Category Archives: Business

Deception…

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In the universe of the bureaucratic underling, few things are more highly sought after than a cubicle next to a window. Generally assigned based on seniority in rank or time in service, it’s one of the small things that can make a cube feel less like a 5×8 coffin and more like an actual productive work area.

Sometimes, of course, appearances are deceiving. When you show up in a new office and there’s a prime window seat with your name on it, tread carefully. In any normal office, this seat would have been fought over and allocated long before you showed up. If it’s sitting empty, consider it a warning sign… Like the beautiful house on the tree lined street never quite seems to stay sold, there’s a fair chance this cube has problems. Someone might have died there in harness and it’s haunted or at a minimum it’s cursed by one or more of the myriad problems that tend plague a cubicle and all those who dwell in them.

If there’s any good news to be had it’s that not much in life is permanent. You’ll probably get a chance to move into something more attuned to your needs (eventually). Of course you’ll be leaving behind the window, but if a career in service has taught me anything, it’s that windows are easy enough to come by, but you only get a finite amount of sanity to shepherd you through 30+ years of toil. If you ever had to pick between the window and some sanity, it’s what you’d call no contest.

For more helpful tips someone really should have mentioned before letting you go to work as an office drone, don’t forget to get your very own copy of Nobody Told Me: The Cynic’s Guide for New Employees.

Adverts…

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WordPress makes it mercifully easy to keep a mosty respectable blog up and running without forcing you to master all the behind the scenes nonsense. I’ve long since given up on ever wanting to be by own webmaster. It would just be one more thing that I don’t have time to do right and would result in doing a half-assed job that would, in turn, make me crazy.

There are a few things, that WordPress lets you tweak without forcing you into managing your own page. This morning, while I was renewing my lease on adfreebannerhttp://www.jeffreytharp.com and making sure it mapped over to WordPress, I picked up one of these extra options.

Starting today, you should be reading this and every other post completely ad free. If I’m going to spend time making sure you have daily updates, pour ridiculous amounts of time into other projects, and make a half-hearted effort at marketing it, the only ads I want you to see are the ones that put cash in my own pocket. I guess we’ll find out this time next year if the return on investment pays off. Even if it doesn’t in a purely dollars and cents terms, running ad free gives the place a much cleaner look. That by itself is probably worth eating a little extra cost.

The next time you see an advert featured here, you can buy with confidence that you are helping to subsidize my writing habit, rather than putting money in the cold hands of a faceless corporation. With that in mind, why don’t you go ahead and check out the Retail Partners list to the left of this post and find yourself something to read?

The taming of the American truck…

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Note: Over in the “About” tab, I once promised that this wasn’t going to be a place you’d necessarily want to come to hear a discussion about “how big my engine is.” I hope you’ll forgive this one small exception to policy without demanding that I redefine the blog, its purpose statement, or who I am as a writer.

I’ve driven two Fords over the years. The first was a ’68 Torino GT with a 302 cubic inch (4.9L) small block V8 and 210 horses under the hood. The second was a 2006 Mustang GT with a 4.6L V8 and 300 horses. Of course I realize nether of those are trucks, but they do speak to my general taste in engine size and configuration. My current ride is a truck (though not a Ford) and it weighs in at 5.7L and 381 horsepower. Sure, the gas mileage in all three of these V8 wonders was crap, but they all had just a little more “go” to give every time I put my foot to the floor and that made every fuel stop worth the few extra dollars it cost.

Now I see Ford is in the process of neutering the venerable F-150 line, offering a paltry 2.7L V6 for the green-nicks who for some reason want a full sized truck that’s also profoundly underpowered. Ford’s only V8 offering will be their 5.0L, turning 360 horse. It’s a fine engine, but not what you expect in a class of truck that use to sport 6.2L and 411 horses. And certainly not the size engine I’d want under the hood of my truck.

