Video Game Tester: Gaining weight is easy when you sit and snack all day...

I started writing about my days as a video game tester in California.

I Once Had a Job Testing Video Game
A Hella Cool Pop in the City

I am not what you call a thin man. I've always been a little on the girthy side. I had a brief spurt of thinness when I came back from Army basic training (I was in the National Guard), but I quickly gained it back by sitting on my butt watching TV and drinking regular pop.

One glorious Spring/Summer of 1999 when I went on the Atkins diet, I lost about 20 pounds. I had dropped down from 225 to about 205 in a few months of dieting. Everyone was impressed at my resolve. I avoided sweets like the plague. I didn't eat bread. I took vitamins. I worked out. I rode my mountain bike. I played basketball. I was a "lean, mean, fighting machine" or at least lean...

After I obtained my job as a video game tester, I suddenly found it harder and harder to maintain my diet. I tried, but with things like meat and eggs now costing about twice as much in California than what they cost in Nebraska, I was forced to start skipping the protein and eating like a normal person.

My first week at the video game company, people would run and get a soda (see the hella story) often. I would go and buy my diet pop from the vending machines, which was adding to my daily costs in the city. Laura quickly started to complain about. It was bad enough we were shelling out 10 bucks a day for me to commute, but I shouldn't spoil myself from the vending machines! This would be a continual point of contention for us during our stay in California.

Before long, I was asked by a co-worker if I wanted to go and get a "soda". So we walked across the hall to the other side of the building into the break room. I pull out some money and start to put in the vending machine. He pulls open a large cooler filled to the brim with pop and takes two out. He asks what I'm doing. I tell him I'm buying a pop (duh). He then tells me that the pop is free. Turns out, our company, to compensate for the long hours required to work there, furnished pop for us.

Great! But the bad news was, the pop was all sugar pop. I initially resisted the urge by trying to bring in my own pop in my cooler, but then Laura started insisting that I buy, instead of my usual Diet Dr. Pepper, a cheap knockoff from a major retailer who shall remain nameless. I started bringing those, but those generic diet pops started losing their luster rather early. Oh sure, they tasted like Diet Dr. Pepper, kind of, but only if you drank it ice cold and really fast. Otherwise, you were stuck with a cheap knockoff that tasted like it was canned at the bottom of a metal bucket. So much so that I started to wonder if I was going to suffer from metal poisoning. Being the hypochondriac that I am, I had to make a decision. Chug down the generic swill or drink the forbidden sugar pop.

It wasn't a hard decision. I started drinking it.

It was pretty sweet. Some guys would start stocking it around Tuesday and if you were the lucky ones to get first dibs, you grabbed a few cans while they were warm to hide in your cube for the end of the week. Once it was cold, it was a pop lover's heaven.

Now there is a little bit of a problem when you start drinking sugar pop at a job in which you are required to sit there and just twiddle your hands all day long: you increase your calorie intake without a way to burn it off. Considering that I was working about 10 hours a day, I think it was safe to say that I was drinking about 5 pops a day during work alone. That alone accounts for over 1000 calories. When you couple that with the various snacks that I would eat all day like chips, popcorn and snack cakes, you are spelling a recipe for some nice weight gain.

There's an old Simpsons episode where Homer deliberately gets to over 300 so that he could be considered morbidly obese and could go on disability. He goes to the mall to get something to wear when he goes to "work" at home. The guy asks if he works with, around or something with computers. Homer says, "I work at a computer." The guy mutters to himself that it must be all the non-stop sitting and snacking. I can relate to that statement as I worked in a place where you could do non-stop sitting and snacking.

Now there I was in some nice shape when I came to California and I was ruining it by eating bad. To top that off, I wasn't working out. I had intended to work out, but when you do nothing but work and have little time off to yourself, the last thing you want to do is to do some more "work" by working out.

At work, I had tried to eat right, but that is expensive! If you take away the free donuts and the free pop, you end up having to drink some orange juice if you don't water. The OJ alone was two fifty at the food shop down in the atrium.

I tried to go without the extra pop and snacks, but when you're playing the same game or the same level of a game over and over and over until you want to shoot yourself in the head, your eyes will start to droop and you'll feel a little tired. Soon enough, your head will start to nod and then your body will twitch violently. You look around to see if anyone noticed that you kind of fell asleep. Then, before you know it, you WILL fall asleep! You'll wake up to see that you have run off the road in the Formula 1 game that you're testing and your car is nuzzled against a fence off-road while the in-game timer shows that you are 10 minutes into a two minute race!

This actually happened to me.

Scott, the co-worker from Ohio, mentioned to me that a former worker was notorious to taking cat naps while he was supposed to be testing. It was hard to catch him because his demeanor was a sleeply-eyed testing face. He'd look like he was sleeping, but then he'd move and the game would continue.

One day, Scott was walking by while the worker was supposed to be testing our free-form cuddly video game when he noticed that the in-game timer, which probably should be only at 3 minutes because the levels were pretty fast to finish, was now at 40 minutes. Scott yelled, "Juan! You're supposed to be testing, not sleeping!"

For fear of falling asleep, I would drink and eat to stay awake. At first you feel guilty about it, but then it becomes a natural habit.

My attempts at working out turned into doing some jumping jacks before work in my cube when no one was around and feeling like an idiot doing it. Having almost been interrupted more than once, I quickly disbanded the working out fever and resolved to gradually getting out of shape.

Oh sure, Laura and I would go hiking in the hills around our adopted hometown of Vacaville, but when you only do that once a week, the odds that you'll actually get a benefit and keep the pounds off are very slim indeed. I did also try to use the apartment complex "gym" that consisted of some really old exercise bikes and a really old weight station. The apartment manager told me after I used it that most residents use it a few times and then never come back. Well, it wasn't hard to figure out why...

But it wasn't just me with my snacking and eating. Because you could eat at your desk, you could walk around and see people eating Chinese food from containers, salads, yogurt, burgers and fries, sandwiches, frozen smoothies from downstairs, flavored coffees, frozen dinners, candy bars, popcorn, etc.

What was interesting about the ripple effect was that in the morning, the testing bay (the closed off area where we worked) actually smelled decent, but by the end of the day, it would smell like a take-out food mash-up what will all of people's food stuffed into people's tiny garbage cans outside of their cubes. After a while, our supervisor got so sick of the smell that she encouraged us to throw our stuff away outside the bay in the snack bar area's big garbage cans. I actually started to do this, but my attempts to kiss some behind and suck up to the boss fell on deaf ears. The place still ended up smelling.

What was worse was on Friday, when people would order out more to celebrate the weekly Friday paycheck. The food would pile up worse in the tiny garbage cans. Then when the weekend came, the building would shut the air ventilation off to save energy, which would create a nice semi-humid sauna just right for spreading the rank food smell around. So if you had to work Saturday or Sunday for overtime (which was often), this was an oh-so-pleasant aroma to take in while trying to work. We'd try propping open doors to get the rank smell out until the cleaning crew came on Sunday night, but it wouldn't help much. I took to bringing Lysol to spray down my area, which helped immensely.

Because of the previously mentioned snacking and eating, I ended up gaining weight.

I think I must have gained twenty pounds. When I arrived back in Nebraska some 10 months later, I was sitting down with my brother, Bill, who ever-so tactfully looked at me, laughed and then asked, "How much weight have you gained?"

I replied that I didn't know.

He then called me "Bobba the Hut" and quipped in a Jabba the Hut voice, "Bobba eata a lotta co nichua video gama. Ha Ha Ha."

You bastard...