So you think it's all fun and games?

I work as a software tester, or a QA analyst or a Quality Control Specialist, or whatever you want to call me. Most people have no idea what I do all day. To put it simply: I make sure that the program that I'm assigned to works the way it's supposed to regardless of the person's expertise. That is, if you do something correct, it works correctly. If you do something incorrect, it should stop you.

My first job in the QA industry was when I worked for Sega in San Francisco in their test department. I didn't really intend to make it my career choice, but I kind of stumbled into something I'm quite good at, which is pointing out other people's mistakes without having to explain how to correct them.

Whenever I mention to people that my first job in QA was working testing video games, I'm usually met with the same response: "That sounds like fun." To which I reply, "You'd think that, wouldn't you?"

This usually gets a puzzled reaction.

I've written a story a while ago about how I equated getting a job testing video games like being told that you're going to die, but in a way that starts with good feelings first. Maybe a better analogy is that it's like drinking. At first, it's fun and games. Then you start to get bleary eyed and black out. Then you wake up with a feeling that you wasted hours of your life when you could have been doing something more productive. Finally, the hangover ends and you start over.

Here's a video that describes the video game testing world. From my perspective, it's absolutely accurate with what I went through.

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...

A hella cool pop in the city...

In California, one of the biggest culture shocks I had to endure did not involve anything involving a landmark or a saying, although those certainly could cause confusion to anybody visiting or a newbie Californian like myself.

I mentioned before that I worked in San Francisco as a video game tester. While I worked there nearly every day and visited San Francisco off and on with my wife when I wasn't working, it wasn't until after I left the state that I found out that people referred to San Francisco as "The City". My wife told me that you couldn't refer to it as "San Fran" or "Frisco" or anything close to it without people glaring at you. It was just "The City". Eddie Izzard, a British comedian known for dressing in drag onstage, taped his "Dressed to Kill" HBO special in San Francisco and noted that it sounded like snakes were in the audience from the people hissing when he didn't refer to San Francisco as "The City".

Looking on this now, it strikes me as odd that San Francisco got this designation. New York City is "The Big Apple", New Orleans is "The Big Easy", Los Angeles is "LA", but I never understood why San Francisco is so special that it out of any city in the country is "The City". It's still strange to me.

California is also the home for the term "Hella". I first heard the term on a South Park episode where Cartman, the fat kid, annoyed everyone in one episode by declaring everything "hella stupid", "hella lame" or "hella crazy". I didn't realize it at the time, but it was a joke on the California use of the term "Hella". If you look it up online, you'll see that "hella" is actually a slang term mainly used in the Northern California area. Some think it's a derived from the term "hell of a" meaning "very" or "a lot".

A lot of culture comes from California. For example, the Valley Girls with their own Valley Speak that once swept the nation. For some reason, Hella just has never caught on with the rest of the country. Not that they don't try.

I had seen the South Park episode years before my move to California. Suddenly, I became surrounded by it. At the video game company, some guys would declare things "hella cool" or "hella crazy". I thought it was rather funny to suddenly hear it all around me. Funnier yet, the kids that weren't allowed to say "Hell" substituted "Heck" at created "Hecka" for "Hella". I almost lost it in a video store when I heard that the first time. I heard a kid declare to his Mom that the movie he wanted to rent looked "hecka cool". I thought it was just that one kid, but I heard it several times after that, usually in a video store, by kids that weren't teenagers yet declaring anything and everything "hecka cool".

One of the hardest words for me to avoid saying lest I be labeled an outsider in California was the word, "Pop."

When I was working at that Pizza Hut for a few short weeks, I'd take people's orders over the phone and I'd ask them near the end, "Do you want any pop to go with that order?"
This was usually followed by a confused sounding, "What?"

I thought that maybe people had a hard time understanding me since I have a habit of mumbling, so I'd repeat with, "Do you want any soft drinks like Coke, Diet Coke, etc."
One night, it became clear to me why people were confused. I asked the "Pop" question during an order and the lady answered with a drink order. She then asked, "Are you from the Midwest?" I answered that I was indeed from the Midwest, Nebraska to be exact. She said, "I'm from Ohio. I figured you were from around there because I haven't heard the word "Pop" used in a while."

It became clearer at the video game company. They would stock free pops into a large cooler for us to drink. People called it "soda".

Now at this point, you're probably wondering what took me so long. I just had never heard people refer to products like Coke as "soda". All my life, it was "Pop" so forgive me if it took me a long time to figure out what term people used for their "sodas". I think it was when I would see guys get up and go, “Dude, do you want a soda?” or “Hey, they just restocked the sodas?” that I put 2 and 2 together to get to the “soda” variable.

Soda was a hard term for me to adopt. It felt weird to call soft drinks “soda” because in my mind, “soda” is the clear, flavorless stuff that you add to hard liquor to dilute it, like with a vodka and soda.

So I would find myself saying to my tester friends, “They just restocked the pop… err… soda cooler!” To which guys would give me a strange look as I had stepped off the train in San Francisco wearing overalls with a banjo on my knee and a piece of straw hanging out of my mouth.