Maybe the days of the throaty, powerful V8 engine are doomed as the world seems happy enough to putter around in underpowered 2.something liter rattle traps. If that’s the case, the Tundra and I are going to be acquainted for a long time to come, because I’ll run it until the floorboards rust through before I think that dropping a baby V6 into a full sized vehicle is a good idea. Fuel efficiency is well and good and smaller cars absolutely have a place in the fleet, but for the sake of all that’s holy can we please not turn all our trucks into Rangers and S-10’s?

On tap…

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I know a few weeks ago I promised a new fiction project was in the offing. I haven’t forgotten about that. It’s safe to say the preliminary research and reading have taking a touch longer than I anticipated, but it’s still there on the agenda. I’ll try to make a fresh start of it after the inevitable mayhem and chaos that surrounds the last days of December. I’m not even going to even try putting a date on when that little gem might be ready to see the light of day.

Lest you think I’ve spent the last month dithering about to no good purpose, I do have a touch of good news for what’s on tap in the coming weeks. What Annoys Jeff this Week: 2013 in Review is coming along nicely. With plenty of fresh, snarky commentary, I’ve spent a lot of time tweaking, correcting, and generally updating each post to make it the very best level of vaguely hostile I can manage.

Assuming I don’t fall down and hit my head on something hard or develop the same debilitating sickness that laid me low last Christmas, I expect to deliver up WAJTW:2013IR for your New Year’s Day reading pleasure (plus or minus a few days). My best guess is the final cut will weigh in around 23,000 words and with all of the spelling, grammar, and usage corrections I’ve been making, the whole thing should be downright readable… something that doesn’t matter all that much when you’re blogging, but that paying customers seem to put a premium on for some reason.

All that’s left to do is finish editing October and November, finish writing December, write the intro, design the cover, and then upload everything to the interwebs and hope it all looks good together electronically. Sigh. Maybe I should reconsider that first of the year date.

Bare minimum…

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The year was 1994, or approximately the end of the last ice age. I was 16 years old, worked 20 hours a week and McDonald’s, and minimum wage was $4.25 an hour. Flash forward to 1998. I was 20, worked about 16 hours a week as a student dispatcher, and made $5.15 an hour. Jump two years into the future. I was 22, worked 40 hours a week as a first year teacher and made $15.38 an hour. Climb into the Way Back Machine for one more ride to 2008. I was 30 years old, with an undergraduate degree and an MBA, working for Uncle Sam, and making a multiple of $15 an hour.

So what’s my point? Nothing much other than giving you a little background and assuring you that when I say working in fast food and making minimum wage sucks, that it’s a situation I know a little something about. It sucks a lot. As someone who cleaned grease traps, unloaded truckloads of frozen foods, and filtered the fryers, I’m uniquely postured to say that with a degree of authority. Although the job sucks, I can’t bring myself to see that it sucks badly enough to justify paying basically the same wage I made as a first year teacher. After all, that job sucks for a whole different list of reasons… and not just that, it requires a 4-year degree, testing, certification, and a relatively clean criminal background check. Yes, dare I say it, teaching is more important work than flipping burgers and the compensation should be commensurate with that.

There is nothing in my experience of working minimum wage jobs that tells me anyone should make $15 an hour based on the work’s level of difficulty. Of course level of difficulty really isn’t the argument. In all the cases I’ve heard, the reason is simply that they should make $15 an hour because they need more money. I hear ya, brothers and sisters. I need more money too. But you see, I never “just” worked my part time minimum wage job and expected it to be enough to get by. I cut grass in the summers and shoveled snow in the winters. I collected aluminum cans and cashed them in for pennies. That was all side work on top being a pretty successful full time student and on top of my part time job. Even now that I’m outside that $15 an hour range, I’m not above picking up cans from the side of the road, or taking on an occasional side job, or writing a damned book about my experiences and selling it online.

Let’s be brutally honest, there aren’t many of us who are working as hard as our grandparents did. I’ve never come out of deep mine after eight hours underground coated in coal dust. My young life wasn’t put on hold to take four years off to go liberate Europe. I’m not up at 4AM to milk the cows. I’ll bet most of the fast food workers who think they need $15 an hour aren’t any of these things either. And for the record, I’m not saying they should be doing those things. All I’m saying is that what I really want to see is what they’re doing to improve their employment options beyond holding up a sign and demanding more money. Not everyone needs to go to college and get a job wearing a tie, but if you’re strolling around waiting for your CEO to pay you more just because you think it’s what you deserve, well, I hope you’re dressed warm because you’re in for a long wait.

