Monthly Archives: December 2015

The nastiest of four letter words…

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Maybe it’s the fact that during a “normal” week, I spend five out of seven days at the office, but it does feel like more and more of what ends up on these pages finds its inspiration from my four by eight foot cell. That’s genuinely not intentional. God knows I’d much rather leave that mess where I drop it at the end of the day than drag it along with me here. Despite that, the office – and probably any office – provides a wealth of reasons why someone might blog, or drink, or take pills excessively. In my experience the modern office is a reaffirmation of why, in the end, work is simply another nasty four letter word that darkens our vocabulary.

As a case-in-point, I offer the following vignette:

It was suggested today that perhaps the weekly 2-hour meeting that we were all sitting in was not sufficient to get us to the root cause of any of the issues that keep getting thrown around week after week. Someone daringly offered up the suggestion that a solution might be found by way of scheduling an informal weekly follow-up meeting to the already scheduled weekly 2-hour meeting. Let that sink in for a moment. The solution to one unproductive meeting is to continue to hold it, but to then schedule a second meeting to discuss the same topics that were at issue in the first meeting.

Someone, some brave soul, might have there suggested that the solution to solving problems might be found by sending the whole group out of the conference room and back to our desks, waiting voice messages, backlogged email, and, you know, actual work. While we all cast looks askance at one another, not one intrepid fool among us floated that idea. Our fate was plainly sealed.

Some days I wonder what the hell we’re doing here… but mostly I just shrug, roll my eyes, and trudge on towards close of business.

Lost Not Found…

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As part of my highly specialized and important position, one of the duties I’m saddled with is performing oversight of a 750 seat auditorium. It’s like being on the event staff at a concert hall that never puts on an event more interesting than the 100-meter snooze or a Gregorian chant marathon.

In addition to approving reservations for such entertaining acts as Mr. Smith’s Retirement Ceremony and calling in service orders when the crack in the foundation starts leaking (again), about once a week I get to field calls from panic stricken people who have left something behind in my beautiful facility. We’ve turned up everything from briefcases, to iPads, to an entire box of key chains. More often, though, it’s a call about a cell phone or eyeglasses.

Today’s call, routed through a third party to me, inquired about a trifecta of loss – cell phone, ID card, and passport. I rolled my eyes and explained that no, no one had turned anything in matching that description. Knowing full well that the chances of any of these items being there were slim to none, I still schlepped down, unlocked the building, and poked around “where the guy thinks he might have lost them.”

Aside from a stray dime, my exhaustive search turned up nothing at all. The only thing it did accomplish is to set me thinking on what kind of human being goes the 40 miles between here and Baltimore without once realizing (or attempting to look at) his cell phone? Allowing that amount of time to elapse between checking in on the latest Tweets, posts, or headlines is just unnatural. Probably some kind of damned terrorist.

I’d just waste the rest…

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So last week Mark Zuckerberg promised to divest himself of 99% of his fortune over his lifetime. About 13 seconds later, the chattering class filled the internet with complaints that he wasn’t giving it away fast enough, or to the right causes, or that he was just structuring the donations to be a tax deduction.

Without coordinating with the founder of Facebook on where he stands on the issue, my initial response was 1) Who the hell empowered anyone to decide how fast someone should give away their own money; 2) You go ahead and pick your causes and I’ll pick mine; and 3) If you are going to give away the better part of $49 billion, you’d be absolutely insane not to plan for the tax consequences of doing so.

The super-wealthy in America have a long and noble tradition of charitable giving. The barons of the industrial age built libraries, universities, and other public institutions that still dot the country. While even in my wildest, most avaricious dreams I’m not in the company of a Rockefeller, a Carnegie, or a Zuckerberg, I pretty much want to be left alone when it comes to what I give and the causes I choose to support. In my case the causes tend to be local and animal focused almost exclusively – figuring that sick kids and the disease of the moment are always going to find reasonably strong support.

No matter how worthy your cause, telling people that they’re wrong for not donating exactly the way you do (or would) is a pretty ludicrous proposition. If you don’t like what Zuck is putting is cash behind and how it’s being structured, go on out and raise $49 billion of your own and give it away any damned way you’d like… and then remember not to claim any of it at tax time. Unless you’re planning on doing that, I’m not sure I even know what you’re talking about.

It might be helpful in this circumstance to just be glad that people like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet are doing their bit. Under the same circumstances, I’m not at all sure I’d be able to restrain myself from spending half of it on gambling, alcohol, and wild women and then just plain wasting the rest.

With that in mind, my hat’s off to the lot of them.

Sex Ed: 2015 Edition

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Every year, my employer requires me to attend several classes, the message of which seems to consist solely of “Rape Bad.” Now we could go in to the somewhat faulty logic of believing I didn’t know rape was bad until sometime during the 247 times I’ve sat through the training, but that’s an old story.

The only redeeming quality this training really has is that I get to sit in an auditorium with a large group of my peers and watch them get very, very uncomfortable every time any word even remotely adjacent to sex is mentioned. It never fails to entertain me to see how many middle age adults, who have all presumably had sex at one point or another, are utterly flustered by the topic.

This year’s version of the training consisted of two presenters whose variation of the content was a little more racy than usual. Parts of their schtick included having the group yell out words we use for a woman who has a lot of sex. You can probably guess most of what ended up on the list. Then we repeated the exercise by listing out the names we use for oversexed men. Likewise, the list was predictable. That wasn’t the best part, though.

The very best thing was perfectly unexpected and came about while the assembled group was listing off all the euphemisms for “having sex.” Hooking up, bumping uglies, doing it, greasing the weasel; it was a reasonable list. Then one of the younger people in the crowd – one of the few, I should note – shouted out the inevitable “Netflix and chill.”

