Fact check…

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I’ve seen a couple of posts banging around the interwebs today that claim if we just gave every American a slice of the upcoming Powerball jackpot, everyone would get about $4.33 million and we could dispense with poverty forever. It’s a fun idea, except for the part where the math is utterly wrong.

With a estimated cash payout of about $868 million and about 300 million Americans that works out to $2.89 per person… or enough for everyone to get themselves a extra large coffee from Dunkin Donuts. While I’m not theoretically opposed to the everyone-gets-coffee scheme, I think it’s pretty clear that it’s a long way from “curing” poverty.

It’s a stone fact that for a handful of people in the next few days life is most likely going to take a radical departure from its current trajectory. It’s not going to lead to a chicken in every pot, although that makes for a nice little story on the internet.

Unfortunately it also illustrates nicely why fact checking shouldn’t just be for history majors.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Delmarva Power. There’s an issue with my power bill. I called their “customer service” number Monday night and was met with a 50-minute estimated wait time. That’s not going to happen, so I called back Tuesday morning. The wait time for that call was a sleek 27-32 minutes. They split the difference and I waited half an hour to be immediately told by the CSR that the system is down and they can’t answer any questions. They did offer to call back when their system is up, which is fine I guess, but what I really want is to determine when I talk to my vendors myself rather than sitting around looking forlorn like a 14 year old girl waiting for her true love to call. After blasting them on social media, someone did reach our to me and promised I’d get a call back “sometime” in the “next few business days”. Fifty hours later. Still waiting.

2. Staffing. In order to send any information outside the organization you need approximately 4,587 separate lines of approval. It’s not necessarily hard work, but it is what some might call tedious. Reaching the point where something is approved for release always feels like something of any accomplishment… but the best part is when you get something fully staffed, vetted, socialized, and approved only to be notified two hours after you hit send for the final time that someone at Echelons Higher than Reality has decided to “go a different direction.

3. The sky is falling. Look gang, I’m not a fancy big city investment banker, but despite the thrashing Wall Street has taken this week the sky really isn’t falling (yet). The Dow made its high in May of last year. We’re down in the neighborhood of 10% off that high – that’s the operative definition of a correction – but still a ways off from a bear market. If you haven’t jumped out well before now, the only thing cashing out in this market does is lock in whatever loss you’ve suffered. If I were in danger of retiring next year I’d be a little more worried. As it is, I’d say it’s time to stack some cash and do a bit of hedging. If that doesn’t work for you, just win yourself a Powerball Jackpot and you’re all set.

H-bomb of justice…

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When the world around you seems to be driving full tilt towards batshit crazy, at least you can count on North Korea to kit it up a notch. With discord and dissension the order of the day at home and wars simmering across the Middle East, it’s like the two bit dictator of our favoriteKimbackwater just needs to rattle his cage a bit so the world remembers he’s there – and doing whatever it is you do when you’re the undisputed liege and master of earth’s most isolated nation.

Good work, Dear Leader. You’ve reminded us all of the basic absurdity of, well, everything. While world leaders may have to treat you as a serious threat to global peace and safety, I think your antics are just delightfully entertaining. The long-departed Nero only fiddled while Rome burned. Kim Jong, on the other hand, seems to be happiest running from house to house with his personalized book of matches and flinging them indiscriminately at whatever catches his fancy. It must be a charmed life. I mean, why wouldn’t it be, the ladies seem to dig him.

Paying for it…

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I’ve always read that people who don’t have a plan for what they’re going to do in retirement are the ones that end up bored or worse – longing to return to the orderly days of life at work. While a two week vacation hardly qualifies as a dry-run for retirement I can say with at least some degree of certainty that a really detailed plan to fill my days may not be strictly necessary when the big day comes.

For the last week or so I’ve mostly done as the spirit moved me. I ate when I was hungry, slept when I was tired, and filled in the other hours cooking, tinkering around on minor repair projects that time never seems to be found for, devising less-than-lethal anti-squirrel devices, and reading. To put it simply, I excel at simply puttering around the house and doing whatever strikes my fancy. I think I could be ok doing that for a long, long time.

Of course I’m not retired – and not even on the same continent as that far off day. Now is the time (or more precisely tomorrow is the time) when I’ve got to go back to busting my hump to pay for the possibility of unlimited free time at some point in the future. As this particular winter Sunday draws to a close, I find my motivation lacking… anyone out there want to pool our funds and buy a crapload of Powerball tickets?

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. CVS Caremark. I ordered a refill on a prescription the day before Christmas. As it turns out it was a few days past its expiration, but no worries, the fine people at CVS will contact the doctor’s office for a renewal. A few days later at 7:39 PM they sent me a email that they couldn’t reach the doctor and that I needed to contact the office myself ASAP so they could process the order. No problem, except that 85 minutes later CVS sent me another email cancelling the order “since they hadn’t heard from my doctor yet.” I don’t know what kind of doctor the dipshits at CVS Caremark go to, but mine doesn’t keep office hours at 8:00 on a Tuesday night. Seems a better business practice might be to give a guy until normal business hours to respond.

