Saturday, October 29, 2011
Photographs and memories.
This is an experiment. A sizable chunk of my leisure time over the past few years has been devoted to perambulations with and photographing of a once sizable herd of cats and dogs, so from time to time I'll post some of the pictures. Spending time with the non-2-legged has not necessarily changed my perspective on much of anything; nevertheless, it may have fleshed it out some, or filled in gaps, or simply demonstrated that some things may be more clearly viewed from somewhere other than 68 inches above the ground, the plane occupied by my eyes. This is Chewbacca, by the way--better known as Chewie or sometimes Chewmonster, and, by some in the "Flickrverse," as "the superstar."
Waste
Enjoyed my usual Friday lunch with my parents yesterday. At some point in conversation with my father, talk turned toward combines (the humongous machines used to harvest grain, not NFL scouting combines, etc.). He’s in the market for a new one (well, new to him--he doesn’t have a quarter to half a million dollars or more for a brand-new, state-of-the-art machine with a $15,000 seat, etc.). He is also not sure what to do with his old one. He was talking to a neighbor who had a couple of old combines, or parts of them, stored in sheds and barns, who told Dad that he had once asked a combine repair guy what the old motors, which were still in practically mint condition, might be worth. “Surprisingly, nothing,” the man said. “These old motors will run forever, so nobody ever has to replace one.” So there are hundreds, maybe thousands of perfectly good combine motors rusting away in barns and sheds and salvage yards all over the country, partly because nobody has stepped forward with a potential use for them (trust me, I would step forward, if I had any brilliant ideas).
I was thinking about that during this morning’s perambulations with assorted critters in the bean field to the south of me. The beans were harvested weeks ago, but for some reason I started noticing a lot (relatively speaking) of beans that were left behind by the combine, mostly because they were too close to a weed-overrun fence line, or in corners outside the turning arc of the machine, or in wrinkles of terrain that the combine’s head, because of its sheer size, simply passed over. In the general scheme of soybean farming, what was left behind didn’t amount to much, but multiply that field by hundreds or thousands of others and you would probably have a pretty impressive pile of beans.
It would be too easy, and in fact to some degree inaccurate, to call those left-behind beans--which did their job, they grew and matured as best they could in conditions this past summer that were, well, “suboptimal” in terms of rain, etc.--and rusting combine motors a metaphor for the American middle and working classes, but the temptation is there. In the case of neither the combine motors nor the beans was their ultimate waste due to deliberate intent of the farmer, however. The farmer did not profit from refusal to maximize their potential.
Contrast that to what corporations, in concert with the federal government, have done to American workers over the three decades since Reagan and his “trickle-down” economics entered the picture. Essentially they maximized their own immediate profits by ensuring that nothing “trickled down;” in fact, an argument could be made that they reversed the “trickle”--dollars they did not pay us enhanced their profits.
Unfortunately, with their slow but relentless destruction of the middle and working classes, they’ve laid waste to unfathomable amounts of human potential. Instead of reinvesting in the workers who helped build their companies, they’ve basically done the opposite.
These same “job creators” who are crying that the relative pennies spent on social programs are “mortgaging our children’s futures!” are the people who have ensured that many of our children HAVE no real future.
At some time in the future--and probably not the distant future--when historians conduct an autopsy on the corpse of the United States of America, they’ll probably find that the source of the fatal cancer was rooted in the 1980s, with the overt shift from a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” to a government “of the few, by the few, and for the few”--the 1%; when "what's good for General Motors is good for America" became "what's good for General Motors is good for, um, General Motors management and stockholders, and if something happens that is NOT good for same, taxpayers will fix it for them."
Imagine the possibilities if they truly HAD let some of the profit "trickle down," if they had invested in the potential of American workers rather than simply exploited it?
If there ever is an epitaph for this country, maybe we should just borrow the one Herman Wouk used for Youngblood Hawke, from the novel of that name: "Death is only a sadness. Tragedy lies in waste."
