FiftySomethingMan

A visit to Pepsi.com

2009-01-28T09:56:00.000-05:00

There’s probably no consumer product I’ve consumed more of in my life than Pepsi-Cola. For at least the last 40 years, it’s been my everyday drink of choice – preferred over water, over beer, over tea and over coffee. Especially preferred over ice, with a straw, in a tall frosty glass. A quick calculation shows that I’ve probably spent close to $10,000 on the corn-syrup-infused soft drink over the years. I’ve downed 438,000 ounces, which amounts to over 5 million calories, which adds up to about 5,000 pounds of added bulk, roughly the weight of a modern supertanker. It also means I’ve consumed more than a million milligrams of sodium – enough to build my own salt mine.

My love affair with Pepsi began as a youth in the 1960s. It was the ultimate treat my parents could get me at the end of the day. I occasionally strayed to other brands of cola, specifically RC Cola which at the time was the only drink to come in a 16-ounce bottle. Like many, I experimented during college, trying now-defunct brands such as Jamaica Cola, Chek Cola and the poorly-conceived Ebola Cola. Pepsi’s arch-enemy, whose name I shall not allow my fingers to type, is my choice only when there’s no other choice.

There’s nothing quite like that feeling you get after about the fourth or fifth gulp, when the carbonation in your gut reaches critical mass and that gentle eruption of flavor flows back into your sinuses and, if you’re lucky, stops there. It’s “the taste that beats the others cold” and “the choice of a new generation,” to quote slogans the company has used since its creation in the nineteenth century. I’ve got a lot to live, and Pepsi’s got a lot to give. Let’s see what some of that is by visiting the pepsi.com website.

The first inclination for any consumer visiting this site, after considering the home page request to make suggestions to our new president about how to Help Refresh America (I think I can guess at least one), is to find out what it is that makes Pepsi so tasty. I know there’s water and I suspect there’s sugar, but what else gives it that special bite? Well, there’s caramel color, phosphoric acid, caffeine, sodium benzoate, potassium, citric acid and “natural flavors.” I know what caffeine is, I imagine citric acid comes from fruit, and I read somewhere that phosphorous can make you glow, all of which are good things. And who can dispute the wholesomeness of natural flavors? I can practically taste the dirt in a freshly opened can of soda.

In the “yesterday and today” section, we learn that Pepsi was invented in 1898 by Caleb Bradham and was originally called “Brad’s Drink,” a clever name that survived for days. It was created, Bradham said, to aid digestion. He said it tasted good and was good for you, unlike certain other colas I could name who bred a generation of cocaine fiends. We see a whirlwind of Pepsi logos circling the computer screen and eating up display memory before being shown the new container design. This is introduced with inspired words we could just as easily have heard during President Obama’s inaugural address: “We’re looking forward without losing sight of our past. We celebrate tomorrow, but honor yesterday. Today, we introduce the new face of our future.” Be assured, however, that “the taste remains the same” and only the marketing campaign changes.

Wandering around the site a little more, I see a part that issues “false rumor alerts,” where the company gets a chance to address concerns that the drink is made from the liquefied remains of slaughtered Amazon natives (completely untrue). The only entry here is a rather benign story about a patriotic can Pepsi allegedly produced with an edited version of the Pledge of Allegiance. Creating a patriotic can hardly seems scandalous; I can only assume that the abridged Pledge was the point of concern, maybe something about the “Republic of Richard Stanz” preparing for an attack on the American homeland.

We also see the obligatory corporate interest in protecting the environment in the form of the Pepsi Eco Challenge. I thought this might be a specific effort to restore balance to the biosphere – maybe planting a new tree for every plastic bottle cap that’s properly disposed of. Instead, it’s some vague “New Pepsi Challenge,” designed to recreate the excitement of that time the company dared consumers to choose among competing cola brands. “Today we heed a different call and face a different challenge, one that cuts across brands, companies, industries, even continents – the challenge of environmental stewardship, protecting our planet’s resources for generations to come.” I expected perhaps a call to pursue renewable stores of potassium or an end to our nation’s reliance on unfriendly suppliers of benzoate, but couldn’t find it.

It was fun to view the company’s current TV ad campaign, the “Pepsi Pass,” in which every generation is shown refreshing the world. We see Pepsi first being served at an old-time soda fountain, then the drink is successively passed to a 1920s flapper, soldiers celebrating the end of World War II, teenage drag-racers, hippies, a streaker, disco dancers, break dancers, Germans tearing down the Berlin Wall, and finally modern concert-goers. Most historians credit the pressure of Ronald Reagan’s military build-up in combination with decades of economic stagnation for the collapse of the Eastern bloc. As a loyal Pepsi drinker, I’m glad to see the truth finally told: the gassy fullness caused by drinking too much requires you to vigorously move around to get relief, and the Germans chose to get their exercise by dismantling the symbol of communism.

Finally, I did a quick review of all the current Pepsi products on the market. I barely survived the emotional roller coaster that was the rise and fall of Crystal Pepsi in the 1990s, so I was glad to see that the diversification of my favorite soft drink is still robust. We now have regular Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, Caffeine-Free Pepsi, Diet Caffeine-Free Pepsi, Pepsi Max (with extra caffiene), Diet Pepsi Max, Pepsi One (with one calorie, for those who can’t stand zero-calorie drinks) and an orchard of fruit-flavored Pepsi’s, including cherry, lime, vanilla, cherry and vanilla, and caramel cream. It’s only a matter of time until we see Pepsi with Chicken Broth and Green Pepsi, with broccoli, kale, cabbage and algae.

I’m sure they’ll be wonderful. I plan to drink many thousands and thousands of ounces.

More celebs to rewrite history

2009-01-28T09:55:00.001-05:00

Film actor Tom Cruise revealed last week that he had a childhood dream of killing Adolph Hitler. While on a world tour promoting his new movie “Valkyrie,” Cruise told reporters he regretted that time travel was not available for him to show up in 1930’s Europe and personally take out the Nazi leader responsible for the deaths of millions.

“I always wanted to kill Hitler, I hated him,” Cruise, 46, said. “As a child studying history and looking at documents, I wondered, ‘why didn’t someone stand up and try to stop it?’”

News of the Hollywood star’s desire to transcend the laws of time and space in an effort to preemptively remove the brutal German tyrant represented a new high-water mark among celebrity do-gooders. No longer content to adopt Third World children and raise funds to fight disease, today’s idols won’t limit themselves to what’s physically possible as they aspire to help humankind and promote their vanity projects.

Here’s a look at what other kinds of murderous retro-vengeance are on the minds and lips of the stars:

Kirsten Dunst: “When I was a very young girl, probably not more than two or three years old, I harbored a desire to kill (Hall of Fame Detroit Tiger) Ty Cobb. He was a very racist, very mean man. He may have held the all-time base-stealing record for decades, but he did it with a cleats-up style that injured many a second baseman. I really, really hated him.”

Bruce Willis: “I’ve always had a very strong distaste for the Chinese Cultural Revolution that led to the deaths of uncounted thousands. I’m not saying I’d want to kill (then-Chinese leader) Mao Tse-Tung because he did some good things to fight the Japanese during World War II. I’d just like to have been on hand to advise him against some of the more heavy-handed aspects of his efforts to overhaul his society.”

Marg Helgenberger: “Given half the chance, I’d put fifteenth president James Buchanan on my hit list. He did virtually nothing to head off what everyone could tell was going to become all-out civil war, plus he was our only bachelor president. He was a real bungler, and we’d all be better off today if his sorry ass had been eliminated before his 1856 election.”

Carson Daly: “For me, it kind of depends on how far back in time I could go. If there was no limit, I’d want to kill Alexander the Great. His reputation, as the nickname implies, is that he was an enormous political and military talent. Though he did bring Western culture as far east as India, he was very pushy about it, killing many tens of thousands of innocent people. If, however, I’m limited to just the last century or so, I’d kill (Russian tyrant) Josef Stalin.”

Philip Seymour Hoffman: “Rather than bring physical harm to flawed-but-human creatures, I’d go back to 1935 to prevent so much devastation from the Labor Day hurricane that ravaged the Florida Keys. I’m not naïve enough to think I could’ve prevented formation of the storm, but I do think I could use my histrionic acting style to warn many hundreds of residents to move to higher ground.”

Meryl Streep: “I’d kill Vlad the Impaler and I’d do it with my bare hands. Even though he was the basis for the great dramatic character of Dracula, that whole impaling thing just rubs me the wrong way.”

Roger Moore: “I’d kill Ivan the Terrible. He was just terrible – what more can you say?”

Rene Russo: “I’m not sure I’d go so far as to kill him (Oliver Cromwell), but I’d definitely do something to seriously hamper his more vicious tendencies. While I sympathize with his anti-royalist tendencies, there were more constructive ways to achieve the ascent of the Parliamentarians without all the fighting and executions.”

Dennis Quaid: “I’d kill either (Roman emperors) Caligula or Nero, I’m not sure which. Caligula was mad, so I guess you could say he had something of a medical excuse for his virtual ruin of Rome. Nero, though, you know he fiddled while Rome burned. That’s very un-cool.”

Orlando Bloom: “There’s not one individual I could name, because I was never very good at history, but I’d definitely want to do something to prevent the Spanish Inquisition. I’m a big believer in freedom of religion, so you can imagine how I feel about the idea of Catholics burning alleged heretics alive. By the way, watch for the upcoming release of my film ‘Elizabethtown,’ coming to DVD on January 31.”

John Mayer: “I know Tom Cruise is already taking care of Hitler, so I’d say I’d want to kill (Italian fascist) Benito Mussolini. He would’ve been as bad as Hitler if he had the skills, but things just didn’t quite work out for him.”

Osama bin Laden: “I’d go back in time to kill the mother and father of Mike Meyers. That ‘Love Guru’ movie absolutely sucked.”

Thoughts on death and dying

2009-01-28T09:53:00.001-05:00

I’ve been thinking lately about death and dying, and there are a few things I don’t like about it.

Obituaries, for one. I find myself being drawn to reading the obituaries in the local paper, since I’m more likely to find people I know hanging out on that page than in sections like sports, weddings or commodities futures. As my young son used to observe as we’d drive past a cemetery – “that’s where the dead people live” – I think it’s time for us to take a fresh look at the concept of death notices.

Currently we get to read all about how old people were, who some of their survivors were, and which email address condolences can be sent to. We’re told that they “passed,” “departed this life,” “were funeralized” or “went to be with [their] Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ,” but are given few other details. Sure, some notices may say that the departed passed “peacefully but unexpectedly” or “after a courageous fight.” That doesn’t really tell us enough. What we don’t get to hear, unless we’re good at reading between the lines, is what everyone really wants to know – the cause of death. If, in lieu of flowers, mourners are asked to make a donation to the National Skydiving Association, there’s a decent chance that the dead guy fell 10,000 feet out of an airplane. If they were employed by Johnson’s Crushing and Hacking, Inc., it’s a fairly safe bet they were killed in an industrial accident.

I think it’s a shame that the dead and their family members have to be ashamed of the way in which they left this earth for realms unknown. We have a much better understanding these days of what’s involved in the cessation of bodily functions, and it’s usually not anything to be particularly embarrassed about. My face might be red (before turning ashen) if it’s reported that I died trying to hold down a mattress in the back of a speeding pickup truck before the mattress became airborne. But at least everyone would know I was the kind of guy to help move a friend to his new apartment.

Then there’s the issue of what to do if your passing is going to take a while. No one wants to die of a lingering, painful illness, though I can’t say for sure I’d prefer the quick and easy death involved in a head-on train impact. You hear people saying they don’t want to spend their last days lying in a hospital bed hooked up to all manner of mechanical intervention to keep them alive. “I’d rather be home with my family,” they say, conveniently forgetting the smell of the cat box, the annoying telephone solicitations and how far ten steps to the bathroom seems when you’re no longer the most continent person in the home.

Before I’m discharged to my cluttered, dusty bedroom, I’d want to know more about which particular machines I’d be hooked up to if I stayed in the hospital. Might there be morphine involved? High-definition satellite television? The ability to pee without having to get out of bed? Talk about being treated and released. I’d be tempted to sign up for that now if I didn’t have to start paying for four years of college education this fall.

Speaking of early enrollment, I read a science fiction story once where members of the aging population were given the opportunity to end their lives sooner rather than later in return for a cash reward, a fabulous vacation and a pain-free passing. The short-term expense to society would be offset by the decades in which the fading individual was not eating their meals on wheels and using up other social services that might be better dedicated to those who could chase down their own food. I think this proposal should be given serious consideration. Put me down for spending a week in a hot tub on cruise ship eating prime rib with Anne Hathaway.

There’s one important consideration to reconcile before this can become a workable public policy: how you would create the least difficult death. Humanity has had a long history of failing to figure out the easiest way to go, if you can use execution methods as any example. The intentionally cruel attempts of ancient peoples – stoning, crucifixion, being fed to whatever wildlife was handy and hungry – gave way in recent centuries to progressively more user-friendly methods. The guillotine, gallows, electric chair and lethal injection were all thought at one time or another to be humane choices, though I don’t think any are quite my cup of poisoned tea. I think more research is needed to figure the fastest way out, and might I suggest the cast of the movie “Twilight” as possible volunteers in this study.

Finally, there’s the question of the afterlife. Most organized religions regard self-destruction as a sin, probably because it can make such a serious dent in their membership rolls. If you get to the other side legitimately and have lived a relatively good life, most creeds will give you a pass to a magnificent paradise featuring angels, harps, virgins, clouds, cows, gods with lots of extra arms, and all your dead relatives, though presumably the grumpy ones will have found other accommodations. If you’ve sinned or, in the Southern Baptist tradition, done a disco dance, you instead are consigned to a hell that will likely include at least one Bee Gee as well as a lot of other horrible stuff.

I honestly don’t know what waits for me in the Great Beyond. My best guess is that it’s eons and eons of nothingness, kind of like what the A&E channel has become. It’s only because we have such difficulty imagining what that void would feel like that we’ve come up with all these elaborate afterlife scenarios. Since they can’t all have it right, and because I hesitate to cast my lot with a randomly chosen sect (with my luck I’d get Zoroastrianism, which preaches a final purgation of evil from the Earth through a tidal wave of molten metal — ouch!), I prefer to think that you get whatever it is you believed in while you were alive.

And for me, that’s where Anne Hathaway comes in again.

In appreciation of the breakroom

2009-01-28T09:51:00.000-05:00

When he grows weary of his heavy labor and seeks a few moments of rest and reflection, the American worker is able to turn to a quiet refuge of solitude where he charges his batteries before re-entering the global economy with renewed vigor. These are the hallowed halls of the corporate breakroom.

The origins of the breakroom may be lost in the mists of time, but we can imagine how ancient hunter-gatherers might take a few moments from their huntering-gathering to rest under a sprawling fruit tree. With the modern marvel known as the vending machine still eons in the future, they had no coin slots that would lead them to refreshment. Instead, they’d nudge the trunk of the tree with their brawny shoulders and hope that an apple or pear might fall at their feet. As is the case for us, their modern cousins, sometimes it did and sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes, instead of fruit they’d get a bird’s egg or a dead raccoon. What are you gonna do?

As societies moved to an agrarian and eventually an industrial economy, the breakroom evolved with the times. In the sweatshops of eighteenth-century England, the 14 hours of toil spent every day tending the steam-powered orphan press would be broken into manageable chunks by the occasional moments spent chained by your overseer in a quiet corner for trying to steal some steam. The apples of yesteryear and the SunChips of tomorrow may have been replaced by badger-sized rats, yet still it was good to catch your breath.

Today, we have advantages and comforts unimagined by our forefathers. As an example I’m familiar with, I’ll describe the breakroom at the office where I work.

The room is painted a shade of ecru/tan/beige/off-white that is the closest thing possible in the visible spectrum to no color at all. I’m not sure of the room’s dimensions, but if people were laid end-to-end on the floor (which only happens during third shift), I’d imagine it’s roughly twenty by forty feet. There are maybe eight or ten nondescript grey tables each surrounded by a random mix of plastic and cloth-covered chairs.

However, it’s what’s around the edges of this quiet corner of the corporate world that draws in the tired workers of both the office and the warehouse. Primarily, there are the vending machines: one that contains mostly snack foods such as candy, cookies and chips; one that was intended to hold actual meals of sandwiches and salads but now offers only instant oatmeal, cup-o-soup and plastic orange juice containers with some type of dark sludge in the bottom; and one each for Coke and Pepsi products, still sadly segregated in these otherwise diverse times. You can tell all the machines host a lot of traffic by the sticky notes affixed to their fronts, bearing messages like “you owe Jane in accounting 85 cents” and “I found a roach in my Snickers!!!”

Almost as important as the vending machines are the appliances used to make their products more palatable. We have two microwave ovens, one splattered with hardened sweet residues and the other with savories, so your cooking won’t be too badly mis-flavored if you choose the right one. There’s a toaster oven that neither toasts nor ovens, though it will provide a measure of warmth to your food. There’s an ice machine where you can immerse your hands when they get tired of typing (at least that’s what I think it’s for). There’s a refrigerator for those who choose to bring their meals from home, as long as they heed the warning sign on the door: “Absolutely no pizza boxes or two-liter bottles – they WILL be thrown away.” We used to have a coffeemaker but the warehouse people ruined it for everybody by using up all the artificial creamer and never replacing it, the jerks.

As for entertainment, besides watching people bang their fists on the vending machines, there’s a television perched in one corner with its endless loop of Headline News. We also have a bookshelf generously stocked with a surprising variety of paperbacks and magazines that makes it appear we’re a more literate crowd than we actually are. There’s a single window that looks out onto the parking lot, a clock with hands that make a 360-degree circuit every hour, and those intriguing walls I mentioned earlier. Those last three features draw as much attention as the more stimulating options the later it gets in the day; people working on overtime seem to have an especially keen interest in the walls.

Finally, I’ll mention the internal communications centers of the room, a couple of bulletin boards. One of these contains information being communicated by management about health, legal and other employment-related issues, as well as copies of recent emails sent out by headquarters, including the one explaining how we can afford to buy a company in Brazil but no employee hams for the holidays. The other board is a forum for people wanting to get messages out to their fellow workers. There are a few rules – nothing allowed that promotes commercial or for-profit enterprises, all postings must be approved by site management, they can be up for only ten days before being removed – but otherwise it’s the kind of wide-open space that our brave patriot ancestors earned for us when freedom of speech was first established in this country. When I checked the board yesterday, it showed a newspaper clipping of a record catfish catch, an article about how much trouble you can get in if you tell the health insurance people you don’t smoke but you really do, advice to wipe down all surfaces during cold and flu season and, inexplicably, a large map of the United States. (I think it fell out of one of the National Geographic magazines.)

It’s a warm and welcoming place where we while away our 15 minutes of paid break time twice a day. While it may not be for everyone – like the people who choose to sit in their cars or the coworker I discovered doing some bizarre exercise routine in the darkened training room next door – it can be a special “happy place” for those who need a break.

Impressions on an historic day

2009-01-21T10:25:00.001-05:00

Observations on yesterday’s historic events:

--My suburb of Charlotte, NC, was slammed by two inches of snow Tuesday, grinding everyday life to a complete halt. Transportation was paralyzed, schools were closed and people stayed home from work to eat French toast, made with all the eggs, bread and milk they’d purchased the previous night. Life slowly returned to normal later in the day when all the car accidents that could possibly happen did happen. In other news, the U.S. inaugurated its first African-American president, beginning an era of hope and promise not seen in decades.

--When Chief Justice John Roberts bungled the first few lines of the presidential oath of office, I got the sneaking suspicion that he was laying the foundation for a constitutional challenge that Barack Obama was not in fact president because he didn’t say exactly the right words. What Roberts should have prompted was “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the president,” but instead he came out with “I do slovenly swear that I will facetiously execute the president of the office.” Fortunately, Obama saw what Robbie was up to and managed to recite the correct wording.

--In an attempt to capture every possible camera angle, the networks at one point were focusing their cameras through the bullet-proof glass and onto the front line of dignitaries right before the oath was delivered at noon. An astute reporter observed that the giant foreheads seen on the distinguished guests were a “funhouse mirror reflection” and not actual giant alien foreheads.

--I noticed that 10-year-old Malia Obama was fiddling with some kind of electronic device while waiting for her father’s big moment. TV commentators claimed it was a camera, but I got the distinct impression that she was texting her friends. I can only imagine the message that a pre-teen girl might send in the midst of so much attention being paid to her and her family: “OMG – my dad is becoming president – I’m so embarrassed!!!”

--I was not particularly impressed with the invocation delivered by controversial preacher Rick Warren. He managed to avoid the verb “smite” while talking about the diversity of America, but still snuck in a few ingratiating references to his own personal savior, while giving only passing acknowledgment to everybody else’s. Then, for the last quarter of the recitation, he had the nerve to sample from the Lord’s Prayer. What is he, some kind of DJ Saddleback? I just hope he’s made to pay royalties to whomever it is who owns the rights to that “Our Father, who art in heaven” lyric.

--I thought it was very sad when the Obamas had to get out of their GM-produced megamobile during the parade and begin walking because the vehicle couldn’t get above 2 mph. This was the Big Three’s opportunity for some impressive grill time before a huge national audience, and the giant Escalade broke down at least twice on the route. They were able to get it re-started both times and finally ended up at the reviewing stand in time to watch the rest of the parade.

--During some of the postgame analysis on CNN, Democratic strategist and Louisiana native Donna Brazille talked about how great it was to be so close to the historic event up on the main stage. She said she ran into Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas at one point and, in the spirit of bipartisanship, resisted what had to be an overwhelming temptation to punch him in the mouth. Instead, she reportedly told the Savannah-raised justice, “Georgia in da house, Louisiana in da house.” Responding with classic Thomasonian wit, the soft-spoken arch-conservative responded, “duh?”

--It was high noon, the historic moment was at hand, and inauguration coordinator Senator Dianne Feinstein takes the stage to introduce … an overhead backup band? Their set was mercifully short, just long enough for me to make a quick trip to the restroom before the presidential oath. They were just finishing when I got back, so I may not have the band lineup exactly right, but I think I know at least a few of them – cellist Yo-Yo Ma, violinist Itzhak Perlman, pianist Billy Joel and saxophonist Kenny G were immediately recognizable. It was only the tambourine player that I didn’t recognize.

--Dick Cheney made his final appearance as sitting vice president literally sitting, in a wheelchair. He couldn’t have been happy with how diabolical that made him look. Reportedly, he suffered a back sprain while helping move furniture out of his office the day before (that man-sized safe isn’t going to move itself, you know). I’ve been through similar back pain myself, and I can tell you that sitting down is not the position you want to assume. When I had my most recent spell of back spasms, I wanted to either stand up straight or lay flat the whole time; any bending at the waist was extremely painful. I guess they couldn’t wheel him into the proceedings on a stretcher, since that would make it too hard to see unless he had one of those iron-lung mirrors you see in old movies. I suppose they could’ve slanted the gurney to a 45-degree angle so he might get an actual view. That was probably vetoed, however, when they realized how much it would look like he was doing a shout-out to waterboarding.

--Since I had to watch the proceedings from the office, I had to rely on the magnificent architecture of the worldwide web to get my live feed, and things were not going well. I went to several sites I would’ve thought reliable – CNN, CBS, ABC, MSN, even, in desperation, Fox – and all of them said I could “click here for live video.” I’d click there and nothing would happen except for a circular graphic rotation. I could understand why CNN’s wasn’t working; they had to use up half their bandwidth to include inane but real-time comments from their Facebook connection (Allegra Bischoff is thinking Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann are total foxes; Reza Gulastani is thinking I love everybody, God loves everybody, I think I need to study now). I finally got a site up and running just as Obama was stepping up to the podium for the main event, then … screen freeze. I rushed into the breakroom and was able to see the historic moment along with a group of African-, Asian- and Latino-Americans from our warehouse. When they broke into applause as the oath finished, it was a great moment.

Best of luck to all of us and to our new president.

Lives of the Dead: Martin Luther

2009-01-19T09:07:00.001-05:00

Martin Luther (1483-1546), widely regarded as the father of the Protestant Reformation and a number of unintended babies, was a German theologian and religious reformer who challenged the supremacy of the Catholic Church. He also had a vast influence on European concepts of politics, economics, education, language and hair styling, with his now-familiar bowl cut making him one of the most crucial figures in modern European history.

He was born in Eisleben (later Hitlerville, and then back to Eisleben) in what today is Germany. His father, originally known as Hans Luder, had wanted to name his son “Lex” but was convinced by his wife to go with “Abraham Martin and John,” later shortened to simply Martin. The family was descended from peasantry, but Hans made a nice living for himself and his family as a copper miner and part-time fletcher/cooper (roughly equivalent to today’s writer/director). Martin received his early education at Magdeburg and Eisenach, before enrolling at the University of Erfurt at age 17. Red-shirted during his freshman season, he became an outstanding left tackle for the Fightin’ Furter football team by the time he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1502. He passed on an opportunity for a pro career -- he was projected as high as the eighth round by some scouts -- and chose to stay in school to pursue his master’s, which he received in 1505.

He began to study law, as his father wished, but didn’t have enough credits to graduate so he fell back on his undergraduate major – monking -- and entered the Augustinian monastery. Within a year, he had so impressed his superiors that he was selected for the priesthood, ordained, and conducted his first celebration of mass. (“Celebration” might be overstating the case, as he kept stumbling over the unfamiliar phrasing, once mispronouncing “Madonna” as “My donut.”) He continued his studies in theology, including multiple re-takes of basic Latin, until he got his big chance to go to Rome and check out how Catholicism was done in the big city.

To put it mildly, he was not impressed. In fact, he was shocked by the worldliness of the Roman clergy, especially the way they had substituted vodka shots for wine in the communions they conducted. This led him to question other basic tenets of church, and he gradually came to believe that Christians were saved not through their own efforts but instead by God’s grace. The church leadership was making a tidy fortune off the sale of indulgences, which were peddled to the peasants in the form of mugs, posters and t-shirts (“Rome Rules” was a common slogan for this merchandising). This crass effort disgusted Luther to the point where he suffered from nearly constant vomiting, though scholars recently discovered a sixteenth-century Domino’s menu that led them to believe that salmonella-tainted pizza may have been a contributing factor.

Luther finally emerged into worldwide prominence when in 1517 he was named Holy Roman Empire Today’s “Most Pious Man Alive” and became known for some graffiti he had scrawled on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenburg. This posting of the so-called Ninety-five Theses has been greatly misunderstood by historians and only recently was clarified when the old door itself was located at a garage sale in East St. Louis, Missouri. It was long believed that Luther wrote the theses before-hand and then nailed them to the cathedral door as a sign of protest and to show his growing prowess as a construction worker. In reality, Luther wrote the seminal document on-site, meticulously painting it onto the oak with a fine single-haired brush. What bothered the church elders more than what the manuscript said was the fact that he was always in the way, blocking the main entrance almost constantly during the three weeks it took him to finish. Most of the demands were not that unreasonable – for example, he wrote of the need for sturdier pews to “accommodate the ample Germanic hind.” He also wanted Wednesday night services moved to Tuesday because most members couldn’t TiVo floggings in the public square like the wealthy clergy could, and he wanted the liturgy conducted in native languages because Latin “sounds too much like they’re just making it up as they go along.”

He made it all the way through the next-to-last thesis (“94. Enough with the incense already, it’s giving everybody a headache”) with church officials only mildly curious about the progress of the bowl-headed scribe. On the morning of his final day of work, he began writing the last entry as a crowd of onlookers grew around him. “The pope is not ni…” he began. The throng began buzzing with anticipation. The pope is not what? Nitrogen-based? Nihilistic? Luther slowly added a “c”. Nicene? Nickel-plated? Then he added an “e”. “Don’t get upset everybody – it could still be ‘Nicene,’” shouted one observer, trying to quell the growing distress of the crowd. Then Luther added the punctuation mark that would change European history forever, a period. “The pope is not nice.” The multitude gasped, but soon dispersed when they heard a beheading was being set up across the street.

The Roman Curia, which is kind of like a Senate subcommittee only crankier, began an investigation that eventually led to the condemnation of Luther’s teachings in 1520 and his excommunication a year later. He was summoned to appear before Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms and asked to recant. His famous assertion of conscience in the face of certain punishment – “No Can Do!” – is most likely legendary, but still he was spirited away by Prince Frederick the Wise who kept him in virtual house arrest at his castle.

Luther was able to continue much of his other life work, though it paled in comparison to royally pissing off the entire Catholic Church. He made a little money doing some free-lance translations and sticking his nose into the Peasants’ War of 1524-1526, where he supported the peasants’ political demands while repudiating their theological arguments, a fine distinction that was lost on all the people who had swords. He married a former nun, a widely acknowledged hottie by the name of Katharina von Bora, and continued his writing as his influence spread across northern and eastern Europe.

By the late 1530’s, his health began to deteriorate and he took on an anti-Semitic bent by accusing the Jews of exploiting the confusion he had caused among Christians. This made him virtually unable to locate a decent doctor, and he died on Feb. 18, 1546. His obituary, printed several days later in the Eisleben Picayune-Examiner, included a long list of his works, an even longer list of his children, and the name of his new religion: Martinism, which was later changed to Luthermania, then Lutheranism.

This...is...CNN.com

2009-01-18T09:37:00.000-05:00

This … is … C … N … N.

So intoned the Lord our God, in his only commercial spokesperson role, some 40 years ago when the Cable News Network premiered. I was an early adopter of the cable news format when it was first made available in the 1970s, and have been a fan of its derivative networks since then. I enjoyed watching Braves baseball, Turner Classic Movies and the unchanging drumbeat of Headline News (now rechristened HLN) repeating the same stories over and over and over. I got a vicarious kick out of Ted Turner’s unsuccessful mergers, with both Jane Fonda and Time Warner. I’ve even taken the tour at the Atlanta headquarters, ascending the world’s tallest escalator to end up in a tiny room where they explain how the weather people can’t even see what they’re pointing at as they wave their arms in front of a green screen. Amazing!

Having seen the bricks and mortar of the operation, I was eager to take a look the digital and the virtual in the form of the network’s website, CNN.com. As you might imagine, the home page is heavy on the headlines of breaking news. Thursday’s highlights included must-reads such as: “Rabid fox attacks dad, son,” “Man complains about Buddhas at zoo,” “Cow gas tax not happening,” “18th Porta-Potty set on fire” and “Iowan: Cold hurts, makes ‘skin burn.’” There’s also promotion of a feature about what’s on schoolchildren’s minds (“Make Iraq war go away”) and an offer to update your Facebook status while you watch the inauguration on CNN.com.

CNN is working hard – some might say a little too hard – to make itself relevant in the new-media landscape that potentially threatens its very foundation. In its efforts to involve viewers and make them more a part of the news operation, it’s giving Average Joes nearly equal footing with its staff of veteran journalists. While participation from the grassroots can offer a broader perspective on the events of the day, it can be distracting to those of us used to a little more professionalism.

Take the concept of the “iReport,” a user-generated site containing stories that are “not edited, fact-checked or screened.” Just the kind of reliable information source you want. One recent example went beyond news into the realm of opinion and policy-making, allowing an iReporter to offer his views on how to fix the most severe economic crisis of our time. Zennie Abraham, also known as “Zennie62,” offered his taxpayer stimulus package to CNN chief business correspondent Ali Velshi. Zennie’s plan calls for a $3,500 stimulus check to those making less than $100,000 a year, presumably including Zennie. Velshi said such a plan wasn’t targeted enough to work but Zennie defended his idea: “$3,500, particularly for college students and their parents, can help pay for their housing.” (Sounds like someone trying to afford first and last month’s rent so he can move out of his parents’ basement.) CNN’s Velshi, after hearing the explanation – and mindful perhaps of the network’s changing demographics – started to agree. “That could work,” he said lamely.

Another new feature a little too close to the cutting edge for my comfort is the Rick Sanchez Show, wherein Rick attempts to moderate a Twittering free-for-all that’s taking place in a strip across the bottom of his screen. He tries his best to turn submissions like “great rap, agree … disagree no matter … all good. gots to go to bed. will do again morrow” and “hey, why’s ur girlfriend gaining weight again. u making her too happy?” into relevant commentary on the topic at hand. He squirms so hard at some points that you fear he’s going to pull a muscle.

The website also includes details and extras about certain on-air personalities and the efforts they go to in making themselves more interesting. The “Today”-equivalent morning show on HLN is called “Morning Express with Robin Meade,” featuring a former beauty queen with a chatty manner, a smile as wide as Heath Ledger’s Joker, and the kind of extreme makeup required in today’s high-definition production. Robin hosts the Morning Express Challenge, a news quiz where both the first correct answer and a randomly drawn player win the same prize – an autographed picture of Robin – but both are enrolled in a chance to win the grand prize, a trip to Atlanta to meet Robin in person. We also see Robin posed in what looks like the open bay door of a helicopter, the smile wisely wiped from her face as she offers her “Salute to the Troops.” And, you can sign up for her daily email news preview, sent out early each morning in her signature lower-case style: “morning glory! let’s shake the sleepy out of you. this isn’t our top story, but i love this one: too much caffeine can make you hallucinate and see ghosts. okay, how much are we talking? more on that.” I actually subscribed to this service for a while, until I cancelled after realizing there’d be no pictures of Robin still in her baby-doll pajamas.

Other highlights around the site include pictures of hunky Surgeon General-designate Sanjay Gupta, promotions for the “News to You” show (a kind of “Best Week Ever” rip-off without the snark), and the obligatory nod to Nancy Grace’s all-consuming obsession with the Caylee Anthony case. I looked for something on CNN’s resident right-winger Glenn Beck, but he’s apparently left the company for a new and more welcoming home on Fox News. Either way, I’m glad to see network news offering a big enough tent to employ those afflicted with uncontrollable facial tics such as Glenn’s.

You can also sign up for CNN Mobile alerts, in case you want to be notified immediately via your cell phone should there be a warning about Vicks Vaporub or how “doctor [is] interested in seeing kids not kidney, lawyer says.” I tried to find out more about similar high-tech extras but crashed my PC twice when I tried to go to the Tools and Widgets section of the site.

All in all, it’s a respectable representation on the Web, almost deserving of the thunderous tones I quoted at the beginning of this post. If God is no longer in the promo business, maybe they can get James Earl Jones to splice a “… dot … com…” onto the audio for their site.

Post not available in stores

2009-01-15T18:58:00.001-05:00

With the poor economy continuing to affect TV advertising revenue, you see more and more direct marketing commercials selling items that are “not available in stores.” These ads typically feature extremely agitated pitchmen, a toll-free order number, a price that’s typically $19.95, and tiny-font shipping and handling charges that run you another $12. If you order now you can get two, and don’t forget that these items are not available in stores, probably because the idea behind stores is that they offer products people actually want and need to buy.

It used to be that you only saw these commercials late at night, when you were so worried about how you’d deal with sudden urges to fish that you couldn’t sleep. And mercifully, there would be an ad for the “pocket fisherman.” Now you’re likely to see these kinds of spots any time of the day or night. An NPR report recently explained the trend: as traditional advertisers reduce their budgets, local stations make leftover air time available to these low-end buyers at drastically reduced rates. One ad buyer interviewed admitted he was a “bottom feeder,” which I think would be an excellent name for a product: Try the BottomFeeder! You’ll never need to buy bathroom tissue again!

A lot of the trailblazers in this industry have unfortunately been made archaic by modern technology. The Ginsu Knives, famous for cutting through a can, were so sharp and awkward to use that most of their purchasers accidentally slashed their wrists. The Medic Alert bracelet, for when you’ve fallen and can’t (or simply don’t want to) get up, was antiquated by the cell phone. The Clapper, which allowed you to turn stuff on from across the room, was discontinued when seniors began using the Segway to travel effortlessly about their homes from light switch to light switch.

One of the promoters currently most in demand for these frenetic spiels is a bearded, raspy-voiced fellow named Billy Mays. Son of baseball’s Willie Mays, who roamed centerfield for the San Francisco Giants for over two decades on his way to 12 Golden Gloves and the Hall of Fame, Billy wanted to get out from the shadow of his famous father. His big break came in the ‘90s when he was selected to be spokesman for the Bedazzler, a tool that embedded plastic gems into jackets, jeans and that household pet desperately in need of a makeover. He later sold items like OxiClean, the Mantis Tiller and Miracle Whip (I can’t remember ever seeing him hawk the well-known dessert topping, so I can only guess this product was instead some kind of domination device).

Described by The Washington Post as having a “signature yelling approach” and being “known for screaming in lieu of talking during infomercials … a full-volume pitchman, amped up like a candidate for a tranquilizer-gun takedown,” Mays was last seen branching out into the service economy. He was recently named the new voice of iCan Benefit Group, “the first company offering health insurance Billy Mays has been excited to endorse.” (He’s endorsed many other insurance plans, but steadfastly refused to be excited by them until now.) I anticipate a not-too-distant future in which Billy sells everything from mutual funds to cremation services in his classic manic shriek.

Mays is not affiliated with the infomercial product that most recently has been all over the airwaves — I mentioned him mainly because I wanted to see how many readers would buy the Willie Mays connection. I’m talking here about the “Loud and Clear” sound-amplifying device that fits in your ear like a Blutooth cell phone apparatus. No longer will your difficulties interpreting sound be obvious to all who can see the electroacoustic device in your ear; now, they’ll think you’re just another self-absorbed tool enamored with pointless technology that hangs off the side of your head. I can hardly wait for the next-gen app that enhances your smelling abilities with the brushed-steel device that protrudes from your nose.

