Good Mike / Bad Mike

I'm a bit of a liar.

I sometimes recall a moment, at 7 or 8 years old, when I put a piece of tape on the wall, wondering if it would really be invisible. Some time later, one of my parents (I don't even remember which one anymore) came along and asked if I had put tape on the wall. I said no. 

I'm a parent now, so I can picture the scene in my head. Parent walks down a hallway and sees a piece of tape in the middle of the wall. Three feet away sits young son, looking in another direction, hiding a roll of tape.

"Did you put this tape on the wall?"

"No."

"Did you put this tape on the wall?"

"No."

"Are you sure you didn't put this tape on the wall? You're not in trouble. I just want to know."

Hmm. This seems like a trick. I thought I would be in trouble for putting the tape on the wall, so I lied about it. Now if I admit putting the tape on the wall, I have to admit I lied about it. Then I WILL be in trouble for lying. Better stick to the plan.

"I didn't do it."

"Ok, you wouldn't be in trouble for putting tape on the wall, but you're about to be in trouble for lying to me,

I knew it was a trick!

so I'm going to give you one last chance to tell me the truth."

As a parent, I'm still not sure what comes next. On the one hand, if young son finally comes clean and admits doing the deed, he's finally owned up and told the truth. But he's also admitting to lying about it when you first asked him. I'm thinking the least trouble would be admitting it in the first place, followed by owning up to the truth after lying about it, then finally, continuing to lie, even after being called out for lying. But how do you differentiate the punishments? You have to punish him for lying, but do you punish him less for admitting he lied? If you do, will he start lying about things, then admitting it at the last second, knowing it'll lead to a reduction in punishment?

All I had to say was, 

"Yes, the package says 'invisible', and I was wondering if it would really be invisible." 

Without trying to ennoble my actions too much, I was engaging in skepticism, in science, testing claims. I don't know how my parents might have reacted, but I know how I'd react now. I'd be glad my kid didn't believe everything people told him. Invisible tape is minor, but everyone has to come to terms with misleading advertising sooner or later, and the process has to start somewhere. Once you discover they've been pulling the wool over your eyes about invisible tape, you might be less likely to believe wearing a magnetic bracelet will improve your health or that the Easy Bake oven will be easy or allow you to bake.

I never learned not to lie -- I just learned to be ashamed of myself when I did. And that's not my parents' fault. They disciplined me when I lied. Common sense (I have more to say about the concept of common sense some other time) would dictate if you punish a child for lying, sooner or later, to avoid punishment, they'll stop lying. But I didn't. I just tried harder to tell better, more bulletproof lies. Ultimately, I just started hiding the things about me that I didn’t want to have to lie about.

I don’t know about other people, but I feel like I have two people inside my head. I have Good Mike. He’s positive, cares about justice and decency, loves his family, and wants to find the good in everything. Good Mike really exists, and he’s the guy who usually writes this blog. He’s the angel on my shoulder who shows up to remind me about the things I’ve learned from all my past experiences. 

But there’s also Bad Mike. He’s bitter, angry, cynical, pessimistic, and doesn’t listen to reason. He’s the misanthrope on my shoulder who tells people the world needs an asteroid to wipe out the human race. He makes fun of everyone’s music. He rages at drivers who don’t understand the function of turn signals. Bad Mike really exists, too, and I can't reconcile Good Mike with Bad Mike.

Because I know myself and my tendencies, I've pushed myself while writing my posts never to say anything untrue. But while my posts have been honest, they don't represent all of my conflicted and strange split personality. I've committed a sin of omission, so to speak, in bottling up Bad Mike. I set out to write every day, to try to connect with people, to learn from my audience and, though it feels a little narcissistic to say so, I was hoping to teach my audience something about themselves and about me. I don't write every day, though. I only write when Good Mike has something to say.

Bad Mike needs to breathe. As it turns out, I think my conflicting sides inform one another. The good little voice in my head only exists in counterpoint to the rude little voice in my head. 

