Welcome to my world.

Welcome to adashtrash (more properly, a-trash, although it doesn't read as well, which is really what matters in the blog format, isn't it?), an ongoing chronicle of my life as an "orange badge" at Microsoft. For some of you, that makes sense. For the rest of you, I have two explanations, one short and one long. Only you can decide what one is right for you, although since I have to write both either way, I would encourage you to read both as well. Seriously, it will only take like five seconds to read the short one, so why not?

(In fact, in the time it will take you to read this sentence, you could have already read the short version. Twice. Maybe three times if you took one of those speed-reading classes, although I don't really believe those work, so maybe just the two times is more realistic.)

(Three times. Or four, if speed-reading works. Which I don't think it does. )

(Five times. Or six … never mind)

Anyway, here are the aforementioned two versions of what it means to be an orange-badge:

Short Version
Riding a bus in the South, pre-Rosa Parks. Or, to use a slightly less dramatic comparison, like being a Sneetch with no star on its belly during those heady, stars-upon-thars days.

Long Version
A lot of people work at Microsoft. Everyone who works here has a badge, which you need to get into secure areas of the various buildings on the Microsoft campus. (Am I the only one who finds that term annoying? A campus is a place where people sit around "The Fountain" or "The Quad" and pretend to study while checking out the co-eds. Not a place where you go sit in a windowless cube for 8 hours a day, which--now that I write that--sounds more like a prison, which is perhaps a more apt metaphor.) Anyway, everyone here at Microsoft has badges with their pictures and names on them. If you actually work FOR Microsoft, you get a blue box around your picture, and are a blue badge, AKA an actual employee, AKA a "real person." (I have actually seen an internal dictionary of Microsoft terms that said "Real person: Someone with a blue badge.") However, if you simply work AT Microsoft but not FOR Microsoft, the colored box around your picture is orange, making you--you guessed it--an orange badge.

Naturally, this two-tiered system lends itself quite handily to rampant discrimination based on badge-color, or "badgeism" as I like to call it. Here are just some examples of badgeism that I can think of off the top of my head:

• You don't get a real email address. Instead, your email has an a- (hence the name of the blog) (Don't blame me, I did say this was the long version) in front of it, so everyone you email will know that you are not an actual employee/real person, and—as such—you can be ignored. Or blamed for anything that goes wrong.
  
  
• When Microsoft ships a product, they usually have a reward or "Ship Gift" or something (possibly even time off) for everyone who worked on the product. Unless … wait for it … you are an orange-badge. Naturally, orange-badges aren't eligible for ship gifts or time off. (Well, we can take time off, we just don't get paid for it ...) Because, you know, OUR part of the project wasn't important. Presumable, blue-badges took care of all the important stuff, while the orange-badges just straightened up their offices and went on latte runs.
  
  
• You only have all-day access to the building you work in, and possibly the nearest cafeteria. So if you have a really early conference call you need to be in the office for and it's in a different building, you need to either call security or beg a passing blue-badge to let you in. Naturally, blue badges have 24/7 access to pretty much any building, because you never know when some low-level programmer might have a legitimate need to get into the marketing building a mile from where his office is at 10 PM at night for an urgent, work-related purpose, and not just to sniff the chairs of the hot marketing chicks that won't talk to them. (Hey, it could happen.) (Actually, it probably has.) (I mean, some of the marketing chicks are really pretty hot.)

There's more, of course, but I'll save those for later. Otherwise I wouldn't have anything else to blog about, would I?