Rather than using a spokesperson, the Loud and Clear commercials feature actors pretending to go through their daily routines enjoying the life-enhancing properties of a monstrous hearing aid. There’s a guy in bed next to his annoyed wife, who’s giving him dirty looks because the TV is too loud for her to sleep, until he discovers the Loud and Clear and can turn that damn thing down. There’s a woman rocking out to the kitchen radio while her husband tries but fails to concentrate on his laptop work. Rather than asking him to get his stupid computer off the kitchen table, she’s seen moments later happily accessorized in her Loud and Clear. Others are involved in a number of activities designed to demonstrate that today’s seniors aren’t your father’s old people – they’re energetically playing bingo, strolling through the woods in tight jeans, and listening in on two neighbors having a private discussion across the street.

This last example hints at the more malicious uses of the Loud and Clear, which are also illustrated in the commercial with a surprising lack of guilt. One scene shows a guy, hopefully a private detective, sitting at the wheel of his parked car with the amplifier in his ear and a camera in his hands. He becomes suddenly attentive, clicks the camera at some off-screen scene, then nods in quiet satisfaction at how easily he was able to get naked pictures of his kid’s hot teacher. I’m not sure how the hearing device helped with this, unless maybe it keeps him on guard for the piercing sirens of approaching squad cars.

Generally, though, the Loud and Clear is shown engaging in harmless fun. There’s a party scene where a trio of attractive women are chatting, then the shot widens to show the eavesdropping stud who’s delighted to learn they’re talking about him. There’s a hunter in the woods — hopefully not the same woods with the tight-jeaned woman — using the hearing enhancer to listen for the rustle of live game. I only hope the L&C has a volume control handy, because when he lets loose with that shotgun, he’s going to get way more amplification than he bargained for. There’s a quiet conversation at home with the family, above a caption that reads “HEAR PEOPLE AROUND YOU!”

Probably the worst, most devious thing about this product is that I want one. I can tell that my hearing has declined in recent years, and I recognize that it would be nice to watch television and have some idea of why Howie Mandell is beating that guy over the head with a baseball bat. My world could be so much richer.

Actually, I think I’d like to have two, one protruding out of each ear. Maybe if I order now…

When I first learned to blog

2009-01-12T17:37:00.001-05:00

The following is a piece I wrote as a submission to our local newspaper when they expressed interest in the subject of local blogging a few months ago. Though it “doesn’t meet their needs at this time,” I believe that by “this time” they mean “while humans walk the earth.” So rather than waste my efforts, I’m putting it in as today’s posting.

As a fifty-something middle-class European-American, I long ago gave up any aspirations to be on the cutting edge of modern culture. There was a brief period years ago when I might’ve considered myself marginally “cool” – I think it was for about a half-hour during my junior year of college – but once you find yourself with a family, a suburban home and a corporate career, you are so far past cool as to need only a light jacket.

I like to think, however, that I’m at least aware of all the latest happenings among the younger generation. Though I choose not to indulge, I know all about the discos, the hip-hop, the so-called “brake” dancing, where kids stop and reverse direction in mid-tumble. I’ve heard the music of Madonna, LL Coolio J-Z, and Fall-Down Boy. I have a cell phone and I’ve walked past the video game section in Best Buy. And I’ve learned enough about computers and the Internet to think I’ve found a niche where perhaps I can rekindle enough of my def self to put a toe in the kids’ pool.

I’ve started a blog.

The young people out there know what I’m talking about, but let me take a moment to explain this phenomenon to any of my contemporaries who aren’t familiar with the concept. The blog has nothing to do with Steve McQueen and meteors exuding a pink, gooey substance (that’s “The Blob,” as I was embarrassed to learn a little too late) and everything to do with chronicling your every thought, move and breath for a fascinated world to follow. It’s a little like being an exhibitionist from the comfort of your home, without the gross and illegal parts.

I went online and found WordPress and Blogger, two of the more popular sites that serve as portals to the time-space wormhole known as the “blogosphere.” This huge ball of Internet waves, sitting in geosynchronous orbit over south Asia, is where you choose your blog name, create your profile, even upload video, if you can find the VHS port on the side of your laptop. The setup is quick and remarkably painless (as long as you keep your power cord out of the water) and before you know it, you’re a blogger!

Now that you’ve got the infrastructure in place, you need to turn your attention to something known as “content.” This annoying but necessary part of keeping a blog requires you to think of something interesting to put in your postings so that when people open your webpage, there will be words instead of blank space, which tends to discourage return visits. From looking at some of the blogs already out there, it seems that your content doesn’t have to be especially pertinent – cats, lawyer jokes and death threats are a few common themes – it mostly just has to be there.

My favorite subject so far, as I hope you’ve been able to guess from the last 491 words that preceded these, is humor. Since standards aren’t especially high, what with the lack of editors, fact-checkers and other mainstream media flotsam, all you need to do is position your screen pointer on the “write” tab and click it to open a window that looks something like an email entry. Type until your hands get tired and then press the “publish” button.

At this point, you’re usually given the option to “view site” so you can see what you just wrote in a slightly different format, but one that is now being viewed by millions of people around the world. Or at least that’s how I thought it worked. Turns out that the hardest part of blogging once you’ve gotten this far is figuring out how to get people to actually visit your blog. I believed that once your posting went up, there’d be a flashing signal on every computer then online that would direct readers to stop whatever they were doing and read all about you. I kept watching for evidence of all this traffic to show up in the comments that record what visitors think of your hard work. It’s the positive reinforcement of these remarks – notes like “wow, you’re terrific” and “worst blog ever” – that provide the incentive for people to keep up their blogs for weeks at a time. It’s been slow to come in my case, though with networking, webcasting and poking people with sticks, I’m starting to build a respectable audience.

It’s certainly not money that provides the motivation for blogging. If you’re thinking about joining in this communications revolution as a way to add a little extra income during this time of tight cash, you’ll find out quickly that that’s not how it works. Though my laptop does have a slot on one side that looks about the right size to spit out fifty-dollar bills, they haven’t come yet, and I’m starting to think they never will. Still, I’ve achieved the satisfaction of joining a community of like-minded citizens to whom connectivity, even though it’s virtual, gives us all a sense that we’re involved in something very, very special.

Being cool.

More of FiftySomethingMan

2009-01-11T10:50:00.004-05:00

If you've been a reader of my work at this blog, please be aware that a more complete compilation now exists at davisw.wordpress.com. This site includes DAILY postings, including many amusing features you won't see on FiftySomethingMan.blogspot.com. I will continue to maintain this blogspot site, adding primarily essay-sized pieces about three times a week. But if you want to see smaller (and sometimes even funnier) postings, and you want to see them every day, please visit me at davisw.wordpress.com. Thanks.

Website Review: M&Ms.com

2009-01-10T08:05:00.001-05:00

While I was at a theater recently waiting for the movie to start, I temporarily pulled my attention away from the trailer for Kevin James’ Oscar-bound vehicle “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” to read my M&M’s wrapper. I wasn’t too surprised to discover there’s an M&M’s website (mms.com, not the mandm.com I might’ve expected, which is being cyber-squatted on by men who like Depeche Mode) and I promised myself I’d check out this internet curiosity the next time I couldn’t find anything better online.

Several months later, I made my first visit and was delighted to learn there’s a world of enchantment behind that hard candy shell. The folks from Mars – the candy company that owns M&M’s, not the single-celled life forms on the nearby planet – have put a lot of work into dreaming up ways they can sell all things M-related. They offer not just the candy itself, with colors and imprints I could hardly believe, but an immense variety of merchandise, recipes, games and allergen warnings. Let’s review the site map as soon as I down a handful of America’s favorite sedative-shaped chocolate treat.

Mmmmmmmmm! I love the taste of ampersands.

The home page currently features three revolving promotions: exploring the five fabulous flavors of new M&M premiums; the somewhat-outdated “make holiday magic with M&M’s and Martha (Stewart, I’m guessing, not Washington)”; and the “bring ‘M’ to the party” Super Bowl campaign. I’m guessing “M” is the cool new identity designed to appeal the younger generation, who love the brevity of single-lettered terms, as in “let’s do some ‘X’” and “I have to ‘P’”. This is where I also learned that the iconic “melts in your mouth, not in your hands” slogan has been replaced with “Always Fun,” which works, I guess, unless one of them gets lodged in your trachea.

The recipe section was largely predictable, taking just about any cake, cookie or pie concoction and throwing a bunch of M&Ms into the mix. There were a few interesting ideas that wouldn’t have occurred to me (“put ‘em in your coffee!”) as well as a number of others that struck me as a bit of a stretch. These would include the Autumn Turkey Casserole, Citrus Basil Sangria and something called “Plantains with Mex,” which I hope includes a type of southwestern flavoring and not an actual Mexican. In addition to the recipes was a related section called crafts, which offered creative ways to assemble the M’s into works of art. Among the more inspired suggestions were the Eight Nights of Light cupcakes (for the Jewish holiday known as Hanukkah, which Mars has apparently moved to January), a party pizza cookie with M&M’s standing in for pepperoni and anchovies (two of the aforementioned “five fabulous flavors” I suppose) and a holiday wreath made of hundreds of green M&Ms crazy-glued together into a wheel.

Other ways to incorporate the M&M experience into your personal lifestyle included bedding, clocks and, not surprisingly, extra-large sweatpants; online games such as “Red vs. Green,” “Flip the Mix” and “Shmuffleboard” (that’s right, spellcheck, shuffleboard with an “m”); and the company’s venture into sports marketing with a sponsorship of NASCAR driver Kyle Busch. This last section is particularly interesting to those of us in the South. We get to read about the entire crew – cleverly dubbed the guys who “show grit in the pit” by some pathetic corporate copywriter – including jack man Jeff Fender, who during his downtime enjoys fishing, the music of Bad Company, and long walks on the beach without being hit by racecar. We also see Kyle himself, posing at the track alongside a cocky-looking M dressed in a fireproof suit, because though he won’t melt in your hand, he doesn’t do real well with 900-degree gasoline fires. We get to read extensively about Kyle’s 2008 season, lowlighted by a nineteenth-place finish in Miami, a solid eighth in Phoenix and “surviving crash-filled Talladega despite damage from a late-race accident” to celebrate his birthday May 2 with M&M candies and “finding his inner M.”

Another way that Mars is trying to engage the candy-buying public is with the opportunity to create your own virtual characters. To get you started, they show a group of anthropomorphic sweets sitting around a breakroom table with coffee (WATCH OUT!!) and “Hi my name is” tags identifying them as Stacy, Naomi, Larry, Tony and Mike. A few of these guys are what you might call slightly edgy-looking – no body piercings or purple hair but a tattooed “m” on their chins. We see another set of unnamed characters standing proudly in front of a picture of an actual 50-foot M&M-styled Statue of Liberty holding her beacon skyward near the Brooklyn Bridge in 2007. One of these characters does have a mohawk, perhaps in recognition that Lady Liberty welcomes the tired, the wretched and the haircut-impaired.

My favorite part of the mm.com website is where you can order personalized M&M’s with words, faces and colors of your choosing. The faces consist primarily of the characters noted above and the colors include just about any pastel you can imagine. The words, however, are subject to a list of do’s and don’ts. The do’s include the requirement to use nice words, be cheerful, have fun and be expressive, just as long as you don’t take your basic American freedoms too far. You can’t use obscenities, proper nouns like business, celebrity or product names and, “to avoid any confusion and keep everyone safe, we will not print any reference to prescription drugs, especially those that are in pill form.” To drive this last point home, they show a diagonal “no” slash through a candy that reads “Mary’s pills.”

Finally, there’s the boilerplate part you see on just about every commercial website, offering basic facts about the company. We learn that Mars also makes Uncle Ben’s rice, Combos snack crackers, Seeds of Change for the home gardener, and a disturbing quantity of cat food varieties, including Whiskas, Sheba and Pedigree. An ingredients section talks mostly about potential allergens in their products, with additional unnerving references to bass, cod, crab and shrimp (hopefully these are in the cat foods, not candies like Skittles and Snickers.)

Then there’s a store locator to help you find where to buy M&M’s. It’s hard to imagine that locating the ubiquitous dark brown bag we all know and love is really a problem, unless perhaps you’re on safari in Kenya. I keyed in the zip code where I’m writing this posting and found that there are bags for sale in the drugstore across the street, the gas station opposite that, the bookstore on the other corner, and the dollar store three doors down. In total, there are 29 outlets within ten miles of my house.

I appreciated the opportunity to learn more about this fine all-American product and what makes it so special. Watch for more website reviews in future Friday postings.

Three procedures and still alive

2009-01-07T20:08:00.002-05:00

ATLANTA (Associated Press) — Griffin Bell, 90, the shrewd Southern lawyer who grew up with Jimmy Carter and later became U.S. attorney general after Carter was elected president, died Monday in Atlanta. He was being treated for complications from pancreatic cancer, kidney disease and being 90.

From the perspective of someone still in relatively good health, it often seems like medicine can go too far in treating the ravages of time. I think there comes a point when you feel like you’ve lived a rich, full life and now it’s time to go do something else, like maybe die. Throwing the incredible expenses of the modern healthcare establishment at the elderly and infirm just doesn’t always seem wise, especially if you hit one of them in the eye with an otoscope.

I’ve been incredibly fortunate with my health for over 55 years, and haven’t spent a night in the hospital since that whole birthing thing back in 1953. I’ve had my fair share of the usual modern maladies that almost everybody goes through – measles, mumps, mole removal, molar removal. I had what we politely called a “nervous stomach” in my teens, I’ve had a couple of lower back issues that kept me prone for days at a time, and I got chicken pox as a Christmas present from my son about ten years ago. Only three times have I gone through anything more serious.

My first such episode occurred in 1989. For years, I had noticed a brownish area just inside the top of my left ear. I chalked it up to poor hygiene until one day when it started bleeding. I knew that blood was only effective when it was coursing through your veins and that having it drip off the end of your earlobe wasn’t as good. I made a visit to the dermatologist who took one look at the wound and made his frightening pronouncement – ear cancer.

Well, not exactly ear cancer. It was a skin cancer that happened to be on my ear. All those hours I’d spent on college break in Miami laying out on my parents’ patio without benefit of sunscreen hadn’t been wasted after all. I was referred to a cosmetic surgeon despite my protests that I already looked damned good, but they explained he’d be the one carving off thin layers of my cartilage until all the cancer was removed, then would rebuild what was left into some semblance of an ear. The procedure I’d be undergoing was called “Moe’s surgery,” which sounded like it might involve a conk on the head rather than traditional anesthesia, but actually turned out to be Mohs surgery.

The operation was done in a Charlotte doctor’s office while I was fully awake but feeling no pain. Everything went as planned and the doctor assured me that all the malignancy was removed. I couldn’t look at the cosmetic results right away, since they wrapped my whole upper head in a bandage. I was able to return to work the same day, looking like that guy playing a fife in the middle of that iconic Revolutionary War painting, except that I had a $4,000 doctor’s bill sticking out of my pocket. But my coworkers we really impressed at the dedication I showed by coming in with such an apparently brutal head wound.

My next significant experience came in 2003 while I was planning my first business trip to India. I had noticed occasional discomfort in my groin for a few weeks before a particularly acute episode sent me home from work to wander restlessly around my house. When I went to the doctor later that morning, he immediately recognized the wandering as a symptom of kidney stones (go figure). X-rays confirmed the presence of a crystalline mass lodged firmly in my urethra. “It’s about six millimeters in diameter,” the technician told me, but failed to note whether that was considered small, medium or super-sized. Regardless, it was bad enough to require what they refer to in the business as a urologic intervention. Unless I passed the stone naturally or wanted to risk the male equivalent of childbirth while 35,000 feet in the air over the Middle East, I needed to get this taken care of.

Shortly before the outpatient procedure, called a “simple basket extraction,” I thought I might’ve avoided it entirely. After using the urinal at work, I looked down to see a corn-kernel-sized piece lying next to the scent cake. Had I painlessly expelled the stone and avoided costly surgery? Unfortunately, it turned out to be exactly what it looked like – a piece of corn – though I fail to understand even today how it got there.

Going ahead with the physician-assisted removal turned out to be fairly simple, at least for me. The trickiest part was counting backwards from 100, and then waking up to ask when we were going to start, only to discover the doctor had not only finished but left the building. The nurses kept watch on me until I was able to wiggle my toes and pee on my own, which took only a few hours. Recovery was quick and relatively pain-free, and I’ve survived to this day without another incident.

What you’ll doubtless be glad to hear is the last experience I’ll recount was the highly recommended (by doctors, not by patients) diagnostic colonoscopy. As veterans of this wonder of medical science will tell you, the worst part comes the day before when you have to drink huge amounts of a foul liquid designed to cleanse your system of everything you’ve ever consumed. Once this is accomplished, you’re ready for your outpatient visit at the hospital. There was no backward counting this time; instead, you get an injection that puts you into a “dream sleep” where your dream consists of someone putting the proctological equivalent of a Swiss army knife (including a light, camera, scalpel, eraser, fountain pen and comb, I seem to recall) several feet up your colon. I do remember lying on my side and watching a TV show where the plot consisted of a cute little pink character named “Polyp” being snipped by a “Mr. Scissors”. The next thing I remember after that, I was arguing with my doctor about the billing.

It seems there’s a loophole in the way most insurance companies view the colonoscopy. They urge you to get one, they tell you it’s fully covered because it’s purely diagnostic in nature, but if they find anything that needs to be removed (which they apparently always do), then the diagnostic designation disappears and you’re suddenly responsible for a percentage of the $5,000 cost. Or, you could choose to have them maintain the status quo by shouting “hey, leave that thing alone” during your dream sleep. I almost came to the point of demanding that my gastroenterologist reinstall the polyp before I finally knuckled under and paid the fee.

I seriously doubt that any of these conditions, left untreated, would’ve led to my untimely demise. I suppose I could’ve had colon cancer, renal failure or an ear fall off, though chances are excellent I would’ve survived at least two out of three. Had they occurred later in life, I think I might’ve considered that option more seriously. I hope Griffin Bell didn’t suffer too much from treatments for the kidney and pancreas problems when his larger issue was that he was 90 years old. I’m not sure living to a ripe old age just for the sake of hitting a really high number is a worthy goal. It seems like the oldest living person is dying every other day anyway.

The worst day of the year

2009-01-06T10:45:00.001-05:00

The first Monday in January should receive some kind of official designation as the worst day of the year. State and federal offices should be closed, black bunting should drape store windows, and flags should be lowered to half-staff. Calendars should note this as a day of commemoration of how miserable our lives are going to be for the next four to five months.

If you haven’t done so already, pause now for a moment in recognition of just how bleak our immediate future is. We’ve been observing one holiday after another for several weeks now, so even happiness and celebration are no fun any more. We’ve gorged on foods we’d never otherwise eat (can you imagine a dinner of goose, champagne and chocolate-covered cherries in August?). The friends and family we only get to see once a year have reminded us all too clearly why we moved halfway across the continent to get so far away from them.

I don’t know about you, but the weather where I am today is cold and wet, the sky a low-hanging grey. I’ve returned to a job that seems unlikely to get any more exciting or any more secure in 2009. There are no significant holidays, no coming of spring, no summer vacation anywhere in the near future. The landscape of life is desolate, barren, foreboding, dreary and miserable. Happy god-damn new year.

I tried yesterday to head off this gathering funk by going to the Y for a nice vigorous run on the treadmill. Exercise has always elevated my mood, even when it has to take place elbow-to-elbow with my fellow fatties in front of a bank of TVs showing the Dolphins losing another playoff game. I’m not one of these exercisers clogging the floor who are motivated only by recent resolutions to get fit. I’m the guy who was complaining to the manager that they were closing the Y early on Christmas Eve. Now here I am, unable to find a vacant treadmill because of all these latter-day athletes.

Out of the ten machines available, two of them have runners while the rest have walkers. Walking is for the hallways of hospitals, not for expensive exercise machines. The guy who just barely beat me to the last available treadmill is wearing a sweater, pleated slacks and penny loafers. He jabs perplexedly at the control buttons until the belt begins the slowest possible movement, which seems to satisfy him until a few minutes later when he feels compelled to poke a few more buttons, bringing the machine to a stop. The same pattern of behavior is repeated several times before the pudgy woman to his right finishes her stroll and lowers her moist bulk to the floor. A machine is finally open.

As the endorphins kick in during my run, I start thinking of a few of the positives that do exist in the first half of the calendar year. There’s the new TV season, one that’s lacking the day-long “Password”-a-thons we’ve endured over the recent holidays. There’s the Obama inauguration in mid-January and the Super Bowl in early February. But all these are enjoyed vicariously at best and don’t even require us to leave our living room.

There are some legitimate holidays on the calendar falling between now and the unofficial start of summer on Memorial Day. There’s Martin Luther King’s birthday in just two weeks, so we’ll get a Monday off to remember the accomplishments of the great civil rights leader. But greeting card companies haven’t told us yet how we’re properly supposed to celebrate this day. Neither parties nor gift-giving nor dressing up in costume seem quite appropriate.

In February, we have Groundhog’s Day, which represents the point at which we might potentially see an end to winter in the distance. Recent efforts to turn February 2 into even more of an occasion have met with limited success. Watching Punxsutawney Phil being groped by that guy in tuxedo and top hat was amusing the first 40 times I saw it on the news, though the novelty has since worn off. I liked the idea of expanding the number of species honored to include other groundlings – moles, voles, badgers, hedgehogs, large rats, etc. – but this added biological diversity did little to spur retail sales and holiday cheer.

Later in the month is Valentine’s Day, when we honor our beloved ones with candy and flowers and the disappointment of knowing a spouse can’t be any more thoughtful than that. Then, just a week or so later is the government-concocted President’s Day, timed to honor the birth of perhaps our greatest commander-in-chief, Abraham Washington. Once every four years, we celebrate the rare Leap Day by trying to find the instructions for changing the date on our digital watches. On March 17, St. Patrick’s Day comes rolling in drunk and smelling of cheap beer. We all wear green so as to better disguise the vomit stains on our shirts. By the time it’s April, we’re starting to sense that warm weather is in the air and we all get a little silly celebrating April Fool’s Day, when radio shock jocks trick us all into thinking an asteroid is about to hit the earth. We laugh when we realize it’s not.

Finally, on some apparently random Sunday between March and May comes Easter, originally scheduled to honor the birth of Christ but now more about the bunnies and candy than the Lord and Savior. When I was a kid, Easter was second only to Christmas in significance. Hunting for eggs, rather than avoiding them like we do as adults, was a big deal, as was the story of Peter Cottontail rolling back the stone from Jesus’ grave. With its Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Sadder Saturday and Maundy Monday (which gave us one of the few Easter carols, performed by the Mamas and Papas), Easter had the potential to give us almost a week off from work, but now most offices barely notice it.

Well, there seems to be a few breaks in the clouds as I look outside, and at least I have a job, a wonderful family and a home that’s not on the auction block. There is something to be said for the satisfaction of getting back to a routine that gives you a feeling of accomplishment at the end of the day instead of the incessant bloating I’ve endured since Thanksgiving. Once I get hungry again, and tired, and overworked, and stressed, and anxious about the economy, maybe then I’ll be happy.

Wrapping up the bowl games, sponsored by FiftySomethingMan

2009-01-03T10:05:00.003-05:00

One of the great things about the global economic catastrophe has been the effect on certain corporate marketing decisions. High-powered multinationals have been forced to look at their priorities and re-evaluate how important it is to shareholders to have the company name plastered all over everything from sporting venues to golf tournaments to baby’s foreheads.

Two new baseball parks being built in New York City for the Yankees and Mets are struggling to find firms willing to spend multi-millions for naming rights, and may have to begin hosting games next season as Hank’s Place and Choker’s Field, respectively. NASCAR auto racing has seen a significant decline in its sponsorships, to the point where you can almost see a bare patch of material on drivers’ uniforms. Traditional suppliers like GM and Chevy are scaling back their involvement in motorsports and we may soon see a Daytona 500 featuring Mini Coopers and old VW minivans.

I’ll miss the occasional unintended consequences that resulted when corporate takeovers clashed with the best-laid marketing plans. For example, when First Union Bank acquired CoreStates, it also inherited the basketball arena that was home to the NBA’s 76ers. The “CoreStates Center” sign was coming down and the “First Union Center” sign was going up when it occurred to someone how headline writers were going to abbreviate the new name.

Before the college football bowl season finally began winding down, many of us (OK, a few of us) sat in front of our TVs wondering about this new crop of low-rent game sponsors. Slashed rates allowed local credit unions and regional trucking firms to have their images splashed across a national stage, prompting viewers to wonder how exactly they could patronize the San Diego Credit Union or R+L Carriers even if they wanted to.

To help these would-be customers, I’ve compiled a complete list of the games and their sponsors with a little something about each firm. I would’ve included the teams who played and the final score too, but nobody cares.

magicJack St. Petersburg Bowl – The magicJack is some kind of device you stick in your computer to make phone calls. Sounds like a good idea until you realize how awkward it is to hold the monitor up to your ear while you try to talk into the mouse.
R+L Carriers New Orleans Bowl – R+L is an Ohio-based trucking firm founded in 1965. Ralph L. “Larry” Roberts was a mere teenager with aspirations of owning his own business. His dream became a reality with the purchase of a single truck he used to haul furniture. The firm then grew into … That’s really all you need to know.
SDCCU Poinsettia Bowl – Everyone living in San Diego, Orange and Riverside counties is eligible to join this federally insured credit union. If you watched the game from your home in Louisville, their competitive CD rates make a move to California worthwhile. I hear R+L is available to help with your couch.
Motor City Bowl – Not too surprisingly, this Detroit game failed to attract a big-name sponsor. Reports are that next year’s game will be called the Bailout Bowl.
Meineke Car Care Bowl – Meineke is a car maintenance franchise clever enough to have worked not only their name but also what they do into their bowl name. This might be something for the SDCCU to consider when they begin negotiations for next year’s Poinsettia Bowl, which could instead become the SDCCU Foreclosure Poinsettia Bowl.
Champs Sports Bowl – Champs is a seller of sports equipment even though I thought they were a sports bar. I must be thinking of some other company I’ll never patronize.
Papajohns.com Bowl – Most people are aware of Papa John’s Pizza, but they also want you to know about their website, which uses a PDF (pizza delivery format) to bring you hot pies through your high-speed Internet connection.
Valero Energy Alamo Bowl – Valero is a retailer of gasoline that managed to work a slight rule change into the Alamo Bowl. Team scores not only can rapidly rise, but they can plummet just as quickly.
Roady’s Humanitarian Bowl – Roady’s Truck Stops are the nation's largest chain of truck stops, catering to the professional driver and traveling motorist in 45 states, meeting the humanitarian needs of people low on fuel for many years.
Brut Sun Bowl – As the final seconds ticked off the clock in this classic, the winning coach was drenched by a cooler full of Brut cologne. He’s currently recovering in the Augusta burn center.
Bell Helicopters Armed Forces Bowl – The rush to purchase helicopters from viewers who enjoyed this match-up drove Bell’s stock price to a three-year high.
Chick-Fil-A Bowl (formerly the Peach Bowl) – They dropped the “peach” out of a concern that fuzz is not something chicken consumers want to be reminded of.
Outback Bowl – This is much like the regular college game except the football is replaced with a Bloomin’ Onion.
Gaylord Hotels Music City Bowl – This bowl game had more adjectives (4) than one of the participating teams had points (3).
Konica Minolta Gator Bowl – Makers of fine cameras until the next leap in digital technology sends them into bankruptcy.
AutoZone Liberty Bowl – Perhaps the winners of this game and the Meineke Car Care Bowl could meet in a playoff: the Sell ‘Em a Muffler When They Just Need a Spark Plug Bowl.
GMAC Bowl – A long, long time ago, people bought cars from a company named “General Motors” and frequently did something called “financing” with GMAC to pay for the car on credit. This bowl is a salute to those bygone days, and includes players using helmets made of leather that have no faceguards.
AT&T Cotton Bowl – AT&T is one of the few big names still in the bowl sponsorship business. Send me a 10-cent text message and I’ll tell you more.
FedX Orange Bowl – Another of the big names still in the bowl scene. Surviving despite the tremendous loss of business due to email attachments and zip files, FedX now has a business model that relies primarily on Amazon and eBay shipments, along with its recent diversification into mowing lawns.
Allstate Sugar Bowl – A curious combination considering New Orleans was wiped out by a hurricane and is still having trouble recovering because of tight-fisted insurance companies. You might be “in good hands” with Allstate, but watch out for their prehensile tail that may be picking your pocket.
Capital One Bowl – What’s in your wallet? Not much cash after you’ve finished paying the astronomical interest rates on their credit cards.
Tostitos Fiesta Bowl – The most delicious, crunchiest game on the postseason calendar.
Insight Bowl – I challenge you to follow this one: Starting in 2000, this game moved to Bank One Ballpark, now known as Chase Field. The game moved yet again effective with the 2006 game, but remained in the Phoenix metropolitan area, this time in Sun Devil Stadium, which was left without a postseason game when the Fiesta Bowl moved to the University of Phoenix Stadium. The game was formerly known as the Copper Bowl until 1996 when sponsorship was assumed by Insight Enterprises and it became the Insight.com Bowl from 1997 to 2001, and then the Insight Bowl. Insight, incidentally, is either a type of Honda, a broadband service, or a laptop maker.
Rose Bowl, sponsored by citi – Yes, the same “citi” as the Citibank that narrowly avoided financial collapse late last year. So their stockholders wouldn’t be pissed that they threw money at the little-known Rose Bowl, note how they put their sponsorship after the bowl name and lower-cased the first letter, hoping no one would notice.

A resolution on resolutions

2009-01-02T17:05:00.001-05:00

This being the New Year, it seems we’re required to propose resolutions to improve our lives and the lives of those around us. What a drag.

I agree that it’s naturally appropriate to respond to the excesses of the holidays with a good stiff shot of moderation. It just makes sense that we can’t spend the entire year eating rum balls and eggnog for breakfast, and so it’s reasonable right now to assess the wisdom of year-round splurging, especially as you approach your late fifties. But to formalize this reasoning into a strict resolution is not something I’ve ever felt comfortable doing.

However, if I must, let me put it this way: everything I’ve been doing for the last month or so I’ll stop doing, and everything I’ve stopped doing I’ll resume. As an important exception, however, I will continue running my autonomic nervous system as I always have, and I’ll persist in being unable to take to self-powered flight.

I went online this morning to see what were some of the more common resolutions being considered. According to Wikipedia, these resolutions were “sorted by the horizontal pixel dimension in ascending numerical order. It is important to realize that the use of the word ‘resolution’ in this context is misleading and inaccurate. The sizes given are pixel dimensions, and do not imply anything about the resolution of the display, which would be expressed in pixels per inch or pixels per centimeter.” Typically helpful Wikipedia.

When I looked around a little longer, I found a more useful list that cited the following as popular choices among Americans: lose weight; manage debt; save money; get a better job; get fit; eat right; get a better education; drink less alcohol; quit smoking; reduce stress; take a trip; and volunteer to help others. I think just about everybody can agree these are worthy aspirations for self-improvement. All of us are imperfect in one way or another, except for a certain savior born over 2,000 years ago who probably never smoked in the first place and already had a pretty good job. If He wanted to make some kind of resolution to improve, about all He could do would be to work on His tan. (Should I capitalize the “t” in “tan”?)

The other thing about starting these new resolutions right on the advent of the New Year is that the timing of this particular holiday isn’t at all convenient. It’s virtually impossible to begin the New Improved You right at the stroke of midnight, when drinking less alcohol is probably the last thing on what’s left of your mind. You might be considerate enough to hold your girlfriend’s hair out of her face while she vomits over the balcony railing, but that’s hardly what you’d call volunteerism. You’re still wanting to celebrate throughout the day on Jan. 1, and then even though it’s back to work for most of us today, it is a Friday and then you’ve got all that free time to be tempted on Saturday and Sunday, and now you’re out to the fifth of the month before any proper behavior can reasonably be expected to begin.

Which reminds me: whoever is in charge of such things needs to resolve to reschedule our holidays so they’re more evenly spread throughout the year. After the King holiday in the third week of January, there’s nothing until Memorial Day, a full four-and-a-half months away. The summer holidays are pretty well spaced, but you hit another dry spot of almost three months until Thanksgiving, then there’s a holiday virtually every other week. I wouldn’t be opposed to getting rid of the January New Year’s Day altogether and putting it back to the beginning of spring, where the Druid gods intended.

But I digress, and that’s something I need to work on improving.

Anyway, while I was researching this subject yesterday, I did come across something I might be able to sign off with. Access Hollywood had talked with a variety of celebrities and other prominent individuals from around the world to see what a few of their resolutions might be. A number of them struck me as a tad bizarre, but most of these are folks who have risen to the top of their professions, so it’s probably worth taking a look at this insight into some of what made them so successful. The following list includes the individual quoted and what they wanted to accomplish in 2009:

George W. Bush: To discover and settle the West Pole, using only dogsleds and shopping carts for transportation
Laura Bush: To bank the seven ball into the side pocket
Barack Obama: To attend next year’s Chick-fil-A Bowl, especially if Vanderbilt is playing
Michelle Obama: To make a smoked bacon reduction sauce
Bill Gates: To learn to play the songbah drum using a stapler
Rod Blagojavich: To drink more brackish water
Oprah Winfrey: To breathe more frequently
Will Smith: To move furniture randomly throughout the day
Warren Buffett: To wear underclothing more often
Peyton Manning: To become chief technology officer of Dr Pepper
Usain Bolt: To play Scrabble with the evil twin of Mickey Rourke
Dakota Fanning: To close on a stunning three-bedroom, two-bath townhome condominium
Michael Phelps: To have his teeth yellowed from drinking coffee
Bernie Madoff: To be run over during the live telecast of a NASCAR race
Britney Spears: To have cholesterol so high it starts leaking out her nose
J.K. Rowling: To be sentenced to 35 years in a federal penitentiary by mistake
Tiger Woods: To review a major motion picture that doesn’t exist
Judge Judy: To develop gills and swim like a fish
Brad Pitt: To eat more cologne samples from men’s magazines
Vladimir Putin: To avoid saying the words “Queen Latifah”
Tina Fey: To climb more trees
Amy Winehouse: To cozy up to a warm winter soup
Tom Cruise: To have that 6-by-8-inch mole on my lower back checked out
T-Pain: To upgrade his 401(k) to a 407(m)
Robert Mugabe: To learn arthroscopic colo-rectal surgery by correspondence course

Doing the Charleston, Holy-style

2008-12-31T10:42:00.001-05:00

A spokesperson for the travel industry estimated this week that at least 5 billion Americans made a trip of 100 miles or more during this holiday season. A large majority of these were on the airlines or driving on the road, though a growing minority of travelers are choosing clean alternative transportation such as paddle boat, skate, and sliding downhill on a piece of cardboard.

When my family and I decided to go the 200 miles from Charlotte to Charleston, S.C., to visit my great aunt, we debated the merits of flying versus driving. We could make it either way in about the same amount of time, when you consider the attendant hassles and time delays involved in modern jet travel. Did we want to pay about ten times what it would cost to drive so we could experience the stimulation of surly counter agents, body searches and a potential plunge from 20,000 feet, or could we endure the tedium of freeway motoring? We realized how close a call the decision was about 50 miles out of town when I almost fell asleep at the wheel, but in the end, we’re glad we decided to drive.

There’s little of the magnificent American landscape so idolized in popular culture on the stretches of interstates 77 and 26 that bisect the state of South Carolina. Brown flatlands give way to sulfurous marshes as you approach the coast, so you’re generally left to your own imagination to summon enough interest to stay alert.

One way to do this is to admire the creativity (and lack thereof) that’s been put into the naming of different locations along the route. Towns have been saddled with unimaginative monikers like Jedburg, North, Cope and, from mapmakers who gave up completely, Ninety Six. There’s also a “Townville” that apparently was judged to be better than “Cityberg” or “Villageton”. Meanwhile, interchanges between the federal highway and various county roads have been given elaborate names to honor prominent locals, I guess because “Exit 17” was just wasn’t inspirational enough. For example, there’s the Medal of Honor Recipient Eugene Arnold Obregon Memorial Interchange, the State Solicitor J. Robert “Bobby Joe” Adamson Jr. Interchange, and the Buck Mickel Memorial Southern Connector, to name just three of the dozens we passed. I can only assume that the memorials were put at highway exits to symbolize how these heroes left the mortal world in much the same way we drivers are forced to get off for gas and a Pepsi.

Though most of the old-time South is located too far off the highway to appreciate, we did get a good sense of the bygone era when we stopped in a tiny village called Restarea. The town had only two roads – “Cars Street” and “Trucks and Campers Avenue”. Though the manufacturing base of Restarea left long ago, there are still pockets of commerce among the 100 or so residents of this bustling community. The only shopping area is a bank of vending machines behind a beautiful wrought-iron gate. There’s a small park where families eat at picnic tables and dogs romp at the end of a leash. The city hall still shows an unfortunate remnant of segregation, with the community rooms divided into separate men’s and women’s facilities. Despite that, there’s still evidence of an active cultural scene inside, including an innovative arts installation where residents can leave their thoughts for others to consider, including thought-provoking folk wisdom such as “eat me,” “Goths and emo rule” and “your stupid.”

As we got further into the last half of our four-hour drive, amusements starting running low until we were passed by a large semi with a sign on the back that asked “How’s My Driving?” I’ve seen these for years and always wondered if anyone ever called, so I pulled out my cell phone and decided to give it a try. After a couple of rings, the operator answered “England Transport customer service, can I help you?”

“Yes,” I responded. “I wanted to offer a comment on the driving of one of your owner-operators.”

A pause, then skeptically, “How can I help you again?”

“I was just passed by one of your trucks on the interstate and a sticker on the back asked ‘how’s my driving?’ and gave this 800 number. I figured not many people responded unless they were mad about something, and I just wanted to offer another perspective.”