So over the next few weeks, this blog is going to change in format. Bad Mike has some things to say, and this blog, accordingly will change names and formats. 

Bad Mike isn’t always nice, and he's frequently illogical and unreasonable, but I’ll try to make him entertaining. Bear with him, though. I didn't know Good Mike was funny until people told me, so I definitely don't know how interesting Bad Mike is going to be. I'm hoping that when Bad Mike and Good Mike speak to each other, I get closer to my own truths and my own feelings. Time will tell.

There's scotch tape on the wall, and I put it there, dammit.

Get ready for Good Mike / Bad Mike.

Plenty

Jessika finds constant amusement in my need for numbers and specificity. Even for so simple a task as making boxed macaroni and cheese, I follow the directions. But directions aren't enough. Because of whatever strange things happen inside my head, I go a step further. See, the side of the box calls for 4 tablespoons of butter or margarine and a quarter cup of milk. When the kids eat mac and cheese, I always take a fresh stick of butter out of the fridge, so I can measure it more easily (I sometimes even look for the stick where the measurement lines aren't crooked), and I pour milk into a measuring cup. I set the butter and the milk on the counter, along with the torn-open package of cheese. Once the pasta finishes cooking, all I have to do is add my pre-measured milk, butter, and cheese packet. Then I stir. 

Jessika eyeballs her quantities. She puts some butter into the pot, puts some milk into the pot, and she never measures it. I can't live like that. I can't just put "some" of anything into a recipe. I will happily eat food that others cook, regardless of their methods, but I personally have difficulty with the concept of "some of this, some of that" cooking.

So the food I cook often has complicated mise en place, leading me to dirty large numbers of tiny dishes to make simple recipes. You know those cooking shows where professional chefs use countless ramekins to show the TV audience what all the ingredients look like before they go into a dish? I would manage my cooking life like that, if I could. I like to think, though, that the food I cook maintains consistency from one preparation to the next. If you've eaten my baked mac and cheese once, the dish will taste the same each time (unless I don't have a properly-shaped dish or try making it with gluten-free pasta). You know what you're getting. I find comfort in knowing what I'm getting.

So, I've probably front-loaded the punchline for this entire post here, but bearing in mind my need for numbers and my need for mise en place, when Jessika and I took the kids to the beach last week, we had friends and family telling us over and over again to use plenty of sunscreen. For most people, this is pretty good advice, but for the four of us, it was a recipe for fiery pain and copious amounts of aloe.

This is a picture of me from last week. No, look again. The sun temporarily burned away my smug arrogance.

Jessika and the kids had never gone to the beach. They don't know about the sunlight reflecting off the sand or the danger of an overcast and windy day. So they didn't have a frame of reference for how quickly they would burn or how much sunscreen to use. I have a frame of reference, but I have an entirely different set of challenges, which I managed to inflict upon my wife and kids. I don't have any idea how to quantify "plenty". By my reckoning, if I made $60,000 a year in my job, I'd have plenty of money. By somebody else's reckoning, $60,000 a year would barely pay the bills. "Plenty" is a matter of perspective. An NFL quarterback with 4 or 5 seconds to think about where to throw the ball has plenty of time. Give me the same amount of time to throw a football, and I'm still trying to figure out how to hold the stupid thing.

You know what would have helped me? A measurement. Something like, "Apply .25 ounces of sunscreen per 50 square inches of skin." Then the package could give me a helpful infographic detailing how to determine my overall skin area, based on my height and weight. A skin pigmentation graph wouldn't hurt either, just in case there are greater or lesser amounts of sunscreen recommended, depending on skin type. I also wouldn't mind having a couple of pictures of what my skin should look like after applying sunscreen. Should there be a slight sheen to my skin? Should it look normal? Should there still be white streaks from where not all the sunscreen absorbed into my skin? These are pressing questions from someone who dragged three innocents into the world of beach-induced, head-to-toe sunburn last week.

