No, I haven’t lost my mind. Friend of mine and I are having a drink at the bar, we both work remote for different companies and we started talking about the old episodes of The Jetsons when Mr Spacely (the boss) would pop up on George Jetson’s screen out of nowhere and start screaming at him. In some ways, that’s kinda how remote work is today, just not flying cars!
So, later tonight I’ll be on a quest to find old episodes of The Jetsons to watch!
“Spacely’s a stoop… Spacely’s a stoop… Spacely’s a stoop… .”
Yes, I work remotely, no, I haven’t seen any episodes of The Jetsons since I started (or indeed, for 40 years).
If my boss* started screaming at me through my screen, she’d be fired before she finished.
Officially, my boss is me. But I do have an editor that I’m accountable to for my content (but not my hours or anything else).
In the Jetsons, the screen was just the futuristic version of a phone or intercom. George still had to go to work.
I prefer the Simpsons episode where Homer was working at home (because he had become too fat to move?) and he used a dipping bird to keep hitting a key on the keyboard to keep the app going.
On a slight tangent: It was recently the 60th anniversary of the first airing of the Jetsons and the local paper had a page about the show. I watched it in the 80s and thought it was an old cartoon. I was 50’ish years old when I found out that was mostly incorrect. It had one season with 24 episodes in the 62-63 period, and then a second season with 41 episodes in the 80s. Reading the descriptions of the second season, I was definitely watching those as well. I had no idea some of them were new.
There was a 3rd season in 87 but I wasn’t watching by then.
I haven’t seen The Jetsons lately, but my job is very similar to George Clooney’s in Up In The Air. I don’t fire people for a living, but as a management consultant, my profession used to be known for being on the road at least 4 days a week. Now Anna Kendrick has come in with her online meetings so I do all my work from the home office.
To be honest, I can’t say I miss all that travel.
And then the terrible film that came out around 1990 or so, that was around the time as Captain Planet cartoons and the Exxon Valdez so the environmental theme was hammered into your head in what should have a been a cute and lighthearted movie.
Ditto, except I think I’ve seen The Jetsons as recently as the 90s
Speaking of the Jetsons, didn’t the opening sequence show him going to work? I guess that was so long ago that the idea of remote log in wasn’t conceivable at the time.
I love that episode. I joked so much with my coworker about using a dipping bird that he got me one. I had it running in my office for a couple weeks (you have to top off the water), but the top of its head got so much mineral build-up that it started getting top heavy. I need to clean it up and start the “perpetual motion” machine again.
Heck, I watch Jetsons episodes when I should be working. These four day work weeks are a killer.
Wait, did I say that out loud?
We made a lot of jokes about it. And thought up crazy ways to move a dipping bird around on a keyboard so it could go through an entire Unix install script. We did end up calling an old database integrity check ‘the dipping bird’. This old code was written in the days of steam driven computers and expected to take 24 hours or more to run. You might check it for error reports once in a while. Now days this might take 1/2 hour to run and if you didn’t turn off prompting it would ask to continue every few seconds.
Hah! I’ve somewhat seriously considered getting one of these - I work on two different computers, and if i’m on computer A, computer B times out and is a bit of a pain to log back into.
Since I use a trackball mouse, however, this would be less useful; I’d have to connect an otherwise-useless regular mouse to computer B, taking up a USB port and desktop space.
Re the OP:
Yes, and no.