“OK,” said the woman. “Can you give me the truck number, please?”

“No, I can’t. It’s already passed. But I can tell you it had a metallic silver trailer, mud flaps on the back wheels and was heading south about 60 miles from Charleston.”

At this point, I got the distinct impression this woman was only pretending to care. “Oh… kay,” she said. “Can you give me your, uh, comment?”

“Yes,” I said. “The driver seemed to be doing an adequate job. Nothing dangerous, nothing dramatically good either. I’d say he was meeting expectations.”

Another pause. “Um, okay. England Transport appreciates your input. Thank you for calling.”

“Do I get a coupon or a discount or anything toward my next less-than-truckload haul?”

No response. She’d hung up. At least my grogginess had passed.

Rural South Carolina was now receding in the rear-view mirror as we headed toward the more metropolitan Low Country. We passed a pickup truck with a bumper sticker advertising the “Medieval Tattoo Studio,” and I couldn’t help but wonder how inked scarring of the skin could be more primitive than it already was. Maybe they splash you with flaming tar to give your etching a random effect. Soon, the “Holy City,” as Charleston bills itself, was all around us.

We had a pleasant two-night stay at our favorite Hampton Inn-Historic District (thanks for the one night free, Mr. Eichmann). We started to remember next morning at the lobby breakfast buffet some of the reasons for the “Holy City” nickname. A family at the next table grasped each others’ hands and bowed their heads, quietly but audibly thanking the Lord for the Honey-Nut Cheerios, banana and decaf that His Mercy had bestowed upon them. Later we met up with our aunt, and got to hear all the details about how her tiny evangelical congregation had schismed yet again, this time over something to do with casseroles. (They had been renting a movie theater for their weekly services when there were 40 of them; now that they’re down to 20, they’re looking at local self-storage facilities.) Aunt Vertie confirmed later that she had indeed erased the line between faith and lunacy. We commented on how well her Buick Regal seemed to be running, and she noted that it probably needed some brake work but she was hoping the occasional addition of fluid would allow it to last “until the Rapture.” This sounds like something that GMAC and other car loan financers should investigate – leasing options that are pegged to the End Times.

It was a short enjoyable vacation that made a nice respite during the holidays. Charleston is a great place to visit but I prefer my home just off the Ungodly Memorial Interchange.

Giving until it bleeds

2008-12-30T07:40:00.000-05:00

There was a lot of negative talk out there after my Friday posting claiming that gift-receiving was so much better than gift-giving http://davisw.wordpress.com/2008/12/26/giving-vs-receiving-which-is-best/. The Internet was absolutely abuzz, if you count the guy who said I was a “seflish idoit” and the email I got from my mom asking if that’s the way she raised me.

To prove the point that I can also be a very caring individual who feels deeply the importance of giving back to his community, I’ll be hauling a load of stuff over to Goodwill at the end of the tax year on Wednesday. I also went to the bloodmobile Saturday to give the gift of life.

Talk about giving of yourself, this is the most selfless contribution one can make short of a lung. My wife and I have been giving this annual donation right around Christmas for the past five years or so. She’s actually way ahead of me in the quantity given, having started in college. I was only introduced to the concept when the local Starbucks began sponsoring the event with the incentives of free coffee and a baked good for all donors. I also wanted to see if it was true that you’d get drunker on a couple of beers after your body had been sapped of almost a quarter of its life-force.

We arrived early enough to be first on the list of those signing up. While the rest of the nearly overflowing coffee shop was lounging around concerned only about number one (that coffee goes right through you), Beth and I read through the pre-donation materials to be sure we were still eligible. Easily clearing the requirement that I was at least 17, weighed at least 110 pounds and had at least one arm, I signed where they told me and soon was called out to the parking lot where the bloodmobile was parked.

I was directed to the tiny interview room by a middle-aged South Asian woman. This was a good start: my past experience with the workers who staff these events was that they tended to be either young Hispanic- or African-American women who were fast on the take but still required several jabs to hit the right spot, or else they were older Southern white women who were equally jab-happy but much slower about it. I’ve seen enough cardiologist ads in the paper to recognize that Indians make great healthcare professionals. In addition, when it was discovered the scanner connection to the laptop wasn’t working properly, she was able to troubleshoot that without calling home.

We huddled together in a space about the size of an airliner bathroom while she ran through the extremely personal health history questions she kept assuring me she was required to ask. Was I a hemophiliac? No. Have I had an organ transplant in the last 60 days? I don’t recall one. Have I ever had sex with another man? No. Have I ever had sex with a hemophiliac or transplant recipient who was a man? Have I ever been in prison? Have I ever been to Africa? Have I ever killed and consumed the flesh of another person? If so, did that person have hepatitis? Was I bitten by a crazy cow in the United Kingdom between 1980 and 1996? No, no, no, no, and no, that unfortunate cow encounter was in 1997.

Finally cleared to proceed, I walked out to the main aisle of the mobile. My interviewer asked which arm I wanted to use, and here’s where I must admit I puffed up a little with pride. If you read my previous posting about selling my body to a company that was doing shingles research http://davisw.wordpress.com/2008/11/08/a-second-career-perhaps/, you might remember how exceptional the main vein in my right arm is. The inside of that elbow has been widely admired for the way in which the blue vessel protrudes in a come-hither fashion just below the thinnest layer of skin. Since the right-armed donation loungers were all full, I was asked if I wanted to offer my left arm instead. But when I showed the admiring circle of blood ladies my right vein, they all agreed I should wait. One of them marked the vein with a pen, then posed next to it for a photo to show her family. I took a seat to wait my turn.

After about ten minutes, Beth finished her session and I was able to take her spot. The needle went in effortlessly and soon the blood was flowing. I sat back and relaxed as much as I could while workers scurried perilously close to my connection and the intercom played Christmas songs. And, wouldn’t you know it, two of them were from my “Worst Christmas Songs of All Time” list http://davisw.wordpress.com/2008/12/20/worst-christmas-songs-ever/ and a third was Bob Seger’s boozy rendition of “Little Drummer Boy.” (I don’t know if I was starting to get a little light-headed or what, but the line “the ox and lamb kept time” struck me as absolutely hilarious.)

My languor was soon interrupted when one of the workers reported that an “overflow situation” was developing somewhere in my vicinity. I tried to look behind me where my bag hung to see if the room was starting to look like a Quentin Tarantino film and I was preparing to bleed out. Apparently it was only a minor overflow so I was able to avoid infecting the whole bus with Creutzfeldt-Jakob Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or whatever it was that wacky British cow gave me.

I was disconnected from the tubing, had a gauze bandage affixed to my magnificent vein and was told to raise my arm high in the air. After a minute or so, a role of colored tape was brought out and a length was cut off and wrapped around my arm. Everyone else who’d been through this step in the process was asked what color tape they wanted, so I already had my eye on a nice pale green that would contrast nicely with my hazel eyes. But I was assigned the blue with no questions asked in what would turn out to be the only disappointment of the experience.

As Beth and I headed back into Starbucks to collect our premiums, I began thinking what kind of bakery item I’d be selecting for my freebie. When I placed my order at the counter for a tall-low-fat-mocha-no-whip and a slice of coffee cake, I flashed my bandaged arm at the barista and told her I’d just given blood. The point was to communicate that I shouldn’t be charged for my order but apparently the counter people hadn’t been told how this worked so she rang me up for $5.57. I got the confusion straightened out easily enough, but the embarrassment I endured for those few seconds when she thought I was just showing off my bandage to impress her lingered longer than it should have.

Now if I could’ve shown her my vein, that would’ve been a different story.

New ideas for 2008

2008-12-28T09:34:00.003-05:00

The New York Times recently ran a wonderful feature in their Sunday magazine profiling what they called the “Year in Ideas.” They examined several dozen new concepts floated in 2008 that “helped make the previous 12 months, for better or worse, what they were” – an introduction that belied their alleged astonishment at the unlimited nature of the inventive mind.

I’ll admit that all the ideas are extremely imaginative, but that doesn’t mean that some of them can’t also be extremely bizarre. Today and tomorrow, we’ll look at a few examples:

Air Bags for the Elderly – In light of the fact that falls are the leading cause of death among people 65 and older, a Japanese company has begun selling a wearable set of airbags. Describing the device as looking “something like a fishing vest with a fanny pack attached,” it contains motion sensors that will inflate two airbags – one around the hips and the other around the neck – when a fall is detected. “Instant Michelin Man,” notes the Times. This innovation updates an earlier attempt to reduce injuries, the foam hip pads. Both the low-tech hip pads and the high-tech air bags could be a success from a bioengineering and cost standpoint and yet still fall victim to the elderly’s penchant for wanting to be fashionable. “One of the reasons people shy away from these is that they don’t want to make their hips look larger,” said one researcher. “These air bags look kind of parachute-y.”

The Biomechanical Energy Harvester – A knee-brace-like contraption has been developed by a Canadian scientist that reportedly can harness the power of your walk and turn it into something your cell phone and other small electronics can run on. Strapped to the back of your leg, the device taps the power of your muscles with each stride without making walking feel any more difficult. At less than three pounds, it’s small enough to fit under your pants (or, less subtly, just below the hemline of your skirt), which is a significant improvement on version 1.0 – a backpack that made its own electricity from the subtle bouncing of your walk but, unfortunately, weighed in at 80 pounds.

Bubble Wrap that Never Ends – Again it’s the Japanese leading the way to a better future. They’ve created a battery-powered keychain with a panel of eight buttons that simulate the tactile joy of bubble-package destruction. Roughly translated as “Infinite Pop Pop,” the company has already sold a million of the gadgets in its first two months of release, and it’s reportedly now available at American outlets such as Target and Wal-Mart. Makers of the real thing, the Sealed Air Corporation of New Jersey, acknowledge the tension-relieving properties inherent in ruining their product, yet they won’t admit to feeling the stress of potential competition from the Far East. (Probably the same way GM felt when that first Toyota rolled onto the docks of California.) No word yet on whether the Biomechanical Energy Harvester could be used to power the “Pop Pop” keychain.

Carbon Penance – To assuage the guilt many of us feel about our contributions to climate change, a Swiss-born inventor (again with the foreigners) has built a leg band that monitors how much power you’re consuming. When levels have exceeded a certain threshold, the techno-garter slowly drives six steel thorns into the meat of your leg. The concept came to the inventor, who not surprisingly also refers to herself as an artist, while designing a device that punishes the wearer who doesn’t spend enough time talking to their houseplants. The leg band is apparently not quite ready for full-scale development and distribution because of a slight flaw: when the spikes dig in, they don’t hurt that much.

The Cloth Car – This is a concept car developed in Germany that substitutes fabric for the more conventional (and you’d think safer) hardened plastic and aluminum auto body. The shell, made of polyurethane-coated Lycra, is stretched over a car’s frame in four separate pieces. It creases when the door opens, can be unsealed if work needs to be done on the engine, and contains eye-shaped slits so the headlights can shine through. The interior is similarly flexible, featuring a steering wheel and dashboard that collapse to lie flat and create more interior space. Perhaps the seatbelt and upholstery will be made of steel.This is the second installment looking at innovations of the past year that have both the potential to make all our lives more comfortable and, at the same time, illustrate why researchers and inventors typically live such lonely, pathetic existences.

The Dog-Poop DNA Bank – The mayor of a small city near Tel Aviv wanted a more effective way to enforce regulations requiring pet owners to clean up after their dogs have done their business. So he turned to the city’s director of veterinary services to come up with a system that could use DNA fingerprinting technology to attach (so to speak) unclaimed feces to specific dog owners. An army of 13-year-old volunteers recruited by the mayor’s office fanned out across the city, going door to door to collect samples of poop with which to create a DNA bank. Surprisingly, about 90 percent of city residents who had kids showing up on their doorstep asking for some shit complied with the request. Once the problem of random canine defecation is solved, scientists will then turn to less pressing issues like genetic research on dog diseases and returning strays to their owners.

Eat Kangaroos to Fight Global Warning – An official with Australia’s wildlife services, which you’d imagine is supposed to be protecting indigenous species, proposes that raising and eating kangaroos instead of sheep and beef could cut methane emissions by as much as three percent. Unlike the ruminants we’re used to slaughtering and devouring, kangaroos have a different stomach structure with different organisms to digest their food -- probably something to do with the pouch. Already considered a specialty meat that’s (not surprisingly) a bit gamy in taste, the hoppers-cum-whoppers sustained native Australians for 40,000 years before Europeans arrived with their stupid cows. Reaction in the land Down Under has not been especially positive: the official can’t find any funding to further his study, plus he’s battling newspaper headlines that read “Skippy on the Menu!”

Scrupulosity Disorder – Researchers from Brigham Young University suggest that as many as a million Americans suffer from this disorder defined as “obsessive doubt about moral behavior often resulting in compulsive religious observance.” Not to be confused with your standard evangelicals, sufferers worry about thinking bad thoughts, whether or not these thoughts are acted on in the physical world. An omniscient God, after all, sees past the bumper stickers on your SUV and into your heart, where you may be doing things like being aware of curse words. Though possibly related to obsessive-compulsive disorder, there can be a fine line for chronic hand-washers like certain sects who observe such a ritual as part of ordinary religious observance. Treatment is thus problematic but another researcher says once patients are released from the crippling doubt about their own virtue, they can emerge with a new sense of faith, even if it means slightly more soiled hands.

The Spray-On Condom – The idea with this device is not so much the convenience of application but with the way it can made to fit a variety of sizes. Rather than asking retailers to stock a quantity of as many as 30 or so sizes, the spray-on condom can be customized to each man. The inventor, a German entrepreneur, got the idea in an automated car wash – not in the back seat while canoodling but while observing that the car was being inserted into a tube-like structure and then sprayed with latex from all sides. (Oh, baby). The only drawbacks reported in real-life testing were that the spray was a little cold and that the latex would take up to two minutes to dry. That, and the fact that the European Union’s strict product standards will make it difficult to bring to market, means the condom won’t be commercially available any time soon. I guess if you can wait two minutes, you can wait two years.

Vending Machine for Crows – An NYU graduate student (probably a marketing major) put coins and peanuts into a dish attached to a vending machine he created. The crows arrived and picked out all the peanuts, leaving only the coins. As they pushed the coins out of the way while looking for more peanuts, the coins were dropped into a slot which then dispensed more peanuts. When the crows figured out the equation that coins plus slot equaled more nuts, the more entrepreneurial birds starting looking for loose change on the ground to put into the slot. Realizing that the flock was quickly becoming his intellectual match, the grad student brought in a few more researchers to help him figure what all this might mean. Rather than arriving at the obvious answer (a fleet of trained ravens who could steal cash from the pockets of pedestrians, thereby giving the students the power to ultimately rule the world), they’re trying to do something positive. “Why not see if they can do something useful for us, so we can all live in close proximity?” they asked. They’re now busy trying to apply their techniques to train rats to sort garbage for us, instead of imagining in future in which they could practically bathe in dimes.

Giving vs. receiving -- which is best?

2008-12-26T10:24:00.001-05:00

They say that giving is better than receiving. This sounds to me like one of those counterintuitive urban myths, except with fewer unauthorized kidney transplants. I would contend that common sense dictates that it’s the receiving that’s better than the giving. Sure, there’s a rush of warmth when you see the look on that loved one’s face as they open your gift. But that tends to pass pretty quickly, whereas on the receiving end, you’ve still got the socks.

No matter how much joy I’ve ever experienced giving or receiving during the holidays, it can’t possibly match what one of my coworkers went through just the other morning. Lucy is widely known as, shall we say, the expressive type, never one to keep her thoughts or feelings unshared. The generosity with which she lays out all the details of her life is something I don’t always appreciate. It’s a gift that keeps on giving. And giving. And giving.

The co-worker sitting immediately to Lucy’s right has become her close friend, which Lucy pretty much requires when you’re that close to her every day. Jen was nice enough to bring Lucy a gift, a contraption called the Pasta ‘n More. You may have seen the ads on late-night TV: features include a strainer lid, steam rack, storage lid and, if you order now, two handles. You can cook, drain, serve and store pasta all in one vessel constructed of FDA-certified materials. Makes a great gift.

But “great” didn’t come close to describing how Lucy felt upon opening the package. There were shrieks, there were yips, there were even tears. The entire production floor ground to a halt and got to hear how wonderful the gift was, how fantastic the pasta was going to be, and how unbelievably extraordinary was the two-quart capacity. Eventually, she had to be comforted and led to a chair.

Kind of made one of my most memorable gifts from childhood pale in comparison. I grew up in Miami, which sounds like an ideal place to spend your formative years but was actually quite lacking in many ways. I’d read in books at school about concepts like autumn leaves, mountains, chimneys and snow, though these were totally alien to the south Florida scene. Our Santa came not in a sleigh drawn by eight tiny reindeer. He came in a helicopter powered by Pratt & Whitney.

My grandmother, who lived in Pennsylvania, took pity on me one year and actually mailed me an oak leaf that had fallen in her yard. I removed the leaf from the envelope and marveled at how red and how leaf-shaped it was, not like the palm fronds and crocus spirals in my unnatural subtropical hell. She could’ve used the U.S. Postal Service to clear her yard like her neighbors used the city’s curbside vacuuming trucks if we could’ve figured out the logistics. Only the intervention of my parents kept me from requesting a snowball with the next shipment.

This is not to discount the value of the gifts I received from my own parents, for these were also very special. We lived in a modest working/middle class neighborhood but they always made sure my sister and I had one of the best Christmases in that part of town, and not just because all our neighbors were Jewish. My anticipation and gift list began in late November, when the 3,000-page Sears catalog would arrive at our door by flatbed truck. Up till about age twelve, I’d quickly flip to the last section of the giant volume where the toy section was spread out in its full black-and-white glory and begin to compile my list. (When my teens arrived, I tended to first make a furtive stop to check out the models in their industrial-strength bras and the sexiest girdles this side of J.C. Penney.) More often than not, I’d get most of the items I’d requested.

Aside from the conventional gifts that every boy of the ‘60s received – footballs, cap guns, the occasional bike – my parents were as accommodating as they could afford to be to some of my more unusual requests (no, not the bra). One year I asked for and actually received a full-size pool table. Our three-bedroom home contained modest floor space at best, yet we managed to turn that monster on its side and wrestle it down the hallway to my bedroom. There, it barely fit next to my bed, hard up against the other three walls. I still remember how impressed visiting friends would be as we stood in the closet banking shots into the corner pocket.

Other especially memorable gifts included a punching bag, a portable tape recorder and a slot-car racing set. As a nerdy, pimply overweight kid, my pugilistic skills were not the best. It was theorized the punching bag would build both the confidence and technique that would allow me to defend against those vicious Jewish bullies. The height of the bag on its spring was not quite right, so my most vivid learning experience consisted of the punched mass viciously returning back to my lower abdomen. I spent hours complaining about this to the tape recorder in an affected British accent, which I imagined would ultimately land me a job as radio deejay. The car racing set, much like the small stereo and the electric guitar I received at subsequent Christmases, was a mass of primitive electronics that alternately provided fun and dangerous high-voltage currents.

My folks were also open-minded enough to buy me some of them rock and roll records all the kids were so crazy about. I still remember the year I received the Beatles’ White Album, and the contortions I had to go through to hide the picture inside of a naked John Lennon. Though I succeeded at that, the Fab Four were eventually exposed when my mom overheard a playing of “I’ve Got a Feeling,” which contained the line “everybody’s got a wet dream.” What had previously been just noise to her now took on the awkwardness of a subject the 15-year-old doesn’t especially care to discuss with his mother. A year later, she heard the lyric “nothing’s gonna change my world” on “Across the Universe,” and commented that John should “quit whining and do something about it if he doesn’t like the world.” That is one valid criticism you can make about the Beatles: they didn’t exert much influence on the culture.

So now it’s the day after Christmas, and I’m enjoying playing with this year’s gifts – peanut-butter-stuffed pretzels, a book of crossword puzzles and a hat. ("Whee!" I gushed as I spin the fedora on my finger. "It's a hat!") At least these gifts are unlikely to electrocute me.

Twas the parody before Christmas

2008-12-24T08:32:00.002-05:00

Twas the night before Christmas and all through the land
The economy’s falling like castles of sand
The stock market tanked like a chimney of hair
Investment banks toppled, and wide roamed the bear
The Dow hit new lows, then fell even more
The middle class joined with the ranks of the poor
Retirement and pensions and 401(k)’s
And savings we’d kept for our golden-age days
Were gutted and shredded and eaten for lunch
And now try to borrow in this credit crunch
We’ve bailed out the autos, insurance and banks
And we’re thrown out of work -- this is our thanks
Unemployment climbs higher, near seven percent
And foreclosures rise and yet so does the rent
The Internet’s fun but it’s taking our jobs
And turning us all into hypnotized mobs
Outsourcing continues, white-collar work prowls
To lands in South Asia with too many vowels
We tried “Buy American”, tried doing our part
But succumbed in the end to the lure of Wal-Mart
When all looked quite lost and we struggled to cope
We saw signs of life, we saw signs of hope
When what to our wondering eyes did appear
A president-elect a bit large in the ear
But he knows how to lead, even knows how to talk
And he goes by the uncommon name of Barack
His electoral victory o’er Old Man McCain
And that gal from Alaska, the one who’s insane,
Was truly historic, inspiring and cool
After eight years of piss-poor incompetent rule
Now he’s picking his cabinet, a quite able lot
Can’t remember them all but I’ll give it a shot
Now, Daschle! Now, Vilsack! Now, Holder and Duncan!
On Solis! On Salazar, Gates, Chu and Clinton!
From the right, from the left, labels falling away
Need just one from the South and one who is gay
Transition’s proceeding at an admirable rate
Less than thirty days now till the January date
That Cheney and Rove and their underling Bush
Return to their homes with one final push
To a life full of leisure while the rest of us work
To undo the disaster that’s left by this jerk
But we’ll hear him exclaim as he flies out of sight
“Sure I lost your life savings, but I coddled the Right”.

Monday musings

2008-12-22T10:36:00.002-05:00

Two new products appearing in recent TV ads caught my attention:

The first is something called “ImmuGo,” which is supposed to increase the efficiency of your immune system. In fact, it bills itself as “the Official Immune Support Product of the Hollywood Movie Awards.” This is quite a claim. Not only have I spent my entire life failing to realize that such a thing as an immune support product exists, but now I learn there is an “official” one. This is one sorry licensing arrangement, if you ask me, not something I’d expect from the marketing masterminds of sister-product “HeadOn (applydirectlytotheforehead).” I guess they chose the Hollywood Movie Awards as sponsor after finding that the Arena Football League and General Motors were not available. If I ever have the need for my immune system to be improved, though, I’m definitely going to choose the ointment (salve? unguent? balm?) used by an organization that shows pictures of George Clooney and Keira Knightley on its website.

The second commercial was for a service rather than a product. I don’t remember the cosmetic surgeon’s name, but he was offering a special that gives you treatment of one “area” free for each area purchased. By area, I assume he’s talking about the part of your body that you want to be surgically revised. This seems a little gimmicky to me. With the exception of a few internal organs (whose physical appearance I can’t imagine anyone would care about), the human body is so symmetrical that virtually everything comes in pairs. You’d almost have to get two areas done at once, unless there are women who want one breast enlarged but not the other or men who want only half of their spare tire liposuctioned. I wonder if the surgeon would allow you to mix-and-match: could you perhaps have the dark bag under one eye eliminated, and then have a toe removed as your second “area”? I’m betting the contract has some fine print that disallows this.

* * *

Did you realize that the group of individuals who officially decide when the nation is in a recession is called the Business Cycle Dating Committee? They look at a variety of statistics to determine when the economy is trending positive and when it’s heading into a downturn and, I guess in their spare time, arrange for social encounters among eligible economists.

* * *

I’ve been thinking about the right kind of career advice to give my teenage son as he prepares to pursue his studies at college next fall. It seems that, between outsourcing and computerization, there’s really going to be very little left to choose from. The only sure bets that I can come up with are nail technician and the guy who puts tires on your car. I’ve read that even fields like anesthesiology and drive-through fast-food order-taker are being endangered, the former by a new software program and the latter by distant call centers that can handle hundreds of Wendy’s at a time. One of Daniel’s big interests right now is journalism, a respectable career to be sure but one that seems to be on its last legs. I’m encouraging the journalism, thinking it may survive on the web long after the last newsprint is recycled. I’m afraid, though, the only worse advice I could give would be to suggest he take courses that would allow him to major in United Auto Work.

* * *

I hate that most fruit flavors have been hijacked by the health, beauty and cosmetics industry. Cherry has become virtually intolerable, since it reminds me of either cough syrup or kids’ shampoo. Orange reminds me of baby aspirin. Somebody should be sued.

* * *

I’ve always wanted to be in a wheelchair, have a cast or be admitted to the hospital. I’ve long believed, as stated by George Costanza on “Seinfeld,” that pity is very under-rated, and I want some. I did have a kidney stone removed a few years ago (unfortunately on an out-patient basis) and I was able to take some advantage of the situation a few days later when I accompanied my family to Costco. I checked out one of the motorized chairs they provide for their more feeble customers and had myself a grand time roaming up and down the aisles. The world looks so different when your eye level is reduced by three feet – all these people look down at you with such sympathy.

I once thought about jumping off the roof of our house when I was a kid in order to break my leg and avoid a particularly arduous segment of physical education – tumbling or wrestling or square dancing, I think. Ultimately, though, I chickened out.

* * *

I’ve always wondered who would win in a fight between a cow and a horse, though both are so even-tempered it seems unlikely ever to happen.

Playing the corporate game

2008-12-19T10:20:00.001-05:00

As I’ve written before, I’ve been involved in a lot of game-playing during my corporate career. I’m not talking about the politics and back-biting that make the corporate life so much fun. I’m referring to the all-too-occasional exercises in what’s generally called “career development,” where a group of employees sit around a table (or a bush or an abandoned fire training tower) and get run through a series of humiliations and/or life-threatening workouts. If you’re lucky, you only feel stupid; otherwise, you end up “developed,” a painful condition where you exhibit a positive attitude all out of proportion to your circumstances.

Generally, these outings are designed to promote creativity and build camaraderie among the troops. You’re taken out of your normal cubicle environment and put in a setting where you are encouraged to think outside the box, dare to be great, or push the envelope of your normal comfort zone. I happen to believe that thinking outside the box is over-rated, and remind my cat of this every time he strays over the edge of his litter container.

Nevertheless, I try to be a good boy and play along. The first couple times, I genuinely tried to improve myself and my value to the company. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become a lot more jaded, as you’re about to read.

One fairly common method to get group members to open up and talk freely is to mentally transport them to a different place in time. Here, they can talk about their aspirations or ramble nostalgically about the past. In one session I went through in the early ‘90s, staged for what were (wrongly as it turned out) perceived to be future leaders, we were told to draw a picture of where we saw ourselves in ten years. The only thing the 15 people had in common was that they imagined a future somewhere very far away from the company they were supposed to be leading. I remember that my picture had me sitting on a dock next to a huge satellite dish that retrieved documents from outer space that I would then proofread while my son sat next to me fishing. (I wasn’t exactly prescient about the coming rise of the Internet.) Poor artist that I am, my group’s facilitator interpreted the scene as someone working at NASA directing the first mission to Mars, with my son playing the part of a tethered robot. Close enough, I figured.

A similar exercise was done with another group a few years later: they were told to think exactly ten years into the past. Headlines of the exact day were read aloud and a hit song from the period was played to tickle everyone’s memory. We heard funny tales from high school, a story about a surprise birthday party and, from one young woman who could barely hold back her tears, a recounting of the day after her mother was killed in a head-on collision with a drunk driver. The brainstorming was not especially inspired after that.

Another common activity is to break the group into smaller teams who are then given an assignment that requires them to work together to accomplish a goal. Once, we had to use tape, pipe cleaners and popsicle sticks to create a contraption that could cushion an egg from a six-foot fall. Another time we had to reach consensus on the best way to fold a sheet of paper into an airplane, then test our designs with a farthest-flight competition in the parking lot. My prototype was damaged when it was run over during flight testing; I wanted to ball up the remains and wrap them around a rock, which I was convinced I could throw way farther than anyone’s aircraft was going to go. Apparently, this was not the paradigm shift my trainer had in mind. Maybe I’d do better if a coloring or finger-paint session was next on the schedule.

I also had an opportunity to work on the other side of the equation when I spent a few years as an excellence trainer. (Note that I said “excellence,” not “excellent.”) During each day-long quality awareness session, we played what was called the JIT game, which was meant to demonstrate just-in-time production techniques. Each six-person team was given a collection of interlocking blocks and asked to set up a line that could produce exact replicas of a certain configuration. They were required to re-engineer their process several times – with blatant hints from the trainers – to achieve more and better widgets crafted each time with fewer and fewer people. At the end, they could do their very best work with only two people instead of six. Inevitably, some participant would learn the wrong lesson and ask what would happen to the four people who no longer had jobs. The trainers were told to make some vague hint about how maybe they could work in marketing instead.

The most enjoyable game I can recall from my quarter-century experience with this garbage was the Myers-Briggs personality assessment. What I liked best was that this was something you could do largely in the privacy of your own personal space, without having to “team-build” with your half-witted coworkers. You’d answer a battery of questions about your preferences – there were no right or wrong choices – and then you’d be put into one of 16 categories that labeled you as an extrovert, a thinker, a perceiver, an innovator, a molester, an invertebrate, etc. The only group participation required was at the end when you were given your results and told to go to a part of the room where you’d join up with others of your monstrous ilk and compare notes.

One thing I have learned from all these corporate games is how to game the system. Since no judgments are made, no answers are wrong and no ideas are too ridiculous, you can offer up the most absurd input and enjoy watching your guide squirm as they validate your responses. “Yes, Bob, your idea about twirling on our tippy-toes while talking to clients on the phone is a very innovative one,” the trainer says. “Let’s write that up on the whiteboard.” Until they wise up and put your manager behind a two-way mirror with your personnel file, your pay grade and a taser at the ready, these learning opportunities can actually be rewarding. Just not how they were intended.

I beg (urp) your pardon (achoo!)

2008-12-16T17:38:00.001-05:00

I wrote not too long ago about my annoyance with the social convention that demands a verbal response from bystanders when someone sneezes. Just as we properly fail to comment when our friends and coworkers make other kinds of unprompted nasal or oral outbursts -- like snorting or saying “hi” -- so too should we mind our own business for the sneeze.

The most common response always seemed a little presumptuous to me anyway. “God bless” sounds too much like an order to the deity. He’s supposed to stop whatever grand enterprise He might be involved in so He can heed your command to bless Bob from accounting simply because he (Bob) had an irritation of the nasal passage that caused a sudden, forceful expulsion of air and God knows what else? Even the most focused of us has to concentrate when creating worlds or smiting errant Methodists; we don’t need to be distracted by requests for trivial blessings, especially when we all know that Bob makes it louder than he has to just because he craves attention.

Saying “God bless” is second nature to many of us, yet would other cultures similarly demand their gods do such casual bidding? Can you imagine hearing “Shiva, hand me that stapler,” or “Yahweh, tell that guy to knock off the humming”? I don’t think so.

If we’re all going to agree that spontaneous eruptions from the mouth or nose need some kind of acknowledgment, let’s at least be consistent and come up with some standards that make a little bit of sense. I think I’m as competent as anyone to start the discussion.

For sneezing, I proposed we switch over completely to the more secular “Gesundheit.” I believe that translates from the German to “good health,” which is probably too late to hope for if the cold germs are already in the trachea but seems like a nice sentiment anyway.

For coughing, I think we should say “Schadenfreude.” Again, turning to the Germanic tradition feels appropriate and, since the translation has to do with taking delight in the failure of others more successful than you, a certain bitterness is properly communicated.

For hiccupping, I would suggest something along the lines of “Sorry you’ve had a convulsive gasp caused by the involuntary contraction of the diaphragm. Let’s agree that it won’t happen again.”

For burping, let’s go with “Jacksonian democracy.” Admittedly it makes no sense, but it should at least prompt a change of subject to 19th century American history. I think we also need to acknowledge the pause in conversation you’ll sometimes detect when someone just barely manages to suppress a burp. Your boss says “I really think that in order to cut costs further we’re going to have to (pause, slight puffing of jowls and slight lowering of jaw) lay off our entire workforce and outsource our production to Chimp Haven, the retirement home for lab monkeys” and you’re thinking “Wow, that was a close one; I should probably say something.” That something should be “jubilee.”

For yawning, no response should be required unless the yawn is accompanied by an audible sound. If it is, let me propose either “need a nap?” or the equally appropriate “please close your mouth as soon as possible.”

For throat clearing, keep in mind that this is usually done as a preface to an interruption, so a good reply might be “what the hell do you want?” If instead, a true backup of phlegm was actually involved and the “ahem” was sincere, say nothing but instead evacuate the area immediately.

For chewing gum in such an insistent manner as to cause a cracking sound, we should say (into the nearest 911-enabled telephone) “The nature of my emergency is that my friend has apparently swallowed Bubble Wrap.”

For sniffing or sniffling, like when you’re try to get air through a slightly congested sinus, I’m tempted to suggest the caustic “Oh, boo-hoo, what a baby” but that seems a little harsh, even to me. I think I’ll recommend tactful silence unless – and this is a very important exception – the sniff is accompanied by a high-pitched tweet, which should prompt the response “There seems to be a bird in your nose; let’s join together to kill it.”

Nose-blowing, even the most subtle variety, is an abomination that I can’t believe is sanctioned in polite company. Considering that it’s far less spontaneous than other expulsions – the blower even premeditates (if we’re lucky) his or her move by producing a hanky – it should not be tolerated, much less tacitly endorsed with a friendly comment. Nose-blowing should only be done under the care of a healthcare professional on an in-patient basis at the nearest major medical center, or at least not in the same room as me.

Horking, mostly done by cats trying to expel a hairball though occasionally heard from elderly gentlemen, should be met with the Spanish phrase “se me olvido me cuaderno,” or, literally, “I forgot my notebook.”

I think I’ve provided an adequate framework for the transition from our current methods of recognizing these outbursts to something much more fair and equitable. I realize that there may be some categories I haven’t covered, in particular those hybrid explosions that combine two or more of the above-defined events: the sneef (sneeze + cough), the curp (cough + burp), the york (yawn + hork) and the never-documented but often-theorized snickup (sniffle + hiccup). But I can’t both create and manage this new system, and will have to rely on the good sense of average citizens to take it to the next level if that’s what’s needed.

I don’t want to appoint a Language Czar to oversee my plans though, if necessary, I understand George W. Bush may soon be available.

Don't forget to get Alzheimer's

2008-12-14T12:22:00.000-05:00

Like many people approaching late middle-age, I’m starting to have some concerns about my memory. I’m not sure where on the continuum from a few “senior moments” to full-blown Alzheimer’s I might be, and even if a neurologist could pinpoint it, I wouldn’t be able to remember what he said.

It’s that short-term memory that I seem to be having the most trouble with these days. I guess this is something everyone struggles with to an extent; even the twenty-ish cashier who I just paid for my tea had notes scribbled all over the back of her hands, including a scrawl that looked suspiciously like “kill.” (You’d think a chore that life-altering would tend to stick with you, but maybe she’s got a lot of holiday-related obligations -- parties, cards, gifts for the nephews, etc. -- on her mind.)

Now that I think of it though, my mid-term memory is also suffering. I recently made a list of all the places we’ve gone on vacations over the years so I wouldn’t forget the tremendous time we had in Montreal or that great walk along Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. My wife would suggest that if these events were so memorable, then I’d remember them, and I suppose she has a point. But I did shoot photographs and took video on both of these trips, so why should have to waste cranial storage space when I can just as easily root around in the dusty bags stashed in the top of the coat closet to recall such precious times?

What tends to be most bothersome to family members, and I’ve heard this is a symptom I share with the most desperately neuron-deficient, is that my long-term memory remains quite good. The problem is that it’s not important lifetime milestones like weddings and births that I remember with such clarity. I do vaguely recollect that my wife had some sort of child a while back, and I’m pretty sure it was a boy because that’s what we have walking around the house now 17 years later. But the details of that event are roughly equivalent to my recall of the ’63 Dodgers and the record-setting 104 steals made by Maury Wills on their way to the World Series. The emergence of a living being who represents my own flesh and blood from the womb of my beloved life partner is a truly magical experience but, c’mon… 104 stolen bases in one season?

What worries me is that it’s neither long- nor medium-term memory that allows you to get through the day in some sort of organized, survivable fashion. It’s the immediate stuff that’s most important to daily life. I can’t imagine arriving at the airport having forgotten my passport and yet getting a reprieve from the screeners because I can remember the actress who played Granny on “The Beverly Hillbillies” (Irene Ryan).

For just one example, with this being the Christmas season, I am expected to remember hints dropped by loved ones about the type of gifts that would be most dear to them. I barely even realize that it’s the most wonderful time of year until we’ve run out of Thanksgiving leftovers, and that still hasn’t happened yet. My wife and son already have an estimated four presents either in-hand or on-order for me, and I’ve yet to visit a single retail website (unless you can count ESPN.com). I think Beth said she wants an iPod or socks or tea, or something in that general area. But these kinds of things come in such a huge variety of options these days that it’s very challenging to pick out exactly the correct item. Beth has kindly promised to get me to the website of choice this weekend and position the cursor directly on the gift she wants, then turn away as I click so that there’ll be at least some element of surprise.

It’s exactly this kind of immediacy that enables me to function with some measure of decency. I’ve borrowed a term from modern manufacturing techniques to give credibility to the technique I’ve developed. Called “Just in Time” – for the idea that you don’t build something until right before someone wants it – I want to learn what I need to know just before I need to know it. Don’t tell me several weeks in advance that my mom’s birthday is coming up. I need to know at the very last minute so I can spend three times the necessary amount on rush postage and still be two days late.