While I did my best to adopt the “soda” slang, I was stymied by my wife at home. She refused to call the soft drinks we used “soda”. We’d be at the store buying our groceries and I’d say that we’d need some “soda” to which she’d either glare at me or glare and ask, “Oh, you mean, pop?”
She was bound and determined to get me to stop saying it, so I would have to remember to call it “Pop” at home, but then revert to the California term by using “Soda” while I was working in San Francisco.

I think my California co-workers were confused by it. One day, they asked for an explanation when I again made the unkind mistake of referring to their “soda” as “pop”.
“What’s this “Pop” thing all about?” one of them asked. I tried to explain that this how I’d always referred to soft drinks at home, but again they looked at me like I was a yokel. Thankfully, a co-worker who was originally from Ohio came to my defense.

“Hey, I’ll back Bob up on this. That’s what they call it in the Midwest. You don’t understand. It’s not as is this is just a local thing. It’s everywhere! The store aisles literally say, “Pop”. You’ll see a store ad in the newspaper and people will say, ‘Hey! Pop’s on sale!"

I should point out that when I was in California that a lot of guys that I worked with seemed to have no concept that there are other states outside of California save for Oregon and Arizona. Most never seemed to have traveled outside of California. Why should they? They have almost every pastime that you could want to do in California. Like tall trees? Go to the Muir Woods. Like hiking? There are plenty of hills. Like to surf? Go to the beach. Like to ski? Go to Lake Tahoe.

Because of this, the guys I worked with seemed genuinely shocked when they'd walk by me and I'd be listening to some music that they'd actually listen to. They looked like they wanted to ask, "So did you mug some Californian and steal his walkman?"

It sounds very stupid now that I write about this, and it is, but the soda story actually sets up my next story: How to lose weight and then gain it all back and then some by sitting on your but all day.

I once had a job testing video games...

I'm starting another new direction with this blog that no one reads since you're all on My Space.

By the way, I thought about going with a My Space page when I started this blog over a year ago and I was struck by something, that it looked like crap. My Space pages look like some beginning web designer who only had a budget of $50 and one day to design a page. The pages are just plain ugly. Very ugly. I thought that there is no way I'd get any traffic on a page that looks this crappy, but I guess I was wrong. Oh well...

In 1999, my wife and I moved to California. She got a job at a local newspaper. I couldn't find much for work save for my immediate job when I walked into the local Pizza Hut, told them I had over 8 years experience and then proceeded to make 3 pizzas to their regular cook's one pizza. You could say I nailed the interview (which there wasn't one).

I had told my boss that I didn't come to California to work at Pizza Hut, so he was aware that I was planning on leaving.

One night, I stumbled across an ad that read, "Do you like to play sports video games?"

I read it. It was for doing quality assurance on video games. All I needed was a resume and a list of every game that I can ever remember playing. The resume I had. The list of games I had to make.

It took a while, but I managed to get my list of compiled. Scanning my memory from Pong until that time, I came up with an extremely long list of games. Surprisingly, I got an interview with the agency filling the job. I then nailed the job interview at a well-known video game company.

It was an interesting interview.

There were questions like:
"What makes a quality game?"
"Do you like playing games?"
"What do you like in a game?"
"What's the worse game you've ever played?"
"Have you ever spotted a bug in a game?"
"How would you go about testing a game?"

I had never tested a video game before, but I managed to cite some examples in which I thought a game sucked and why. I also managed to come up with some examples on some bugs that I had seen in some games.

They nodded and murmured to each other, "That's a bug."

I was excited as hell when they offered me the job. It was very unexpected. I was making barely six dollars an hour at Pizza Hut and now I'd be making twice that amount (almost). Looking back at that, it wasn't much to live on, but it was a decent amount and more than I had ever been paid before.

I told my wife that I got offered the job. Her response: "Oh Lord!"

I told my brother, Joe, that I got offered the job with the line: "Prepare for me to suddenly become the coolest uncle your boys have."

He said that their reaction to the news of my new job was that they were "very impressed."

Thus we enter the first stage of getting a job testing video games: Excitement.

You see, just like the five stages of dying, there are stages that one goes through when getting a job testing video games.

The five stages of dying are: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.

I would say the stages of getting a job testing video games are: Excitement, Disappointment, Depression, Self Pity and Acceptance.

People look at me odd when I used to tell them that getting a job as a video game tester was like dying. It's because you go through several stages when you work this job.

The day I started, I was a little nervous because I had to suddenly commute to and from San Francisco. Besides that, I had never worked at a testing job before and I had no idea what was expected of me. I imagined that I would be sitting around playing the game and making notes on what I thought was wrong. As a matter of fact, that is mainly what I ended up doing.

I chose a really ass backwards method of commuting to work. Instead of driving down the insane Interstate 80 west to San Francisco, which is the most direct route, I ended up taking a much longer way. I wanted to take the subway, the Bay Area Rapid Transit, to San Francisco, but there wasn't a line in the east bay where I lived, so I drove about 40 minutes from Vacaville to Concord to get on a train. From there, it was a 50 minute train ride to downtown San Francisco. From the station, it was a 20 minute walk straight south to get to South of Market, where the company was located. If you do the math, it's about an hour and 50 minutes each way! That alone depressed me.