Finally, I need a timeline for reapplication. Based on time of day, cloud cover, temperature, latitude, whatever other relevant factors come into play -- how often should I reapply sunscreen? Again, a handy infographic would help me.

With enough time on my hands, I could even pre-portion sunscreen, creating my own preventative mise en place for the entire family, saying, "Ok, now it's time to put on sunscreen. This is exactly how much you need, in this little squeeze tube. We'll meet back here in 53 minutes and 21 seconds to reapply, unless the sun comes out. Then we'll meet in 41 minutes and 43 seconds."

Then again, Jessika has now completed her first trial run at the beach. And her macaroni and cheese comes out just as well as mine does. 

I probably don't need to pre-portion, after all.

You Don't Have to Turn on the Blue Light!

I'm afraid of the police. I shouldn't be afraid, since I stick pretty close to the speed limit these days. I keep my tags current and my various lights working. I always come to a complete stop at stop signs, and I don't run red lights. In fact, in 20 years of driving, I've only been involved in one accident where I was at fault, and in that one, I was traveling approximately 5 miles per hour and the car in front of me had nothing more than scratches on the bumper. So I'm a pretty safe driver, and my adherence to other laws these days is generally as precise as my adherence to traffic laws.

Driving down the road, though, noticing a police car behind me, I always worry about what might happen. Do my brake lights work? Do my running lights work? Is this guy going to worry about 1 mph over the speed limit? My hands start to shake a little, and I can't stop looking at my speedometer and my rearview mirror. A cop pulled me over once for having an expired tag. The sticker had come loose and fallen off, or someone had physically removed it from my plate. Either way, he pulled me over. I didn't get a ticket, but I had to sit on the side of the road with blue lights flashing behind me. The county police pulled me over twice in one night once for a dead headlight. The light must have just gone out, since I hadn't noticed it yet. Two different police officers in one county for one headlight! Seriously? There are no murders happening that need investigating?

Even if I know I'm obeying all the relevant traffic laws at that moment, I worry that the officer behind me might turn on the blue lights anyway. See, I've had a run-in with the police that never should have happened. I haven't always worried about the speed limit as much as I do now. In fact, I used to have a heavy foot. I got a ticket once from a motorcycle cop who'd set up a speed trap. I wasn't exactly flying, but I was over the speed limit, so I can't reasonably complain. I went to the courthouse to pay my ticket. Shortly after walking up to the payment window and presenting my copy of the ticket, a sherriff's deputy approached me. 

"Are you Robert Michael Coon?" 

"Yes."

He also confirmed my social security number. Yep, that's me. I started to feel a little nervous. 

"Did I park in the wrong parking lot or something?"

"No. We have a warrant for your arrest."

Now, I'd obviously sat on the side of the road before with flashing blue lights behind me. I had even testified in court against a guy driving a dump truck who had clipped the back of my car. I had no frame of reference for this. 

"So what do I need to do to clear this up?"

"Well, first I'm going to arrest you."

You know the stereotypical (probably archetypal) movie scene where one white guy walks into a bar full of black guys and says something offensive? You know, there's the record-scratching sound, and everyone just freezes in stunned silence for a minute? Yeah, I felt something like that.

He was nice enough to let me use my cell phone to call Jessika. I told her I was under arrest, and I didn't know why. I told her they were taking me to the county jail. I didn't know what else to say. The officer put me in handcuffs and leg cuffs and led me out to a police van. I got into it, along with some other people, and we drove to the county jail. They booked me, took my photo and fingerprints, all that jazz, and I sat in a holding cell for the next few hours while I waited for an officer from Oconee County, Georgia to come pick me up for transport to their county jail. I don't think I felt anything. I just sat listening to people tell each other their stories, why they were here. People really ask each other that question: "What're you in for?" I figured it was just a movie thing.