Aside from occasions like gift-giving and breaking the heart of my dear mother, the other major handicap I’m learning to live with has to do with following directions to get from one location to another. Visiting my son’s high school the other day, I asked at the main office to be directed to a particular room number. I was told go out this door, turn right, go down the hall and through the double doors, walk across the open area to building E and take the first hall to the right all the way to the end. I moved my head up and down and put the most understanding look I could summon on my face as the sounds being made by the secretary in front of me went whizzing by my head. It was at this point that I wished I’d put a Garmin GPS on my Christmas gift list.

There is one major benefit to a severely deficient memory, and that comes while watching television. I can’t tell a first-run TV show from a rerun even if it stars Bernie Mac, Heath Ledger and Pope John Paul II. I can blissfully sit through every episode of “Seinfeld” or “The Office” that I’ve ever seen and enjoy the jokes like I’m hearing them for the first time. This annoys my wife to no end, since she has the memory of a wolverine and can recite dialog from foreign films she hasn’t seen for years, and do it in French. Plot twists already known to millions hit me out of left field, like an errant throw from Orlando Cepeda trying to gun down the speedy Wills on his record-breaking dash for third base.

I’m just hoping to hang on till retirement, when I can while away my remaining days, remembering to drool now and then but not much else.

Rediscovering the rock concert

2008-12-12T12:04:00.001-05:00

As a fifty-something man, it’s been some time since I’ve been to a live rock concert. I’ve been a fan of the genre for as long as I can remember (at least since 1966’s “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron,” assuming that counts) and grew up being inspired by rock’s energy and message (the Red Baron gets shot down in the end). Nothing beats a live performance of rock ‘n roll to celebrate those two magical elements in a community of like-minded people.

The last concert I can remember attending before just recently was during my final year in college when I drove 180 miles to see John Denver. Now I know a lot of the purists out there will claim that John Denver hardly qualified as a rocker, but let me tell you that the bespectacled moptop could seriously get down. He wasn’t all “Rocky Mountain This” and “Rocky Mountain That.” He actually had a drummer on several of the songs.

This past summer, I got to attend my first arena show in ages as I accompanied my 17-year-old son to a performance of Canadian rockers Rush. I was delighted to be invited, first because it indicated that Daniel wasn’t too embarrassed to be seen with his dad in public, and secondly because he was embracing a style of music that we could share an appreciation for. Also, I wasn’t on restriction, like the friend he originally planned to go with.

We made our way to the Verizon Amphitheatre just north of Charlotte on a hot July day. Walking through the parking lot, we saw numerous tailgate parties featuring abundant amounts of beer and suspicious smoky odors. The rebellious nature of rock was alive and well in these small groups who were openly defying the property-wide ban on cigarette smoking. When we got to our seats, we found ourselves situated in mid-row between a guy throwing back Bud Lites at an alarming pace and a 6-foot-8 student with limbs the length of a primate.

The three-man band took the stage and proceeded to rock long and hard through a set list of new songs and classics. We tried to care about selections from their new “Snakes & Arrows” album but were really there for oldies like “Tom Sawyer” and “Working Man.” To give something of a theme to the tour, they’d produced a short film featuring Jerry Stiller on a nationwide search for rotisserie chicken (I didn’t get it either), and stage props that included upright ovens that roasted rotating birds. The increasingly drunken guy to our left was really getting into this, repeatedly shouting “chicken! wooo!” and “wooo! chicken!” directly into my ear. As the afternoon heat and closeness of the crowd started getting to us, we retreated to the back lawn and spent the rest of the show looking up at the stars and considering how man should “put aside the alienation and end up with the fascination.”

Then, just this past Wednesday, I had an opportunity to join Daniel for another concert, this time with former Talking Heads front-man David Byrne. We drove through a soaking rain to arrive at a trio of venues clustered together on the east side of Charlotte. I had been to this site several times before but became confused about where exactly I was supposed to park. There’s an auditorium, an arena and a theatre, and they are forever changing labels as corporate naming rights come and go. Were we looking for the Bojangles Arena, which used to be the Blockbuster Coliseum after it had been the Cracker Barrel Arena for years? Or did we want the Papa John’s Theatre, formerly the Time Warner Cable Theatre, formerly the Slim Jim Turkey Jerky Performance Space? We found a line of cars queuing up for a parking lot, so we got in it and hoped for the best.

And the best is what we got. David Byrne put on an absolutely brilliant performance with all the quirky lyrics and bizarre choreography of the Talking Heads. Three back-up singers and three dancers lumbered frantically around the stage in hilarious chaos, at one point performing while lying flat on the floor and at another time scooting around in office chairs. The music was every bit as enthralling, with the new stuff as mesmerizing as the oldies. I will say nothing nasty or sarcastic about Byrne who is, remarkably, a fellow fifty-something.

The auditorium offered very comfortable amenities and seating, though the crowd didn’t seem to know how to use the latter. When the musicians first took the stage, we all stood and welcomed them loudly. We continued standing through the second song, and the third song, and I began to wonder why we had bothered to pay for the seats. When a slower-paced song began, most of the audience took the chance to sit down and rest, but then re-exploded onto their feet when a high-energy number followed. My back is not in the best shape and I was starting to wish we could pick a pose and stick with it; I didn’t care which one, I just didn’t like all the up and down. Perhaps the guidance of a program would’ve been handy, like those we used to have in church that prompted “the congregation rises” and “now you sit down.”

The other parts of the concert that gave me pause were the sing-along portions. It wasn’t a formal row-row-row-your-boat kind of thing. I’m talking about how enthusiastic audience members would chime in with the chorus of certain songs, whether they knew the lyrics or not. I wanted to hear Byrne singing “Life During Wartime,” not the bozo behind me who chanted “This ain’t no Hardee’s/This ain’t no Frisco/This ain’t no dueling in town/No time for potluck/Or heebie-jeebies…” and so on.

The end of the set arrived, a reasonable 90 minutes after the show began, and we gave a rousing ovation as the band bowed, waved and then left the stage. Then, more awkwardness – how exactly is this encore thing supposed to work in a way that doesn’t embarrass the performer and afflict the audience with repetitive motion injuries? We all know it’s a sham, that the musicians are going to return for another song or two. Still we play this little game where we pretend we can’t live without them and they pretend to be on their bus, halfway out of town already. Byrne and company seemed to stretch their luck a bit with the amount of time they stayed off-stage, and the cheers were starting to ebb when they finally returned. Embarrassing, yes, and yet we did it all over again following another song. After this one, though, we clipped our appreciation short and managed to get them to stay away.

Though awkward, uncomfortable and slightly scary to someone my age, I must say I enjoyed both of these concert experiences thoroughly, probably slightly more in retrospect than during the event itself. It was a great chance to bond with my son and allow us to share a common passion for a cultural phenomenon that will never die, even if most of its earliest fans will shortly.

Help me, Honda (my life with cars)

2008-12-11T09:38:00.001-05:00

With all the attention currently being given to the plight of the American auto industry, I thought I’d take this opportunity to use other people’s hardship for my own personal gain as a topic for a blog posting.

Not that I’d be caught dead driving an American car, because driving while lifeless can be very dangerous. Actually, my family and I have a long history with domestic auto producers. My grandfather worked for a Ford dealer in Pennsylvania. My father owned almost exclusively Ford products for most of my childhood, except for a failed and ultimately flaming experiment with a Renault. The two most memorable vehicles of my youth were a giant Mercury Monterey with a reverse angle rear window that rolled down at the touch – actually it was more of a 15-second jiggle – of a button, and an even gianter Galaxy 500, our first car with air conditioning.

And my first car was a “blue” Ford Falcon I inherited from my mother just before my junior year in college. I put blue in quotes because the paint job had become almost crystalline in the heat of the Miami sun. It ran reliably enough despite its stunningly ugly appearance, safely taking me the nearly 500 miles I’d routinely drive between Tallahassee and Miami. My most vivid memory of the Falcon was the day I parked it in front of my landlord’s office while I ran in to pay the rent, then emerged just in time to see it rolling downhill toward several parked cars. Not the best way to find out that adding transmission fluid twice a day was an inadequate alternative to actually getting the transmission fixed.

My next car was also a Detroit creation, the much-maligned Chevy Vega. This one really was blue, a “fastback” that seemed like one first-rate vehicle to a poor college student of the early ‘70s. Even though it was another automatic transmission, the gearshift was on the floor, which gave its sluggish drive a certain sex appeal (if only to me). We bought it from a neighbor in Miami, who convinced us it was a great deal, which it probably was since he used his front as a used-car salesman to hide what in retrospect were obvious organized-crime connections. I don’t know how many headless bodies were crammed into that hatchback before the Vega came into my hands, but I know they had a remarkably smooth ride to whatever paving project they ended up in.

The Vega had the distinction of transporting me from my dismal life as an eternally under-achieving college student in Florida to an honest career in a suburb of Charlotte. I drove it for about a year in my new hometown, until I became concerned the corrosive oxidation would metastasize from its body to mine. In my first independent transaction with a car dealer, I made the ghastly mistake of trading it in for a brown VW Rabbit. Not an American car, I know, but by the early ‘80s VW had picked up many bad influences from its U.S. counterparts, not the least of which was constant breakdown. I wasted a lot of money on fruitless repairs before taking it back to the dealer, who took pity on me and put me in my first brand-new car, a Datsun 210.

I was still an very uneducated consumer – I bought the car in the hope that the “cool” setting on the dashboard fan was actually air-conditioning, which it wasn’t – yet I lucked into a reliable though basic vehicle whose fanciest extras were FM radio and faux leather seats. I still remember the feel of those seats after driving through the afternoon heat to my second-shift job a half-hour from home. Open windows on the interstate and that “cool” setting provided little relief to the pit of my lower back, which was utterly sodden by the time I arrived.

Now that I was experienced with Japanese models, I bought a succession of sensible cars. First there was a red Honda Civic, then a white Honda Civic, then a grey Honda Civic and finally a silver Honda Civic. Not much imagination, I admit, but memories of that damn VW were slower to recede than the stench of a dead rabbit jammed up in the under-carriage, and I wanted reliability above all else. I admit I was tempted more than once during that 20-some-year span to go all middle-aged in my car selection, maybe a Miata or a convertible or at least the Honda CRV, the company’s smaller SUV. But common sense (and the advice of my wife) always prevailed. The craziest I was ever able to get was the Honda Odyssey, a chick magnet of a minivan if ever there was one.

My only complaint with the succession of Civics was that there always seemed to be a slight problem in the same area, one I’ve found hard to describe to my mechanic. It’s sort of near the steering wheel, a bit to the left of the gearshift, maybe just above the accelerator pedal. I think it’s referred to as the vehicle operator, or “driver.” Aside from that incident with the wandering Falcon, I’d never had any accidents with my American cars, probably because I was so attuned to every detail of their operation that I actually paid attention while I was driving. With the Hondas I was able to do other things, like listen to the radio and go in reverse.

In my first accident, an oncoming driver tried to turn left in front of me and we had a major fender bender in which I actually sustained an injury, a sprained thumb. The next incident was on the interstate near the exit ramp on my way home from work. A line had backed up for some reason, and when the truck in front of me rear-ended the vehicle in front of him, bringing him to a sudden and, I might add, un-signalled stop, I naturally plowed into him. Some extensive front-end damage but nothing irreparable. Finally, I was backing out of a parking spot at the mall on a foggy day, trying to see over the monstrous SUVs that flanked me on either side, when another driver looking for a parking space backed into my rear side panel. In none of these three cases were the Hondas totaled, an extremely cool verb I’ve always wanted to use; they were only partialled. All were fixed and returned to service.

In the judgment of the moment, none of these episodes seemed even remotely to be my responsibility. All of them were largely caused by the inattention or carelessness of others while I was going about my business. I couldn’t have anticipated things were going wrong or changed to a direction that would have led to a more positive outcome. Simply put, none of the three failures were my fault.

Sounds like I could get a job as head of one of the Big 3 automakers.

Cruising to Alaska

2008-12-07T19:42:00.001-05:00

The recent news story about the cruise ship full of luxury passengers almost being hijacked by decidedly more downscale Somali pirates reminded me of my own experience with the cruising lifestyle. It’s all too easy for everyone to make their own jokes about the prospect of buffet-stuffed tourists brandishing pool cues and miniature golf putters to ward off the boarding party, but I’m sure the confrontation was still very frightening to all those on board.

The real story of vacationing aboard a lavish mega-ship is something I got to experience first-hand a couple of years ago, back when people had something called disposable income (ask your grandparents, kids). My wife, son and I had the chance to get nicely priced package through our local YMCA’s Silver Fox Club, a group of retirees who more typically take rollicking day trips to Charleston rather than the seven-day voyage from Vancouver to Alaska that we had latched onto. I kept asking at the sign-up if it was okay that we weren’t doddering and they insisted that it was, so off we went.

Our group of about 20 departed from Charlotte on a flight to Seattle where we would catch a chartered bus for a quick ride across the Canadian border to our port of departure. We arrived at SEA-TAC airport (so named because it’s both seamy and tacky), collected our baggage and shuffled over to the bus loading area. After some considerable delay – we had to shove our own suitcases into the storage bay, which our elderly companions apparently hadn’t trained for at the Y – we left the airport for the two-hour drive north.

Our driver, a heavy-lidded man who looked like he’d hijacked a few buffets of his own, was just across the aisle from my seat near the front of the bus, er, motorcoach. As our vehicle veered from one side of the lane to the other, I could’ve sworn I saw his head nodding. I’d survived five trips to the south Asian subcontinent without a bus plunge and I wasn’t about to experience one on I-5 just outside of Bellingham, but there was the usual sign that said not to talk to the driver, er, operator, so I resisted. Finally, I thought it might be better if I said “much longer till we get there?” now rather than “oh my god, we’re going off a bridge” two minutes from now, so I did, and he seemed to brighten.

By now, though, we were seriously behind schedule and faced the real possibility that we’d miss our debarkation. Even though the cruise line had contracted with the ground transport provider to get us from the airport to the seaport, I doubted they’d delay 2,000-plus other passengers just to wait for the Foxes, even if we were Silver. After we made several wrong turns around the port facility, we found the ship and managed to get out and scramble up the passageway just in time.

The ship was named Something of the Seas (Empress? Brilliance? Enchantment? I forget now) and was as huge as it was magnificent. Greeted in our stateroom by our steward with the usual joke about how the salt air would make our clothes shrink, we stopped to nosh on the welcome-aboard buffet before proceeding to the lifeboat drill/buffet (all jackets extra-large), then on to the settling-in buffet before a quick nap and the midnight you’re-still-not-full buffet. The next two days we were “at sea” according to our itinerary, churning through the Inside Passage while playing trivia games, going on scavenger hunts, scaling the on-board climbing wall and admiring an outdoor pool that seemed out of place off the coast of western Canada.

We arrived at our first stop on the morning of the third day. This was the famous Hubbard Glacier, a mass of ice a thousand feet deep and a mile wide, inching slowly through the mountains and into the sea. We couldn’t actually get off the ship and experience the glacier first-hand (too slippery, I guess) so we sidled up several hundred yards off shore to watch the glacier “calving.” This is the process where huge chunks of ice fall off into the ocean with tremendous splashes while several cruisers-full of drunken tourists watch and talk thoughtfully about global warning. Though this was an unusually moderate June for these parts, the wind rushing over all that ice made us quite cold, so we switched over to Irish coffees.

The next day we arrived at our first on-shore excursion at a small town with a “k” in it. We were told they only had about 100 year-round residents, who kept several blocks of souvenir shops during the summer and kept indoors the rest of the year. The main attraction was a vintage steam train that carried us about 15 miles into the snow-capped mountains where we enjoyed fantastic views. Probably the most unusual of these was a cliff face with a huge graffiti scrawl that read “Mr. Hamilton made us do this.” The story was that in the 1930s, a high-school teacher from the Midwest brought his students up here for a summer of adventure, character-building and, apparently, dangling from ropes. They thanked him at the end of the summer with this cliff-drawing before those who survived returned to Illinois.

We docked next in Juneau, Alaska’s capital city. As we learned in the recent presidential election, state government in this part of the country isn’t much to look at, so we skipped tours of the boxy administrative buildings for a ride up the skytram to a park perched high over the city. We walked a nature trail hoping to spot any of the Big 3 of the Alaskan outdoors (bear, caribou and eagles) but encountered only these furry groundlings that scampered through the brush in a pale imitation of wildlife. The park also had a Pepsi machine.

Our last stop on Day 6 of the trip was in the fishing village of Ketchikan. We had previously shunned the expensive excursions offered by the cruise line; however, this was our last chance to do something truly special, so my son and I signed up for a seaplane trip into the interior. We joined the pilot and a couple from Arizona for a 45-minute hop to a crystal-clear lake virtually untouched by the outside world. We flew in low over the mountainsides while the pilot played inspirational music (“America the Beautiful,” the theme from “Rocky”) over the intercom and let us all take turns holding the steering thing and pretending to fly. Once on the lake, we taxied over to the shore where the pilot produced a small fishing rod and allowed my son to catch his first fish. On the flight back, the pilot surprised us with short dive, just long enough to photograph everyone’s delighted expression, then maneuvered back into Ketchikan Bay just as an unforgettable sunset broke through the clouds. Meanwhile, my wife had been to the totem pole museum, which I heard was quite nice.

All that was left now was our return to Vancouver and the flight back home, both very dreary prospects. Before you get off the ship, they make you gather in arbitrary color-coded groups before you’re allowed ashore, since everyone surging to the gangway at once is apparently a bad idea. All the fees and tips have been paid, so there’s no incentive for ship personnel to be pleasant to you anymore and you end up feeling like you’re in a refugee camp. My group, Camp Yellow, was among the last to be able to board our bus. We drove about an hour through the grey drizzle to the U.S. border where we were ordered off the bus by immigration while our vehicle was thoroughly searched. “We’re old and tired and all have headaches,” I wanted to scold the officials who had delayed us. I doubt that would’ve helped our situation, and eventually we made it to Seattle and barely made our return flight, no thanks to the Department of Homeland Security.

It truly ended up being the trip of a lifetime and I think of it often now that I face a future of lean times and modest vacations. Having been born in Florida and currently living in the heat of the South, Alaska had long been for me an idyllic land of cold and mountains, and in 2005 it was yet to be despoiled by its association with a certain bee-hived governor. Unfortunately, now, when I wear one of my souvenir “Alaska” t-shirts bought on those rustic wooden sidewalks of that town with a “k,” I have the conservative Republicans of my hometown coming up to me, pointing at my shirt, and saying, “Alaska! Alright!”

Dispensing with good taste

2008-12-03T18:04:00.001-05:00

If we could apply some of the same principles used by manufacturers of toilet paper dispensers to our country’s ports and immigration checkpoints, our concerns about national security would be over.

Bathroom tissue located in public restrooms is way more secure than it needs to be, if you ask me. American industry has developed highly engineered systems mounted in our nation’s stalls that are designed to allow users the absolute minimum amount of product while simultaneously making that product maddening to get at. These hulking plastic cases dribble a thin, single-ply dangle of paper out of their interior with a reluctance disturbingly similar to what I’m feeling in my own mid-section while trying to wrestle a few squares free.

Managers of these communal bathroom facilities – in restaurants, offices, government buildings – know this is a service they have to provide free of charge to their customers. So they’re obviously interested in limiting their expense as much as possible without putting their drapes and other nearby textiles in jeopardy. I sympathize with their situation in these hard economic times, but I also have similarly urgent hygiene concerns that need to be addressed. I decided to learn more about the companies that build and market these stingy dispensers.

Not surprisingly, most of them are manufactured by multinational corporations with interests in many sanitization-related areas. They are typically sold as part of a package that includes both the dispensers and the toilet paper, which I guess makes sense if you think about it. (The Pez analogy is one that unfortunately comes to mind; you rarely see the candy sold without the dispenser.) Bay West is one such company, offering a broad array of services in the environmental, industrial and emergency segments. Their corporate motto – “Slide Door Right for More Paper”– is printed proudly on each of their dispensers, and belies their larger mission in fields like brownfield site remediation (ew!) and hospital waste management. It’s good to know they have something to fall back on if bidets ever catch on in this country.

Another name that I came across in my research in the lavatory at a local bagel seller was SCA. When I searched for this firm on-line, I came back with several hits that caused me concern that this trend toward synergy in the industry was spinning out of control. Was SCA the Society for Creative Anachronism? The Student Conservation Association? The Society of Crystallographers of Australia? I could imagine any of these names being euphemisms for the business of helping the public do their business in public, but none turned out to be the company I was looking for. A link to “SCA Armor (Heavy)” seemed promising, considering the amount of protection these devices provide, but also led to a dead end. Finally I was routed to something called “Tork Online,” which referenced an SCA that sold “away-from-home tissue products,” and I knew I had struck pay dirt.

“An in-depth knowledge of our customers’ businesses means our products work hard to eliminate waste, reduce maintenance costs and offer hygienic solutions,” reads the products page. “Our dependable, attractive dispensers are designed to optimize hygiene, function and cost-in-use through designs that reduce consumption and maintenance time, dispense effortlessly and discourage pilferage.” Note that it’s only in the last two words of their blurb that they hint at their true purpose, keeping me and others from making off with free toilet tissue.

A more thorough look at the products section shows a fine array of conventional and jumbo dispensers, and a certain genius of these producers that I hadn’t considered before. The conventional model is described as “preventing waste by dropping a reserve roll only after the primary roll is depleted, keeping the used roll core in the unit and washroom floors clear of debris.” The jumbo model -- for high-traffic facilities and, I presume, the waiting rooms of gastroenterologists -- offers a “unique tear feature that eliminates the risk of cutting or scratching hands,” convenient for those moments of desperation we’ve all experienced but are too fortunate to remember in any detail.

Another maker is a company called Merfin, which I’m proud to say services my own workplace. With their system, “time spent replacing rolls can be reduced by up to 90%, and savings are increased by reducing waste and over-consumption with virtually indestructible locking dispensers.” I knew over-consumption was the problem that hyper-extended our nation’s credit system, but I never thought of it as an issue in the area of personal hygiene. Who are they to judge what’s enough or what’s too much? Anyway, I will give them credit for coming up with a cool trademarked and intercapped name for their line – VersaCore, offering the most versatile (bold italic theirs) tissue dispensing options in the world.

Finally, I want to reference probably the best-known company in this field, Georgia-Pacific. I didn’t go to their website because I found out enough to convince me that they are the future of public bathroom tissue during a recent and urgent visit to the toilet in the new upscale Barnes & Noble not far from my home. This casing, while still made of the traditional PMMA polystyrene that seems to be an industry standard, features a stylish, sloped front-end and an overall design that would be at home in the lobby of Europe’s trendiest boutique hotels. I was so impressed that I took a picture with my cell phone, even at the risk of criminal prosecution and a probable listing on certain predator lists. (I’ll include the photo with this posting if I can figure out how to get it off my phone and onto my computer). Even better, it dispensed paper easily in a free-flowing, luxuriant manner that tempted me to roll a mound out onto the floor and lay down for a nice nap.

All things considered, though, I think I’d still prefer the retro approach – the lone, free-standing roll sitting on the tank behind the seat.

Thanksgiving weekend musings

2008-11-30T17:44:00.002-05:00

Among professional writers, I think the best job would be working in the press office at the State Department and the worst job would be as an editorial writer. At the State Department, every time there was some international catastrophe, it’d be your job to come up with the modifier that expressed the unparalleled level of concern all Americans felt in this time of tragedy.

“Hey, Bob,” your boss would instant-message you, “how concerned are we about Finland being invaded by space monsters?”

“Pretty darn concerned, I’d imagine,” you’d respond, stalling while you reached for your thesaurus. “I’d say we’re either ‘profoundly concerned’, ‘gravely concerned’, ‘momentously concerned’, or ‘immeasurably concerned’.”

“Good job, Jim,” the boss would reply. “We can always count on your sympathy.”

At the other end of the spectrum is the poor editorial writer, whose job it is to be outraged by mass murders, supportive of the local blood drive, and troubled by the rise in teen pregnancies. Only blatantly obvious and widely agreed-upon opinions are allowed. It’s only if you want to end your career in a hail of indignant letters to the editor that you could endorse an armed revolution against the government or a boycott of Girl Scout cookies.

* * *

I went to the mall this weekend, not because I needed anything but because it’s required by federal statute. I avoided the so-called Black Friday (which I thought is what they used to call Good Friday and actually seems like a better name, since it wasn’t good that Jesus was crucified but rather it was black, which I think in the current reference indicates retailers’ profits) like the plague, which was also black but not as popular. Anyway, my wife and I went on a rainy Saturday afternoon, mostly just to see the crowds and punish ourselves for eating too much turkey. What I like best about a crowded mall is a game I made up that I call “mall-walking”. It’s not the slow-paced circuits made by energetic seniors, but rather an attempt to dart as fast as possible through crowds of zombified shoppers, imagining I’m avoiding tacklers while returning a kickoff for a touchdown. It’s best to walk quickly rather than run, unless you want to really be tackled by security guards. You start on the clockwise side, so you have a few “blockers” going in your direction but most everyone else is coming toward you. Extra hazards include kiosk merchants trying to rub you with cologne samples, restaurant workers trying to hand you teriyaki chicken, slow-moving family blobs who spread out six-wide, and fast-moving professional shoppers erupting unpredictably from storefronts. If you make it to the goal line (a pod of easy chairs containing heavy-eyed husbands who, before the mall was redesigned last summer, had to seek out the bedding section of Sears to recline their slumping figures) without being touched, you win. I still think this would make a great video game, where you could use famous malls or other high-traffic areas – Times Square, the Ginza shopping district in Tokyo, penitentiaries serving the U.S. Congress – as different game fields. Electronic Arts, are you out there?

* * *

One of the most embarrassing situations I’ve ever encountered happened recently in my office. Coworkers were circulating a card to send to someone’s father who was about to have a serious operation. I was vaguely aware that someone in that family was in the midst of a health crisis, and had wrongly assumed that a death was involved. When the card got to me, it was left at my desk with the inside open, so I could add my thoughts and/or prayers but I couldn’t see the message printed on the cover. Too quickly, I scrawled my message: “Thinking of you in your time of loss.” It was only when I closed the card to pass it on to the next person that I realized it wasn’t a sympathy card, it was a get-well card. My callous lack of sincerity was captured in permanent ink. It didn’t matter that my sympathy was in one sense technically suitable – there probably was going to be loss involved in the anticipated amputation of his arm. But it was pretty clear that this wasn’t the kind of loss I was referencing and, even if it was, it was a pretty insensitive way to express my wishes. Switching into recovery mode, I considered my options for fixing the hideous error. I obviously couldn’t run out and buy a replacement card, because of all the original messages already affixed. I considered white-out, but the glossy smear would only draw more attention and some curious individual would inevitably scratch it off to see what was underneath. The only other choice was to work with the existing ink-strokes and modify them to change the message. After about 20 minutes of work, I got it to read “Thinking it’s your time to floss.” I had no idea what this was supposed to mean. My hope, however, was that my coworkers would think it was a friendly inside reference that only the patient would get, and that the patient wouldn’t know who I was anyway.

* * *

I called my insurance company this morning to investigate an apparent error in billing that cost me about $250. I was almost positive I was right, but even the smallest doubt seems magnified when you’re dealing with a sophisticated multinational computer system. I actually got through the automated voicemail system relatively unscathed and in touch with a real live person, who turned out to be quite helpful. After the usual small delays (“our computer seems to be a little slow today,” he says as he looks at my premium history in a grid that dictates how nice to be) he located my account and the source of the problem. “Yes, I think our records may be in error,” he says. “Will it be okay if we make the correction in your next billing period?” Yes, of course, that’s great, I say. Then comes the little trick they’ve apparently taught every help desk in the world in the last year: “Before I let you go, can I interest you in our new 3.5% APR certificate of deposit?” While you’re still in the throes of relief over your billing being corrected, there’s a piece of your willpower against solicitation that has become slightly weaker, and they’re damn sure going to take advantage. I very much want to return the favor of helping this individual like he’s just helped me, and $5,000 does seem like a small price to pay. But in the end, I recover enough to politely decline.

My life as a football fan

2008-11-28T09:56:00.001-05:00

I’ve been a football fan for as long as I can remember, but I’m not sure why. In recent years, I’ve been able to put my attention to the game on a more sane footing than when I was young. I understand now that the outcome of a contest played by rented behemoths who’s five seconds of action is constantly interrupted by hopped-up robot graphics, slowed-down replays and giant pickup trucks running over things has very little to do with my happiness. Or at least that’s the way it should be.

That’s not always how I viewed it. My earliest memories are not of watching others play the game but rather participating in the activity myself, a concept now seen as hopelessly quaint. Larry and Lloyd and Ricky and I would take over the only open area in our Miami suburb – a public street – and play two-on-two games with gutters for sidelines and mailboxes for goals. It was a touch game consisting almost entirely of passing, since tackling on the asphalt was frowned upon by our moms and pediatricians. (Tackling was done only when we couldn’t scare up the four-person minimum and resorted instead to a backyard version of the game called “kill the man with the ball”.) We’d play for hours at a time, up and down the street with scores often soaring into the hundreds, interrupted only by the occasional cry of “car!” to avoid being struck by an oncoming vehicle.

The first football teams I followed from afar were the University of Miami Hurricanes, a pathetic bunch in the ‘60s more concerned with tanning than athletics, and the Green Bay Packers, more concerned with winning than packing. We didn’t have a pro team south of Washington back then, so proximity wasn’t an issue in my choice of gridiron heroes. The closest we ever got to the pros was when the now-abandoned consolation “championship” game was played in the Orange Bowl, and my father and I would use tickets promoters could barely give away to watch teams casually vie for the title of Third Best Team in the All of Football.

In 1967, the NFL finally realized that the South might possibly be interested enough in physical brutality and incredible amounts of sweating to support a pro team, and Miami was awarded the Dolphin franchise. They were lovable losers in those early years, featuring a head coach who chose his inept son to be quarterback and defensive stalwart Wahoo McDaniel, part of that rare breed of wrestlers-turned-linebackers who were named after game fish. The best part of those early years were the rare occasions when the Dolphins scored a touchdown and a porpoise I thought of as Flipper (though for copyright reasons, I think his name was actually “Blipper”) would leap in celebration from his above-ground pool in the end zone, then retrieve the extra-point kick on the occasions those were made.

I rooted so hard for the Dolphins in my high-school years that they actually started winning games. This was the beginning of my only recently abandoned fantasy that I could positively influence the outcome of a game by jumping up and down in front of a TV screen, crying out “yes!” or “no!” as appropriate to the circumstance. I imagined that either I had keen enough acumen to recognize quality players and coaching better than other observers, or else that I possessed a supernatural skill that somehow would propel footballs over goal lines and through goal posts. When the team posted a perfect 17-0 record and won two Super Bowls in the early ‘70s, I was proud to take the credit personally.

Shortly after I went off to college, I began to develop other interests. I worked at the school newspaper, finally found enough self-confidence to begin a form of dating, and even went to class now and then. As a result, or so I believed, the dynasty began to wane. I’d still watch when I could, on the TV in the dorm lobby, but thunderous expressions of glee or outrage had to be muffled lest onlookers be frightened. I still remember going back to my room after a narrow loss to the Raiders, and getting mad at my roommate when he teased me about my disappointment. “You don’t understand,” I tried to explain. “You making fun of the Dolphins is like me making fun of your family.” In an epiphany, I realized I was an idiot.

Fortunately, the timing of my about-face couldn’t have been more convenient, as my college team, the Florida State Seminoles, were in the midst of their worst run in school history. They had made the ludicrous move of hiring a coach with a doctoral degree who was using good-vibe pop psychology to coax the players into winning, if they felt like it. The result was an 0-11 season, followed by an only slightly improved record the next year after the coach vowed no more Dr. Nice Guy. I had picked up the contrarian nature of the counterculture by this time and, since football was only slightly less politically incorrect than the secret war in Laos, my friends and I delighted in the ‘Nolean ineptitude. Again, though, I was believing that my mental state was directly affecting results on the field.

It took a move from football-blessed Florida to the football-cursed Carolinas to finally break the spell. During my first 15 years in the region, there was again no pro team to follow and the game as played at the college level here contained more than enough mediocrity to keep me at bay. (Anyone who can get excited about a match-up between perennial rivals like Duke and Wake Forest is in serious need of a hobby). The last time a team from that Atlantic Coast Conference generated widespread enthusiasm was around the time the ocean of the same name was formed out of ancient Pangaea.

When the Carolina Panthers came into being in the mid-1990s, I followed them somewhat when they were up and not so much when they were down. Some might accuse me of being a fair-weather fan by ignoring their exploits when success was limited. But I’m not buying tickets to their games when they’re not providing entertainment, just like they don’t come to my house and run the west coast offense when I’m not providing them money. I am watching their games this season, since they currently sport an 8-3 record, but I do it by first recording the contest on my DVR and then playing it back at triple speed. That’s my idea of a hurry-up offense.

Now, when coworkers talk on Monday morning about their respective teams of preference and how “we” really handed it to the Cowboys yesterday or “our” defense made the difference, I can see the truth behind their perceived participation. As my wife succinctly put it when I got a little out of control watching a game early in our marriage, “do you even know any of those guys?”

Time for your performance review

2008-11-25T11:16:00.000-05:00

I received my performance review the other day at the company where I work. The annual exercise makes me, like everyone else, pretty uncomfortable. If I don’t care for the evaluative nature of statements like “that’s a nice haircut,” you can imagine how I feel about a session that appraises my fundamental value as a contributing member of the global community. Especially in this economy.

Overall, though, I’d say the meeting went about as well as could be anticipated. On a scale descending from the top-most “exceeds expectations”, down to “meets expectations”, then to “needs improvement”, then to “you suck”, I’d probably rate the session with my supervisor as “meets expectations”.

Unfortunately, that may not be saying much, considering I had pretty low expectations going in. I’ve been receiving what are supposed to be annual evaluations for quite a few years now and, like most American workers who describe them as demeaning, demoralizing and a huge waste of time, I have mixed feelings on the subject. On the one hand, I recognize the need for the hectic rat race to pause momentarily so that a thoughtful discussion of how we work can take place between manager and managee (my spellcheck suggests I use “mangy” or “manatee” here and, now that I think of it, I have felt like a flea-bitten sea cow at work recently). And by the same token, I understand that it provides a proper context for the awarding of merit raises, the value of which you can’t argue with, if we got them. But on the other hand, it’s hard not to resent having a non-deity like my supervisor sitting in judgment on me.

I began preparing for my most recent review in April, when I realized the 2007 year-end appraisal was now about four months past-due and therefore imminent. I scribbled a few notes about what I considered my major accomplishments – trips overseas to train our offshore teams, membership on a quality improvement committee, never coming to work armed – and put them in my shirt pocket to carry around with me. We used to be able to tell approximately when the review session was coming because we’d be asked to formally write up any input we cared to offer, but like other fads in the world of human resources, this practice was abandoned faster than a colicky infant in Nebraska. I was proud to consider myself more prepared than most of my co-workers, who usually just wait for the manager’s window blinds to close to recall something good they’ve done lately.

Before this self-review portion was dropped, the company experimented briefly with something called the “360 review”, where coworkers above, below and on the same level with you were asked to provide input on the evaluation. Though you can easily imagine the theoretical value of giving equal weight to the perceptions of all who interact with you, this turned out to be about as morale-building as the self-criticism of Soviet indoctrination camps. Hearing that your organizational and communication skills failed to impress the garbage-collection guy was truly crushing.

By the time my one-on-one session did happen on Friday, I had basically lost interest in making any positive case for myself and was prepared to offer a “whatever” if the newest review form had a place for one. I didn’t think I’d do especially well, since our workload has been so slow lately that it’s hard to keep up any real enthusiasm for productivity. But I had forgotten that this was the 2007 review, not the 2008 one, so my accomplishments harked back to those long-ago days when we did something.

That being the case, I was pleased to see that I had received a “strategic supplier” designation in all categories except for safety, where I was judged “capable”. (Apparently, being a strategic supplier is a desired thing, and capable is not as good but not necessarily bad, since your performance is judged on a safe/not-safe dichotomy and, since I didn’t get killed on the job, I passed.) The categories where I received the “SS” included quality of work, quantity of work, initiative, technical competence, working with others, and attendance. The only better grade I could’ve received was something called “pinnacle player” and, when I asked a while back why I didn’t get any of these despite what I considered an outstanding year, I was told these were reserved for only the most exceptional employees, on the level, say, of a returning messiah or an Oprah.

A key part of any performance review, of course, is a fair and open discussion of what the employee can do in the area of skill improvement. Even the best worker can stand to do a better job in some aspect of his or her work, and I understand the importance of continuous improvement (at least as an impressive corporate buzzword). My development plan called for obvious things like “monitoring to ensure you are within established guidelines for attendance”, which I think has something to do with showing up on a regular basis, but I was also asked to make sure that my productivity rate was within the goal of 3.2%. I’d be happy to strive for this goal if (a) I knew what the hell it was, and (b) 3.2% of what? Unfortunately, the review time expired before I could summon the curiosity to ask the question. (The end of my shift had arrived and exceptions to the no-overtime part of our current cost-containment measures did not include discussing productivity). I can only hope that whatever that metric is, I come in at no worse than 3.1%, or no worse than 3.3%, whichever is more fitting of a strategic supplier.

Next year, if the economy continues as it is, I imagine the ratings might be on a two-point scale, something like “you still have a job” or “here’s your severance package”.

