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Being Very Very computer — How Tech Workers’ Attention Spans Wander

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The internet is really good at helping you waste time – often while pursuing work-related goals. The onset is gradual, and sometimes takes hours. Something like that happened to me this evening while I was hunting down the answer to Proxy server & NET:ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID. By 7:45, when I found myself reading the origins of Care Bear tummy symbols, I realized something had gone wrong. Or as Bugs Bunny would say, I knew I should’ve taken that left turn at Albuquerque! Below is a recap of my findings…

Care Bear Stare

Care bear stare, circa 1983.

Quick Care Bear Facts

  • The Care Bears started out as minor characters on greeting cards in 1981

  • The Care Bears franchise was launched in New York City on 9/24/1982

  • The 10 original Care Bears were:

    • Friend Bear

    • Bedtime Bear

    • Wish Bear

    • Grumpy Bear

    • Birthday Bear

    • Funshine Bear

    • Good Luck Bear

    • Cheer Bear

    • Tenderheart Bear

    • Love-a-lot Bear

  • There are currently 39 known Care Bears

  • Their primary mission is to battle the forces of sadness, and their ultimate weapon is the Care Bear Stare, in which the collected Bears stand together and radiate light from their respective tummy symbols

  • The Care Bears appear to live among rainbows and clouds, highly suggestive of heaven

  • There’s no consensus on the question of whether or not they possess souls

Imagining the Care Bears in absurd scenarios is a cottage industry

Reddit is filled with examples like these…

  • How many Care Bears would it take to kill Superman? For the purposes of this fight, they have the same strength of an average bear, yet are smaller, fluffier, and cannot be killed by blunt trauma. The fight takes place in Times Square, and Superman has been irradiated by our sun for one month.

  • Could all 10 Care Bears, with arms interlocked, using the full power of their combined Care Bear stare, overwhelm Ghostrider’s Penance Stare?

  • The Care Bears vs John Wick’s Rage – they see Wick’s grief and come down to show him there’s hope and light in life and they will always be his friends so he won’t be alone. Can they convince him to put his guns away, stay out of the game and live in peace?

  • How powerful is a Care Bear Stare? From what I've seen, a CBS is basically an automatic win if you get enough Care Bears to use it at the same time, but what is its strength if only one Bear used it? It only took 8 of them to completely melt the snow from an entire forest which requires enough energy to blow up a town. Only one bear would be necessary to take down both Jackie Chan and Abraham Lincoln together.

Very smart people have wondered about the Care Bears

Dave Chappelle offers the absolute best synopsis.

“It was about a fucking group of teddy bear people. They were like teddy bears, but they were like people and they were all different colors and they all fucking just walked around caring. They cared about each other and everything else. They all had different designs on their stomachs and the designs told you something about what they might be like inside.

And when shit got real bad, as nice as those teddy bears were, they didn’t get mean faces. They got determined. And the leader would say, come on guys – it’s time for the Care Bear Stare! And them little teddy bears would lock arms, and stare at the problem, and I’m not even bullshitting, actual love would shoot out of their chests, and would dispel anything that was fucked up. ”
— Dave Chappelle

NET:ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID

If you happen to find yourself developing code that needs to relay messages back and forth between two systems… say: Jenkins and Perforce… and neither of those systems are under your direct control, and it’s 7pm on a Friday night, and Assembla tech support hasn’t gotten back to you yet…there is a greater-than-zero chance you might find yourself reading about whether or not the Care Bear Stare could stop Ghostrider. If that should befall you, it’s time to close up your computer.

What happened to the error

I got rid of it by making a different choice: opting to NOT do something fancy, and instead doing something with code I completely control, and therefore produces no variability. Sometimes, a simple quick and dirty solution beats the crap out of technically elegant. This was certainly the case with my problem.

At the end of the day, my work is being done in the service of making software that someone pays for. Those people don’t care if the webhook setup I’m working on is state-of-the-art. Kind of like home buyers aren’t curious about the brand of hammers and power drills that went into the construction of their kitchens.

Chrome Extensions are OK by me

At the beginning of Friday, I thought they were cheesy – in the same way that pegged jeans and tiny backpacks are – but they’ve started to grow on me. The one I’m working on will give my users the workflow they want. In addition, it won’t force anyone to change an uncooperative SSL cert, or put me (or anyone else) at the mercy of an external technical support team’s ticket queue. ❤️