Behind the scenes, Jessika had jumped into action. When she called my friend David, he didn't believe her. I'm not the only Mike we know. She said "Mike's in jail," and he thought she was talking about a different friend named Mike. Nobody believed I could do anything to land me in jail. It had to be another Mike. She called my sister and my parents, and they found an attorney who managed to get me out that afternoon. I'm glad he was so capable, because I walked out of that jail at 5:00pm on a Friday. At any point, if anyone involved had moved just a little more slowly, I could have spent the weekend in jail. But everybody came through, and I walked out of the jail to see my parents and my sister and my wife waiting for me outside. I kissed Jessika, and at 32 years old, I walked to my father, hugged him, holding on for dear life, and I cried.

In 2001, while living in Athens, GA, Jessika and I had our radios stolen from our cars. The thief also took my backpack with my college textbooks and notebooks. I can only assume that something in that backpack had my name on it, because a few years later, a man who called himself Robert Coon committed felony credit card fraud in Oconee County, Georgia, near Athens and the University of Georgia. I lived in Athens while I attended UGA, so when an enterprising deputy looked up rental records in Oconee County, he found my name and my social security number. Without making any attempt to contact me or verify my identity, he had a warrant sworn out for my arrest. Fortunately, by the time the crime took place, I lived an hour away and worked for Barnes and Noble. I also bear no physical resemblance to the person who committed the crime, so my attorney was able to get the case dismissed before I was formally arraigned.

So now I can't see a cop without a moment of terror. Every single time I see a police car on the road, I think about the power that they have to change a person's life. I didn't commit the crime in question, but because a sworn officer of the law said that I did, I spent a day in jail. What if I had still lived in Athens when the crime occurred? What if the perpetrator had more closely matched my physical description? What if the defrauded individual in the intervening years between the crime and my arrest had forgotten enough of his features that, looking at me, she had become convinced I was the person who stole her money? I could have gone to real prison, not just a county jail, simply because a deputy said I did something, and I couldn't prove otherwise. We hear the phrase "innocent until proven guilty", but at no point in the process of getting handcuffed, taken to jail, and left in a holding cell for a warrant that never should have been issued did I EVER feel innocent.

Despite our illusions to the contrary, our lives are not always under our control, at least not in the sense we can actively predict. Sure, if we had chosen to live in another apartment way back in 2001, we wouldn't have had our radios stolen, and I would not have been impersonated by a criminal. But what else might have happened instead? We can't see around every corner, predict every outcome.

I just keep an eye out behind me.

Bloody Legs and Broken Printers

As the parent of an 8th grader, I'm beginning to learn about the occasionally incurable sullenness of teenagers, about the difficulty of finding out anything useful about a teenager's life, and about the pain of watching a child seemingly procrastinate his future away.

I get it. The sullenness comes with the age, not from some grudge he bears against us. I expect, like most of us, he'll grow out of it sooner or later. I think the need for privacy has something to do with a desire to have control over his own life, even if he only controls our access to information. And his procrastination probably won't end the world. Most people procrastinate at some point in their lives, and the world still has plenty of doctors and engineers.

Don't get me wrong, though. Procrastination can cause bodily injury.

In my freshman year of college, I had two roommates in an apartment off campus. During that year I got sick -- not just a sniffle, but full on body-shivering, fevered-delerium, can't-get-out-of-bed sick. I had a roommate to help out, and though he'd never publicly admit it, he's actually a nice guy. He went to the store and got supplies for me, and though he didn't minister to me in the way a nurse or a mom would, he really helped me make it through. And seriously, as a couple of teenagers, it would have been more than a little awkward for him to stand over me taking my temperature or rubbing Vick's Vapo-Rub on my chest. Though the realities of dealing with other people's hygiene habits, sleep patterns, and music volumes can rankle, having other people living with you can provide a safety net you don't get when you live alone. 

