> Between Jira Tickets I Eat Curry Rice With Feces Hands

In between Jira stories I eat curry rice slop with my brown feces-encrusted hands in solidarity with all my third world colleagues. I lick the fingers deep. Turmeric, rice starch, whatever dried on the nail from the last bathroom visit. Same color family anyway. Brown is the house color of decay, diarrhea, and H1B lunch.

They sit two cubes over making that wet smacking sound with the same plastic tupperware they have used since 2019. Garlic hits the HVAC. The PM walks past and pretends the smell is "culture." I match them bite for bite so nobody can say I am not a team player. Elite human capital. Best and brightest. Net gain.

Then the buttholes are pre-lubbed with diarrhea and they "scrum" like good little agile "engineers." Fifteen minutes of pointing at a board nobody reads. Yesterday I said I was 80 percent done on a ticket that is a login button. Today I am 80 percent done again. The guy from Hyderabad updates Jira with a paragraph that means nothing and everyone nods. Velocity is a number we invented so the standup has a plot.

Software engineer is a job title. Real engineers have a license. These people have a Slack handle and a work visa and a gut full of curry that is already halfway back out. We stand in a circle and say blockers. My blocker is that my asshole is conducting a daily standup of its own and I still have to pretend story points are science.

Sprint review is a slideshow of tickets that moved columns. Nobody shipped a product a plumber would respect. We shipped process. We shipped empathy. We shipped a burndown chart that looks like a child's drawing of a hill. Then we eat more slop and lick more fingers and call it collaboration.

I used to think the office was for work. The office is a cafeteria with laptops. The work is typing into a box any retard can type into. The brown hands keep coming because the wage is lower and the diarrhea is already priced in. HR calls it diversity. I call it a shared bathroom schedule.

After standup I go wash and the sink is already a crime scene. Orange film. Rice grains. A thumbprint on the soap dispenser that looks like it has a citizenship. I wash anyway. Then I go back and accept another story about a dropdown. Best and brightest. They flew 8,000 miles to argue about Fibonacci numbers while their colon writes the real retrospective.

If this is the talent pipeline then the country already lost and we are just documenting it in two-week increments. I will keep eating with dirty hands. Solidarity. Also I am hungry and the rice is right there.