2. “Single stream” recycling. If you’re going to call it that, maybe it shouldn’t be followed by a lot of exceptions – especially things that you were accepting last month like – shredded paper and plastic bags. How do you think I’m getting stuff to the dump anyway if not in plastic bags? I try to do my bit and separate as much as I can, chuck the food products out into the mulch pile, and generally cut down on what’s going directly our of my house and into the ground. In part I do it because it’s generally the right thing to do. But I also do it because up until now it was pretty easy. In the future it seems paying the extra $7 a month to dump it all as “trash” is probably easier.

3. Dog shit. Look lady, I don’t care if you are blonde and built like a swimsuit model, you’re going to pick up what your dog leaves in my front yard. Yours might not stink, but your dog’s does.

Hitting pause…

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In the interest of not committing myself to deliver something I may not feel like doing, I’m going to go ahead and state for the record that my intention over the next few days is to declare an operational pause, take a knee, and not do much writing over the next few days. I really think I could benefit from just turning my brain off and letting the system reset, so that’s the barest sketch of what I’m planning for between now and next week.

As usual, of course, I reserve the right to change my mind at any time and resume posting like a madman. It feel like even odds on whether that will happen or not. It’s hard to imagine four days passing by without something seeming noteworthy.

With that, I’ll wish you all the very best for a merry Christmas and get on about the too-long list of things that need to get don around here before sun up tomorrow.

Inevitable…

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The inevitable happened today. Somewhere at echelons higher than reality someone decided that there was a TPS Report that just couldn’t wait until after the holidays – that out there in the far reaches of our vast bureaucratic quagmire, some vital piece of information sure to bring democracy, peace, and justice to a troubled world was just laying around waiting to be reported upwards. Rank and high station may have their privileges, but getting dosed heavily by common sense isn’t among them.

What really happened today was a request for information was generated high in the stratosphere, it was typed into the computer and then passed to me “for action.” I immediately rolled my eyes, which is something I spend an inordinate amount of time doing if I can be perfectly honest. I then in turn typed my own message passing the requirement for this very important information down to the next level. When they receive it, someone will roll their eyes and ask what the fuck I’m smoking and then they will write up their own email and send it ever further down the line. Eventually it will reach the desk of some individual who knows at least some of the answer, they’ll write up a response, and then the whole great process gets thrown into reverse – with each level seeking out its own approvals, making a few changes, and then sending it upwards before an answer returns to my desk where I’ll realize that the answer-by-committee bears no resemblance to the question I asked originally. Because time has expired on the clock, that factoid won’t stop me from rolling my eyes and passing it on back up the chain.

It’s a clunky, archaic process at the best of times. Let me just say for the record, sending something out two days before Christmas and expecting a response immediately after the new year is not, by anyone’s definition, the best of times. What it is, however, is a recipe for a systemic failure at almost every level. It’s the operative definition of setting yourself up for failure.

But this is the season of yuletide, when a long dead saint rises up from his frozen tomb and alights onto his sleigh driven by eight super-natural reindeer to distribute toys constructed by enslaved elves to the world’s children. It’s the season of miracles like that… so if you just believe hard enough, maybe anything really is possible.

The darkest evening of the year…

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The winter solstice arrives at 11:49 PM EST and with it the longest evening of the year. That means tomorrow there will be fractionally more daylight time than there was yesterday. There are still a few weeks where sunrise will keep getting later in the morning, but that will be offset by gains made in the afternoon.

This is actually the second post I wrote this evening. The first took on an altogether too bleak feel that was neither desired nor intended, but that nevertheless hung over it like a shroud. Take two, here, is an effort to redeem myself by striking a slightly less emo chord.

This time of year always reminds me of a long ago English class and Robert Frost’s melancholic snowy wood. Even now twenty years later Mr. Frost’s words and Mrs. Butler’s voice are stuck firmly in my head on nights like this.

Long, dark nights didn’t bother me much back then, but the older I get the more I find myself in favor of those languid summer nights when twilight seems to hold on for hours. They’re a long way off yet, but by morning we’ll have turned the corner – sometimes that’s enough.

Preserving the illusion…

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And so tomorrow we begin Christmas week, or what I affectionately like to think of as Why the Hell Didn’t I Take the Whole Week off Week. During most slow periods I can fiddle around sufficiently to find something to keep myself busy, if not gainfully employed by the strictest definition. The week of Christmas always presents something of a challenge, though. You see, even in the bureaucracy, 95% of the people who are still around are smart enough not to try kicking off anything new – and the 5% who aren’t that bright can safely be ignored until the new year. Even on the off chance that something does come in hot, the chances of the right combination of people needed to resolve the issue satisfactorily actually being available are precisely nil.

It’s been my experience over the years that offices being “open” at all these last two weeks of December is almost a complete fiction. Sure, the lights are going to be on and there are going to be some people milling around for all the good that’ll do. It’s not quite farce, but it is only a step or two above illusion.

Rest assured, friends, I will do my part to maintain that illusion right up until the final buzzer – at which point I will scamper to the exit and promptly forget everything even remotely office related until the new year. And if you think “scamper” was an incorrect word choice, you’ve clearly never seen me leave the building at the end of the day. Only the interest of preserving some semblance of personal dignity keeps me from processing to the door at a flat out run most days. On the day leading into an 11-day weekend all bets are off.

Those days will go fast enough and the grind through 2016 will commence well before I’m ready for it… but in the meantime I’ll do my level best to enjoy every moment between now and then.