What was going on in Europe 18 years ago? Isn't this like the third story about someone who was kept locked in a basement for 18 years? I guess the only comfort I can take out of this is that Europeans can no longer point their collective fingers at the US for being batshit crazy, now that they've unearthed their own homegrown psychopaths.

I'm not young and naive. I've worked in the corporate world. I'm just wondering when we all became a bunch of spineless pussies. When exactly did that happen?

Yeah yeah, we're all a bunch of corporate whores, spinless pussies, ass-kissers, bla bla bla.

So tell me something: you, as a baker working at 3am, had a couple of people working for you, and one of them hired someone to do the books let's say, i.e. nothing to do with baking. Let's say that person with no baking knowledge or experience marched into your kitchen one find afternoon after a day of brioche and challa and sprouted-brain-flax-seed-low-carb muffins (for the soy latte set), and told you that using the refrigerator to store your sourdough starter was a waste of resources (just stop making sourdough, you'd save space and nobody likes it anyway). Are you telling me you wouldn't be a little tweaked by that? If you say "no" then I say "bullshit".

Most jobs require some level of diplomacy. You can call it politics, and sometimes it is, but usually it's just a matter of dealing with a huge variety of personalities and having to negotiate getting along with everyone in order to achieve a common goal. There's nothing spineless or whorish about that, and further to the refrain of "corporate america sucks!" well hey presto, I work for an ASP software company -- we need a central office, because someone has to bill our clients, someone has to answer the phone when they have problems, someone has to come up with new ideas of things we think they need, someone needs to build it, and someone needs to go out and sell the software to new customers. Lots of someones, actually, so we have a sizable organization.

That's the world. As romantic as it sounds, we can't all be in trades, and in fact if it wasn't for large organizations with their weird personalities and politics and rules of engagement you probably wouldn't be able to be a baker at 3am. Unless you grow your own wheat and mill your own flour, your supplies are produced by a bunch of spineless pussies in a building somewhere doing demand forecasting, a bunch of ass-kissers doing supply management, a few corporate whores in shipping, and also a few unenlightened dupes doing the invoicing. And some of them probably stop by a bakery on their way into work in the morning to buy a cup of coffee and a sticky bun.

Sweet, dude, thanks. That new address bar sucks.