I found this out during my sophomore year, when I waited until around 1am one night to finish and print a paper due at 8am the following morning. I had decided, after having a year with two roommates my age, to try living alone. Aside from the inconvenience of moving, nobody was really mad about it. I'm still close with one of them, and I'm pretty cordial Facebook friends with the other (despite the probably unclosable political gap between us). I was young and still figuring things out for myself, so I wanted to try something new. I found myself sitting alone in my apartment, at my computer, a mere seven hours before I would hand in my paper. I clicked "Print" and found out, to my horror, that my printer had stopped working. I don't know what happened. The printer quit working, and the campus computer lab had already closed.

Has ANYBODY ever had a printer you could trust?

I called my old roommate, David. Problem solved. I could print the paper at his apartment. So I saved it to a floppy disk, put on a coat, and walked out to the car. Though the date escapes me now, I assume this must have been early to mid-December, since the temperature was below freezing, and the paper was an end-of-term paper. Of course, because this is how these situations work, the car wouldn't crank. Wouldn't even turn over, in fact. I walked back into the apartment, got my bicycle, wheeled it down to the street, and started pedaling. David didn't own a car, so I still helped him out with transportation, and he also did a lot of walking and riding city buses, so he couldn't pick me up. I had about a mile of uphill bicycle travel in front of me.

I'm not a strong bicycler, and as I started up a hill, I needed to downshift to have any hope of making it to the top. My bike hesitated and threw its chain (probably because the bicycle's wheels weren't moving). I fell off the bike and into the middle of the roadway. Thankfully, at 1:30 am, the road was quiet. I fell on top of the bike, and the handlebars bent under my weight. Even through my jeans, I skinned my leg badly, to the point where I could feel a small trickle of blood. Just to recap, I'm now standing in the middle of the road, blood trickling down my leg, holding a ruined bike in sub-freezing temperatures, now with half a mile to walk to get to a place where I can print a paper. Of course, I'll then have to walk home, since David doesn't have a car in which to drive me home.

By the time I reached David's apartment, I was a shivering, stressed-out mess, but I got the paper printed. I think he gave me a hot drink. I walked home. To my credit, I never even considered asking for an extension on the paper. I HAD to get the paper printed and turned in on time. I would not have even TRIED to make excuses to the professor about my tough night. Even as a sullen teenager, I knew I'd had plenty of opportunities before 1:00am to finish and print my paper, which would have avoided all of my trouble. Sure, I would still have needed to deal with the printer and the car, but not in the middle of the night, bleeding into my jeans.

So when I see my son putting off assignments until the night they're due, I'm not just worried about what will happen if I have to drive to Walmart at midnight to replace a printer. I'm worried about the habits he's building, because I don't want to think about him walking a freezing mile through a rough part of town in the middle of the night, dragging a useless bicycle behind him. But if you asked my parents, I'm sure they'd tell you they wanted the same for me. I still haven't completely learned the procrastination lesson, but because of events like this one or my recent issue with a flash drive, I've learned more about the role of planning and anticipation in our lives. We can't prevent the really big, bad stuff from happening someday, but we can avoid the small stuff.  

I don't expect him to learn the lesson any better than I did until he has to endure his own defeats. I think I might learn a little from him, though.

You Forgot Your Flash Drive

I love The Big Bang Theory. Despite the show's cavalier treatment of geek culture, sometimes getting crucial details wrong and showing the writers of the show are probably more chic than geek, the characters have enough similarity to myself and to the geeks I've known in my life that I can forgive their mistakes (I'm not going to dig into their inaccuracies here, but I'll note -- there are no playable races in World of Warcraft with prehensile tails). I'm thrilled that the top-rated sitcom in America can reference comic books, fan conventions, video games, and string theory without even a whiff of mainstream disdain and still remain the top-rated sitcom in America. Around my house we don't even name the show anymore. On Thursday night, we get my daughter in bed and sit down to watch The Boys. Yes, the girls on the show have taken a larger and larger role over the years, but for us, it's still The Boys.

"There is no more Sheldon! I am the sword master!"

