created a monster.

I wrote a work of viral fake-news, completely unintentionally.

I'm not going to retell the story; you can follow the link above for that. But since then, my "Bibi speech" has been resurrected and gone viral again twice - in 2019 and now, in 2021. And, moreover, it's been translated into Spanish and Russian (though I haven't seen it in Hebrew yet). I even got a mention on Snopes!

I feel a kind of guilty pride about this. I mean, I wasn't specifically intending for my openly fictional prose to get copypasta'd and circulated as if it were real. But the fact is, it clearly touched and resonated with a huge number of people, who were inspired to forward it to an average of eight hundred of their closest friends (I may be approximating here, but then, it's well documented that 84% of all statistics are invented on the spot). It seems that every time Israel goes into yet another round of fighting with Hamas, my monster, seemingly of its own volition, creaks open the top of its coffin, lurches out into cyberspace, and storms around the world, now in multiple languages.

I don't have much more to say about this story, because I'm still processing the meaning of it all, and with the current situation and my personal responsibilities, I don't really have time to wax lyrical.

I will, however, take advantage of the attention I'm receiving to post a brief commercial message: 

If you enjoyed my writing, there's more of it. I've written a pretty darn good novel, plus a few short stories. Go and get some of the free stuff here.

I also write speeches for the Prime Minister of Israel. Hey, it's his problem if he doesn't want to use them...