And that’s when time stopped for a moment and a room full of middle age folks looked vaguely perplexed and then, slowly, some of the looks became decidedly horrified. Knowing the average age of the crowd, I can only presume that look of abject horror came on because many of them would have children in the age range where Netflix and chill is a phrase in common usage – and perhaps one that’s been slid past them when they ask little Johnny or Suzy what they’re doing on date night.

It made an awfully large group of people awfully uncomfortable… and that made me laugh. This mandatory sex ed stuff isn’t so bad if you just come to it in the right frame of mind. The more you know, indeed.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Forgetting Thursday. Most weeks, by the time Thursday rolls around I have a laundry list of potential topics to pick from. The annoyances range from monumental to petty and all are perfectly suitable for taking up a hundred or so words in print. Occasionally though, you run into a week where nothing exceptional happens and grievances are too petty to even be worth mentioning. Mercifully they don’t come along all that often or this whole effort would come to a painfully sudden stop. It’s been my experience that good times tend to make for piss poor writing.

2. Satellite Radio. I dearly love my SiriusXM radio, but it occurred to me yesterday when they renewal notice arrived $273.22 seems awfully expensive. I’m perfectly willing to pay for the joy and convenience of not needing to change a channel from one side of the country to the other, but honest to God shouldn’t something called a “Music Royalty Fee” be included as part of the standard bill for a device whose purpose, largely, is to play music. An entirely separate $33.34 line item for this does seem a touch excessive me. I like Sirius. I want to find a more reasonable price point so I can justify keeping my subscription. As it stands, though, there’s too much competition online that’s free or cheap for me to fork over the better part of $300.

2. “Christians didn’t do anything about the KKK.” In response to the question “Why don’t Muslims do more to stop the radicals among them,” the immediate response seems to be “well Christians didn’t do anything about the KKK.” Except that’s not true at all. In 1954 President Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard to ensure the integration of Little Rock High School. In 1964 the FBI under Director Hoover flooded into Mississippi to break the grip of the KKK on the local justice system. Federal agencies have continued to infiltrate and prosecute all manner of hate groups from then right through to the present day. The second half of the 20th century was never my primary area of study, but I do seem to remember a fair number of whites who went south to register voters, help organize boycotts, and generally be part of the process. With that being said I’m assuming the counter question being asked is really “what did ‘white people’ do to curtail the activities of white hate groups, I think the answer you’re looking for is “a lot.” I can’t speak for anywhere else, but when the KKK shows up “on parade” here in Cecil County, it’s mostly six old guys on the courthouse steps. They might not be dead, but they’re sure as hell defanged compared to where things stood in 1950, dontcha think?

Gotcha…

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Hard as it might be to believe, seven years have passed since I brought home a diminutive chocolate Labrador puppy that had spent the first weeks of her life in a Millington, Tennessee garage. Mama didn’t make it through the birthing process and the room full of pups was bound for the local shelter sooner rather than later. Hand feeding and the constant upkeep of the small herd had proved too much for the resident humans to manage any longer.

MaggieAs these stories so often start, I wasn’t planning on getting another dog. Actually I was, but I wanted to get through Christmas before starting the search in earnest. Dragging a two month old dog on one of my transcontinental road trips wasn’t high on my list of things to do. Or it wasn’t until a colleague of mine at the time posted a sign offering “free to a good home” and then proceeded to tell me the backstory.

In one of the better snap decisions I’ve ever made, I told the boss I was going to have a look at these dogs and I might be late coming back from lunch. Even at that I hadn’t planned to come back with a dog that day. I really just wanted to look things over. It was supposed to be a start to the “looking” process, not an acquisition. That’s what it was, or rather what it started out as – right up to the point where the door to the garage opened and an army of wagging tails charged out.

There was a lone chocolate in that sea of black. Unlike the others, she didn’t rush out into the room. While her litter-mates sought to occupy every bit of space simultaneously, she hung back – not quite cowering in the presence of the unfamiliar, but in no hurry to greet it either. She was satisfied to find a quiet spot away from the maelstrom and observe. Maybe that’s why the tumblers clicked home. I scooped her up for a closer inspection. With a sniff she seemed satisfied and promptly fell asleep tucked under my arm like a fuzzy football. Some decisions are made for you.

My lunch that day ended up taking a bit longer than planned, although the boss didn’t seem to mind since he went home with a lab of his own later that afternoon. All told, I think my office ended up taking in four or five pups from that litter, but I’ll forever think that my girl was the best of them.

Flash to bang…

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The time it takes to go from “flash to bang,” is an allusion to the time between a round impacting on target and when an observer hears the sound of that impact. Essentially it’s a low tech method of determining the amount of distance between you and whatever caused the bang. There are vagaries such as terrain and weather that intervene, but in principle sound travels at about 350 meters per second, therefore if flash to bang is 2 seconds, you’re 700 meters away – and that probably makes you way closer than you want to be to whatever is being pummeled.

In common usage down on the cube farm, flash to bang is used to mean the time between when you make a decision to the time that decision reaches fruition. The flash to bang on wanting a cup of coffee to getting that cup of coffee is generally very short. For other seemingly mundane tasks which seem like they should be accomplished quickly, such as publishing things to a website or getting a memo signed, the flash to bang could be months.

There’s no good reason for it, but as a professional lifetime spend tending to such things has taught me, that’s just the way it is. The lesson here, perhaps it’s the Zen of the Bureaucracy, is to try not to take it personally, shun emotionally entangling yourself with however long “the system” takes to do something. As a cog ex machina you don’t have any actual control over those things. Like terrain or weather you can influence them a bit around the margins, but getting from flash to bang is just going to take however long it takes.