One of my favorite episodes has the boys on a trip to Northern California to attend a physics conference where real-world physicist George Smoot will present a paper. Sheldon has a research paper of his own on a flash drive to give to Dr. Smoot. He expects the professor will love it "because it's brilliant." To his dismay, in the middle of their train ride through California, he discovers he left his flash drive at home, and to his mind, the rhythmic sound of the train's wheels mock him, chanting "you-forgot-your-flash-drive, you-forgot-your-flash-drive, you-forgot-your-flash-drive."

I have read voraciously throughout most of my life, and I studied fiction in college, and in fiction, I believe we find mirrors for ourselves. We find new ways of describing our lives and coming to terms with our successes and failures. By experiencing part of another person's life, we gain perspective on our own. So instead of putting up a new blog post last week, I have spent the past few days repeating to myself -- 

you-forgot-your-flash-drive, you-forgot-your-flash-drive, you-forgot-your-flash-drive

Yeah, I lost my post.

You see, I find opportunities to write at different times during the day. Sometimes, after getting out of the shower and before waking up my daughter for the school day, I will find a few minutes to get some thoughts into digital form. Throughout the day at work I find myself jotting down notes on a legal pad I keep at my desk, and instead of leaving the building or taking a walk on my 15-minute breaks, I will often stay at my desk and get those thoughts into a text file on my work computer's Notepad program. I save those thoughts to a usb flash drive. I do most of my composing in Notepad, actually, because I can edit a plain text file on practically any computer I happen to be near. So I've taken to keeping all of my posts on my flash drive, and when they're ready to publish, I copy/paste them onto Blogger, do a quick final edit to make sure the formatting looks right, add whatever pictures I plan on using, and click "Publish".

So last week, after pecking at it off and on for a couple of weeks, I felt ready to publish. I had done some editing during breaks at work and had the entire post saved to my flash drive. I came home and unloaded my pockets. Then I got sick. Unlike my friend Terese, I didn't become Wolverine, but I was in bad shape. I spent the weekend in a Day/Nyquil-induced haze, and by Monday I had forgotten where I put my flash drive. I can't find it. I've looked in all the places such things end up, even checking the laundry room, on the off chance I forgot to take it out of my pocket (it's happened before -- the thing is pretty durable, as it turns out). I don't think I can recreate it, either. I got it out of my head looking the way I wanted to, and I'm not sure I can get it back in there and back out again. So barring a miracle, my post is gone. Sheldon keeps chanting in my head, over and over and over again.

Jessika occasionally points out my concern, bordering on paranoia, for my way of doing things. I wouldn't say that I suffer from OCD, though. I have had experiences during my life that I would not like to repeat. Ever have a credit or debit card declined in a grocery store with a cart full of groceries? Such an experience might make you more likely to check your bank balance before heading out to the store, or check it on your phone while you're shopping. Either way, you'll verify that you have funds before piling a bunch of stuff on the belt. I've written before about pushing a car up an icy hill because I couldn't be bothered to keep track of weather. 

So I create habits for myself that help me avoid situations I don't want to repeat. Some might call them rituals. I don't care. Call it paranoia. Call it what you want, as long as I don't repeat past mistakes. At work I have a complicated highlighter usage system for keeping track of orders that I take. I made mistakes very early on, and I don't want to repeat them, so my highlighters have helped me create habits that help me avoid mistakes. In public places, I have a habit every few minutes of touching my back right pants pocket. I keep my wallet there. One of these days, if I ever lose my wallet (which is hard to do when you're constantly verifying its presence), I'll have a pretty good idea of the time frame when it went missing.

I have a feeling that my new flash drive, when I buy it, will have a designated location at work, and a designated location at home. I have a feeling I'll become borderline obsessive about checking those locations to verify the flash drive hasn't disappeared. I don't want to lose another post. 

Call me paranoid. 

But my paranoia has a purpose.