I was thinking about that during this morning’s perambulations with assorted critters in the bean field to the south of me. The beans were harvested weeks ago, but for some reason I started noticing a lot (relatively speaking) of beans that were left behind by the combine, mostly because they were too close to a weed-overrun fence line, or in corners outside the turning arc of the machine, or in wrinkles of terrain that the combine’s head, because of its sheer size, simply passed over. In the general scheme of soybean farming, what was left behind didn’t amount to much, but multiply that field by hundreds or thousands of others and you would probably have a pretty impressive pile of beans.
It would be too easy, and in fact to some degree inaccurate, to call those left-behind beans--which did their job, they grew and matured as best they could in conditions this past summer that were, well, “suboptimal” in terms of rain, etc.--and rusting combine motors a metaphor for the American middle and working classes, but the temptation is there. In the case of neither the combine motors nor the beans was their ultimate waste due to deliberate intent of the farmer, however. The farmer did not profit from refusal to maximize their potential.
Contrast that to what corporations, in concert with the federal government, have done to American workers over the three decades since Reagan and his “trickle-down” economics entered the picture. Essentially they maximized their own immediate profits by ensuring that nothing “trickled down;” in fact, an argument could be made that they reversed the “trickle”--dollars they did not pay us enhanced their profits.
Unfortunately, with their slow but relentless destruction of the middle and working classes, they’ve laid waste to unfathomable amounts of human potential. Instead of reinvesting in the workers who helped build their companies, they’ve basically done the opposite.
These same “job creators” who are crying that the relative pennies spent on social programs are “mortgaging our children’s futures!” are the people who have ensured that many of our children HAVE no real future.
At some time in the future--and probably not the distant future--when historians conduct an autopsy on the corpse of the United States of America, they’ll probably find that the source of the fatal cancer was rooted in the 1980s, with the overt shift from a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” to a government “of the few, by the few, and for the few”--the 1%; when "what's good for General Motors is good for America" became "what's good for General Motors is good for, um, General Motors management and stockholders, and if something happens that is NOT good for same, taxpayers will fix it for them."
Imagine the possibilities if they truly HAD let some of the profit "trickle down," if they had invested in the potential of American workers rather than simply exploited it?
If there ever is an epitaph for this country, maybe we should just borrow the one Herman Wouk used for Youngblood Hawke, from the novel of that name: "Death is only a sadness. Tragedy lies in waste."
Friday, October 28, 2011
Information Over(under)load.
Speaking of cats . . . . A few years ago I had a kitten named Mina whom my then-wife termed my “little princess.” When she was maybe 2 months old I started taking her outside, where I would sit down on the front step with her on my knee, and watch her as she contemplated the world. She would look everywhere, mostly with her nose--sniffing the usually light breeze, amazed and awed and intimidated by things I could neither see nor otherwise sense.
Mina died last year, and now, in addition to two other dogs (and five cats), I have a 6-month-old boxer/beagle-mix puppy, Cecil. Every night Cecil and I go sit out on the porch for a while. He LOVES to sit on my lap and sniff at the world, at once intrigued and intimidated by whatever he smells on the air; Nina’s (other dog) furious barking from all corners of the yard; distant headlights coming up the highway. I cannot even imagine how the world must appear to him when it is dark, yet he can smell and hear and see so much more than I can, and he has so little experience with this little universe.
Cecil runs and plays with Nina during the day, but at night, when Nina is all guard-dog, ferocious and protective and constantly vigilant, she must seem an entirely different, and in some ways, frightening creature to him.
With so much continuous and possibly seemingly contradictory--the dog he knows as playmate when it is light outside, fierce wild creature at night, for instance--incoming information, life must be confusing for Cecil sometimes.
Maybe he would be happier if he had never been exposed to “fierce Nina,” if he still knew her only as playmate.
That’s the trouble with information, I suppose--how can you know when it becomes too much. Or conversely, when you don’t have enough?
I get that feeling when wandering about the web, sometimes. For every “fact” you find, every opinion, there are countless contradicting “facts” and opinions. Trying to sift through it all and find some sense-making “thread” tying it all together, can be as overwhelming as all the sounds and smells and sights must have seemed to kitten Mina, sitting on my knee in balmy Mississippi air, so many years ago, or to Cecil, sitting on my lap a couple of hours ago.