A bad time to start eating good

2008-11-23T11:15:00.001-05:00

Food has always played a central role in my life. I know that’s something that everyone can claim, except maybe those lucky few who survive by photosynthesis. I use it not only for sustenance and pleasure but also as a major contributor to my overall sense of well-being and security. If I have an ample store of baked goods, take-out entrees and my favorite soft drink, I feel I’m ready to survive any calamity short of a thermonuclear holocaust. My wife accuses me of collecting cookies and cakes like a squirrel collects acorns, but where else am I going to find a chocolate-chunk blondie post-apocalypse?

We’ll all be thinking a lot about food in the coming days, with Thanksgiving just around the corner. Because of its carbo-centric theme, this has always been my favorite holiday, but it’s hardly the only day where I’m thinking about the menu days in advance. As I write this posting, it’s Saturday afternoon and I can tell you virtually every meal I’ll be eating between now and the holiday five days in the future.

During the workweek, I’ll have a blueberry breakfast bar, hazelnut-flavored coffee and pulp-free orange juice for breakfast, and a sliced deli turkey sandwich on Milton’s bread with two reduced-fat Oreo cookies for dessert. I’m very particular about these selections, and will not tolerate orange juice with medium pulp, some pulp, a little pulp, or one small suspicious glob you’d hope is only pulp. Pulp is for paper mills, not breakfast juices. I might allow some variation in this otherwise rigid schedule for a special celebration – the day after Obama was elected, for example, I treated myself to reduced-fat Chips Ahoy! (because of the exclamation point) – but I take great comfort in the predictability of this regime.

Dinner is my opportunity to allow a little variation in my food consumption. Tonight, for example, I’m considering the hamburger I bought but never ate at lunch today, some leftover Japanese food from my wife’s lunch, or I may just pick out some items from the prepared-food bar here at the grocery store coffee shop where I’m writing. I’ve already checked out the grilled hot dogs sitting under the warming lights and, though they look tasty, there’s a sign that says the buns are available behind the bakery counter, and I’m a bit reluctant to ask the worker there “do you have buns?” (especially since there’s a new hire sitting behind me who’s going through the company’s sexual harassment training DVD).

I may be able to attribute some of my quirky attitudes toward food to my upbringing. My mother created most of her meals out of her Pennsylvania Dutch background until she moved to a Miami neighborhood dominated by Italian transplants from New York. This allowed her to add things like lasagna and meatballs to hog maw and shoo-fly pie, though usually not in the same meal. Breakfast was typically skillet-fried potatoes and something called “scrapple” – more appetizingly known as “liver mush” in the South -- and the lunch I carried off to school usually included a can of Vienna sausages (whatever rarely harvested parts of the pig that weren’t in the scrapple were probably in the sausages). It was all very tasty and very dense on a molecular level, and was probably a significant contributor to the fact that I weighed nearly 250 pounds by the time I graduated from high school.

When I went off to college, my eating habits didn’t get any better. “Healthy” eating was a concept still in the distant future in the 1970s; all foods that didn’t contain metal filings were considered healthy in those days. Despite the fact that my favorites at the time included the Burger Chef “Big Chef” and French fries covered in tartar sauce, and I remember celebrating my new-found independence early in my freshman year by eating a two-pound bag of Hershey kisses, I managed to lose weight throughout my college years. I briefly fell under the mistaken impression that there were other things in life besides eating, some of which suppressed your appetite when taken in illegal quantities. I rarely missed a meal – to this day when I hear someone say they forgot to eat lunch, it’s as astounding to me as if they forgot to properly regulate their body temperatures – yet I somehow found a way to metabolize the calories efficiently.

When I met my future wife after college, concepts like fat and cholesterol had become more widely known, as well as the idea that green plants could be used for something other than landscaping. Unlike many kids, I actually enjoyed most vegetables during my formative years. The cartoon character Popeye got me started on spinach and from there it was a slippery slope onto harder flora like broccoli, cabbage and cauliflower. I never went for the likes of okra and squash because of their funny names, though that never kept me away from a McRib. My diet did gradually improve throughout my marriage, largely thanks to my wife’s vegetarian tendencies and a maturing of my tastes that allowed me to appreciate fine wines as well as fine Pepsi.

Now I have a son who eats like the typical teenager, and I find myself once again coming under negative influences. The appreciation I had cultivated of foodstuffs like tofu and tempeh is now being undermined by Rob’s affection for all things nuggety. I still enjoy good-for-you quality – right next to those hot dogs I have my eyes on is a loaf called “field roast grain meat”, the first two ingredients of which are filtered water and wheat gluten – yet I find myself increasingly drawn to fast foods. Maybe I can find a proper balance in the oxymoronically named taco salad.

One of my wife’s favorite sayings is “life is too short to drink cheap wine”. In these uncertain economic and geopolitical times, I’m tempted to agree, and extend the aphorism to include “…eat healthy foods”. I worked hard a year or two ago to lose about 25 pounds, suffering through sensible portions that bordered on the subatomic just to make my clothes fit better. Now I’m inclined to think that’s a pretty high price to pay for a single notch on my belt buckle, and find myself migrating back to comfort foods, so-called because you can trade your trim-fitting clothing for a comforter.

When I drove through KFC for my son on the way home from school the other day, and I got to smell the barbecue boneless chicken wings he ordered, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

That may yet be my fate if I don’t straighten up and eat right.

Thanksgiving comes early in the office

2008-11-21T10:47:00.000-05:00

The turkey carcass sits mangled on the serving table, looking like the victim of a bear attack. The sweet potato casserole has been denuded of its marshmallow topping, but you could probably scrape a few more servings out of the corners of the pan if you tried. The stuffing is completely gone, serving its stated purpose of stuffing those who now lounge around the edges of this scene, barely moving except for the effort it takes to moan.

No, you haven’t been transported a week into the future by the magic of the blog. This is the scene I left behind at yesterday’s office celebration of Thanksgiving, a full seven days before most of us will commemorate the occasion.

The corporate calendar of holidays is not something most of us are aware of until we walk into work one dark January day and discover we’ve neglected to bring the green bagels for St. Patrick’s Day, which the outside world celebrates on March 17. Maybe I exaggerate a little, but not much. The government has imposed Monday observance of the more minor holidays like Presidents, Labor and Memorial days. Christmas and New Year’s are complicated by the fact that the days before them -- the Eves -- are in many ways more important than the actual holidays themselves. Many human resources departments have come up with the concept of a “floating” holiday for individuals to use in the religious observance of their choosing, such as Yom Kippur, Kwanzaa or Talk Like a Pirate Day. People in my mostly Christian office, for example, use their optional holiday for the day after Easter, prompting one observer to wonder if the “floating” had something to do with Jesus’ ascension into heaven.

I guess having the Thanksgiving potluck yesterday made some sense on a gut level, considering few of us would want to gorge like that two days in a row if it were scheduled for next Wednesday. The only opening left on the sign-up sheet when I got to it was “salad”, which seemed very un-Thanksgiving-like but worked for me since it was so easy to prepare (take one head of lettuce, rip to shreds, serves 20). Management was providing the ham and turkey, and everything else was being brought in by the staff, who would have a chance to dazzle coworkers with their best recipes, many of which involved green beans, cream soup and those crunchy onion things.

The sit-down time was scheduled for 11 a.m. so the organizers had the better part of the morning to set up the centerpieces, warm and then re-warm the hot dishes, and tempt us all with the smells of the season. This was to be an affair that combined our staff with workers from the front office, who we sometimes pass in the restrooms but about whom we know little else. As the serving time arrived, I was unfortunate enough to be just outside their offices when a manager called out for me to summon them. At first I was confused about who exactly he meant, and nearly beckoned the 200-plus temporary work crew from the warehouse. That would’ve been a horrible mistake, certain to result in stolen plastic cutlery and tiny, tiny portions for everyone. Still, I didn’t want to call for these front-office folks I didn’t know (“hey, it’s the guy from the bathroom – what’s he want?”) so I went to hide in my car for a few minutes.

I hoped this would have the added benefit of allowing me to miss the inevitable speech-giving and prayer that would precede the food consumption. But as the schedule started running behind, I made it just in time to hear the department head note that though these are difficult times, we still have much to be thankful for, followed by a brief blessing. Not being a currently practicing Christian myself, I’ve always felt awkward during this portion of the proceedings. It’s not because I take offense at having others’ religious beliefs imposed on me; rather, I’m bothered that I use the respectful silence to think of the sarcastic prayer I’d be tempted to offer if I’m ever called upon. Instead of beginning with “dear Jesus” or “holy Father”, the sacrilegious scamp in me wants to begin with a “good God” and then launch into several other James Brown references like papa’s brand new bag and how good I feel (so good). Fortunately for everyone, Edna does a nice reverent offering, and it’s finally time to chow down.

Office chairs were pulled up to the long row of covered work tables. After people worked their way down the buffet, carefully gauging the decreasing capacity of their Chinettes against the promise of what appeared further down the line, we were told to squeeze into a seat and begin the scheduled conviviality. The randomness and closeness of this seating arrangement, not to mention my very real fear of being injured by flying elbows, caused me to linger toward the end of the buffet line in the hope the table would be too full. I lucked out and was able to return instead to my work station to eat, where I got a kernel of corn stuck between “F7” and “F8” on my keyboard.

I genuinely enjoyed the food, as did everyone else. I was also able to enjoy the air of warmth and geniality in the room without actually having to get any of it on me. We didn’t have any holiday music piped through the intercom as we’ll do at Christmas -- primarily I guess because there isn’t any, except for the less-than-festive “Turkey in the Straw” -- but there was a certain atmosphere that for a moment almost made me give some actual thanks.

I managed to avoid overeating, which was good since I had a long drive home to navigate in the next hour and I didn’t want to sleep through it. Others in our department weren’t so lucky, as they staggered back to their desks to face another three hours of duty. The combination of turkey, heavy carbohydrates and the kind of workload you might expect at a financial services firm during the worst economic downturn in 70 years must’ve been as tough to handle as an Ambien/opium blend injected directly into your forehead.

At least there were no Detroit Lions to send them over the edge and into lethal coma.

Achieving quality step by step

2008-11-19T18:15:00.000-05:00

Ever since we started outsourcing a lot of our work overseas, many companies have been real big on standard operating procedures. I think the theory is that breaking down your production process into a simple step-by-step operation makes it possible for even the most untrained worker to perform. While that can work well at a very basic level for those eager but inexperienced developing-world types, it hampers the ability of us still working on American soil to find creative ways to screw things up.

About ten years ago, the rage in corporate quality movements was something called ISO 9000. The idea was that if you documented (or “wrote down”) all your processes and then operated as you said you would, nothing could go wrong. No variation was possible when humans were turned into mindless, instruction-reading work-bots. Errors in this system were supposed to be so few that a special numeration system had to be devised to describe how tiny the odds of failure were. This was the concept of “Six Sigma”, or six mistakes out of all the fraternity or sorority members in the world.

Though ISO 9000 is still followed in some corporate backwaters of the world, it gradually lost credibility in the U.S. First there was the problem that even if American workers could make sense of the instructions, there was no guarantee that just because something was written down that it would work (see the 2008 Republican platform and any MapQuest directions for just two examples). And then there was the problem with the name of the initiative itself: ISO stands for International Society for Obduration, which I think has something to do with pity, and the 9000 part represented the year in which actual gains from the program could be seen.

The remnants of this system that still exist in most lines of work are now called “standard practices”. They used to be called “best practices”, but that was considered too elitist, I guess, and it was judged more important that we do everything the same, whether it was actually good or not. Now, whether the person doing the work is in Boston or London or Hong Kong or Neptune (in the year 9000), all they have to do is go to the corporate intranet, access the development and training section, then go to the operations page, then find the kind of process they’re doing, then call up the appropriate requirements, then find the “SP”, then start looking for another job because they missed a critical deadline while monkeying around on the computer.

When you do have time to follow the standard practice, you better pull up a chair because it’s typically going to take a while to get through it. One example I’m looking at breaks a particular operation down into 15 steps, which seems almost manageable until you consider that step 8 alone includes four checkboxes followed by 16 bullet points and six sub-bullet points. Other steps are ridiculously simple, like step 15 which involves taking your page off the printer. The standard practice doesn’t tell you how many fingers to use to pick up the sheet of paper, whether to use your left hand or your right hand or what kind of protective gear you should be wearing but, as the website warns all users, “don’t use a hard copy of these instructions because they are constantly being revised in the spirit of continuous improvement.”

When despite the best efforts of the quality mavens something wrong does make it out to a client, an investigation into how this could possibly happen usually takes place. A “service recovery account” is requested of the offending manufacturing site who attempts to figure out, usually several weeks after the error was committed, what step in the flawless process was not followed. Usually, the answer is something like “we didn’t work on this job”, and the matter is referred to another location. Once the site is definitively determined, the managers there will “drill down” through a massive collection of archived paperwork to figure out which individual or team was responsible (the drilling is just a figurative term at U.S. offices but involves an actual boring device for workers offshore). A corrective action is implemented, typically a scolding email to anyone who might’ve participated in the misdeed. We’re able to report back to the client that we appreciate they’ve pointed out an improvement opportunity that has made our process even better, and that someone won’t be getting their merit raise, if it’s ever decided these will be reinstituted.

What all this ignores is that some of the steps in a process are more critical than others, and that it takes an experienced person to know when it’s safe to cut corners and skip something trivial. If sub-step 2.4.7(A)(e) involves hopping on one foot while you key in your job number, you’ll see the Bombay skyline compliantly swaying with tremors while in Atlanta they’ll just take a chance they can skip the hopping. Our overseas workers are extremely good at doing exactly what they’re told to do, knowing they could be out on the streets if it’s found they cut a corner. At best, there will be “stand-ups” (where a top manager stands up before the group and yells at them), “letters of retribution” inserted into personnel files and, worst of all, week-long reprogramming regimens that involve the south Asian equivalent of a forced march. Virtually no one gets dismissed for cause domestically, since downsizing is certain to eventually take care of them anyway.

There’s a pendulum of emphasis that swings back and forth between quality and meeting deadlines that American workers seem to be better at timing. We’re much closer to the screaming customer to be able to tell when we’re about to enter a new era. We use those all-American traits of innovation and intuition and poor reading skills to perform from the gut what we think needs to be done rather than what some piece of paper says. And we can tell when it might be a good time take a lunch break to avoid those managers who are shocked (shocked!) to learn that a standard process wasn’t followed step by ridiculous, excruciating step.

Learning to blog at WordCamp

2008-11-16T12:33:00.000-05:00

Attendees at yesterday’s Charlotte WordCamp -- you could tell it was a new media thing by how they took the space out of “WordCamp” -- generally fell into two categories. There were the experienced bloggers looking to refine their skills and improve their social networking by actually meeting real people, and there were those like me, real (but old) people who had heard of blobs and inner-nets and wanted to get into this online action while we still lived and breathed. It was the twitterers and the twits. The avatars and the ava-tards.

The event was sponsored by The Charlotte Observer, respectfully called the “mature” media by symposium leaders who probably refer to it as the Observersaurus in private. I learned about it while reading an article in the paper a few months ago that promised an opportunity for new bloggers like me to learn the ropes. Publicizing the affair in the local section of the paper, right next to the article about Billy Graham “celebrating” his 90th birthday, apparently garnered little notice, and registration was wide open when I went online to sign up. When word finally made it out to the blogosphere a few weeks later, the location planned for 50 participants now had to hold in excess of a hundred.

I arrived early Saturday to make sure I could get an outlet for my laptop’s power cord. Going through the lobby and up to the third floor of the Observer building, it was painfully evident that such a long-respected bricks-and-mortar newspaper operation was on the wane. The faded paint, the tattered flooring, the creaking elevator that failed later in the morning, trapping its inhabitant into the identity of “Elevator Guy” for the rest of the day, all served to reinforce the transition now taking place in the media world. We signed in at the registration desk, wrote our names onto nametags in marker ink that soaked through two levels of clothing as it made you high, and headed into the conference room to begin the session.

It was pretty evident right from the beginning about the dichotomy we’d be struggling with all day. Mostly middle-aged representatives of the Observer stood around the edge of the room, studying the participants like we were lowland gorillas. Their sponsorship was obviously aimed at figuring out how to get in on this young demographic and turn them into eyeballs they could charge 37½ cents a piece each day. Sharing their background if not their status among the employed were about a third of the participants. As we learned during brief self-introductions, these folks had opted for a “midlife career change”, “early retirement” or “freelance writing” that all looked suspiciously like being laid off. The other two-thirds, including the people at the front who’d be doing the presenting, may or may not have had jobs and didn’t really seem to care one way or the other. They had Twitter, and that’s all they had time for anyway.

After the introductions, the first item on the agenda was a meet-and-greet for non-beginners and a general Q&A session for the rest of us. The meet-and-greet would take place in an adjacent room, so the non-beginners were told adjourn for about 30 minutes while the newbies remained behind to ask their stupid questions. I probably had enough experience to go either way but the prospect of climbing through all those wires and aisles convinced me to stay behind, though it did occur to me that perhaps we were being separated like the concentration camp victims told to stay behind for the showers.

I don’t know what went on the other room (I suspect there was a fair amount of snickering and cootie vaccines) but my group took the opportunity to ask variations on the same question for the better part of the session. What was a tag and what was a category? How are they different? How are they the same? What’s a tag again? What do you mean by category? A tag cloud, what the hell is that? Should I have brought a laptop?

After a break, we were again allowed to commingle with the veteran bloggers. There was a technical and design panel that gave ideas on how to make your blog stand out from the 700 billion blogs out there. We were told how to steal a theme, copy a graphic and plug in a plug-in. Most of these tips were delivered in reverse top-ten formats, a la David Letterman, which I’m guessing was supposed to make the aged among us feel like we had taken a long afternoon nap and stayed up past 11 for the first time since college. The nap came in handy, as the discussion turned to FTP, future-proofing, subdomains, RSS and microblogging, and I turned to my version of the Internet to avoid boredom. I had AOL open for about five minutes before I realized this was probably the most embarrassing site choice anyone in the room could possibly make.

After a lunch break for pizza (exactly what I thought bloggers ate), we began the afternoon session with the topic of content development. Not surprisingly, a recurring suggestion from all five presenters was that a blog should actually have some amount of content, which may not have occurred to about half the room who were waiting for the part about downloading reliable cash streams. Content was described as “king”, “queen” and, ultimately, the “ten of spades”. We were told we’d need dynamic content to attract readers but probably wouldn’t have any readers to appreciate it in the beginning, unless you worked for the Observer or developed wide social networks in places like FaceBook, MySpace and the bulletin board at Goodwill.

Some of the ideas for good content seemed to be exactly what I was already doing. One slide read “picture = 1000 words”, which I initially took to mean that the picture of the perfect web posting was something that ran to a thousand words in length. Unfortunately, what this actually referred to was the assertion that you could put photos and other graphics on your blog. My thousand-long-word essays now seem to be serious overkill compared to many of the blogs we were shown, where perhaps as few as fifty words were needed as long as several of them were “tweet”, “Obama” or “my naked girlfriend.” Apparently you can also put video on your blog, and I plan to do that as soon as I can find the port on my laptop that accepts VHS tapes.

Of course, no seminar like this is complete without the inspirational speaker offering his formula for success. Right before the keynote address, we were told that promoting your site was as simple as (now write this down) “create” plus “serve” times “community” equals “wealth”. This was about the most useless formula I had heard at one of these things since a corporate development trainer had advised me that ambition divided by talent minus honesty to the third power is greater than or equal to the cosine of success. Nobody wrote anything down, primarily because pens and papers are such primitive technology that only the older folks even brought them, and most of us were back in the lunchroom by now trying to snag a few more Chips Ahoy. Among those who remained, I did hear some tap-tap-tapping followed by a long pause as they looked for the “equal” key.

At the end, we collected our decidedly low-tech T-shirts (not at all virtual or digital, like I was hoping), said our goodbyes to the new contacts we had made, and hoped that someone somewhere in the room would be visiting our blogs.

Being neighborly in the subdivision

2008-11-15T17:51:00.000-05:00

They say that good fences make good neighbors. Since the restrictive covenants in our particular subdivision forbid the installation of “fences, barriers or similarly containing obstructions”, we have lousy neighbors.

Maybe I’m being a little harsh. I’m actually quite fond of the neighborhood we’ve lived in now for almost 15 years. It’s a collection of perhaps 60 or 70 upper-middle-class homes built in the pre-McMansion era, when floor plans were sensible and pre-existing plant life was respected by not being slashed and burned. In fact the name of our subdivision – I think it’s “Shady Creek”, but it could be “Shadow River” or “Dappled Brook” – reflects both the old hardwoods that canopy the main road and the shallow creek that, if you don’t look too closely, runs cleanly alongside the main road.

We live on that road, on the corner of one of about a dozen cul-de-sacs. We have a nice mixture of young families and retired couples, many of them academics from the college about two miles away. We’ve seen little of the housing market distress that haunts Subprime Village at the Township at Cityplace across the way, and even enough of a progressive streak that we sported a few Obama yard signs during the recent election season. I nod to the people I pass on my occasional walks and raise two fingers off the steering wheel (three if I’m feeling friendly) as I drive past them, and am on good if anonymous terms with everybody. Most of them know me as the Stocky Guy that Runs and would probably describe me as the quiet type should I ever be charged with some gruesome crime.

I don’t really know my immediately adjacent neighbors at all. Some community-minded type down the street recently collected names, professions and other basic data for a small directory she published, but several families on our block declined to participate in the census. So they are known to me as follows.

The retired couple on our right (they’re either retired or simply don’t work very hard) have lived in their house for about two years now. I thought about approaching them and introducing myself when they first moved in, but after a few near-miss encounters it grew increasingly awkward to do so. Now I mostly see the husband as he walks his harnessed cat in the yard behind our shed. Why our property is better suited for the feline constitution than his is a mystery to me, but what’s even more curious is that he does this activity in full view of my wife and me. At least he has enough shame not to wave when he sees us. I’ve seen his wife only rarely when, for some reason, a different antique auto appears in front of their home every weekend and she engages in a long discussion with the driver. Maybe they’re running a stolen vintage car ring and the cat on a tether is meant to be a cover for their criminal enterprise.

The family on our left, across the cul-de-sac, consists of a young couple with two school-age daughters. They all seem nice enough from a distance, if balloons occasionally displayed on their mailbox is any indication. I have no problem with them, but I do have a concern with one of their visiting mothers. She recently pulled up to the side of their house to witness both me and her son hard at work in our respective yards. It seemed pretty obvious that both of us were herding leaves toward the curb, where the city’s vacuum truck would pick them up in a few days. Rather than park her car in front of his home, however, she chose instead to put it on my side of the street. I was stunned at first by this blatant show of preference for her own flesh and blood, especially since she did it right in front of me. After she went inside, I continued shepherding my leaves to the curb and put them exactly where I had originally intended, leaving a small space for her late-model sedan in the center of my pile. At least the vehicle was still largely visible from the door handles up.

Behind our house is an African-American family that I also know very little about. They’ve lived there about five years now but it’s been hard to watch their comings and goings because of how our respective homes are positioned. They probably know us a lot better than we do them, since the sliding glass double doors leading into our family room let them look out of one of their bedroom windows and directly into our lives. We had a good bit more privacy until they cleared a stand of shrubbery just inside their property line about six months ago; I’m not going to ascribe any voyeuristic motives to this questionable bit of landscaping, though I cut a pretty dashing figure as I clomp around the kitchen in my pajamas. The only other thing I know about them is that, for some unknown reason, they have their grass cut by the retired Southern gentleman on their other side. I’m guessing it’s some sort of Civil War reparations arrangement.

Finally, across the street there lives a cluster of several hundred people. It’s not an overcrowded group home but instead a development of townhouses just beyond the creek. Though not technically a part of the subdivision, the only way they can come and go is via our main road so I’ll consider them neighbors enough to grumble about. My primary beef is that they and their landscapers use the grassy area visible through our front window as a place to heap their trash, in direct violation of some municipal code or other we discovered when we called the city to complain. A guy came out and posted a “no dumping” sign, which they promptly ignored except for knocking it over. When we put it back up, someone stole the sign leaving only a post, which is nice as posts go but mentions very little about the ordinance. I bet the mostly retired community that lives in this development would sympathize with our concern and might even mention it to the landscapers, if any of them spoke English.

All in all, it’s really a pretty good place to live. We may not be neighborly when it comes to borrowing cups of sugar and checking each other’s pets while on vacation, we do have a Neighborhood Watch program. I know this because there’s a sign (not yet vandalized) and because the neighborhood coordinator stopped at my door one day to ask if she could have our stepping stones. I suppose they are desirable as stepping stones go – cement, circular, about 2-feet wide, truly exquisite – but I wasn’t quite ready to simply give them away to the crazy lady who yells at passing cars to “slow down!” Perhaps, for the betterment of the community I should have.

Profiles in line-waiting

2008-11-12T10:59:00.000-05:00

I’m writing today from our local Earth Fare grocery store, which has kindly set aside – whether they know it or not -- a table and a wi-fi connection for my almost daily use. For those of you not familiar with the chain, it’s in the organic/health/inedible food segment, featuring high-end gourmet offerings along side free-range sticks and locally grown chaff. How it ended up in my rather working-class neighborhood is beyond me.

Since I am using their space and their power and their Internet waves, I’m careful to patronize them on each visit with at least the purchase of a bottled tea (today I’m sampling the “fair trade” flavor). When I approached the checkout, there were two lines open, each of which had a single customer with a significant basket-load of merchandise. I lingered back briefly because I hate being reluctantly waved ahead when the large purchaser feels obliged to let me and my single item go through. Once each of them had committed to their position by partially unloading their basket, I picked the guy on the left to get behind.

Usually, I’ll do some profiling of the people ahead of me before I commit to a line. It’s a sexist, ageist, racist, classist habit I have that you’d think would get me to the cashier faster. Obviously, I look at the quantity of items being purchased but that’s actually a very small factor in my assessment. The ideal people to get behind are young professionals who have that urgent on-the-go air about them. They’ll typically be paying with a debit card, usually swiping it crisply before the purchase is even completed, and the next thing you know they’re motoring out the door. At the other end of the spectrum is the harried working mom herding her kids while talking on her cell phone, the college student who’ll be digging through the 12 pockets in his cargo pants trying to scare up enough coin to pay, and the elderly couple fumbling through their belongings looking for the check book.

Today, I waited patiently as Guy on the Left fell slightly behind Guy on the Right in their unloading. Switching lines at this point is usually not a wise option, as inevitably that speeds up the line you left and slows down your new choice. Besides, you can’t switch more than once without looking like you’re planning an armed robbery. You need to commit to your choice and stay with it unless some serious misfortune befalls the line, like a price check, a register running out of receipt tape, or (God forbid) some once-in-a-lifetime calamity like a travelers cheque.

The line I didn’t choose is now wide open while in my line, the unloading has just finished and the customer is ready to step forward and acknowledge the cashier. I momentarily consider switching before two more carts pull in the temporarily cleared line and eliminate that option. That’s okay, though; I’m thinking my patience has paid off and I’ll be plunking my tea on the conveyor belt shortly. Suddenly, I’m horrified by a completely unexpected development: the customer in front of me knows the cashier’s mother! Soon there is chitting and chatting and reminiscing and banter, and I’m starting to wish my tea had a little more preservatives and a little less organic brown rice syrup, because it looks like I could be standing here a while.

While the grocery checkout system we have in America has its flaws, I still think it’s better than the foreign alternatives I’ve seen in some of my travels overseas. In Manila, where retail seemed to be on steroids with the humongous Mega Mall just a few train stops down from the even larger Mall of Asia, I was in a grocery store that had no fewer than 35 checkout lines, and each of them was staffed on the busy afternoon I visited. In addition to designating several lanes as eight items or less (I think they’re on the octal system there rather than the metric), they also had two lanes marked “elderly only”. I would’ve thought this was a great idea if they hadn’t defined “elderly” as 50 and over, so I decided to be offended instead.

In London, where I believe food stores are called apothecaries or chemists or something like that, I was too intimidated by biscuits that looked like cookies and cashiers that looked like earls to buy anything. In Bombay, the huge population apparently necessitates a whole different system that involves massing around the checkout and jostling for recognition like you were in some sort of commodities trading pit. Where there were lines, they didn’t seem to exist for any reason, as I had people literally step in front of me to make their purchase. In Sri Lanka, a rebel insurgency requires you to stand in line to go through security before you can stand in another line to do something else, so you’ve kind of lost interest by then and decide to order room service instead.

Then there are the lines to get out of these countries and back into the U.S. Unlike retail lines, where annoyance and a waste of time are the biggest risk, the immigration and customs lines feel like actual life-or-death scenarios. When I tried to get out of Hong Kong, I had to pass through a scanner that detected my body temperature to make sure I didn’t have SARs, bird flu or other forms of excessive hotness. After it was determined that I was cool, I was challenged again at the ticket counter to prove that I was eventually going back to the States instead of staying indefinitely at my interim destination in the Philippines. My pasty features and American passport apparently weren’t proof enough that I wasn’t Filipino; I had to go through back flips to produce documentation that I had an airline ticket back home.

Once I got to my final stop in Charlotte a few days later, my joy at being home after five weeks abroad was quickly dampened by the long, snaking line leading up to the immigration desks. About a half-dozen officers were on hand to service two jumbo jets that landed simultaneously for what must’ve been the first time in North Carolina history. Two subsections separately serviced American citizens and foreign nationals, though a third one for suspiciously dusky people who carried all their luggage on the plane with them would’ve been helpful. The perfunctory inspection that resulted in every one of the hundreds who were waiting being waved through eventually got me to my baggage and the customs officials. As soon as the official saw that I had visited something called Sri Lanka, I was ordered aside for a thorough search. The inspector was very chatty and very friendly, which I suspect was the result of some intense profiling training rather than a desire to be nice. Finally satisfied that my cheap souvenirs and even cheaper wardrobe presented no significant threat to national security, I got to meet my family and head for home.

I suppose it’s only appropriate that the profiling came back to haunt me.

Sunday meanderings

2008-11-10T11:25:00.000-05:00

It’s Sunday so of course I’ve just finished up a bunch of household chores, the last of which was leaf-blowing. We’re at the peak of fall here in my part of the South, which means my tree-covered lot can be cleared of fallen leaves just in time to start all over again. My right arm, with which I held the blower, is very weak and sore right now, so I hope you’ll excuse me if I don’t type too many words from the right-hand side of the keyboard. Topics thus eliminated for consideration include hijacking, polkas, and PIN numbers (ouch!)

What I’m actually going to discuss today is a variety of short topics:

Is there any household chore more overwhelming than dusting? I made myself devote an hour to it this morning and I’ve barely scratched the surface (guess I should’ve used a softer cloth). Our home office with all its dust-attracting electronics was especially imposing -- the shelving under our computer desk looked like a deserted alpaca refuge. After getting most of the obvious surfaces cleaned, I looked up at our wall of built-in bookshelves and realized that to do it right, I’d have to remove every book and wipe it down till the entire shelf was empty, then wipe down the shelf. Then repeat 16 times. Just as wrinkle-resistant clothing eliminated ironing and the modern blender allowed us to make smoothies without the use of a diesel engine, I wonder if technology will ever conquer household dust. Perhaps if our homes were converted into airless vacuums, there’d be no way for dust particles to travel from wherever the hell it is they originate. But then I guess breathing might be an issue.
I stubbed my toe badly as I came out of the shower after today’s yard work and it (eventually) hurt. The delay it takes for pain signals to travel from your foot to your brain and back is absolute torture. It’s like knowing the date three weeks in the future that you’re going to die. I kicked the tub hard and thought it was going to be a bad one, so I preemptively cried out in anticipated agony, then felt a little disappointed when the anguish didn’t materialize. This is what my life has come to.
Did you read the other day about the airline passenger who became so unruly during her flight that they had to subdue her by taping her to her seat? I wonder if the airline had one of those new a la carte pricing structures and charged her for the tape.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could live your life sequentially instead of on the normal space-time continuum? Do an entire life’s worth of a single task as soon as you’re born, then another, then another. You could take care of all the unpleasant, tedious and painful chores at one time and get them out of the way, so you’d be able to spend your final years doing nothing but the enjoyable. It might be difficult to spend eight months straight doing a lifetime worth of shoe-tying and the three weeks in the dentist’s chair would more painful than a tanker truck of nitrous could possible alleviate, but once done, they’d be out of the way forever.
Whenever I get a haircut, I typically ask for just a trim so it won’t be obvious. I’m trying to avoid that awkward conversation that inevitably ensues several times the next day when someone confronts you with “you got a haircut!” That’s merely an observation, not a compliment, so “thanks” isn’t the proper response and is in fact presumptuous. Maybe they’re being nice by not saying it’s the worst haircut this side of Chris Matthews. I think the most appropriate and equivalent response might be something like “you’re wearing a shirt”.
Speaking of which, I’ve noticed that long-haired female anchors on the 24-hour news channels invariably display half their locks cascading down in front of one shoulder while on the other side, the hair goes behind the shoulder. I assume this was test-marketed with focus groups who for whatever reason preferred this half-and-half look. I just want to know if there’s someone on set who’s responsible for making sure the hair-halves return to their proper position every time the anchor looks off to the side.
In these difficult economic times, there’s a no-risk way to make a little extra pocket change by visiting your favorite fast-food outlet. It’s called Teenage Cashier Roulette. Make whatever purchase you like and then give them a more-than-sufficient but wholly inappropriate amount in payment. For example, if your value meal comes to $3.88, give them a ten-dollar bill and 13 pennies. The correct amount of change would be $6.25 though, thanks to the American educational system, you could get back any amount between five and a thousand dollars. If you calculate what you’re supposed to get, you complain if it’s less and get out of there as fast as possible with your tidy profit if it’s more.
I was wondering out loud the other day why it seems that celebrities have such a high incidence of twins. My wife said it’s because they can afford fertility treatments and those have a greater chance of resulting in multiple births, but I think it’s because they’re at least twice as good as the average person.
When I get mad at fellow motorists during the morning rush hour, I tend to use under-the-breath name-calling rather than gunplay to get satisfaction. Over the years, I’ve developed a glossary of terms for different kinds of incompetent drivers that might be helpful for others to adopt. A “moron” is someone who’s driving slower than I am, an “idiot” is someone who was driving adequately until they plowed into that guardrail, and a “maniac” is someone who’s driving faster than me. A “jerk” is someone who makes a turn without a signal, won’t make a right turn on red even though the way is clear, or commits any other turning-related offense. An “imbecile” is anyone with a nicer car than me who commits even the most minor infraction (driving slightly off-center in their lane, for example). And finally, a “hat driver” is anyone older than me driving a big car at least 15 miles an hour under the speed limit while wearing brimmed headwear.

Happy birthday to me

2008-11-06T17:24:00.000-05:00

Today I celebrate what I calculate to be my 55th birthday. When you have to do the math to figure out your age, you know you’re old. When your subtraction neglects to borrow from the hundreds column and you mistakenly calculate your age to be a negative number, you know you’re really old. With this birthday today, I think I’ve passed that threshold.

There are no party plans or other significant celebrations in the works. It’s a Thursday and we’re all still real tired from staying up for the election coverage the other night, so a party isn’t really practical (not to mention that I have no friends). My immediate family will be acknowledging me with cards, gifts and a special dinner that my wife is preparing. I got a few mumbled “happy birthday’s” from my coworkers and I’m looking forward to a phone call from my parents tonight. But other than that, I’m on my own as to how I’m going to be getting any unique treatment today.

It’s just the regular workday and the regular routine, so there’s not a lot of merriment I can inject into the occasion. I get up at 4 a.m., arrive at work by 5, take a lunch break around 10:30, get off at 1 p.m., stop by the Y for a workout, etc., etc. But I have managed to find a few small ways to honor myself on the anniversary of my birth.

