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.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Friday, October 10, 2008
Misanthropy can be fun
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.
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.
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Hello, world, it's me
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?
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?
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
The land of tea and terror
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”.
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”.
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Cleaning house, and then some
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”.
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”.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Blessed are the annoyed
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.
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.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Quality was Job One
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.
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.
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