Too much information, too much stimulation.
But the flipside of that particular coin may be as bad, or worse.
Came across a term the other day, “isolation paranoia.” I don’t know--couldn’t figure out from whatever Google found for me--whether that is an actual psychological condition or not. Basically it means that when you’re isolated from other people, specifically in a work situation, you tend to become paranoid. You start wondering what it “means” if you haven’t received a daily communication from your supervisor, for instance. You wonder about phantoms, essentially.
Example: I am part of a team of “remote” transcriptionists working on several accounts scattered across the country (the accounts AND the transcriptionists). One of our larger accounts recently underwent a changeover to an electronic medical record, EMR. We were only told that the account was switching over to a new platform, something like that, but then, suddenly, all the transcriptionists assigned to that account were finding “no job available” when they signed on for their shifts. After a few days of utter confusion, they finally informed us about the switch to EMR. Now, on most accounts and in most remote transcription jobs I’ve had until now, we--the transcriptionists--have never really been able to communicate with each other. We’re hundreds or thousands of miles apart, no longer have even regular conference calls. On this team, though, the supervisor decided to create a virtual “water cooler” for us--she made a private Facebook group and invited us all to join.
I don’t know if her bosses would have approved of that--communication among employees in most companies is generally discouraged, but from what I’ve seen so far, it has been a godsend to a whole bunch of people who work together yet never see or chat with each other.
And I’m seeing “isolation paranoia” in action.
Perceived “non-communication” becomes as fraught with meaning as actual “communication.” When you’re a “remote” employee, working in more or less a vacuum, you start to “see,” or sometimes “imagine,” things going on which are somehow just out of your reach, just outside your field of vision.
You start to get used to hearing the fiercely barking Nina, then she goes suddenly silent--ohmigod, is she hurt??? What’s going on???
The daily stat reports you used to receive and be pissed off by? Suddenly they go away, but nobody tells you why. What does that mean?
At our virtual water cooler, our Facebook group, the term “mushroom treatment” has popped up a few times recently. You know, “I am a mushroom. I must be a mushroom--they keep me in the dark and feed me bullshit.”
Then the company president sent out a memo that was supposed to “inform” us, but left most of us--and we are ALL language specialists, remember--mostly confused.
Too much information, too little . . . It is becoming increasingly difficult to know one from the other.
Mina died last year, and now, in addition to two other dogs (and five cats), I have a 6-month-old boxer/beagle-mix puppy, Cecil. Every night Cecil and I go sit out on the porch for a while. He LOVES to sit on my lap and sniff at the world, at once intrigued and intimidated by whatever he smells on the air; Nina’s (other dog) furious barking from all corners of the yard; distant headlights coming up the highway. I cannot even imagine how the world must appear to him when it is dark, yet he can smell and hear and see so much more than I can, and he has so little experience with this little universe.
Cecil runs and plays with Nina during the day, but at night, when Nina is all guard-dog, ferocious and protective and constantly vigilant, she must seem an entirely different, and in some ways, frightening creature to him.
With so much continuous and possibly seemingly contradictory--the dog he knows as playmate when it is light outside, fierce wild creature at night, for instance--incoming information, life must be confusing for Cecil sometimes.
Maybe he would be happier if he had never been exposed to “fierce Nina,” if he still knew her only as playmate.
That’s the trouble with information, I suppose--how can you know when it becomes too much. Or conversely, when you don’t have enough?
I get that feeling when wandering about the web, sometimes. For every “fact” you find, every opinion, there are countless contradicting “facts” and opinions. Trying to sift through it all and find some sense-making “thread” tying it all together, can be as overwhelming as all the sounds and smells and sights must have seemed to kitten Mina, sitting on my knee in balmy Mississippi air, so many years ago, or to Cecil, sitting on my lap a couple of hours ago.
Too much information, too much stimulation.
But the flipside of that particular coin may be as bad, or worse.
