ShoutBoot: The origin
When people first encounter the phrase “ShoutBoot” I assume their first thought is: “How in the World they’ve come up with this?” Well – as almost everything – this has its own story. A pretty amusing one actually.
The hero of our story is Barack (as we’ll call him) who was working in a factory back then. His co-workers weren’t the brightest guys in the planet and consider this as a very strong euphemism. It wasn’t the ideal workplace: had to get up very early (4:00 AM), the work was boring (standing beside a conveyor belt 8 hours a day) and the pay wasn’t even near to decent. But it was a job which is better than nothing, right?
Having conversations with the co-workers wasn’t an easy task. For example, how would you comment the following:
Oh man, I’ve eaten two plates of bean sauce and almost half a kilo of bread!
And it was way fu**ing good!
What do you say to that? Nothing I suppose just like our hero did. He shut his mouth and gave an awkward smile. Later he told us these stories which we found very amusing. One of these stories gave birth to the phrase which became a byword among us. One day one of the workers was very upset about something. It was enough just to look at him and you immediately saw how disturbed he was. Suddenly one of his co-workers stepped to him and said the following:
Do you know what would I do if I were you?
I would grab a gumboot and shout into it!
Turns out that in some weird sense he was right. Everybody experiences the “shout-into-a-boot” feeling from time to time. This blog has been created in this sense where we can shout it aloud. Not just frustration which would be very depressing. No… Just about everything that comes to our mind.
We’re primarily software developer kind of guys so don’t be surprised if you encounter some very techy discussion about MSN direct file transfer in pidgin for example (hopefully you will by the way) but that’s not the whole picture. In fact you can expect anything from movies seen recently to Ron’s latest ideas about quick food so be prepared… Anything is possible.
Gabe