Maybe you can’t put a value on a human life, but the market can damned sure put a value on the work we do with the life we’re given. It’s up to each of us to maximize what our labor is worth… and if you personally find it worth $15 an hour, I’d recommend you set your sights a little higher than grill jockey at the local greasy spoon.

What to get for the guy who hates everything…

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If I may be so bold as to make a Christmas shopping recommendation for everyone, I’ll take this opportunity to remind you that books make excellent gifts… and I’m not just saying that because I want you to give my books to Coverpeople. Although, if you choose to give the gift of Jeff, you can pick give the electronic or paperback edition of Nobody Told Me: A Cynics Guide for New Employees from Amazon. If you’ve gone all electronic or just want to stick it to Amazon, the ebook is also available from Barnes & Noble and Smashwords.

I know there are a few of you who are always looking for a deal, so in that spirit if you purchase your ebook from Smashwords, I’m offering a $1 discount from now until December 25th. Enter CW57P when you check out and you’ll receive the promotional price of $1.99.

Let’s face it, Nobody Told Me: A Cynics Guide for New Employees, is just about the perfect gift for the guy who hates everything.

Upgrade me…

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I’ve given up on try talking myself out of having the latest, greatest iteration of Apple’s phones and tablets. That sooner rather than later I’ll end up with one of the two new iPads announced this afternoon is a foregone conclusion. Now it’s a simple question of which one I’ll bring home with me.

I’ve really come to like the size of the current Mini as opposed to the “full sized” original iPads. My only disappointment from my Mini is the non-retina display. It’s been sort of like going back to standard definition television after watching everything in HD. Sure, you can do it and it’s perfectly serviceable, but it’s well off the mark from being optimal. The new Mini resolves that issue and adds a whole lot of added horsepower to boot. Of course with the new full sized model being a slimmed down version of its former self, it’s a tossup which one is going to end up being my go-to tablet for the next year.

The only thing I know for sure is after last month’s fiasco of waking long before the crack of dawn and standing in line for four hours to be met with “sorry, sold out.” I won’t be lining up for this launch. I don’t mind standing in line when I know I’m going to have something to show for the trouble, but with Apple product launches I no longer have that old warm fuzzy that they’re going to fill their own supply chain first before making units available for other retailers. Whenever they can ship it to me from China is just going to have to be fast enough this time around.

Millions and millions sold…

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Everyone expects “revolutionary” from Apple. The truth is they only really do revolutionary once or twice in a decade. Once they set the market it’s all about making evolutionary changes. Evolutionary is precisely how I’d describe the iPhone 5s. It feels exactly the same in hand as the 5. Aside from the new color options, you’d probably never know it was a new device until you fired it up and saw what was “under the hood.”

The 5s, not surprisingly runs iOS7 like a champion. It’s a very snappy performer at every task I’ve thrown at it in four days. The new camera is the real game changer for me. I think they’ve finally improved it to the point where I won’t even be tempted to drag along a stand alone point and shoot camera when I go somewhere. For you photogs, it’s obviously not SLR quality, but hey, it’s a phone and not a $1000 camera, so there’s that. The OS itself is starting to grow on me. It still feels a little too colorful for me, but I have to admit the interface is very slick once you get use to it. There are plenty of toggles and options to control how iPhone behaves, but at the end of the day you’re still in Apple’s walled garden so some options are limited. Fortunately, most of us don’t by iOS or Apple products because we want to tinker with the innards.