Came across a term the other day, “isolation paranoia.” I don’t know--couldn’t figure out from whatever Google found for me--whether that is an actual psychological condition or not. Basically it means that when you’re isolated from other people, specifically in a work situation, you tend to become paranoid. You start wondering what it “means” if you haven’t received a daily communication from your supervisor, for instance. You wonder about phantoms, essentially.
Example: I am part of a team of “remote” transcriptionists working on several accounts scattered across the country (the accounts AND the transcriptionists). One of our larger accounts recently underwent a changeover to an electronic medical record, EMR. We were only told that the account was switching over to a new platform, something like that, but then, suddenly, all the transcriptionists assigned to that account were finding “no job available” when they signed on for their shifts. After a few days of utter confusion, they finally informed us about the switch to EMR. Now, on most accounts and in most remote transcription jobs I’ve had until now, we--the transcriptionists--have never really been able to communicate with each other. We’re hundreds or thousands of miles apart, no longer have even regular conference calls. On this team, though, the supervisor decided to create a virtual “water cooler” for us--she made a private Facebook group and invited us all to join.
I don’t know if her bosses would have approved of that--communication among employees in most companies is generally discouraged, but from what I’ve seen so far, it has been a godsend to a whole bunch of people who work together yet never see or chat with each other.
And I’m seeing “isolation paranoia” in action.
Perceived “non-communication” becomes as fraught with meaning as actual “communication.” When you’re a “remote” employee, working in more or less a vacuum, you start to “see,” or sometimes “imagine,” things going on which are somehow just out of your reach, just outside your field of vision.
You start to get used to hearing the fiercely barking Nina, then she goes suddenly silent--ohmigod, is she hurt??? What’s going on???
The daily stat reports you used to receive and be pissed off by? Suddenly they go away, but nobody tells you why. What does that mean?
At our virtual water cooler, our Facebook group, the term “mushroom treatment” has popped up a few times recently. You know, “I am a mushroom. I must be a mushroom--they keep me in the dark and feed me bullshit.”
Then the company president sent out a memo that was supposed to “inform” us, but left most of us--and we are ALL language specialists, remember--mostly confused.
Too much information, too little . . . It is becoming increasingly difficult to know one from the other.
Manufacturing Crisis
Walking outside with the dogs and cats this very windy afternoon, found myself mentally free-associating (that is, meandering down various paths, sort of like web surfing, if that’s a term, anymore), starting with Occupy Wall Street, moving from there (somehow) to language, to language of the workplace, language specifically of my workplace, language differences between, say, Cape Cod and San Antonio, which led me somehow to thinking about my religious sister’s matter-of-fact proclamation one day a few weeks ago that there would be no 2012 elections because President Obama (well, she didn’t say “president;” she never refers to him as the president) would manufacture a crisis, declare martial law and cancel the election.
And somehow that led me back to Occupy Wall Street. It occurred to me that someone will probably start preaching that President Obama and his socialist minions orchestrated OWS as just the kind of crisis that could compel him to declare martial law. It also occurred to me that, if the idea had sprung into my head, likely it had already sprung into the heads of others. So when I got back inside, I googled it--and sure enough, no less an “authority” than Glenn Beck had floated the idea a couple weeks ago and people have been running with it.
Of course, this makes perfectly good sense. The same President Obama whose lack of leadership experience (he was a community organizer, for heaven’s sake!) makes him an utter failure as a president, in their eyes, nevertheless could mobilize a national, or rather, international “grass roots movement” (well, he WAS a community organizer, for heaven’s sake!) that could bring down a 223-year republic of 300 million people, probably half of whom hate him.
It doesn’t strike me as a particularly plausible scenario.
That said, I do fear that OWS will end badly. Before it’s over, someone is going to be dead--probably several someones. Among the thousands of protesters, and the thousands (?) of people who hate them, there are more than a few potential Jared Loughners--people with guns and axes to grind. Depending upon who is the first to die, there will be retaliation--if a Wall Street bank gets shot up, what happened out in Oakland is going to look like a picnic. If a group of protesters gets shot up, there will be a different kind of retaliatory violence.
