{"id":11231,"date":"2013-03-21T10:24:36","date_gmt":"2013-03-21T10:24:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dropsafe.crypticide.com\/?p=11231"},"modified":"2013-03-21T10:25:57","modified_gmt":"2013-03-21T10:25:57","slug":"pycon-attendee-fired-from-job-for-being-overheard-making-dongle-jokes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alecmuffett.com\/article\/11231","title":{"rendered":"#PyCon attendee fired from job for being overheard making ‘dongle’ jokes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Without comment:<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

…and…<\/p>\n

What I will share with you here is the backstory that led to this \u2013<\/p>\n

The guy behind me to the far left was saying he didn\u2019t find much value from the logging session that day. I agreed with him so I turned around and said so. \u00a0He then went onto say that an earlier session he\u2019d been to where the speaker was talking about images and visualization with Python was really good, even if it seemed to him the speaker wasn\u2019t really an expert on images. He said he would be interested in forking the repo and continuing development.<\/p>\n

That would have been fine until the guy next to him\u2026<\/p>\n

began making sexual forking jokes<\/p>\n

I was going to let it go. It had been a long week. A long month. I\u2019d been on the road since mid February attending and speaking at conferences. \u00a0PyCon was my 5th and final conference before heading home.<\/p>\n

I know it\u2019s important to pick my battles.<\/em><\/p>\n

I know I don\u2019t have to be a hero in every situation.<\/p>\n

Sometimes I just want to go to a conference and be a geek.<\/p>\n

But\u2026<\/p>\n

like Popeye, I couldn\u2019t \u201cstands it no more\u201d because of what happened \u2013<\/p>\n

Jesse Noller was up on stage thanking the sponsors. The guys behind me (one off to the right) said, \u201cYou can thank me, you can thank me\u201d. That told me they were a sponsoring company of Pycon and from the photos I took, his badge had an add-on that said, \u201cSponsor\u201d.<\/p>\n

My company was a Gold sponsor as well.<\/p>\n

They started talking about \u201cbig\u201d dongles. I could feel my face getting flustered.<\/p>\n

Was this really happening?
\nHow many times do I have to deal with this?
\nCan they not hear what Jesse is saying?
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

The stuff about the dongles wasn\u2019t even logical and as a self professed nerd, that bothered me. Dongles are intended to be small and unobtrusive. They\u2019re intended for network connectivity and to service as physical licence keys for software. I\u2019d consulted in the past with an automotive shop that needed data recovery and technical support. I know what PCMCIA dongles look like.<\/p>\n

I was telling myself if they made one more sexual joke, I\u2019d say something.<\/p>\n

The it happened\u2026.The trigger.<\/em><\/p>\n

Jesse was on the main stage with thousands of people sitting in the audience. He was talking about helping the next generation learn to program and how happy PyCon was with the\u00a0Young Coders workshop<\/a>\u00a0(which I volunteered at). He was mentioning that the\u00a0PyLadies auction<\/a>\u00a0had raised $10,000 in a single night and the funds would be used the funds for their initiatives.<\/p>\n

I saw a photo on main stage of a little girl who had been in the Young Coders workshop.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

I realized I had to do something or she would never have the chance to learn and love programming because the ass clowns behind me would make it impossible for her to do so.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Links:<\/p>\n