So I'm in stage one: Excitement and it's pretty exciting so far. The building has a fantastic view of the city from where we work. The people are friendly. It's a very loose atmosphere.

The first week, they check out a system to me and give me a game to get familiar with. I start testing with a guy named Johnny. He was pretty cool and had done some testing for the company before, so he let me in on what to look for in the games. We each had a TV, a VCR and a game system, but that first week, I was testing with Johnny. We were playing a basketball game together. He was usually the Lakers. I was usually the Kings. We'd play and he'd take some notes on what he thought looked wrong. I learned to do some of the same.

So I'm in the middle of the Excitement stage when I suddenly started to feel a little different. I started to wonder if I had made the right decision or if I had settled because I came to the Bay Area with dreams of being a web programmer, but I ended up testing games. I decided to stick with it, but it wasn't long before I entered the second stage: Disappointment.

I started to get a little disappointed. I was disappointed with myself for working there. I was disappointed with the job because I soon realized that playing games all day long ceases to be fun several hours into the first day. When you start exploring the games and generally doing things that aren't fun like checking statistics, misspellings, player animations, etc, it starts to get tedious fast.

I think that I didn't feel that I belonged there. I was surrounded by dozens of younger guys who all seemed to know each other all ready. They would laugh and joke amongst each other while I was quiet. Being a Nebraska guy around California kids can be a little intimidating. I think I expected to find people that I related to. I didn't at first.

Worse yet, I shared a cube with Rod. Now Rod was a cool enough guy, but like me, he seemed to be disappointed with himself for working at the company. Rod told me that he too had moved to the Bay Area with his wife. She found a good job, but he was having trouble finding a job doing 3D modeling. He had hoped that working a job testing video games would be a way to network to do other things, but it was only after he took the job that most of the games came programmed from Japan while a few were programmed in the states, but not at our building, so he started to sink into the third stage: Depression.

When I started, he was playing a game in which a guy goes around blowing zombies up with various weapons. You blow your way through the game until you get to the end of the level. Then a new level starts with the same thing. You shoot zombies, collect power ups and fight the end guy. Between levels you were treated to some extremely bad voice acting in the cut scenes as the mastermind behind the bringing the dead to life shouts, "Ha Ha Ha! Yooou Foooolllsss!!!"

Rod would mimic all of the dialogue because he knew it all by heart. He could literally finish the game in an hour. Watching Rod test the video game over and over was bad enough. He would sit there all stoic, finish the game and then simulate himself blowing his head off with an invisible gun. He'd finish the game, give a big long sigh and then start the game up all over again. That's all he did all day for a few weeks that I sat next to him. To make matters worse, the game was practically finished. He had written up a few bugs in it that wouldn't be fixed and he couldn't find anything else. It was usually after he had finished the game twice that he'd get up and take a long and extended break.

As funny and sad as it was to see Rod go through the Depression stage, it was shortly after the basketball game was released that Rod quit. I liked Rod and talked to him a bit when I was testing. To make matters worse than him leaving, I was assigned the very same game that he was assigned!

I liked the game at first, but soon after getting good at the game and then beating it after an hour or two; I started to sink into the Depression stage myself. Like Rod, I started memorizing the horrible game dialogue and knew every twice and turn in the game after only a few days. It was not fun at all.

As if Depression wasn't enough, I started to sink into the next stage: Self-Pity. Actually the Depression and Self-Pity stages go hand in hand.

I suppose I should have looked on the bright side of things, but I couldn't when I was staring into the face of a soul-crushing arcade port that was not meant for playing eight hours a day.

It was then that I started to question my employment at the company. I started to feel guilty because I felt that I was abusing them for getting paid to work there. There I was, with a college degree and two years of graduate school in hand and the best that I could do was getting a job testing video games. I would think, "What kind of loser am I that this is my stopping point in California?"

I was commuting 3 hours and 30 minutes roundtrip per day for pete's sake! I had to shell out 8 dollars a day in tolls and train tickets to get to work, let alone the gas money it took to get to the train station.

I don't think that everyone that gets a job in the video game industry testing games is like this. The fact that I was homesick for my home state coupled with the long commutes made me super depressed and feeling sorry for myself. Everything was not living up to my expectations.

I finally settled into the last stage: Acceptance.

It was two months in when I finally accepted my job status. I was a temp and there were rumblings that they were going to get rid of the temps. There were 28 of us and they decided to get rid of half of us. I made the cut because I worked hard, did what I was told and didn't complain about it. I was literally the last person to make the cut list. It was after this reprieve that things started to pick up for me.

I'm probably being whiny about this, but I think the fact that so much change was happening so fast in my life was what caused these mixed feelings about becoming a video game tester. I live for stability, but the move, the commute, the job search and the newness of the situation magnified the feelings.