Apple issued a press release today that cited over 9 million iPhone 5s and 5c variants sold over this past weekend. I have no doubt that’s how many were ordered since early Friday morning, but there’s no way that’s how many phones they put in hands over the last three days. The buying experience has really been the only blemish on what I otherwise consider a pretty remarkable phone. Whether you blame rolling out in too many countries, over estimating demand of the 5c models, or manufacturing challenges with the fingerprint reader, Apple had far fewer “flagship” models available in their retail stores than they have in past years. My best estimate is that they had no more than 400-500 on hand at Christiana Mall on Friday at launch. Of course that only matters if you’re committed to getting your hands on a phone on day one. Fortunately for me, Best Buy stepped in and filled the gap left in Apple’s own retail supply chain.

The bottom line? It’s a great phone, a solid performer, and absolutely the best phone I have ever owned. I have no regrets upgrading from the 5 to the 5s. If you’re sitting on a 4s, it’s probably a “must have” upgrade.

The wee small hours of the morning…

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Unbidden, I woke up at 3AM this morning, as if my brain were hard wired to Apple’s central hive in Cupertino. It’s iPhone launch day… sort of. It’s pre-order day for the iPhone 5c – the new polycarbonate-shelled, mid-priced successor to the iPhone 5. Even though I’m not in the market for the “c” variant, my internal clock still managed to rattle me awake in the wee small hours of the morning. Sadly that means being in for a long Friday with way less sleep than usual to get me through to the weekend. C’est la guerre.

It shouldn’t be a particular surprise that I’m holding out for the 5s, the new glass and aluminum Apple flagship. In previous years, this morning would have been pre-order time for it too, but some combination of marketing, constrained supply, and production factors mean that the only options for its first day of ability are buying directly from a retail store on the 20th or ordering online that morning and waiting (if all goes well) until the middle of the following week to take delivery. My plan for next Friday remains a footrace between my dislike of crowded spaces and an equally strong attraction to having a new toy at the first possible moment.

So for next Friday, my choices seem to come down to this:

Option #A – Wake up at 2:30 AM, drive to Delaware, get in line in the pre-dawn darkness and hope that the local Apple Store has stock on hand by the time I get to the front of the line; or

Option #B: Wake up at 2:30 AM, direct my browser to http://www.apple.com, hit refresh until the site comes back online, complete the order process, wait for a confirmation email, go back to bed until 5:00 AM, go to work, and then wait for four or five days for the FedEx truck to back down the driveway; or

Option #C: Waiting until the supply chain is refilled from the early adopter rush, walk into the local Apple Store and buying a phone a month from now. It also involves about a month’s more patience than I have on tap at any given time.

So really, it comes down to A or B… Both bad options in different ways. Option A is a roll of the dice regarding whether they’ll have the unit I’m looking, whereas Option B is an exercise in at least minor amounts of patience. Unfortunately, because I’m upgrading a current line, these options are also mutually exclusive – meaning I don’t think there’s any way to order one online at 3AM and the go try getting my hands on one a few hours later from the retail store.

With a week to go, I remain decidedly undecided.

A taxing case of hypotheticals…

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I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a fan of tax-free shopping on the internet. Of course I know that theoretically I’m supposed to self-report and pay Maryland state sales taxes due on the items I purchase, but… Yeah. I’m going to invoke the 5th Amendment and not discuss the particulars of what I may or may not do.

As a Republican, I should probably be up in arms about this “new” tax, but as a Constitutionalist, it’s pretty well established (i.e. expressly written) that the Congress has every right to fiddle with interstate commerce as it sees fit. As much as I wish it otherwise, my reading of the tea leaves is that the collection of state income taxes by internet retailers is going to become a fact of life sooner rather than later. Do I like it? No, of course not. Am I going to gird myself for battle against it? No, not so much. I’ve got limited brain power and limited time to dedicate to causes and this isn’t going to become part of the long list of the windmills I enjoy tilting at from time to time.

If I were a good patriot who disagrees with state and federal tax policy, I’d hypothetically vote with my dollars – and have as many hypothetical major purchases as possible shipped for in store pickup in Delaware, where at least for the time being can hypothetically continue to avoid onerous state sales taxes and excessive commercial regulation. Of course if I were really to take by business out of state, I’d obviously file the appropriate quarterly tax forms with the Comptroller of Maryland in accordance with whatever batshit crazy laws the legislature has passed.