I skipped flossing today. This part of the morning bathroom routine is always a challenge, and I know I’m not really treating myself by increasing my odds of tooth loss. But there’s not much fun to be found at this hour of the morning, and it seemed like more of a tangible treat than my other idea – to slather a little extra mayonnaise on the turkey sandwich I prepared for my lunch.
I chose a frayed, comfortable shirt to wear into the office. We don’t have much of a dress code, primarily because we don’t have much customer contact (I should probably point out to our sales force that this might be why we’re not getting much business). I still like to wear a nice pair of business-casual slacks and what I guess is called a dress shirt. The one I picked out today isn’t what you’d call tattered but it has seen better days, like when I bought it for $2 at Goodwill about four years ago.
Today is recycling day in our neighborhood and it’s my job to haul the bin down to the curb. When I collected the assembled piles of newspapers, junk mail and magazines from the counter and carried them out to the driveway, I chose to toss a small batch of cardboard into the regular garbage, just to lighten the load of the bin by a half-pound or so. Sorry about that, melting glaciers.
Shortly after I arrived at work, my closest friend Arnie (a fellow Fifty-Something) gave me two slices of bread as a birthday present. It’s not as pathetic as it sounds. He bakes bread in a bread maker at home and this was from a nice dill and caraway seed batch he made just a few days ago. It was a little dry and a bit too seedy for my tastes but it was definitely not pathetic. He also gave me a Zip-Loc bag.
Though our workload has increased a little in recent days because of an upcoming quarterly deadline, I still had excess time to kill and used a game of Scrabble with another co-worker to help with the killing. I usually think it’s pretty bush league to play two-letter words. However, today I indulged myself by using not only “oy”, but also “oi” and “oe”.
Every time Arnie asked me a question or if I could help him out with a particular project, I responded by saying “Depends”. Incontinence humor is becoming a much more significant amusement for me than is probably healthy.
For my lunch break, I decided to take a 10-minute walk to the neighborhood diner. It was a beautiful day for early November, sunny and approaching 70. Though I didn’t stop along the way to smell the roses, I did pluck a wilting gardenia flower from a bush outside the diner and detected a slight pleasant scent before it crumbled in my hand.
I bought a cookie. I was going to use the change from the purchase to buy a local newspaper but as luck would have it, the change came out to be 48 cents and the newspaper stand required 50. I asked the diner cashier for change for a dollar and she declined, citing a critical lack of quarters in face of the upcoming lunch rush. Times are tough for everyone. I did find an abandoned USA Today in one of the booths, and that’s kind of a newspaper so I settled for that.
While reading the paper, I indulged in one of my traditional birthday customs. I always read the column that lists which celebrities are also having a birthday today, and try to figure which of them I can beat up. I’d honestly have to say I’m in pretty good shape for a 55-year-old and I think I can still take screenwriter Mike Nichols, actress Sally Field and (probably) California First Lady Maria Shriver. I’d probably choose to run from a tussle with actor Ethan Hawke though. On the “Birthdays in History” list, I feel confident that I could soundly whip March King John Phillip Sousa were he still among us.
Walking back to work from the diner, I took a scenic back road rather than risking my life along the shoulder of the truck-choked main highway. There’s no noise and no exhaust fumes and quite a few picturesque hardwoods, though the pastoral mood is lessened somewhat by the cinderblock back wall of a storage facility featuring the spray-painted message “redrum”.
Not many opportunities for self-indulgence during the final 90 minutes in the office. I climbed in my car and headed home right on time. When I hit the interstate segment of my drive, I decided I could splurge a little by declining to use the cruise control and instead went about eight miles an hour over the speed limit. You don’t get much opportunity to live life on the edge when you’re more than halfway through your fifties so I’ve decided to make the most of what time I have left.
When I got home, I took a nap. Not that this is really anything all that special, since getting up at 4 in the morning each day makes the nap a necessary part of staying up past sundown.
When I woke up, I headed off to the Y to end my day with a run on the treadmill. You might think I’d use my birthday as an excuse to skip the exercise for just one day, but I’ve found running to be so relaxing and so addictive that it would ruin my day to miss it. I did make a few concessions – I set the speed on 5.4 mph instead of my usual 5.5 and I brought the machine to a halt after only 25 minutes instead of my usual 30. If I ever used the incline feature, I could’ve cut back on that too. Maybe I should’ve tried putting the setting down below zero to see if I could achieve a negative incline, which would allow me to run downhill. On second thought, I’m probably headed downhill fast enough already.

Adventures in volcano climbing

2008-11-05T14:12:00.000-05:00

I’ve never been much of an adventurer, especially when it comes to the outdoors. I’ve never ridden the rapids, never climbed a rock face, never snow-boarded nor hiked the back country nor parachuted out of an airplane. I’ve participated in the artificial adventure of a ropes course that was required as part of a corporate development initiative a while back. We rappelled down a deserted fire tower with about a dozen safety ropes attached, walked across a rickety bridge and bonded with coworkers while trying to hoist them over a 6-foot wall. The most I remember getting out of this exercise was a great idea I had for getting out of future similar exercises: I’d cut through the bottom of my sneakers and “accidentally” blow out the soles right after the introductory trust fall.

So when I had the opportunity during a 2006 business excursion to the Philippines to go on an outing with my fellow trainers to a volcano, I obviously shuttered at the chance. This was in the midst of a five-week visit to this most unlucky of former U.S. protectorates, and I thought long and hard about ways I could avoid the daytrip. This was, after all, a nation that attracted trouble even more than it did American companies looking for a low-cost English-speaking labor force. The week before I arrived they had a killer typhoon, and two more passed nearby during my stay. Earthquakes were a regular occurrence, as were Islamic insurgencies, oppressive regimes, random bombings, floods and the occasional occupation by Imperial Japanese forces. Just sitting in my hotel room felt quite adventurous enough, thank you, especially with the regular appearance at my 20th floor window of dangling glass cleaners who more than once I mistook for jet-packing terrorists.

Still, this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I had committed to breaking out of my skin and trying new things (the breakout was later diagnosed as only mild dermatitis, not the leprosy I feared). I had already taken a wonderful Sunday drive with a half-dozen friends to a beautiful beach at Subic Bay that was marred only by the fact that the vehicle we ordered was designed to hold six Filipino-sized passengers, not the six chunky Americans who got way too intimate during the two-hour drive. I was considering a weekend hop over to Hong Kong and had even learned to ride the Manila commuter rail, with its quaint concepts of safety and air-conditioning.

I decided I would be brave and join the volcano trip. We were to go by van about 35 miles outside of Manila to the Taal volcano, located in the middle of Lake Taal, near the village of Taal, in the district of Taal. (Obviously, the volcano was the biggest tourist attraction in the area.) While we were assured that the mountain was long-dormant, I was fairly certain that the citizens of Pompeii were once told pretty much the same thing, except in Latin. We would hire a boatman on the shore of the lake, motor about a mile across to the volcanic island in the middle, then hike a trail of moderate difficulty to the summit. It would be about an hour-long trek along a clearly marked path, and there were horses available for rental if we thought we couldn’t make it on foot.

This did little to reassure me as I’ve had a deathly fear of horses since I was nearly the victim of a fatal pony mauling when I was a child. I guess it wasn’t so much of a mauling as it was a too-bumpy ride around an enclosed track, but to a seven-year-old it was scary enough. Despite generally positive feelings I’ve had toward fictional horses I’ve subsequently encountered – Mister Ed, Quick Draw McGraw, Black Beauty, Sarah Jessica Parker – I retain to this day an aversion to these profile-challenged animals. Riding one to the top, and possibly over the rim, of a volcano was not something I was comfortable with.

When we arrived on the island, we were greeted by locals whose only source of income was badgering hikers into buying their locally produced trinkets -- mostly canned Coca-Cola -- or renting their horses. The animals were as pathetic as you might expect in poor rural Asia: hollow-eyed, low-slung and smelling something like sulfur, which I later learned they’d picked up from the volcano. So much for the dormancy claim. Only the oldest member of our group was interested in renting one (I assume it was a rental arrangement, though he may have actually bought the pitiful creature and simply disposed of him in the magma above). The rest of us insisted on walking, I because of my phobia and the rest because they were young and strong and cheap. We continued this insistence virtually the entire way up the trail as the horse peddlers followed close behind us, stubbornly affirming the value of the wretched beasts who made their own case by breathing heavily on us.

The trail was not too steeply inclined and actually quite passable, except for lots of dust, some serious heat, and deep ruts caused by runoff (rain they insisted, lava I suspected). You could pause to rest every now and then and enjoy a great view of the lake. The summit was also constantly in view, so you had a pretty good idea of how much longer you’d be trekking. Soon I was in the final ascent. The horses had finally fallen back, a whiff of cool air appeared, and at last I was beginning to believe this would be worthwhile after all.

At the top was a narrow area of wooden platforms and benches overlooking the caldera. A crude lean-to housed several merchants who were offering drinks to the parched climbers. I stupidly selected the canned Coke over the fresh chilled coconut milk served right in the nut after it had been laid open with a machete. Inside the volcano was a clear blue lake with a tiny island in the middle. The slopes leading down to this interior lake were covered with vegetation only occasionally broken by fumaroles, though they might’ve been huddles of smokers. We were told this was the only place on the planet where there was an island inside a lake (the caldera) inside an island (the volcano) inside a lake (Lake Taal) inside an island (Luzon, the main Philippine island). It’s a singular distinction that never occurred to me even existed, but if it had, I’d be impressed.

After about an hour of picture-taking and exploring this small summit area, we pretty much had the idea and were ready to come down. True adventurers know that the descent is sometimes the hardest part of the climb, so naturally we had no idea what to expect. I stumbled several times in the slippery dust, but the incline was such that my butt didn’t have that far to fall. My young companions became alarmed when they saw me go down, imagining I guess the broken hip or pelvis that is so rampant among what they thought was my age group.

We knew we were about at the bottom when the fearsome stallions reappeared. I was almost glad to see them, considering that they signaled the end of our adventure. Fortunately, their owners were no longer interested in us, since we weren’t about to take a pony ride back across the lake. After being snorted on a few more times as we inched past, my last equine encounter of the day was with the two sawhorses holding up a narrow plank that served as the dock leading to the boat that would get us the hell out of that wondrous adventure.

Change is in the air

2008-11-03T11:00:00.000-05:00

Change is in the air. We see it in the seasons, we see it in the economy, we see it in the space refrigerator hurtling toward earth and threatening to extinguish all life, and we hear about it incessantly from the presidential candidates. Barack Obama calls for “change we can believe in” while John McCain insists on “change you can trust”. Even minor-party candidates have joined the bandwagon, with the United Two-Year-Olds candidate demanding “change my diaper now” and the leader of the Guys in the Next Cubicle Party asking “anybody have change for a twenty?”

In this atmosphere where basic transformations in the way we live our lives are ready to be considered on a wide-scale basis, I’d like to propose several ideas I’ve had knocking around in my head for a few years. These aren’t the conventional and admittedly important policies like energy and war that I’m talking about; these are even more fundamental topics that I feel have been long overlooked. While it’s probably too late for any of them to make it into a major-party platform – and I understand if the president-elect feels compelled to solve that whole end-of-capitalism thing first – I call on the new leader of the Free World to consider these issues, at least by February.

We need a wholesale revolution in the closures on our clothing. Have you ever considered how long it takes to button your shirt as you get ready for work each morning? I have – it’s 11.4 seconds. Multiply this out to include every day of your work life, and it comes to something like 100,000 seconds, which would be a significant number of hours wasted if I remembered how to do long division. We need to replace shirt buttons with zippers, which would take a fraction of the time to close. We also need to eliminate zippers on our pants and instead rely on elastic waistbands, which would also let us get rid of belts. Needless to say, pointless accessories like hats, neckties, undershirts, scarves, sashes and any kind of jewelry or other ornamentation can simply be eliminated. Actually, I’d prefer we all wear one-piece grey jumpsuits that could be mass-produced and selected for wear each day without having to waste time considering the type of fashion statement that a partly cloudy Tuesday in April demands. I’m not sure whether the new president could make this happen by executive decree or whether he’d have to get Congressional approval. I’d suggest it be done by decree and then just dare the Supreme Court to challenge it (I doubt they would, since their robes suggest they’re already sympathetic to the concept).
I’d like to see four buttons installed in our foreheads that would activate the following mental states: sleep, stimulation, euphoria and relaxation. This one might be a little harder to accomplish than the fashion edict, but I’m confident a crash program undertaken jointly by the medical, pharmaceutical and button-making industries could bring such an innovation to our brows by 2015. (Remember, the button-makers are going to be looking for something new to do anyway). Once installed, you’d able to press the appropriate knob – each labeled with raised lettering of “S” for sleep, a slightly bigger “S” for stimulation, “E” for euphoria and “R” for relaxation, so there’d be no confusion -- and find yourself ready to enjoy whatever altered state you’d prefer. Those who felt self-conscious about having buttons on their heads could either come up with an appropriately cloaking hairstyle (see any emo rock band for ideas) or could order the buttons in flesh-colored tones.
Though we failed in the U.S. to successfully adopt the metric system of weights and measures, we can actually become a world leader in a related area by introducing metric time. While the natural rhythms of astronomy make it difficult to fiddle with concepts like day, month and year, there’s no reason we can’t monkey around with parts of the day. I propose that instead of dividing the day into 24 hours, we opt for “cent-hours” (pronounced like “centaurs”) of 36 minutes a piece, making for an even 100 units per day. You’d no longer have the question of a.m. versus p.m., never wonder exactly what quarter-past meant, and could greatly simplify scheduling throughout the entire day. “Meet me at 43,” you could say to a prospective lunch companion. “The doctor has an opening at 72,” the appointment desk could report. Think how much confusion this would eliminate, once we figured out what the new clocks would look like.
I’d like to see piping installed in each home that would allow us to receive more options than just water for our drinking needs. I’m a big fan of Pepsi, for example, and get tired of lugging those two-liter bottles home, not to mention the extreme pricing fluctuations that make oil futures seem stable by comparison. Why can’t I just turn on a tap and have my favorite Pepsi product dispensed over the sink?
Possibly related (and not just by all the new ductwork that would have to be laid), I would like to see plumbing built into bedding that would allow you to relieve yourself in the middle of the night without getting out of bed. I, for one, am ready for my first good night’s sleep since my thirties. It could be done in an appropriately sanitary way, with an access plug that could be periodically removed and sanitized. The piping would travel from the surface of the bed, through the mattress, under the floor and ultimately intersect with your municipal sewage system. And shame on any of you who imagined some kind of waterbed concept when you first pictured this set-up in your mind. That would be gross.
People need to stop holding their noses when they smell something bad. The odor that your olfactory system is detecting is actually thousands of tiny atoms of flatulence or Arby’s dollar-menu roast beef sandwiches or whatever floating through the air and into your body. Your nose contains sticky secretions as well as dozens of small hairs that capture these atoms and prevent them from going any further into your system. If you’re holding your nose and instead breathing through your mouth, you have literally no defense against these disgusting particles unless you’re a baleen whale that filters its food orally or else have hair growing inside your cheeks. (And no presidential signing statements that interpret this regulation to allow simply holding your breath and walking quickly to another part of the room).
Finally, I’d like to see the introduction of a 99-cent coin. I know the dollar coin has been an abject failure, regardless of whether the image of Susan B. Anthony, a dead president, Sacagawea or Jenny McCarthy has been minted into the face. But think about how often the price you’re asked to pay for a product or service ends in zero-zero, and compare that to all the sale prices you see that come in just under a dollar. If this coin succeeded, we could then try the nine-tenths-of-a-cent piece that could be used to pay for gasoline purchases.

As I said at the beginning, change is in the air, and we need to be sure our new president and Congress recognize that reform is as important in the area of everyday habits as it is in larger realms.

Running for my life

2008-10-31T18:20:00.000-04:00

Creature of habit that I am, I’ve been running for exercise now for almost 30 years. Keeping up an average of at least two miles a day over that stretch of time, I’ve traversed almost 24,000 miles, meaning that if I’d headed directly east when I started back in the ‘70s, I’d be all the way to, well, I’d be right back where I am now, I guess. Which probably says something about all the good this amount of mileage has done me.

When I started running shortly after college, it was at the beginning of what was then known as the jogging craze. I imagine I took it up to be fashionable -- to this day, I must admit I’m a vision in my beat-up torn t-shirt and short shorts -- but soon found it to be a great way to relax that didn’t involve showing up outside some vague acquaintance’s door asking if he had “any”. I didn’t much care for the pavement pounding and the midday heat of the Florida panhandle. However, like hitting yourself with a hammer or watching “Oprah”, it felt really good when I stopped, appealing both to my desire for a sense of accomplishment and my desire for being high.

Most of the early years of my running habit took place outdoors, since until the late ‘80s treadmills were reserved for cardiologists trying to stress-test their patients into cardiac arrest. It was a great way to see the sites in faraway places I visited for both business and pleasure. Looking back, I’m still amazed I navigated my way through traffic in places like Chicago, New York, London and Manila without being run over. I was always less concerned with the danger of being fatally injured and more aware of petty aggravation of running in public: drivers pulling up next to you and asking for directions, rude comments about my jiggling physique from passing teenagers, the nerve of cars showing up at a previously empty intersection just as you approach it. And a special irritation we have here in the South, too-polite drivers who wait for you to cross in front of them when you’re still a quarter-mile up the road, requiring you to increase your normal pace or risk the wrath of motorists lining up behind them.

The outdoor roadwork was probably essential when I hit my running peak around 1990, since I was working toward a goal of completing a marathon. I finally accomplished this after five grueling hours slogging through a rainy January day, and I have the tiny proof copy of me crossing the finishing line to attest to it. I remember the satisfying agony I experienced for days later, followed by the realization that approaching my 40th birthday, I was probably getting too old for this.

I still enjoyed exercise at a more moderate level so I found myself turning inward (to climate-controlled health clubs, not yoga). Finding a reliable facility that was going to be open today as well as tomorrow and the next day proved to be a challenge. These clubs tended to fold up and disappear like so many investment banks, though they didn't smell as bad. I finally figured that my best bet was to join a YMCA, as the whole Christianity connection lent an air of stability despite summoning up the disturbing image of Our Lord and Savior pumping away on an elliptical machine.

It took me a while to get used to running on a treadmill. Trading the fresh air and the constantly changing scenery of the outdoors for the mundane plodding on the same kind of belt your groceries enjoy at the checkout line was initially pretty boring. I was overwhelmed at first by all the options available on the control panel of the machine. There’s a so-called “safety clip”, which is basically a long piece of twine that attaches your shirt to a dead-man switch so that if you fall, the belt will stop before you’re propelled into the cluster of free-weight guys just waiting for an excuse to pummel those meek jogging nerds. There are helpful graphics so you can tailor your session to achieve goals like weight loss and toning. (I particularly appreciate the line graph showing how your target heart rate declines with advancing age, starting at 170 for age 25, falling to 115 at age 65 and presumably hitting zero shortly thereafter). I figured out the “quick start” option, which lets you pick a speed at the touch of a button, and the small built-in fan that cools while it disperses any offensive odors you feel like releasing. Instead of controlling your own pace and incline you can also choose from several pre-programmed regimens with evocative names like forest path, trail blazer and alpine meadow. We’re getting new machines soon with even more elaborate options, including built-in TV screens and more realistic trail options like rain-soaked mudpath and chased by dogs.

I must admit I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how welcoming the Y has been and how little they require of you spiritually. I’m able to crank up my iPod to drown out the Christian rock of bands like Puddles of Lamb and Boo to Boo-duh and replace them with my own upbeat and inevitably sacrilegious favorites, like the Village People’s “YMCA”. The wall-mounted TVs carry mostly news and sport channels, though in the corner there’s a primitive closed-circuit station flashing inspirational messages, urging viewers to “eat right,” “be responsible” and “don’t faint because we aren’t trained in CPR”.

I’m not sure how much longer my knees and other joints will allow me to continue my pursuit of exercise-induced endorphins. At my age and weight, most of my contemporaries have traded running for more sensible hobbies, like golf or permanent disability. I would seriously miss the so-called “runner’s high” and the feeling of physical accomplishment that accompany these daily workouts. I guess when the time comes that my legs can no longer carry me, I’ll find some other way to expend effort. Maybe Christianity.

Anticipating the election

2008-10-29T10:57:00.000-04:00

The presidential election is a week away and I’m confident the results will break like I want them to. I’m also very nervous. As a lifelong progressive Democrat (one of about seven middle-aged white guys who fit that description in my suburban/rural county in one of the reddest – and I do mean reddest – states in the South), it’s obvious I’m looking forward to an apparently inevitable victory for Barack Obama. I also know how Democratic “locks” have been blown before, and I know how devious McCain and his operatives are likely to be in their final death throes.

The Republican strategy that seems to be playing out currently (and I do mean playing out) is to paint Obama as the socialist candidate. I’m not surprised that this appears to be failing just like the other scatter-shot initiatives that the Rove spawn have thrown up at the electorate. Are most McCain supporters and those still sitting on the fence even familiar with the concept of “socialism” anymore? I can see this being an effective slur to rile up the Silent Majority of the ‘60s and ‘70s, but among today’s audience it seems like only social science majors are even going to be aware of the term. I’d bet you anything that a poll taken today asking who Karl Marx was would generate as many correct answers as it would responses like “Dancing with the Stars finalist” or “the twin sons of Angelina and Brad”. You might as well label Obama as a “supercalifragilist” or a “Titleist” and just say those things are bad, and the faithful but not-all-that-bright right-wing base would start shouting these at McCain rallies.

The socialist-labeling strategy appears to be replacing last week’s theme of appealing to Joe-the-Plumber types with the warning that Democrats want to “share the wealth” (imagine McCain making air quotes here). Again, I don’t think that this is ringing quite the tone that was intended. As we’re bombarded daily with stories of outrageous executive salaries, bailouts for banks and Sarah Palin’s wardrobe malfeasance, I would imagine that most of us struggling to make ends meet believe a little wealth-sharing might be a good idea right about now. Maybe at one time we had some vague aspiration of owning our own business or making $250,000 a year. By now, though, that dream has become as relevant as the one where I’m riding a zebra over a waterfall in my underwear and then I’m suddenly in a class where I’ve forgotten to study for the test. These folks waving the signs reading “I’m Bob the Heating Guy” or “Remember Joan the Waxer” don’t have aspirations as much as they do too-easy access to permanent markers and poster paper. Soon enough, I hope, we’ll be reading election post-mortems explaining how John the Loser and Sarah the Historical Footnote thought such childish sloganeering could win them a national election during an unprecedented financial crisis.

The week before Joe the Plumber’s unlikely ascendancy from under the sink to the national stage, we got to hear how Obama’s palling around with now-geriatric leftists should cause us to question his judgment. William Ayers who, like many of idealistic but misguided radicals actually ended up devoting their lives to helping the underclasses they protested on behalf of 40 years ago, was equated with our modern-day definition of terrorist. Though Ayers might share the less-than-conscientious grooming habits of the bin Ladens and al-Zawaris, his radical tendencies were intent on changing America, not destroying it. And just because Obama served on some education improvement boards with him or attended a party at his house hardly makes them partners in bomb-throwing. No one would claim that McCain’s 5½ years in the Hanoi Hilton as a POW was some kind of inappropriate association with the wrong type (even though he probably benefitted from a boatload of Hilton Rewards points). I once pulled up next to Ted Bundy at a stoplight in Florida, but I’m not considering a coast-to-coast murder spree because of it.

It’s mostly because of already-existing political tendencies that I’ll be rooting hard for Obama next Tuesday. Because I’ve become so passionate, I doubt I’ll actually be able to watch the returns without becoming crestfallen at every scrap of potentially negative news. The race is being covered too much like a sporting event, and I’ve already wasted way too many Saturday and Sunday afternoons getting worked up as some guys I don’t even know crash into each other and advance a ball down the field in ways that may not suit my liking. Watching the election results, I’d end up yelling at states rather than players – “stupid Nevada”, “Missouri, why don’t you wear a skirt, you little girl”, “Colorado, you were wide open!” – and that just doesn’t seem right at a time when we should be pulling together as a nation.

I’ll probably just Ti-Vo the whole evening while I sit blind-folded in my car listening to my iPod so I’m not aware of the inevitable ups and downs of the TV coverage. Then, early Wednesday morning I’ll play the thing back on triple-speed, hoping the electoral vote count is kept as a running tab at the top of the screen just like the football scores and I can watch it advance quickly. I’ll still be able to urge on my favorite candidates (because I’ll be rooting for an outcome that’s actually already occurred, I’ll have to change my cheering to the past tense: “Have Gone!” not “Go Barack!”) but if there’s pain involved in outcomes I don’t like, at least it will be over as quickly as a pin prick (and I do mean … oh, never mind).

Internet says ... I'm in good health

2008-10-27T19:21:00.000-04:00

I must say, I think I’m in pretty good health for a 54-year-old male in the modern American South. This has been confirmed in the form of an 89 rating I just got from the online health assessment we’re required to take as part of our annual health insurance enrollment at work. I guess I shouldn’t say “required to take”, as we do have the option of skipping it if we’re willing to pay an extra $1,000 in premiums for not participating in this wellness initiative. So, in other words, we’re required to take the assessment unless we have no regard for the value of money.

I received the 89 rating – the Wine Spectator might describe me as a full-bodied white with just a nuance of ripe plums – for answering a series of inquiries about my health and well-being. I didn’t quite get what the two questions I answered as I was signing on for the exam had to do with how well I’m taking care of myself. The fact that my mother’s maiden name was Johnson and my first car was a Chevy Vega don’t seem terribly pertinent, though perhaps I got some kind of credit for surviving the Vega. But the rest of them, on subjects like cholesterol, blood pressure, weight, etc., did make sense, assuming I answered them truthfully, which I was under no obligation to do (except I believe I read somewhere that the Internet can tell when you’re lying).

So what this website does basically is assign values to the 50 or so questions you answer, apply some kind of intricate algorithm to the results, and come up with a profile of where you can stand to improve yourself. Because I reported that my weight was 220 pounds, for example, it somehow calculated that I needed to lose a few pounds. Because I said I didn’t floss as often as I should, the results I received at the end identified me as a member of the cohort that should floss more often. It’s amazing how they come up with such accurate insights.

When it comes to the part that lists the dozens of possible diseases you might suffer from, I’m always careful to read through every one of them in spite of the fact I know I’m going to answer no, no, no, no, no. I feel a little guilty not having had any kind of cardiovascular problems or mental breakdowns, so I’m eager to find some category I can admit to having. Sometimes I’ll agree to cancer, since I had a small skin lesion removed from my ear about 20 years ago, or perhaps asthma, since my mother claims I had this as a five-year-old. But it seems so inadequate when there’s so much misery in the world to choose from.

What I do suffer from are three maladies that I find to be pretty bothersome, even though actuarial exercises like this one apparently don’t think so. They’re not life-threatening, nor would you think they contribute all that negatively to my quality of life. They probably annoy my family, friends and coworkers more than they do me, so I actually consider them something of an asset.

For example, every tenth or twelfth breath I take, I feel the need to make it an extremely deep one that sounds suspiciously like a self-pitying sigh. I’ve had this odd pulmonary habit for as long as I can remember, and even mentioned it once during my annual physical. My doctor dismissed it quickly as being any cause for concern, pointing out helpfully that different people breathe in different ways. For example, I guess, creatures that inhabit dark-watered lagoons don’t even have lungs, and gills are notoriously difficult to sigh through (it’s really more of a rattle than a sigh). If I can’t catch this deep breath every few minutes or so, I’ll feel like I’m not getting enough oxygen. I don’t hyperventilate or pass out or anything like that; I find that if I sneak up on the sigh and turn it from a regular breath into a deep one at the last second, I can fool my lungs into cooperating. The problem, however, is that anyone within hearing range thinks I’ve become frustrated with someone or something, and that I need to tell the world about it in some sort of passive-aggressive format. Maybe I should ask for a note from the doctor that I could flash whenever I’ve annoyed a neighbor.

Another condition I endure is Restless Leg Syndrome, or RLS as it’s known in the acronym community. For as long as I can recall I’ve felt the irresistible urge to wiggle my feet when I’m trying to relax in the evening. I didn’t realize it was worthy of syndrome designation until just recently, when I discovered there’s a whole subculture devoted to the fight to conquer RLS. I’m sure the pharmaceutical industry had something to do with the mainstreaming of this condition, and I’ve tried several of their products to address the issue, but they just don’t work on me. I admire the well-dressed individuals I see in the magazine ads for these medicines – they’re reclined in their well-appointed sunrooms apparently not moving their legs (or at least the photographer was unable to capture the blur) – but I think I’m more envious of their sunrooms than I am of their tranquil limbs. Still, I don’t regard the malady as particularly difficult to live with. If you’re going to have body parts that twitch involuntarily, I’d say that legs are better than tongues or brain stems or genitalia.

Finally, I have to mention my occasionally overwhelming need to stretch. We all experience this feeling as we force our muscles into various uncomfortable configurations during the day, but what I experience seems to be of a different degree altogether. It may be related to the RLS or even the sighing, I suppose. I can accommodate the upper body stretches without drawing too much attention to myself. Throwing back your shoulders, bending your elbows high above your head and letting rip with a good stretch is not all that unusual. But I have these parts of my upper legs, specifically the muscles inside my thighs, that frequently demand the kind of extension you can’t really perform in polite company. I’ll have to excuse myself to the men’s room and hope no one comes in as I take turns placing each foot on the sink and thrusting forward in a rhythmic motion that can only be described as bizarre. I’m going to have a lot of explaining to do if I’m ever surprised in the midst of this exercise. Please drop me an email if you have any suggestions that won’t make me sound like the unfortunate love child of Larry Craig and Mary Lou Retton.

If I can ever figure out how to quantify these strange physical aberrations in the radio-button format of an online questionnaire, I’ll probably feel less guilty about being in such relatively good shape for my age. I may have to forfeit my 89, but it’d probably be worth it for the peace of mind.

Party time at the office

2008-10-25T18:43:00.000-04:00

One affliction affecting social life in the modern office is the too-awkward, too-frequent staging of celebrations for the slightest of reasons. Whether it’s a birthday, a holiday, a farewell or even a death in the family, the employees at my company are like many others who feel compelled to commemorate these occasions with a gathering that includes food, a greeting card and standing around while shifting our weight from one foot to the other.

The latest of these events at my office was just yesterday when we lost a ten-year veteran who found a better job – that is, one that wasn’t in imminent danger of disappearing – working for a local museum. (You know you’re in trouble when your staff is being raided by the not-for-profit sector). Richard is a great guy, intelligent and well-liked by everyone he’s come into contact with. So naturally, we had to embarrass him in a public spectacle before he left.

The date for the party was set about a week before his departure by the luckless individual who is responsible for pulling these things together. She went around the office assigning everyone a food category that they were to bring for the luncheon – soft drinks, veggies, desserts, chips, all the major building blocks of the food pyramid. I was told “you’re bagels”. I bought a dozen the night before, not realizing until the morning of the event that this was assumed to include something to put on the bagels. Fortunately my wife saves condiment packs from fast-food purchases, so I was able to grab a handful of jellies and butters and, in my haste, some ketchup and vinegar.

On the morning of the event, we hurriedly signed a farewell card featuring a cartoon dog with a hang-dog look on its face. I think it’s the same dog I saw on a birthday card we circulated a few months back, and may even have been featured on the last sympathy card we gave out. Anyway, we all made our best shot at a meaningful message for Richard to remember us by – “good luck” and “we’ll miss you” were common themes – and passed the card onto whomever we could find who hadn’t signed yet. Although you want to have time to put some thought into your final goodbye, you have to balance that against the concern that the later you wait, the harder it is to find someone else to unload the card on.

Later in the morning we’re told to start gathering our foodstuffs and assemble them onto the party table, a low-slung counter normally used for sorting paperwork but now covered with a festive blue tarp. A manager called out across the office to summon the celebrants from their crosswords and cross-stitch. “Come eat, everybody”. It was only when we noticed Richard standing nervously next to the deviled eggs that we realized party time had arrived.

First, we took a moment to acknowledge Richard’s work. “You came to us over ten years ago,” said the ranking manager haltingly, searching for just the right tone. “And now we’re here to wish you well in your new job.” Brief and to the point, I thought, and very considerate of how hungry everyone was. And much better than the speech he gave six months ago to the bipolar retiree who’d had a reputation as a royal complainer: “You spoke your mind when you thought we were wrong, and we all appreciated it a lot.” Actually, we hated her, but that’s not something you can say at a retirement party.

Richard was handed his card, which he dutifully pretended to read, then was expected to make a brief speech. He graciously thanked everyone for their effort, said he’d definitely be coming back to visit (they never do), and urged the lurking hoard to dig in. We ate and ate till we were groggy, then spent the next four hours moaning about how Mexicans have the right idea with that afternoon siesta thing.

In addition to the send-off celebrations, we also used to have birthday parties. At first these were done on an individual basis on the day of the actual birthday, then later became group events at the end of the month, then seemed to happen only about every three months or so. (Only at a financial services firm might the staff wish someone a “Happy Birth Quarter”). At these events, we’d gather around a generic sheet cake, sing a dirge-like rendition of the birthday song – my favorite part was always the point at which we’d try to cram everyone’s name into the “happy birthday dear MichaelJenniferSamLindaAllenBertrand” part – then make one of the female celebrants slice up the cake up. Inevitably there’d be a joke about someone celebrating their 29th birthday for the 13th time, and of course the dog card.

Major holidays such as Christmas and Thanksgiving are noted with the usual pot-luck response and a nod to the South’s lack of religious pluralism. The food is basically the same, with ham or turkey maybe replacing the Doritos. Someone will inevitably feel the need to inject a prayer thanking Jesus Lord for the bounty of His overcooked green-bean-and-mushroom casseroles. I don’t have any great moral objection to this kind of religious display in a supposedly secular work place; it just always makes me think of ‘60s TV actor Jack Lord, and I inwardly start humming the theme to “Hawaii Five-O”.

Finally I have to mention the peculiar social customs we observe when someone faces a major medical crisis or has a death in the family. The medical issues are often feted just like the birthdays and holidays, except without the “happy surgery” cards. The last one we did was an especially awkward affair for a very nice coworker who was going in for a mastectomy. The same Friday was also the last day for another woman who was having rotator-cuff surgery, a doubtlessly difficult procedure but hardly in the same league with breast cancer. Someone felt the need to call for a group photo – like the whole mortality question wasn’t palpable enough already – and the shoulder lady tearfully declined to be in the picture with the breast lady, not wanting to butt in on her moment in the spotlight. Everybody felt very guilty and tried to pull together a separate quickie celebration at the last minute, but it was all too transparent that we regarded a metastasized malignancy as somehow more noteworthy than being unable to lift your arm higher than this.

Even worse than this fiasco is the morbid practice we have when there’s actually a death involved. About a year ago, we endured twin tragedies in which one staffer was killed in a car accident and another lost her husband just a few days later. Anyone with half an ounce of humanity (even me) felt the need to do something at a time like this to show our concern, but our choice bordered on the bizarre: we took up a collection of money and offered the bereaved individuals a wad of bills. Because nothing says how our prayers are with you in your time of loss like a cash prize of $285.

I guess you could say that we don’t stand on ceremony in our well-intentioned attempts to recognize life’s milestones. Instead, we kind of sneak up and rub against it inappropriately.

Is this finally the end?

2008-10-22T18:27:00.000-04:00

I started keeping this blog about seven weeks ago as a sort of death watch over what appears to be the imminent demise of my job. My work for a financial services firm seemed more and more tenuous with each plummet of the Dow, so I felt some type of written therapy might help me work through this uncertainty. It looked for a while last Friday that the uncertainty would finally be gone, replaced with a severance package and outplacement counseling.

I imagine it’s rare for anyone being laid off these days to anticipate how and when the end times might happen, though I’d imagine Revelations’ Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will probably be replaced by a quartet of security guards to escort us from the building. When I first arrive each morning, the fact that I see none of their rent-a-cop vehicles in the parking lot is my first reassurance of the day, but it usually doesn’t last long. As soon as I walk through the door, I can see the tables where our work is supposed to be. They’re almost always covered instead by the Earth’s atmosphere and maybe a stray stapler.

If I can sign onto my computer without getting some kind of “see IT administrator and don’t forget to bring your ID badge” message, I’ll check the distant corners of the room to see if empty boxes have been collected. These would indicate that we’ll soon be collecting our personal articles – family pictures, a few office toys, maybe an old Lean Cuisine – and making the Lehman Brothers walk of shame out onto the street.

If I make it this far, I’ll check a “production status” email I get each day that contains transcripts of instant-message communications between our scheduling department and our production sites overseas. Usually these are full of mundane discussions like “does it look like you’ll meet all your deadlines today?” or “we are to most humbly call on your forgivitude for yesterday’s malcommunication regarding our temblor in Asia”. Occasionally there might also be a clue about who is now seeking opportunities elsewhere (specifically in the unemployment line) or what sites are scheduled to be “down”, as in down for the count.

Reading the tea leaves like this might be strangely appropriate, considering about 90% of our jobs are now in places like India and Sri Lanka. But it makes for a very edgy, very nervous workforce. So on Friday, when all three managers on day shift were seen leaving together, the rumors and tension began to build. They’re on a conference call with the VP of the division, one coworker claimed. Sarah took her purse and a notebook with her, someone else noted ominously. Lenny turned and went in another door when he saw me in the parking lot this morning, reported a third.

None of these seemed like good signs. Plus, it was Friday, which I think I read is the most common day of the week for layoffs to happen (I guess so you can have a whole weekend to psychologically recover before starting your job hunt on Monday morning). Plus, it was raining.

For some reason, what concerned me the most was that the shift supervisor closed and locked her door as she joined the others but left the light on in her office. In the past, she’s either partly closed the door with the light on, or closed it completely and turned the light off. What could this mean? Maybe I was parsing the details a little too closely, but seeing such aberrant behavior at a managerial level concerned me. I felt like the detective who had entered a room and found himself obsessed with a fork that was turned upside-down even though the adjacent spoon was right-side-up.

The threesome were seen leaving the office at about 8:30 am, headed all the way across the warehouse to a suite of offices on the other side of the building, which we call the Other Side of the Building. Nobody knows much about what goes on here, except that it’s dark and bad and very frightening. It’s home to John “Go to the HR Website” Gehrig, our HR coordinator who, despite the fact he’s at least 140 years old, has so totally embraced the Internet that he’s incapable of answering any questions we might ask. It’s also the home to our largest training room, which is about all any of us ordinary workers have ever seen of the Other Side. Here is where we receive the occasional safety, quality improvement or corporate development training, sessions so deadly dull that I once faked a seizure to get out. Nothing good ever happens over there.

By 10 am, the office had grown increasingly quiet and tense. I figured I’d walk through the warehouse to use the other restroom, in the hope I could catch a glimpse of whatever was going on across the way. There was no sign of anybody except the warehouse work crews, obliviously picking and packing their way to financial security. I used my lunch break to take a walk outside and call my wife to prepare her for the news that something was up. Was a longer meeting better than a shorter one? An increased length could indicate we’d need to plan to take over the work of other closed locations, and details needed to be worked out as to how we’d handle all that overtime and the big paychecks that would result. Or, it could be discussions of how managers should properly deliver the bad news, where to find the extra boxes of tissues, and how to defend themselves against blows to the head and face.

Nearly noon, I returned from my break. I had taken longer than I was supposed to but a reprimand seemed unlikely. I couldn’t imagine even the coldest corporate hatchet-person asking me to collect my belongings and don’t be surprised to see your final paycheck docked by ten minutes. As I walked across the parking lot, there was one of the three managers at her perch on a bench smoking a cigarette. The tea leaves indicated this was a good sign, as sometimes we’ve seen her hiding around the side of the building when she doesn’t want to talk with others. In fact, two of my coworkers had just finished chatting with her as I approached. They turned to leave before I could see the expression on their faces, but there seemed to be little wailing and/or moaning.

