Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Salon Brilliant Career (Mine)
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2004 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
On a midday errand jaunt, I bought some Fitzgerald and Trollope's The Way We Live Now at Stacey's. I asked some coworkers about Trollope and we talked about Victorian novels a bit, both the IT manager and the tech VP enthusiastically recommending Middlemarch. These are the conversations I suppose outsiders think we have all the time.
Yesterday I found out that everyone but me knew that jail differs markedly from prison. One is held in a city or county jail for under a year; a state prison houses longer-term inmates. I've gone my whole life thinking "jail" and "prison" were straight synonyms.