I Am NOT a Sith Lord

A number of years ago, frustrated by my schedule and pay scale as a retail manager, convinced that my natural intelligence should allow me to do nearly any job that I had a mind to do, and motivated by no small amount of shame that one of the "smart" kids from high school dropped out of college and worked as a retail manager, I did something bad. With the help of a friend, I fabricated a job history, taught myself just enough Java to sound like a moron to people who actually know Java, and began applying for positions as a programmer. My friend had successfully pursued the same kind of strategy a few years before and was confident I could do it. He told me repeatedly that HR managers really don't know anything about the jobs they fill, and that confidence and even a degree of arrogance would enable me to walk into a mid-level job. After that, my small amount of knowledge, combined with easily-Googled boilerplate code and a decent mentor reachable on instant messenger would have me up to speed within months. I went for it.

Even then, I knew that I was doing something wrong, and I suck at doing bad things.

I can't even do bad things in a video game without feeling horrible about it. In Fallout 3, when you find the town of Megaton, the one with the unexploded nuclear bomb in the middle of it, you have a choice. You can embark upon a quest chain that leads to defusing the bomb, securing the town against that threat. Or you can complete the quest chain from a rich landowner living in a tower near the town. He thinks the town is an eyesore and wants it destroyed. Through his quest chain you can detonate the bomb and destroy Megaton. It's just a game, and the innocent people in the town don't exist. So in the interest of completing the game in every way possible, I destroyed the town on my second playthrough of the game. I felt bad for three days, then deleted the save file. I simply couldn't deal with the knowledge that I had killed non-existent innocents for no reason other than receiving a virtual trophy. There are Xbox Achievements in that game that I will never get.

I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of voices had suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

In Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the player can choose to play a good or an evil character, a Jedi Master or a Sith Lord. The game keeps track of what dialogue choices a player makes, assigning light side or dark side points for speaking politely or rudely. The player's actions lead to the accumulation of dark and light side points, as well. In one event, some thieves are shaking down a man for money. The player gets light side points for saving the man from the thieves and even more light side points for refusing his offer of a reward afterwards. Or you can kill all of them and take everybody's money. Or you can save him from the thieves and then bully him into giving you the money. In the game, I always speak respectfully, try to stay on everyone's good side, and save as many people as I can. There are other games where the player makes good vs. evil choices, but no matter how hard I try, I'm not happy being the bad guy in a game.

I think it's relevant here to bring up the choice between Jedi Master and Sith Lord in Knights of the Old Republic. According to the various additional materials available on the Star Wars Universe, the Sith don't necessarily see themselves as evil. I'll admit that some, like Darth Maul, seem like mindless killing machines (and are less interesting for it), but others see themselves as realists. The truly strong do not need such concepts as morality or right and wrong. They pursue their own self interest and think that others should do the same. The strong will prevail, and the weak will fall. My software interview was my attempt to become the Sith Lord of my own life. I should pursue whatever opportunities arose, through whatever means necessary.

After interviewing with an oblivious HR manager (my friend was right about their grasp of technology), I had a second interview with a company. I remember meeting my potential boss and making some polite small talk. It was a panel interview and started out well. What kind of work have you done? I had a great answer for that one. Every faked job history had a detailed backstory. Then I started getting the real questions, specific questions that only a true professional would be able to answer. What were the questions? I don't know. I don't think I understood the questions then, let alone now. I was in over my head, crashing and burning. I could see the interviewers glancing at one another. I was caught. Oddly, they never called my bluff. At some point, I begged off with an excuse about getting nervous in job interviews and being unused to not having my reference materials nearby. I even said that I think memorizing details of procedures was unnecessary with the sheer volume of reference at our fingertips online. Why store information both in my head and online? When you're bombing an interview, why not start spewing arrogant generalizations, too? They thanked me for coming in, and I thanked them for their time. We all knew what had just happened.

Just like on my Xbox, there are some real life achievements I will never get. I'm okay with that.