I walked up to Sarah and immediately saw the good news. She was wearing a “Hello My Name Is…” sticker on her chest. Whatever the nature of the morning-long meeting had been, it involved participants who didn’t know her name. This indicated that the session had been some kind of lame managerial training session with outside consultants who might tell you how to maximize your potential and that of your direct reports, but couldn’t be troubled to memorize a few names.

And to think I had been afraid the sticker would read, “Hello Your Job is Eliminated Beginning …”

Fun doing yardwork (the fall edition)

2008-10-21T10:58:00.000-04:00

I’ve written before about how much I enjoy mowing my grass – the satisfaction it gives me to see such perfect results, the sweaty brow and the dirty clothes, how different it is from mowing through spreadsheets and seeing my 401(k) turn into so much mulch. But now the fall has arrived and the grass has mysteriously stopped growing (something to do with the credit freeze, no doubt). Time to run the gas out of the mowers, recall how I should also drain the oil but don’t know how, and turn my attention to a different kind of yard maintenance – stapling all those damn leaves back onto their trees.

Or maybe just gathering them up and putting them down by the road would be more practical. Our yard is actually pretty low maintenance compared to most others in our neighborhood. Though sheltered by trees, over half of the area is covered by a bark and decomposing leaf mixture that requires next to zero care, except for treating the chigger bites you get any time you walk near it. The few strips of grass are largely down by the road, so transporting the autumnal droppings only a few feet into the gutter shouldn’t be that difficult. We live inside the city limits, so we can count on a giant sucking machine (a type of truck, not the city council) coming by to dispose of the collected decay every week or so.

I tried the raking thing for several years, so I could righteously scoff at those gas-guzzling, noise-spewing leaf blowers that everybody else seemed to have. It was also easier to tell me wife I was going outside to rake rather than that I was going outside to blow. But even with such a small area to clear, it was taking me so long that during the peak of fall I’d have to start over again as soon as I stopped, like those painters of the Golden Gate Bridge. I finally invested in an electric leaf-blower, which is much better than the gas guzzlers because, if it’s anything like my understanding of the electric car, it doesn’t use any energy whatsoever.

The job became fairly easy to accomplish once I understood a few basics. My first few attempts though were pathetic. I didn’t know you had to stand there like a golfer with your wetted finger in the air to tell which way the wind was blowing. (When I saw my crazy neighbor doing this, I thought he was making a key point while speaking to the assembled foliage.) I was blowing the leaves into a stiff breeze and trying to figure out why I was getting so much blowback. Once I got the right idea, I had to learn that it takes a certain scooping motion to move piles taller than a few inches, and that you had to start in a corner and establish a cleared beachhead before fanning out from there and corralling the herd properly toward the street.

The thing I’m still not too sure about is how leaf-blowing and respect for your neighbors’ property are supposed to coexist. Before, I was mostly concerned that they were laughing at my feeble attempts to blow the stuff into a 25 mph gale. I’m sure they chuckled inwardly at my look of surprise when more leaves ended up in my hair than down the driveway, because they also chuckled outwardly, and did some pointing as well. Now, I’m worried that there must be some kind of unwritten rule that prevents you from simply jetting the debris into your neighbor’s yard. I’m right that you’re not supposed to do that, aren’t I?

On one side of our lot, there’s a bit of my grass adjacent to a “wild” area, which is adjacent to one neighbor’s yard. I don’t feel too bad about blowing leaves into this spot, especially since this is the guy who walks his leashed, pooping cat onto the edge of our property near the shed where he thinks we can’t see him. Since our house is on the corner, we have only one other adjacent neighbor who is mostly behind our house rather than to the side, so who cares what he thinks? Actually, I do, so I try to find the property line and aim away from it, though I’m afraid that looks too much like I’m being careful not to clear his grass in any way, but jeez I can’t blow the whole neighborhood.

Finally I maneuver the various piles closer and closer to the road. It’s rained recently, so the individual leaves stay mostly in place. The biggest hassle is working with the electric cord and its extension – if you try to stretch an extra foot to get one last area, you risk pulling the cord and having to walk all the way up to the house to plug it back in. To save extra steps, I’m probably being too careless putting the electric appliance on the wet ground, which I’m guessing could cause my death by electrocution, though on the plus side the ensuing fire would consume the leaf pile as well as my lifeless body. It’d be a good way to go, a fitting tribute to my corporate trainees in India who send off their dear departed on funeral pyres.

Now I’ve got to gather one last bit of bluster and deposit the leaves into the road. Does it have to be one pile – more work for me – or would three or four piles be OK? Or what about one long, thin pile all the way around the corner? Do I need to stay clear of the gutter? How neat do the piles have to be? Is it OK to blow the few orphans in the general direction of nowhere, like the professional landscapers I see swinging their machines back and forth? And what is my obligation in the hours or days after I’m done? Is every subsequent gust that comes along and undoes my work in the direction of a neighbor’s yard my fault?

I doubt the city cares but, as I said, I’m more concerned with the disapproval of my neighbors than I am with silly municipal ordinances. Having someone walk over and comment “you know, you’re not supposed to use the medium-high setting on a downhill lie during the third week of October” would be devastating. They (probably) can’t fine me, but they do know where I live.

Killing time at work, the final installment

2008-10-18T13:40:00.000-04:00

The final installment of how I manage to make it through a do-nothing workday:

9:00 – I arrive in the conference room designated for our health insurance screening. It’s a good-sized meeting room featuring a large table surrounded by about ten executive chairs at the front, then another 40 or so straight-back chairs aimed toward the table. The two free-lance nurses sit at the table and direct those arriving to sign-in, weigh themselves, fill out an information sheet, and take a seat to wait their turn. My pre-set appointment time apparently means nothing, as there are about a half-dozen people signed in ahead of me. The whole scene does very little to reassure anyone who might be concerned about privacy as they discuss their health matters at the table. You basically have an audience watching as your blood-pressure is checked, your finger is pricked for a cholesterol test and you answer questions about your most private history. The numbers revealed in the screening will be used in an online questionnaire we’re required to submit as part of our insurance sign-up. Patients with the one nurse are moving pretty swiftly, but the second one has retained her patient for a good bit of time. We all wonder what loathsome condition her poor patient has that requires so much discussion.

9:45 – I finally get called up to the stage, er, patient table. I feel a little like Tom Hanks greeting David Letterman, though fortunately there’s no applause from the crowd. I’ve got the elderly nurse and, though a little slow, she plods through the procedures fairly well. I ask if the blood test will also measure blood sugar, which was included in previous years’ tests, but she says “not this year. I guess they’re trying to save a little money, but it doesn’t really make sense since we can use the same sample.” Apparently, making sense is something that’s done in the healthcare field. Interesting. My numbers are just a couple of points off what they like to see, so she goes through the pre-programmed routine of giving me advice on how to hit the numbers right on the dot. I need more salmon, preferably Pacific or Alaskan though Atlantic is still better than flounder, which is not as good as cod. She tells me where salmon can be bought, how it can be preserved, and how it can be cooked but, unfortunately, not how to afford it.

10:15 – I’m out of the screening and pleased with how it went. Normally, you might be annoyed to get tied up well over an hour for a medical appointment that could’ve taken ten minutes, but I’m just glad I’m that much closer to the end of the day. Perhaps a little dazed from the blood loss (or maybe it’s the thought of all those dead fish), I stumble into Dora in the hallway, the manager who wants me to review our training website. I tell her I’ll take a look after my lunch break.

10:25 – We’re supposed to have a total of 60 minutes of breaks each workday. Believe it or not, at one time there was a posted schedule of who was to go when and for how long. For example, I was required to take 15 minutes from precisely 6:30 to 6:45 am, despite the fact I had arrived only 90 minutes earlier. Fortunately, our corps of smokers, who were allowed to take their breaks in ten 6-minute sessions, undercut the master plan. Now, I typically take about 40 minutes to sit and drink coffee in a Greek diner. It’s the only nearby commercial establishment besides a heavy equipment rental outfit, and at the moment I’m good on front-end loaders.

11:00 – Back from my break, I need to make a vacation request so I can have a day off tomorrow. Rather than simply ask my manager, we are required to submit what’s called a “schedule variance form”. This overcomplicated piece of needless paperwork has no less than five places to enter a date and three places to include your name. You have to specify the type of day off you want: vacation, what’s called a “floating holiday” (though it can be used for activities other than floating), and “other”. I have 15 vacation days, plus these mysterious holidays designed I think to let people take off for personal religious days like Yom Kippur, Good Friday, or migraine headache day. We have no “sick days”, per se, just paid and unpaid time off. The bottom of the variance form has five full lines set aside for comments. We’ve given up on using the spot to complain about this perverted system, and instead add things like “please, please, please!” or “I think my dog is dying tomorrow”.

11:30 – A loud rhythmic shriek repeats a half dozen times from across the room. It’s not that Kim has discovered an even cuter cross-stitch pattern, but rather a test of the weather emergency radio. It goes off every day, so we’ve learned to ignore it as well as the tornado warnings it might be indicating.

12:05 – As I pass my supervisor’s office on the way to my mailbox slot, she calls out to me. Sandra has developed this failsafe management technique that allows her view to prevail in virtually any discussion. She has the patience and tenacity of continuing a conversation until your filling bladder or desire for food forces you to give in. In this case, she also uses the advantage of being seated at her desk while I’m forced to stand in her doorway. She wants to resume a talk we had a few weeks back about how a particular error was committed, which evolves into a dialogue about some similar errors, which turns into an exchange about coworkers we both know from other sites, and somehow eventually ends up focused on the Yuletide favorite “Away in a Manger”. Within 20 minutes my legs have tired to the extent that I’m literally slumping against her wall, taking every tone of her voice that seems to signal the end is near to inch further away. Ultimate, I give in to her position that errors are bad and Christmas is good.

12:30 – My loud, talkative neighbor is at it again: “When my neighbors get home from work, our dog runs over to sit and watch them.” Then, “we bought a ham last week.” Then, “isn’t orange juice good for settling you stomach?” Then, “Happy birthday, Bob. Are you 29 again? My husband says our daughter cried when I sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to her as a baby.” No doubt.

12:35 -- I’m thinking it’s time to take my last break of the day. I’ve discovered a secluded spot featuring a few large boulders near the back of our office park. It’s shaded, has a nice view of a parking lot for semi trailers and can just barely be seen from the road or sidewalk. I’ll take a book or newspaper down here to use up my last 15 minutes reading. My only concern is that I’ll be discovered by passing coworkers, a fear that is nearly realized when I start back to the office and pass Kim and Linda on the sidewalk. Kim would definitely find it worthy of loud commentary should she discover me in my spot. “You were sitting on a rock,” she’d doubtless observe. Her efforts to point out the obvious might then spiral out of control, noting how I have brown hair, that there’s a cloud up in the sky, and “we’re on the Earth!”

1:10 – Dora comes back to me desk to talk about the website review assignment. I’m ready with my all-purpose assessment – “looks good to me” – but before I can get it out, she tells me to put the project on hold, until she’s sure I’m looking at the latest version. Once again, my delaying tactics have paid off.

1:45 – Kim announces “fifteen minutes till you leave.” For the only time that day, I’m glad to hear her.

Nothing to do, part two

2008-10-16T17:59:00.000-04:00

One way that many in my office have chosen to pass the seemingly endless nine-hour day of doing basically nothing is to chat. As I mentioned in some of my earlier postings about my general desire to be left alone, I hate chat. I can do it for a few minutes if it involves a halfway interesting topic and we get to inject just the right amount of cynicism into the discussion, but after maybe five minutes tops I start squirming and shuffling and wishing someone would set off a fire alarm.

We have two kinds of chat in my office: the one-on-one discussion spoken in quiet tones appropriate to the situation, and the wide-open gabfest that draws in everyone in the room whether they want to be involved or not. There’s one person in particular notorious for initiating the latter, and she sits about ten feet behind me. Her intended target audience is the woman to her left, which means she’s pointing her larynx directly at my back, so it’s hard to ignore as she spews out the tedious details of her life in a steel-guitar twang only slightly less nasal than the city of Nashville.

In continuation of the timeline begun in yesterday’s posting, I’ll be including random comments from Kim that might give some indication of how her beloved daughter, her deadbeat husband and her “mawm’n daddy” (parents?) make her existence a living hell, God love ‘em.

6 am – Kim arrives for her designated shift and offers the entire room a hearty “hah thay-er” (hello?). Since much of third shift is still here, nearing the end of their interminable night, they’re stirred awake and are able to get ready to go home. Whatever else you can say about Kim, she makes a great alarm clock.

6:15 – I’m finishing up the only job I’ll work on the entire day. The errors I’ve encountered not only have to be fixed but they have to be recorded in a hare-brained quality improvement scheme abandoned long ago but whose ruins still remain. The point of the project was to quantify the errors so they could be “bucketed” (meaning “categorized”, not “carried out to the compost heap”) and we could learn how to improve on our weaknesses. Instead, the error rate is viewed primarily in the way it potentially affects our paycheck – the more errors we have, the lower any bonus we might achieve at the end of the year. So part of my job has become weighing whether errors are serious enough to fix and record, or whether I should just look the other way. Probably not what the quality improvement folks had intended.

6:25 – Fragment of Kim's life: “Jessica’s school pictures are just darling, but you have to buy a whole package to get the discount. That pitcher company is smart.” Judging from the size of the print on her desk, she’s opted for the Mercator projection wall-mounted package.

6:40 – There’s a knock on the outer door that leads from the parking lot. Nobody ever wants to field these, as it’s usually lost truckers looking to borrow a phone book, but we can’t let them in for security reasons. Rick, the poor soul who responds, discovers the itinerant nurse who has arrived to conduct this morning’s insurance-related health screenings. Even though these were set up at least a month ago, no one knows what we’re supposed to do with this woman. We don’t even know where the screenings will take place -- maybe behind a large skid of boxes in the warehouse? -- so she can’t even get set up before her first patients arrive. Because the woman is elderly, Rick clearly violates company policy by offering her the option of coming in to sit in a corner, or to wait in her car for someone who knows what’s going on. She chooses to cool her scuffed white heels in the dark parking lot.

6:55 – “The fence is done. I painted the ceiling but it’s kinda blotchy. Then I started the vacuuming…”

7:05 – Time to dig up the first distraction of the day. I choose these carefully based on a number of factors, variety being one key but also the presence of upper managers. Since it’s at least a half-hour till the first of these arrive, I break out the newspaper for a little light reading. I’ll catch up on late-breaking news later online, when my intent stare into the computer screen could be mistaken for work.

7:30 – I clean my glasses, take my cholesterol medicine and eat some grapes. Later, I’ll slip into the restroom to cut my toenails. Wildlife studies have shown that grooming builds animals’ self-esteem, but I’m drawing the line at picking nits off my production coordinator.

7:40 – Kim is doing cross-stitch: “blank, blank, blank, space, blank, blank, space, blank … isn’t this beautiful?”

7:45 – The first of the dayshift managers arrive. It’s the one who sent me an email on my enforced day off this week asking my help in checking over a new corporate website. I’m delaying until personally asked, because I know how fast these must-be-done-yesterday projects evolve into something no longer needed. I’ve done way too much work in this job that ended up being wasted (see September posting about training temporaries for a week only to see them let go the following week). Now I’ll need to calculate all my moves around the office to either look busy or to avoid walking past her.

7:55 – Adam and I sign up for the October office refrigerator cleaning. There’s a sheet attached to the door with monthly sign-up slots, which means it hasn’t been cleaned since we last did it in March. It’s not something you’d think I like, but when we did it last spring it took only about an hour and we ended up with a nice take-home bag of abandoned frozen dinners, bottled drinks, and some exquisite condiments.

8:25 – I’ve got 35 minutes to kill until my 9 am health screening. I’ll try to get away with a little close-to-the-vest crossword puzzling, which hopefully won’t be noticed. Nobody cares if we’re seen goofing off, since management knows as well as anyone that our work has dried up. But I’ve got these off-line projects I’m trying to avoid. There’s another one out there somewhere – a different manager approached me last week about a procedure she wanted me to review – but the ball was left in her court when I asked her to email it to me, which she apparently forgot to do. So much of what goes on in the modern office feels like a rain-hampered game of tennis – as long as your last discussion got the sodden mass over to the other person’s side, you’re clear.

8:55 – “Some days Jessica carries her lunch to school and some days she doesn’t. I tell her, Jessica, you’re not allowed to get something extra except on Friday.”

8:57 – “My feet were big when I was young. They used to call me ‘bigfoot’. Kids can be so mean.”

8:59 – “… the bats flew down and landed on her head and tried to make a nest in her hay-ir!”

I’ll pick up at 9 am and my health screening appointment on the next posting. Four hours down and only five to go.

How to kill time at work, part one

2008-10-15T19:27:00.000-04:00

In the last few years, I’ve become very skilled in my ability to kill time at work. It’s not something I wanted to be good at – for obvious reasons, superior abilities in enterprises like pro basketball, movie-starring and running Fortune 100 companies into the can would be better, at least for my sagging bank account. It’s an ability I’ve developed of necessity. Either I go mad, or I find a way to distract myself during long intercontinental business flights and treadmill workouts, both the kind at the gym and those in my career on the corporate Habitrail™.

The business flights have dissipated along with economic prosperity, like the vapor trail I’ve laid over large parts of the Eastern Hemisphere. But the treadmill rolls on and on, allowing me to build increasing frustrations in my workplace and then vent them at 5.6 miles an hour between a teenager jabbering on her cell phone and the elderly gentleman with carbon emission issues of his own.

At work, I’ve collected for myself an array of distractions to make the 9-hour shift pass as quickly as possible. This toolkit includes games, magazines, crossword puzzles, online reading of the latest news and opinion, snooping in on the work of other sites in the hope they’ll screw up, and walking back and forth to the breakroom and bathroom at least 80 times a day. (My doctor’s appointment for diabetes testing is noon Monday).

I thought it might be interesting, though, to chronicle a few of the other details that contribute to the length of my day. Some seem to shorten it while others lengthen it, but all of them together make what I think is a pretty good representation of how too many of us are coping during the work slowdown caused by the current economic climate.

* * *

Thirty-six seconds past 5 am – I arrive at work. I know it’s 36 seconds (one one-hundredth of an hour) past because even though we’re supposed to be a white-collar work force, we still have to punch a time clock. Actually, according to official clocks up and down the Eastern Daylight Time zone, it’s well before 5, but our two time clocks are set five and eight minutes fast, respectively. That might seem annoying to those who aren’t used to it, but for us it means you can clock in on the faster one and out on the slower one, thereby extending your time away from work if you play your clocks right.

5:10 – I’ve finished signing on to my computer, cleaning my workspace of the crumbs left by the second-shift omnivore who shares my desk, and turning on a portable fan to cool myself down. Because our office was built out of a corner of a warehouse, the heating and cooling system has created more microclimates than Napa Valley. The woman sitting no less than four feet to my right is huddled into her jacket with a portable heater blasting at her feet.

5:15 – I finish a quick review of my email. About three-fourths of the messages are from the tech group advising us of computer outages around the network and, five minutes later, the fixing of such outages. Occasionally these are interesting – the Hong Kong office has been closed because of a typhoon, the Sri Lanka office is on a two-hour delay because of civil insurrection, there’s some kind of seismic event in the Philippines – but that’s pretty rare. I’ve also got an email from my former supervisor who periodically borrows me for special projects (more about this later). There’s another one from Health Management Co. that at first glance appears to be related to our recent annual health insurance enrollment, but is unmasked by the subject line “you cannot discount the importance of size.” My guess is that it’s not the size of our health plan savings that they’re talking about.

5:25 – I ask the guy two desks down to my right if he’s heard back from the job interview he went on a few days ago; he has, and it’s good news for him. He’ll start work in two weeks at a local county museum heading up their graphics department. He’s young, smart and full of good ideas, so I take a few minutes to listen and congratulate him. The museum’s specialty is primitive Native American technology. I can’t help but imagine how we’d all fit right in if they wanted to open a new exhibit on the vanishing American office worker. I’d even be willing to pose for the diorama, mouse in hand and StupidVideos.com on screen.

5:30 – I am given some actual work! This is highly significant, considering that I spent two entire days last week not lifting my editing pencil once. The instructions for the 45-page document are encouraging: “please do not assign to vendor”. Despite the generally good job our teams overseas do, it’s always good to see someone still prefers to use a domestic site. The job is full of errors, most of them the fault of either the client or the customer service person who submitted the work to us. The quantity of pages submitted is wrong, the naming conventions for the files are wrong, and there’s evidence the wrong instructions were also given last time because the client has asked not to be billed for some of the changes. As I scan some of the numbers in the graphs, I see that one executive has earned “$6,4379,941” in compensation the previous year. A numerically impossible pay package, I suppose, though I really don’t know that it’s not some new mega-number (ka-zillion, perhaps?) designed specifically to pad executive pockets and outrage the American public. I also notice an error that one of our internal checkers has missed. I fix it but I’m not sure I have the heart to do what else I’m supposed to do in my role as a trainer, and that’s to report him to his supervisor.

Improbably, I find myself less than an hour into a description of my typical day and I’m already up to the length I wanted to devote. Hard to believe, but it looks like this will become a multi-part installment.

The importance of men's room etiquette

2008-10-13T18:57:00.000-04:00

Using the men’s room can be a problematic issue for some of us of the male affiliation. I’m not talking about those difficulties that come with age and certain medical conditions; rather, I’m talking about how the rules of social intercour--, er, etiquette, take on a whole new dimension once men leave the world of the multi-gendered and enter the chamber of necessity.

It seems this is particularly true in the office setting. The people you’re working with on a regular basis become very familiar over the years, and the familiarity and casual nature of that relationship is not one that translates well to the restroom. Being friendly, talkative and outgoing in the cubicle jungle is a great way to get ahead in the world of office politics. Getting ahead, however, is not something you even want to say in certain other settings.

I’ve designed an elaborate set of rules that need to apply to these interactions, and I’m working hard to get them universally accepted. It’s not the kind of thing you can put into an email or PowerPoint presentation, so I’m having to work in this roundabout way to get them widely agreed upon among the men I work with. Posting these guidelines on a blog instead, where they can be read by the entire online world, seems somehow more subtle.

The first rule, of course, is that there is to be no talking inside the men’s room. The risk of saying something that can be misconstrued is just too real, and you don’t want to take this chance with someone who could make or break your career. When some kind of communication is absolutely necessary, it should be undertaken using the non-verbal codes that I’ll detail below.

As you’re pushing the door to enter the room, it is suggested that you snort or sniff loudly, in a manner similar to the way you’d deal with a runny nose. This is to indicate to anyone already inside that another person is entering the room, and that any sort of activities that may be going on in what had been the privacy between you and your maker need to stop immediately. (I’m not talking about anything of a perverse nature, just stuff like examining your noseholes in front of the mirror, examining your tongue, digging wax out of your ear with a pencil, etc.). It’s also a signal to anyone about to exit the room that the door is about to move inward, usually in a very fast and determined motion, and you need to stand back in order to avoid jamming a limb.

If you’re already inside using the facilities, a quick clearing of the throat is a good signal to the newly entered that they too are going to have to share this space where the public world meets the private. Again, you don’t want either party to be embarrassed by what the other is doing or is about to do. There are many words and phrases that can’t be said in the men’s room, but certainly foremost among these would be something like “That’s disgusting”.

If one party is already inhabiting a stall, and doing all that entails, a “courtesy flush” should be used to cover any sounds you might be making that others don’t want to hear. If your particular facility has one of those motion-activated set-ups, you need to wiggle around enough to trigger activation.

The courtesy flush is NOT to be used to cover the sounds of you talking on a cell phone while you’re doing your business. This most grievous of social outrages has becoming surprisingly accepted in some quarters, but not in mine. You may not care if the person you’re talking to gets to listen in on your most personal of soundscapes, but I don’t want them hearing mine. How do you know that the other end isn’t hooked up to a speakerphone in a room full of Sunday school teachers? Plus, I can’t tell that you’re talking to someone far away and not to me, and I don’t want to think up responses to questions like “how’s it going” and “what’s up?”

If you find yourself indisposed and discover you need certain supplies that have become exhausted, just deal with it. Don’t expect me to be passing materials under the stall wall. It seems perfectly reasonable to expect that toilet seat covers can be substituted in an emergency. Too bad if they become jagged when balled up. The only way I’m sending a roll of tissue in your direction is over the wall and through the darkness when I turn off the light and leave the room.

A few other pointers in closing:

The handicapped stall is not the same concept as the handicapped parking space. Unless you’re wearing the blue wheelchair dangler as your necktie, the increased elbow room of this stall should be considered available to anyone. Not that you should be doing anything in there that requires increased elbow room, except perhaps stretching your legs like I occasionally do by putting my foot on the grip bar like a ballet student doing a dance exercise. (Never you mind that I have only one foot visible.) I reserve the right to change the rules on this point should I become handicapped myself.

If you find yourself at the mirror at the same time as another occupant, limit your preening to the bare minimum. A quick brush at your hair with your hand (no combs) or raising your chin to look at your neck is acceptable; applying any type of ointments or unguents is not.

Reading material is not to be taken into the men’s room with you. It sends the message to anyone who sees you heading that way that you’re planning on some type of semi-permanent occupation, similar to what we saw with Russia’s recent incursion into Georgia. Any visit that requires an entertainment add-on is one that is going on way too long. If you need something, look instead for anything that’s been abandoned by those who preceded you. You’ll be surprised how interesting otherwise dry reading (commodity quotes, baseball line scores, Target supplements) can become. And do not, under any circumstances, bring anything you found out of the bathroom with you. The only exception might be money on the floor, and even that carries another whole level of risk if you pick it up from beneath the wall of the stall.

The best approach of all is probably to do everything you can to plan your visits to minimize any and all chance encounters. Our men’s room door is conveniently located between a breakroom entrance to the left and an exit door to the warehouse on the right. So I’m able to abort any approach where room-sharing may be required by diverting for a snack or wandering aimlessly around the shipping dock pretending to be looking for something. If you’re already inside when someone enters to join you, you can slip into a (hopefully) unoccupied stall, and wait till they leave.

Or you can hold it for eight hours.

Economic downturn headed lower

2008-10-12T19:40:00.000-04:00

It’s a nice quiet Sunday and, for at least one day, I’m not going to worry about our collapsing financial system. For the last several months, as my work for a financial services company became less and less, our once-routine weekend of overtime has gone the way of Lehman Brothers and AIG. The company still has a perceived need to put us on call for Sundays, just in case the recession ends overnight, but now we get an inevitable call on Saturday telling us basically “never mind, you’re still doomed”.

The drumbeat of bad news that’s been so incessant in recent weeks can really get a person down, in case you haven’t noticed. I’ve tried several times to swear off checking the Dow every few minutes or so, but like a heroin addict I keep coming back to the sizzling spoon and needle stick of imminent economic collapse. I rationalize any less-than-horrible news into something that can give me hope: Friday, for example, I’m sure we were all thrilled that the fall was less than 200 points, far better than anything else we’d seen that week. I was just as thrilled to learn the other day that my health insurance is going up only 9% and that my gynecological checkups are no longer subsidized.

Still, down, down, down it spirals, and the media scramble to come up with ever-more alarming descriptions of how bad things have become. One website calls it a “tailspin”, while a newspaper opts for “catastrophe”, and the networks use labels like “disaster”, “calamity” and “tsunami”. Confidence is “sliding”, “plummeting”, “diving”, “tanking”. The market is volatile, disturbed, upset, deranged, explosive, troubled, distressed, unbalanced or unhinged. Any minute, I expect to see the news flash reporting that “moments ago, the Dow crashed through the trading floor, seriously injuring 12 in the sub-basement below.”

We scout about desperately for something reassuring, for some fringe economist willing to go on record with a prediction that the recession will last only a few more quarters. Here’s someone standing behind a podium and looking authoritative; he says the economy will be “fine”. Oh, shoot, it’s just the president, sounding like someone who’s just been asked how his weekend was. Here’s another politician expressing faith that we’re destined to see an improved economy in the long term because Americans are the hardest-working, most-innovative employees in the world. Obviously, someone who’s never been to Hardee’s.

To avoid all the repetition of how bleak things are, maybe we can turn the scales upside-down. I think I’d feel better to hear that recessionary trends are “sky-rocketing” or that the downturn has now “exceeded the fears of even the bleakest pessimists”. Instead of hearing that analysts on Wall Street are “looking for a bottom” (who isn’t?), we could think in terms of a “new peak in negativity”. Maybe we’ll hear soon that equities have fallen so low that 100 shares of GM are being given away with the purchase of every new Hummer, though I guess that still would mean no one is trading in the stock.

I’m also getting tired of the whole Main Street versus Wall Street dichotomy. This seems like a cynical effort to put the blame for the crisis in the laps of those who were silly enough to buy up our mortgages, rather than in our belief that we could move into a dream house for the down payment on a new pick-up. We pretend that failing banks and crippled investment houses are hurting only those snooty New Yorkers who probably deserve to be taken down a Cosmo or two anyway. What good does it do to focus instead on the deserted storefronts in our own dilapidated downtown districts? I couldn’t shop in a store on the Main Street of my town if I tried, unless maybe I was looking for some of that heroin I was mentioning.

I’m also growing weary of the visuals we keep getting from financial capitals around the world that attempt to put a human face on the misery by capturing the moment that some desperate trader has just learned that not only has he lost his investments, but his job and the love of his mother. We’ve all seen these pictures of crushed individuals putting their hands into various positions on their faces -- covering their mouths, rubbing their eyes, wiping their brows, blowing their brains out. They cringe, they scowl, they sulk and they make a variety of other frowny faces. Are these the only expressions of dismay these folks are capable of? Or is it just easier for a photographer to capture than the moment when Morgan Stanley’s floor manager stomps his feet, holds his breath and advises clients they should all sit in the corner and eat worms?

So we didn’t end last week with the Black Friday that many had predicted after the near-700-point drop in the Dow we saw on Thursday. Whether or not we’ll have a Black Columbus Day instead is yet to be seen. I thought we’d have a nice three-day weekend to catch our breath, but now I see the market will be imploding at its usual start time of 9:30 tomorrow morning. Can’t we even honor the memory of the western world’s most over-rated explorer without wondering what shade of ebony the day is going to be?

I’m still waiting for the media to point out that you can’t spell “confidence” without “con”, you can’t spell “Standard & Poor’s” without “poor”, and you can’t spell “Nasdaq” without “ack!” And you can’t spell “Dow Jones” without “down”, though you’re left with “Joes”, which I guess could be the name of a bankrupt diner on Main Street. While we’re at it, I might add that anagrams for Wall Street include “wallet rest”, “rat well set” and “law let rest”. But I’m not sure that adds anything to our understanding of why Western-style capitalism teeters on the brink.

Misanthropy can be fun

2008-10-10T18:10:00.000-04:00

I love humanity as a concept. It’s individual human beings that I can’t stand.

I won’t take credit for coming up with this as an original thought, assuming misanthropy is something you’d want to take credit for, but I can definitely echo the feeling. I have just enough Sixties vibes left in my soul to believe somewhere deep down that everybody’s beautiful, in their own way. Though it’s also important to point out this wasn’t sung by Bob Dylan or the Beatles but instead by novelty goofball Ray Stevens, who also claimed that streakers were “just as proud as they can be of their anatomy” and suggested that we give Gui-Tarzan “a hand”.

Certainly it’s not all human beings that I dislike. I love my wife and son dearly, and also care quite a bit for my parents, my sister and her family, and most in-laws. I have a small group of friends that I like, mostly from work and from the distant past, and there are a number of people in the public eye that I admire and respect. I’m also quite fond of our cats, though I guess they don’t qualify as “anthropes”. But 99.9999999999999% of the world I really just don’t care for as individuals.

I don’t think I can attribute this outlook to anything sociopathic. I’m certainly not about to go on some random spree of senseless (or even sensible) violence, which would be way more trouble than it’s worth. I don’t actively hate people that I don’t know. I’m just indifferent, and it’s bothersome when they encroach on that indifference by coming within 50 feet of me.

I think this comes largely from my upbringing. My mother was from a big family that was constantly infighting, so she and my dad decided to leave all that behind after they married and moved 1300 miles from Pennsylvania to Miami. There I could grow up peacefully with just them, my sister and an uncle. We weren’t the types to end every phone call with a needy “I love you”, like so many people seem to be doing these days. (I imagine annoyed spouses on the other end of these calls responding with a sigh and a “same here”, and checking caller ID before they answer the phone again five minutes later when they’re asked “How about now? Still love me?”). We’d see all the aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins once a year on summer vacation, when I could yearn theoretically for the warmth of a large family.

I say all this in preface to the hateful exercise I’m about to undertake. I’m sitting here in Panera this morning, watching a steady stream of patrons come and go. While I imagine that most if not all are upright citizens who have every reason to be loved and appreciated, it’s not going to be me who’s doing it.

Like this twosome that just came in: a guy in his late forties and a much older man. After they order, the younger guy says to the elder, “Where would you like to sit, young man?” I hate, hate, hate that patronizing tone that we older folks get from our age-impaired counterparts. And that phrase – “young man” or “young woman” applied to someone who’s obviously ancient – is just throwing your pathetic condition in your face.

And this guy who just walked in with his precious “Salty Dog” t-shirt and his backpack. We never had backpacks to carry our schoolbooks when I was a kid. The boys carried them on their hip and the girls clutched them to their chests, and that’s as it should be.

And this young Asian guy who just set up his laptop next to me. He plugged into the same outlet I’m using without even asking. Let’s see what he has up on his screen: he’s instant-messaging someone while reading a PDF in the background. We’re all very impressed by your multi-tasking skills.

And the aging hippie type who was already set up here in the corner when I arrived. He just left his laptop and cell phone at the table while he walked off to the restroom. The nerve of someone trusting today’s population not to steal his valuables while he’s stepped away for two minutes. If it’s swiped, that’s just higher insurance for me (just a second, let me go check if it’s the kind of Mac I’ve been yearning to get).

And the older lady who just put a clutch of used newspapers into the recycle rack next to the trash. It’s two local newspapers I already subscribe to, not the USA Today or New York Times I was hoping to pick up for free while I was here. How come people in the South are so provincial and care so little about what’s going on in the rest of the world?

Now there’s an older man and a younger woman, both dressed in business attire. They were already here, but he decided to leave while she’s raiding the free bagel samples. You know you’re supposed to use the tongs to pick those up, don’t you? Does it look to you like the rest of us want your germs?

Here’s a thirty-something guy who looks like a laid-off banker or something, scruffy and wearing those ridiculous cargo pants that go down below your knee and have all these unnecessary pockets. How in good conscience can he be wasting pockets like that when there are kids in the Third World that have no place to stash their change, IDs and iPods? We need to be donating pockets, not hoarding them.

And these two very short women, probably mother and daughter judging by their similar stature. I can’t really see anything offensive about either one of them, and it really ticks me off. No, wait – the younger one just propped her sunglasses above her forehead. She thinks she’s so cool.

Oh, and check out the young black guy wearing a black t-shirt and black pants, and a Blu-Tooth thing attached to his ear. Glad to see you young people making bulky electronic earpieces so fashionable. By the time I need one, I’ll be able to wear my hearing aid dangling jauntily from the side of my head.

And these two women dressed in the uniforms of healthcare providers. One of them just had her cell phone go off playing some song I’ve never heard before. Sounds like one of those latter-day R&B acts that are so inexplicably popular. What’s wrong with Ray Stevens?

Now here’s a group that’s taken over an entire table and seems to be talking politics. Surprising for this area of the South, it sounds like they’re talking liberal politics, about the origins of the word “redneck” and laughing at a pet magazine that has the headline “Dog is my copilot”. They’re all about my age and ideological temperament, and are even eating some of the same baked goods I enjoy here at Panera. But they’re all getting along rather than be antagonistic toward their fellow man. What a bunch of jerks.

Maybe it’s time to go. I seem to be in a bad mood today.

Hello, world, it's me

2008-10-09T10:57:00.000-04:00

Congratulate me, somebody. This piece represents my 25th blog posting as FiftySomethingMan.

In an era when milestones both real and imagined are celebrated virtually every day, it seems like someone should be showing me some attention. If Two and a Half Men can mark its fifth anniversary and President Bush can now count 1,250 consecutive days of being the worst president ever, I’d like to be recognized for reviving a humor-writing hobby I had left uncultivated for over 30 years.

With the current economic recession depriving me of almost all work-related fulfillment other than collecting a paycheck, I’ve found myself once again turning elsewhere to feel productive. This has happened before during similar slowdowns – in the eighties I taught myself to play the “Navy Hymn” on the piano, and in the nineties I attempted to revive the Spanish-speaking skills I had learned growing up in Miami. Neither of these hobbies stuck once job satisfaction eventually returned, though if I ever lose my notebook, need to find the library, or like to eat meatballs in South America, I might be able to get by.

Actually, I’m not sure yet that I’m comfortable calling this “writing”. That seems a little presumptuous, considering the quality of these things. I sure don’t want to call it “blogging”, as that makes me sound way more contemporary than any 54-year-old white guy has a right to be.

Maybe “typing” is the correct gerund. I’ve always loved to type, ever since my parents bought me a portable typewriter for my thirteenth birthday. I was fascinated with the way I was able to put words on paper in something other than my impaired penmanship. I started by simply copying other works, banging away with a single finger and using an all-caps style that would be considered extremely rude in the current age of communications. After a while, I got tired of looking for stuff to copy and found it easier just to make it up as I went along. At least it was a more productive use of a 13-year-old right hand than what I could’ve been doing.

I’m glad to see the skill of typing is still in use, even if it does seem underappreciated. When we have a need at work to input a large amount of keystrokes, we send the project as far offshore as we possibly can. I’m not sure how skilled these developing-world typists might be, but I do know we pay them little enough that they could hire a thousand people to key one word each to produce a document of this length.

I bought a kids’ typing program for my son when he was young, and diligently drilled him through the exercises, even though I suspected voice recognition or some kind of brain-scan interface would be in use before he needed the typing. I eventually gave up on the program and thought all was lost, until he got his own laptop a few years later. With instant messaging as the impetus, he’s become a flash on the keyboard. Chatting up the latest film release with all the cool kids on the Internet is somehow more rewarding than Mavis Beacon’s sparkling animated stars.

When I got my first semi-advanced cell phone a few years ago, I was thrilled to discover text messaging. At last I could practice my love of typing anywhere – in a serene meadow, on the edge of the Grand Canyon, even at the top of the Eiffel Tower. Maybe I’m missing out on some fabulous vistas there, but we’re talking about pressing buttons and watching letters appear on a screen!

Which brings me to my newest fascination, instant messaging, or “I am”, as the younger generation calls it. Even as I’m working on this piece here at the Wi-Fi-equipped grocery store down the street from my house, I’m able to type messages to my wife asking if she needs anything and just generally bothering and distracting her from her own work. She hates it, of course, as any sensible person my age should. But as someone who’s always been a little uncomfortable with one-on-one human interaction, I’d love to see more of it. Maybe one day we’ll all be carrying around little “knuckle-tops” instead of laptops, and we can exchange pleasantries with store clerks without ever saying a word.

The big down side, of course, for such rapid written communication as this is that the quality of the typing suffers in the name of speed. I have to read through instant-message transcripts as part of my job each day, and there rarely seems to be any effort to correct spelling as long as the general idea is transmitted. Occasionally it’s so garbled that I can’t tell what was intended; fortunately, this is only work so it really doesn’t matter. Most of what I’m reading is from our outsource sites, and they seem mainly interested in having a written albeit imperfect record of whooo told thm whta 2 do.

It does bother me though when such sloppiness is used in casual online conversations with friends and former coworkers who’ve been transferred to other sites. I had a very nice discussion with an old associate the other day in which we discussed our families, life in his new city and generally catching up on mutual acquaintances. As I prepared to sign off to meet up with my carpool partner who was leaving for the day, he asked how she was and told me to “say hell” to her. (We talk about work on the way home anyway, so there’s already plenty of “hell” and “damn” and “bastard”. One more mild epithet won’t be a chore.)

I think I’ll settle on calling this current exercise “laptopping”. It’s definitely more advanced than just typing, what with the control-S-ing and the alt-F7-ing, not to mention gripping and clicking my mouse instead of the similar-in-texture bagel just next to it. Plus, there’s the whole Internet connection thing, which allows me to show my typing to the world.

Assuming there’s someone out there listening. If so, can you please give me an indication that you are? The only comment I’ve received thus far was on my jokey analysis of health insurance, to which “vegasguy” pointed out that I’m “allowed to contribute to the HSA and take a 100% tax deduction and then pay any qualified medical cost with dollars that were tax-deductible and grew tax-free.” In other words, he didn’t get the joke.

Is anybody else getting it?

The land of tea and terror

2008-10-07T14:54:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite international business destinations is Sri Lanka. Located just off the southeastern tip of India, the island nation represented my company’s second step in its pursuit of the cheapest labor force in the English-speaking world. (We’ve since set up a third installation in the Philippines, after which I assume we’ll try Zimbabwe followed by Alabama). I’ve been asked three times in the last year or so to help with the training of this outsourcing operation.

Prior to my first trip, I knew very little about the country, other than that it used to be called Ceylon, it was most famous for its tea and rebel insurgencies, and it was way too close to India for my comfort. I had already been to India twice on business and I considered it to be – no offense intended – a spiritually rich but godforsaken hellhole. I had heard that Sri Lanka attracted quite a few European vacationers, so I hoped it might be a little more suitable to my spoiled Western tastes. When I checked out the bookstores for a travel guide and could find plenty about Laos and Myanmar but nothing about my destination, I became a little concerned.

My concern grew when just a few days before my departure, I noticed a small blurb in The New York Times. It reported that the rebels, who previously had been operating only in the opposite end of the island from where I was going, had decided to bomb an oil depot adjacent to the airport I was flying into. Gee, thanks a lot, rebels. I joked nervously with my coworkers that if I were killed in the line of duty, that maybe the company would name a conference room after me (an honor usually reserved only for deposed executives and shut-down sites).

I approached my manager to get a little reassurance, and a little is what I got. The attack was news to her. After a few phone calls, she advised me to visit a special risk assessment website we had contracted with, which advised me to travel only with drivers trained in ambush avoidance. The other advice I got from my manager was good to hear but not exactly sensible: I was to request an upgrade to business class to help ensure my safety. How exactly the insurgents would shoot only the coach class out of the sky was unclear, but I was glad to know I’d be too tanked up on free champagne to care.

The trip itself was largely uneventful, except for the fact that instead of 26 hours it took four days. The corporate travel agent had routed me through Chicago with a half-hour to change planes, which you’re instinctively supposed to know is insane. (“That would’ve jumped out at me right away,” said the agent representative when I called later to complain.) I scrambled to find a grimy airport motel to spend the night, then made it Frankfort, Germany, before discovering I’d again need to rebook, despite assurances to the contrary I had received in Chicago. The new itinerary, featuring a bonus change of planes in Bombay, was going to cost twice what I had originally been quoted.

Now that I had arrived late, neither my host nor the visa attorney I was told I’d need were to be found when I landed in Colombo. I had been given what’s called a “landing visa” by the consulate before I left the U.S., which inexplicably entitles you to land at the airport but not actually leave the airport. As I waited in the immigration line, reading the signs warning against lying about your travel status and the automatic death penalty for drug smugglers, I found myself with no choice but to sidle up close to the nearest Germans and make like a tourist. I had an emergency flower shirt in anticipation of such a screw-up, so I did manage to get waved through.

After making it to the hotel and recovering from my jet lag, I was ready for my first visit to the office. It wasn’t until I gave the address to the cab driver that I realized my office was located in Colombo’s center for international business, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Even worse than this unsettling reminder of terrorism just a few miles from where the airport had been attacked the previous week was the fact that the office was on the thirteenth floor.

The drive from the hotel to the office was a short one. Sri Lanka is a beautiful tropical country and reminded me a lot of my native Miami, with palm trees, natives dressed in colorful attire, and a heavy police presence on every other corner. The decades-long war against the Tamil Tiger insurgents had turned the city into an armed camp packed with security checkpoints. I had to go through no fewer than three metal detectors to get into the Twin Towers, but at least it always reminded me that I had remembered to bring my iPod.

I was treated great by my trainees and coworkers while in the office. Some brought me home-made food (I think it was food), some treated me to local specialties being served in the onsite canteen, some even invited me into their homes. I always felt safe and cared-for while I was in the office, except for one time when a trainee had to suddenly dismiss himself to run into the hall and get sick on the carpet. We later learned he had come down with Dengue Fever, so I had to maneuver past this stain in the rug each day to be sure I didn’t touch any Dengue.

Once I had settled into a regular routine, it wasn’t that hard to get used to the idea that my life was in daily peril. The hotel was within walking distance of the office so, rather than worry about the “ambush avoidance” skills of my drivers, I figured I could handle any incident just as well by running and screaming. And I did have a few incidents, too. One day I was returning to the hotel after work and saw an angry mob being pushed behind police barricades. These weren’t the Tamil Tigers -- who, to hear the government tell it, number about eight -- but instead a group protesting the lack of freedoms they had because of the insurgence suppression. I suddenly thought I had some of that tangy South Asian food repeating on me but soon realized I was whiffing the remnants of a tear gassing. A few evenings later, while having dinner at the hotel, we heard a loud boom. Wanting another story to add to my gas attack, I walked outside and looked down the street to see where a phone booth had just been bombed. Police and soldiers had already roped off the scene, but the next day I was able to stop and pick up a piece of shrapnel. Though I’m still not sure whether the vandalism of the booth was caused by Tamil Tigers or simply Troubled Teens.

I returned to the states after my three-week stint with considerable satisfaction that I’d done a good job as well as some great stories to demonstrate what a travel stud I was. I didn’t get many photos, though. I was dying to get a shot of the machine-gun emplacements just outside the office, but was afraid they’d shoot back. All in all, I had an enjoyable time in the land I now think of as “India Lite”.

Cleaning house, and then some

2008-10-05T17:02:00.000-04:00

This being Sunday, I’ve spent the better part of the morning cleaning the house. As I mentioned in an earlier posting, my religious upbringing has instilled me with such guilt that I can’t spend the day of rest actually resting. Not that I would consider going to church – that’s way more effort than I had in mind, what with the communing and the benedicting and the beseeching and all. Instead, I’ve turned the old saw about “cleanliness is next to godliness” into something like “cleanliness is godliness”.

Today was a good example of my typical Sunday in search of salvation through housework. I woke up early determined to get a lot done before much of the day was passed, so perhaps I could spend the afternoon at a movie with my son or passed out in front a TV football game. I started in the laundry room by putting on a load of shirts, then sweeping the floor. Since the kitchen adjoins the laundry room, I branched out there using a dust buster to suck up clumps of cat hair (I’ve collected enough to build a new cat!), and sponge-clean the most obvious spots of dirt on the floor. Then I headed down the hall to work on our second bathroom, the one my teenage son uses.

Now the dangerous thing about house-cleaning is that it’s considered a “gateway” chore, one that can lead to more serious work. Once you get the blood and the sweat flowing, it’s very easy to get caught up in the moment and attempt improvements that fall more under the heading of “maintenance”. As I’ve mentioned before, I am in no sense of the word to be considered a home handyman. Too often, I’ve started what for most would be a relatively simple project only to get about halfway through and discover I have no idea how to get out of my fix.

Once, I was successful at changing a light bulb in the ceiling of our home office. I know this sounds ridiculously simple, but it did involve removing a globe structure, taking out and replacing the wrong bulb before getting the right one, and then putting the globe back on without breaking it. Inspired by this success, I decided to change another bulb just outside our back door. I knew this was stepping up in class – it was outdoors where neighbors could witness my failure, plus there were cobwebs involved – but my judgment had been tainted by my indoor success.

The housing that enclosed the outdoor bulb was a bit more complicated to remove; I had to feel the screws in the lid and figure out which way to turn them. Usually I screw so hard the wrong way that I seat them so snugly that they’ll never come out. (I’m sure there’s some clockwise/counter-clockwise rule about screws that I should know, but even if I did, I can’t translate clock-faces into screws when I’m working at the top of a teetering ladder). After much effort, I removed all six screws, lifted the lid, and reached in to grab the bulb. It was a tight fit but I got the bad bulb out and the good one in. I flipped the switch to confirm my success, and the light came on. What a man I was in that bright shining moment.

All that was left now was to put the lid back on. Because my step-ladder wasn’t tall enough, I again was operating by feel as I attempted to align the screws with the holes they had come from. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t get even the first screw back into position. I turned it this way and that, re-positioned and re-angled it, re-adjusted the lid, and still no success. Could I just sit the top on there with no permanent attachment? Why did it even need a top? Obviously light-headed from the frustration and the altitude, I had to finally give up and call my wife for help. Soon the more familiar feeling of humiliation had replaced my earlier sense of accomplishment. My wife discovered that four of the six screws I had removed were meant to be a permanent piece of the lid, and it was only two screws that should’ve come out. She spent the rest of the afternoon reconstructing the housing.

As Laura worked away at the top of the ladder while I helped by being nearby enough to call an ambulance if she fell, I flash-backed to earlier humiliations I experienced in the area of home maintenance. There was the time we needed to remove a pine tree from the back yard, and I had to stand by and watch from the ground as my elderly but extremely handy father-in-law shinnied up to do the necessary topping. There was the time I took a full week off from work to paint our house – a brick house, mind you, that needed only trim coverage – and I didn’t even get to the windows before the week was out. There was the time I hid in the kitchen during a plumber’s visit so he wouldn’t be tempted to explain to me what he had fixed. A shameful heritage, to be sure.

Back to this morning: As I sprayed the bathroom mirror clean, got the worst of this colorful but apparently undesirable pink stuff out of the bathtub and wiped down the counter, I noticed that the faucet knobs were especially grimy. I had gotten under there a few times with a toothbrush but it looked like the knobs would have to be physically removed to get at all the dirt that had accumulated. The “H” and “C” tabs (“hot” and “cold”, I guess) looked like they’d snap right out, and sure enough they did.

Underneath, I could see the head of a screw beneath a layer of rust. The head had a pattern I recognized as matching a screwdriver I once saw in our utility closet. Could it be that such a tool would remove the screws, allowing me to remove the knobs for cleaning? I retrieve the tool and stick it deep into the hole and starting turning. Slowly, one screw backs out and then the other. But the knobs themselves remained in place. You never know with these things whether brute force or some kind of subtle maneuver is required for removal, but since I’m no good with the subtle stuff, I figured I’d just try to power them off. And off they came! I tooth-brushed the posts that lay exposed, submerged the knobs in soapy water and wiped off the rust with a cloth.

They say that when climbing Everest, the hard part isn’t getting to the top, but getting back down alive. Now I had to put everything back together without suffering pulmonary edema. I tried to lay the screws back into their holes, but they just fell onto their sides. I then balanced each screw on the end of the screwdriver, pointing upward, and lowered the inverted knobs onto them. I quickly flipped them over and stuck them back onto their posts. I had to turn until I found the right position, then forced the knobs back into place. Incredibly, the screws went in and everything was clean and restored.

I called my wife in from the other room and woke up my sleeping son. Notice anything different about the sink? I asked. “It’s not disgusting any more,” my son said. I’ll take that as a “job well done”.

Blessed are the annoyed

2008-10-04T10:08:00.000-04:00

Blessing seems to be a big part of life in the South. I’m usually glad I decided to live in a region where the weather is decent, the people are friendly and the economy – at least as of ten minutes ago when I last checked the financial pages – was somewhat healthy. Whether or not I’m “blessed” to be living here, I’m not sure. I made some overt choices that got me to where I sit this morning in a coffee shop just off Interstate 77, and “blessing” seems to imply that I simply fell off a passing truck and was fortunate to roll down the off-ramp to a comfortable table in front of a bagel and coffee.

I guess the obsession with blessings in this part of the country is rooted in the Bible Belt traditions most of my fellow Southerners subscribe to. Surely God had something to do with our fate being what it is. His invisible hand -- or “Hand” (I always forget how those spiritual capitalization rules work) -- guided me to this acceptable position of a fifty-something sorta-corporate type hanging on to a half-decent job and semi-comfortable lifestyle. I know I’m a lot better off than the guy I passed landscaping the shrubs on my way in here, but surely not enough to be blessed.

For example, the whole sneeze commentary thing bothers me a lot. Whenever I’m in public, and especially when I’m at work, if I feel the urge to sneeze I have to suppress the outburst or else endure the hail of “bless you’s” that rain down all around me. Maybe my family was too impolite to teach me this social convention, but it’s not one I’ve ever practiced and it embarrasses me to become a late-adapter at this stage in my life. I’m usually able to stifle the sneeze sufficiently to keep anyone from hearing. I hope it’s an urban legend that you can give yourself a cerebral hemorrhage by doing this, though that too would probably prompt a comment.

What is it exactly you’re supposed to say when your sneeze is blessed? “Whoa, thanks”, is usually about the best I can manage. A more definitive “thank you” might encourage a chorus of “you’re welcome’s”, and then I’m back to where I started, wondering if and how I’m supposed to respond further. Other options like “Woo – I think I might be coming down with something” or “I hope I didn’t get any of that on you” seem to be offering more information than anybody really wants.

I once worked with someone who waited till everyone else had said their “bless you’s” and then upstaged them all with a “God bless you”. It seemed like an unnecessary attempt to place his and God’s blessings a level above those of mere mortals. I suppose that should elicit a “thank you both” response, assuming he came from a monotheistic tradition, which I think Catholicism still is.

The only time I really feel required to offer some word of note on another person’s sudden, involuntary expulsion of micro-mucus is when I’m in a one-on-one situation with the sneezer. One of my carpool companions let one rip the other day and the silence that followed was more than I could bear. I tried out what I thought was an acceptable alternative – “gesunheidt” – but I don’t think it had the same affect. He looked at me curiously and then nearly rear-ended the semi in front of us.

Aside from the sneeze blessings, the other one we hear a lot around here is “bless his/her heart”. It’s really only the most rural of us that have the nerve to use this phrase in everyday conversation. Most of my coworkers have at least some non-Southern strain in them, or at least enough to avoid this condescending remark. Among those who do use it, the phrase is always intoned with sympathy even when meant with the most malice possible. They’d use it equally on someone who just stumbled over a vacuum cleaner cord and on Lee Harvey Oswald after he’d been gunned down by Jack Ruby. It implies that if only a particular organ could be rendered subject to the grace of the Almighty, that this person wouldn’t be such a poor excuse for a human being. I’ve always contended that the Yankee equivalent to “bless his heart” was something along the lines of “what an idiot!”, though that might be a bit harsh. Heart-blessing seems to imply that there’s a well-intentioned incompetence involved, which I can understand after meeting some of the Southerners I’ve come across.

One last use of the word that I’ve encountered recently came from a particularly mediocre one of my coworkers. This is a fellow I trained to be an inspector of others people’s work; his job is to review their output, find their errors and then indicate in writing how to fix them. Most of the errors he’s charged with finding are related to language usage, so you can imagine my concern when on the third day of his training, we learned that he couldn’t spell. “Oh, I’ve always been a bad speller,” he said in that tone of pride you hear only Americans employ when discussing how piss-poor they are at math, science or other academic disciplines. I huddled quickly with management after this discovery and, as is typical of the interpretation of work ethic at my company, they decided that it was more important that he showed up on time every day than know how to spell. He started as a temporary worker but has since showed up well enough to earn a full-time position.

Anyway, when anybody walks up to Mike and asks how he is, his response is always “I’m blessed.” Not “fine”, not “good”, not “here” or “great” or “HIV-positive” or anything else you might normally expect as a response. I take it he’s a very religious guy and views every life experience he encounters with a full appreciation for all the good and bad and wondrous and pedestrian that it brings. And so, he regards himself as “blessed”.

Some might contend, however, that he’s an idiot.

Quality was Job One

2008-10-02T10:47:00.000-04:00

As I mentioned in some earlier postings, part of my life in the corporate world has been spent as a “quality facilitator”. Don’t worry, I didn’t know what it meant either.

About 20 years ago, you might recall there was this business fad going around that preached the Japanese had figured out the process for building quality into a product rather than tacking it on at the end in the form of a high-priced ad campaign. This was supposedly done by focusing on meeting customer expectations, defining and documenting your production processes, and enlisting front-line workers to contribute their ideas. It all sounded very idealistic even for a leftist like me who saw a certain appeal in having this semblance of democracy on the factory floor.

Before this quality revolution hit our company, I was running a three-person inspection operation out of a converted electrical closet near our shipping department. Our job was two-fold: inspect components before they went into the final product to remove defects early and then, when that failed, scramble around like poisoned ants to find a few quality items to send to our client. Even though everybody who knew anything about our process admitted there were unavoidable variations, we had to reinforce the notion that perfection was possible. We might ship out 10,000 marred and scarred pieces to the client’s distribution warehouse, but me and two other guys had to handpick the best of these 10,000 for a special separate shipment.

Sometimes this fooled the client and sometimes it didn’t. When our ruse failed, we often had to travel to these distant warehouses to go through all 10,000 products to remove whatever defect had gotten through. The most memorable trip was a weeklong visit to a part of Brooklyn where even the cab drivers wouldn’t go to spend five days looking for a spot on a picture of the CEO’s face that didn’t actually exist in real life. (I always thought it would be easier to put the spot on him rather than remove it from his picture, but couldn’t convince my boss).

Upper management eventually became convinced that this was a sloppy way to run a quality operation so they decided to eliminate the inspection department entirely. Counterintuitive as it may seem, the idea was to dump my two inspectors out on the street and groom me to join a new pro-active quality team that was being formed. Seeing as how this came about two months before my son was born, I was all in favor of any idea that kept me on.

For the next two years, I worked with a new quality manager whose importance to the business was evidenced by the fact that she had her office right next to the president. Not that he ever spoke to her, because in fact he hated her. Regardless, she was given huge powers to hire a consultant who trained four facilitators and group of about 25 sales, customer service and production people who learned how to find the root of a problem, brainstorm ideas for fixing it, and then test these to make sure they worked. My three quality cohorts and I were to stand next to a large easel while these discussions were going on, making notes of the participants’ observations, and coaching them through the problem-solving process. This is what was called “facilitation” but felt more like stenography for an angry mob.

The president had assigned us four specific problems to solve, and we were broken into four separate groups to solve them. I remember two of the issues were how to answer the phones more quickly and how to reduce spoilages. Even though our consultant had advised that we pick small soluble problems while still learning our way, these two whoppers were chosen by the chief executive. Unfortunately, empowering the working masses to speak their minds did not include pointing out this bone-headed move. I don’t remember the third problem, but I think it might’ve been something about Third World squalor.

The fourth one – the project for me and my group – had to do with what were called “counts”. Incredibly, our processes were so out of control that we were unable to produce exactly the quantities our customers ordered, and considered ourselves successful if we came within ten percent. Team members were chosen regardless of their knowledge of the process, the logic being that outsiders would be able to exercise a detached common sense to keep the insiders on track. In reality, the outsiders kept their mouths shut and volunteered mostly for the team’s clerical duties, like typing up the minutes and bringing stale bagels. Those in the know would attend the weekly sessions, or not, depending on how busy their departments were. One week they’d express one opinion, then the next week they’d say something different, then the next week they wouldn’t show up. People were alternately passionate and indifferent to others’ opinions, or even their own. It was a mess.

Part of my job was to put a successful face on this fiasco for my manager. The group would bicker and stall and change direction and give up, all in the course of one hour, and I’d have to describe how “dynamic” the session had been. Our team leader, who was head of the IT department, had decided on day one how he would solve the problem and bullied the group toward this end. But we had to put up the façade that we were gathering data before making a final decision. So he coerced everyone into a plan that required counts to be recorded at each step of production and a “variation form” to be filled out when these numbers were off. Unfortunately, nobody could convince the front-line machine operators to be bothered with such nonsense.

So gradually, over the course of eighteen months, our mission changed from getting the counts right to getting people to fill out the forms. The data I was required to submit to management revolved around the issue of compliance to the team’s mandate, a team and a mandate that most of the blue-collar workforce hadn’t even heard of. I’d try to explain to them the esoteric concepts of Japanese quality circles and they’d go off on some rant about how we had won World War II specifically so we didn’t have to listen to the Japanese.

At least my group continued to appear to pursue its goal with regular meetings. The other teams just sort of faded away. My fellow facilitators turned their energies instead to a suggestion box campaign, a chili cook-off to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the initiative and, for one associate who longed to be a muralist, making really nice posters. Eventually a new president was installed who thought the whole thing was a bunch of rubbish and the effort was finally abandoned.

Still, I did learn a valuable lesson about this whole quality experience. When your job finally becomes so intolerable that you have to resign, work in a free-lance editing business for a year and then return to your original company as a contract worker with no benefits.

Hunting for pleasure

2008-09-30T10:45:00.000-04:00

In spite of the fact that I’ve lived the last 28 years in the South, I never quite understood the lure of hunting. I get the part about how appealing it is to get up in the middle of the night to traipse around in the woods while wearing loud or unstylish clothing. In a way, I guess it’s not that different from what I do going off to my corporate job early every morning, if you substitute “cubicles” for “woods”. I understand the camaraderie of hanging out with fellow hunters, sitting for hours of uncomfortable silence in a tree stand and occasionally discharging high-powered firearms in random directions.

I just don’t get it why the guns have to be pointed at animals.

Don’t mistake me for one of those PETA types. I believe animals have absolutely no rights whatsoever other than to provide us with meaty flanks and maybe entertain us in the home, zoo or circus (though I’m not sure what goes on at a circus qualifies as “entertainment”). But I don’t see the point in searching the outdoors for them when most of their best traits can easily be found in a canned format on aisle 7 or sealed in plastic along the back wall of the local grocery store.

Actually, it’s not even the tastiest meats that are available in the wilds of the South. Here you’re largely limited to deer, possum, squirrels, rabbits and assorted birds, unless you’re lucky enough to stumble across an unguarded dairy farm. I sometimes see the deer gathered in the dark along the side of the road as I drive to work. They usually pause from whatever deer stuff they might be doing to watch me pass, then resume their wild life. Aside from the fact they’re usually clustered together like this, which makes me wonder if they’re talking about me or plotting some kind of deer terrorism, they’re not really that bothersome.

Squirrels (or as hunters say “squirrel”, as if singularizing them reduces the carnage) seem equally harmless. They’re running all through the trees in our yard and provide endless entertainment for our indoor pets watching through the windows -- “cat television”, as my wife calls it. When you see them in the road, they’re either so panicked by your approach that they can’t decide which way to turn, or else already run over. The other assorted fauna – badgers and groundlings and such – are completely inoffensive, unless you try to cook and eat them.

Some hunters will argue that they pursue the sport not only for the food and entertainment, but that they’re also acting to help control the wildlife population. I dislike the idea of a ten-point buck tumbling across the hood of my car and points-first into my lap as much as the next person. But there seem to be so many more humane options for population control. Maybe our would-be vice president has some ideas, considering her experience with ruminant control and birth control. We know abstinence doesn’t work, but maybe that field-dressing I hear so much about (which I assume involves modestly clothing the elk, moose and deer so they’re not so alluring to each other) could do the job.

With autumn now here, the hunting season in my state is heading into full swing. This was recently brought to my attention by ads in the local paper for outdoors establishments that sell the necessary tools of death. The “dates to remember” column was particularly disturbing:

Sept. 1 – First segment of dove season. Limit 15 birds per day. We turn these graceful birds into symbols of peace and for their cooperation in this sham, this is the thanks we give them.

Sept. 1 – Canada goose season. Daily limit 15 geese. They’re talking about the same huge creatures we see waddling through the park and defecating at will? They have to be hunted? To me, they don’t seem all that hard to find.

Sept. 15 – Archery season for deer. Later in the season comes “muzzleloader” deer season, eventually followed by “modern weapons” deer season. So first they wound them with arrows, then give them powder burns a few weeks later, then finally escalate to shoulder-mounted Stingers and laser-guided grenade launchers. Surely they can think of still more ways to kill deer. Hanging? Lethal injection? Beating them with a crowbar?

Oct. 12 – The start of National Wildlife Refuge Week. For one week, all is forgiven, and the animals are allowed to romp freely across the meadows. Just so they don’t get too comfortable, because next comes crow season and then quail season, both great opportunities for those who prefer eating feathers to meat.

I definitely sympathize with man’s inherent desire to master -- or at least hassle -- the natural world. The Bible tells us we’ve been given dominion over the Earth and all the animals and fish on it, and we have an obligation to handle this stewardship wisely. And I don’t see anything wrong with having a little fun at the same time by playing with archery equipment and muzzleloaders (whatever they are, though they sound like a blast). I guess maybe it’s just a matter of how you choose your weapon and your victims.

Personally, I find there’s nothing quite so relaxing and invigorating at the same time as experiencing this mystical place where civilization meets the wild. With the scent of my freshly mown lawn still hanging in the air, I enjoy the crisp sound of a newly opened bag of fire-ant poison. The smell of the pesticide blends with that of the grass as I stalk across the back yard in search of those rounded mounds of reddish dirt. When I locate one, I dip my old jelly jar lid into the granular mix and gently disperse it across the ant hill, watching with a sort of primeval sense of accomplishment as the doomed creatures fall prey to my caring but lethal stewardship.

In that moment, the hunter and hunted form a tandem as old as time. I brush furiously at my shoe to try to get them off of me.

Clean up, clean up, everybody everywhere

2008-09-27T16:41:00.000-04:00

I know I’m a little late to the party, but did you realize that this is National Clean Hands Week? This is not one of those cheesy designations by Congress, who as I write this is busy declaring National Wall Street Bailout Day. Instead, the week of Sept. 21-27 was chosen by the Soap and Detergent Association (SDA) to “encourage a healthy home, workplace and office” with the purchase and use of the cleaning products and oleochemicals made by their trade association members.

I discovered the existence of the SDA with the aid of a framed document posted at my workplace, titled “A Checklist for Washing Hands”. As I’ve written before, my company is big into standard processes so it only makes sense that such a list would be posted in a position of prominence, in the men’s room. The document is dated February of 2002, so I’m guessing this concern for our health and safety was some type of misdirected response to 9/11.

The checklist is prefaced by results from a survey conducted by the association which asserts that some 40% of American workers don’t wash their hands often or long enough (emphasis SDA’s). Consider that the SDA also claims that 58% of employers don’t encourage better cleanliness habits in their workers. “While most people employ good cleaning habits at home, they have less control in the workplace,” notes director of consumer affairs Nancy Bock, who holds a job apparently even worse than mine. I might say some negative things about my current employer but I sure can’t say they aren’t concerned about my cleanliness – I mean they posted the checklist in frame.

The list itself is in two parts: when to wash your hands and, of course, how. The “when” includes each time you use the restroom, before and after staff meetings if food is served (I assume that would also cover my company meetings, where bring your own pathetic sandwich is more the rule), after scanning newspapers in the breakroom, before and after a meet-and-greet activity (where you might have to touch grubby customers) and after disposing of freshly killed vermin. Actually, I added that last one myself. I guess it should go without saying, but if we’re going to have a checklist it needs to be thorough and allow no room for old-fashioned notions of common sense.

The “how” of hand-washing is stunning in its detail. You should wet hands with warm running water prior to reaching for soap, either in bar or liquid form; rub hands together to make a lather; wash the front and back of hands for 15 seconds or more; and rinse hands well under warm water. As Bock notes, “washing often, about eight times a day or more (emphasis both of ours) is the first step.” This seems to be bordering on the obsessive-compulsive to me, but of course I’m not selling soap.

I suppose I shouldn’t be mocking the sincere efforts of the Soap and Detergent Association. I really don’t want myself or my coworkers to end up like the little clip-art guy in the corner of the frame with a thermometer in his mouth and an ice bag on his head. Since 1926, under the leadership of a 25-member Board of Directors and over 40 committees, subcommittees, task forces and working groups, the SDA has been dedicated to advancing public understanding of the safety and benefits of cleaning products. I know lobbyists are currently under a bit of a cloud in the public eye, but I just can’t imagine these guys leaning on lawmakers for multi-million-dollar cleanser earmarks.

I decided to go to their website to learn more about the effort to keep the American public from being so disgusting. In addition to consumer education work like the list I encountered, the group is involved in research, government affairs and coordinating efforts with international associations. To encourage these missions, they sponsor two awards -- the Glycerine Innovation Award, given in collaboration with the American Oil Chemists’ Society, and an award recognizing the best technical paper in the Journal of Surfactants and Detergents. I wonder if I might qualify for next year’s honor with this piece.

As I read on, I’m glad I took advantage of the immediacy of the web rather than relying on six-year-old messages on bathroom walls. Because it seems like things have only gone downhill since the 2002 report. The 2008 study reveals that only 85% of respondents say they always wash their hands after going to the bathroom, down from the previous 92%, and a mere 39% seldom or never wash their hands (emphasis necessary for everyone) after coughing or sneezing. A new feature of the study is an overall grade for the American public, who racks up a not-surprising “C-” for their hand hygiene habits. Once again, we’re excelling at mediocrity.

“Americans should prepare for the onslaught of cold and flu season,” warns Bock ominously. “Cleaning your hands regularly throughout the day can help keep you out of the emergency room.” On the good side, Bock has been promoted to SDA vice president of education since we last heard from her in 2002. I’m just glad to see she still has a job, considering the poor results of the study.

I guess she got credit for some of the additional features now available on the website. New this year are “tips on laundering flood-soiled fabrics”, which I guess is in response to the recent natural catastrophes we’ve seen along the Gulf Coast. “As soon as the flood waters have receded, a new priority becomes how to clean up clothes and other fabrics that have been soaked by muddy flood water.” I’m sure that’d be my new priority as I maneuvered around the bloated corpses of cattle wading back to the shattered remnants of my life. In case I get some dead cow on my only remaining T-shirt, the SDA has me covered: “to help remove protein stains such as sewage and blood, add an enzyme presoak product to the prewash.” Any chance such a product is sold by your members? I sure hope so.

The SDA has also been busy bringing new demographic groups into the world of the clean and hygienic. They’ve established the “Scrub Club” for kids, which includes the Clean Hands Game and webisodes in which you can meet Gel-Mo, the gelatinous mascot of the S.C. And in an attempt to reach out to teenagers, a rap song was commissioned from the students at Sampson Smith Middle School. I’m sure some of the cred of the song is lost without the accompanying thumping bass-line, but if you can imagine the overwhelming rhythm, I can quote the lyrics:

“Yo stop touching that dirty can,
Go to the sink and wash your hands,
If you want to go on a date,
Jump up and wash your hands for goodness sake.
Washing your hands is good for you,
But if you don’t you’ll get the flu.”

Thanks to the SDA, sounds like we can look forward to a bright and shiny future.

A glossary to corp-speak

2008-09-25T10:48:00.000-04:00

I recently wrote a posting about small talk, so today I’m going to take on big talk. Not big in the sense of important or addressing universal truths or even just using big words, but big as in pretentious or bloated. I’m writing about corporate-speak, the twisted, over-wrought lingo that we have to decipher at work on a daily basis. Whether it’s too much use of the “imperial we” or simply an excessive reliance on multi-syllabic terminology (see, I can do it too), business communication has become an oxymoron, neither communicating effectively nor doing it in a workman-like fashion.

What follows then is meant to be something of a glossary to help us all get to the root of what our corporate overlords are really talking about when they get all officious on us. These are some terms and phrases I hear frequently at my job, along with my best shot at de-obfuscation.

“I can support that” – I agree with this and am willing to say so to my boss, when normally I know it’s better to keep my mouth shut.

“Let me reach out” – I’m going to speak with someone or maybe make a phone call or maybe send an email or maybe an instant message to someone who is sitting more than an arm’s-length away from me. Whether or not they respond in any way after my first attempt, my obligation is complete.

“Have a conversation” – This is the same thing as talking to someone, but is meant to sound serious. The only way it could be more serious would be to “sit down and have a conversation”, as the sitting implies the conversation will be happening for a while and you won’t want the other person to be so stunned by your brilliance that they might fall down.

“Wrap my arms (or brain or head) around that” – Trying to understand some new or difficult concept. It used to be only the arms that got wrapped around these things, which at least acknowledged a certain physical reality. The recent addition of brain- and head-wrapping makes me think too much of car accidents involving utility poles, but I guess it’s meant to lend a more cerebral tone.

“Have a nice day”—This is meant to imply that everything under discussion has now been solved and there’s no need for further consideration. If the phrase “thanks for your business” is tacked on, then there’s no point in bringing up the subject ever again.

“I will connect with him or her” – Emails will be sent at some point before the end of the decade.

“I’m writing it on my calendar” – This is meant to show the manager is truly committed to following through on the subject you’ve discussed. Unfortunately, they’re writing it on today’s sheet of their page-a-day calendar which, despite the picture of the funny kitty on it, gets thrown away at the end of the day.

“I will make things happen” – Events will transpire, the earth will spin on its axis and our galaxy will continue to hurtle through space, but chances are your request for a half-day off next Tuesday will be forgotten.

“I need to borrow you” – This is a request by a manager for you to leave your work station and accompany them to some undisclosed destination. Usually bad news that can only be delivered in private will follow, but it’s somehow mitigated by the fact that you’ve just been referred to as an object.

“I have some feedback for you” – It has been reported that you’ve done something bone-headed and I need to rub your nose in it so you won’t do it again. That way, I can tell the person reporting your transgression that we “had a conversation”.

“It has come to my attention” – When an email begins with this phrase, quickly check the sender line because it’s probably from God and you’ll want to respond to Him quickly.

“I want you to own this” – Unfortunately, it’s not a new car. Instead it’s likely some incredibly stupid project that you’re going to be responsible for completing.

“I’m making up that…” – This phrase will preface a theory that the speaker believes which has absolutely no grounding in the factual world. Instead, it’s a random supposition put out as an assumed reality, which makes it really hard to argue with.

“Let me put a bug in your ear” – You’re being told about something that will probably happen at some point in the future and you need to start getting used to the idea while it’s still sounding only hypothetical. Typically, no actual insects are involved.

“Team” – Any collection of two or more people who have some vague relation to each other and a project or goal. Because the team concept is so respected in the corporate world these days, this term is trotted out with increasing frequency. Especially annoying is an email to a group that begins with the salutation “Team!”

“Let me share with you” – I’m going to tell you something in a confidential tone that will soon be known corporation-wide, but I want to tell you personally so you’ll think I’m plugged in to the power center.

“Driving things up or down or out” – Whether it’s physical objects or abstract concepts that have to be somehow moved, the trendiest action word is “to drive” these. Managers drive goods things up, and bad things down or out. I think it makes them feel like cowboys.

“Deep dive” – A thorough investigation that’s accompanied by spreadsheets, data points, bullet points and power points. By the time you’ve finished hearing about one of these, the nitrogen bubbles that accumulate in your blood may mercifully take your life.

“Buckets” – What other people call “categories”, the term bucket is preferred because of connotations it has with feeding and/or cleaning up after farm animals.