Yes, Kent State COULD happen again, and personally I think that more likely than not.
I’m neither a psychologist nor a sociologist, but it seems to me that the mix of despairing, angry groups of people on one side, and stressed-out, hugely outnumbered police on the other, plus external stresses like impending bad weather, is a potentially deadly one.
One unstable person, on either side, with a gun could transform these largely peaceful demonstrations into riots.
Could imposition of martial law then become a possibility? Disturbing thought, although I think it would be hard to justify imposing it nationwide, rather than selectively--specifically in those cities where the demonstrations have become riots.
That’ll teach me to walk around with dogs and cats.
And somehow that led me back to Occupy Wall Street. It occurred to me that someone will probably start preaching that President Obama and his socialist minions orchestrated OWS as just the kind of crisis that could compel him to declare martial law. It also occurred to me that, if the idea had sprung into my head, likely it had already sprung into the heads of others. So when I got back inside, I googled it--and sure enough, no less an “authority” than Glenn Beck had floated the idea a couple weeks ago and people have been running with it.
Of course, this makes perfectly good sense. The same President Obama whose lack of leadership experience (he was a community organizer, for heaven’s sake!) makes him an utter failure as a president, in their eyes, nevertheless could mobilize a national, or rather, international “grass roots movement” (well, he WAS a community organizer, for heaven’s sake!) that could bring down a 223-year republic of 300 million people, probably half of whom hate him.
It doesn’t strike me as a particularly plausible scenario.
That said, I do fear that OWS will end badly. Before it’s over, someone is going to be dead--probably several someones. Among the thousands of protesters, and the thousands (?) of people who hate them, there are more than a few potential Jared Loughners--people with guns and axes to grind. Depending upon who is the first to die, there will be retaliation--if a Wall Street bank gets shot up, what happened out in Oakland is going to look like a picnic. If a group of protesters gets shot up, there will be a different kind of retaliatory violence.
Yes, Kent State COULD happen again, and personally I think that more likely than not.
I’m neither a psychologist nor a sociologist, but it seems to me that the mix of despairing, angry groups of people on one side, and stressed-out, hugely outnumbered police on the other, plus external stresses like impending bad weather, is a potentially deadly one.
One unstable person, on either side, with a gun could transform these largely peaceful demonstrations into riots.
Could imposition of martial law then become a possibility? Disturbing thought, although I think it would be hard to justify imposing it nationwide, rather than selectively--specifically in those cities where the demonstrations have become riots.
That’ll teach me to walk around with dogs and cats.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
"What are words for, if no one's listening anymore."
I’ve admittedly not paid as much attention to the Occupy Wall Street movement as I should have until only recently, so have been playing “catch-up” over the past few days. When you live at home and work alone, and spend the majority of your free time in the company of dogs and cats, it can be easy to lose touch, intentionally or not, with the “real” world.
Still, I’ve paid enough attention to know that the OWS folks are not making any specific demands; that is even one of the knocks on them from some quarters.
I’ve also paid enough attention to know that a pretty broad spectrum of society is represented--the protesters aren’t all college students, or all poor people, or all urban or rural or Yankee or Californian or New Yorker or southern or Midwestern; they are not all unemployed, they are not all disgruntled post office workers; and, so far, at least, they’re not putting up guillotines or mobbing perceived “rich” people.
Seems to me that, mostly, they are interested in “fairness.” It’s not that 1% of the population is “rich,” but rather that the “more” they have has grown so geometrically quickly, while the “less” the 99% have has shrunken nearly as geometrically quickly.
Picture two snowballs: One, rolled downhill, adds layers, grows larger and larger; the other, rolled uphill, if at all, grows little, if at all. After 20 years or 30 years of rolling, the first snowball is enormous, couldn’t be moved with a fleet of earthmoving equipment; the other, despite working as hard as it can, could still be the middle section of a 3-snowball snowman built by happy 7-year-olds.
Basically they seem to be asking why, if "a rising tide lifts all boats," tide seems to be so picky-and-choosey in deciding which boats it will lift, in this particular case. It's as if the tide rolled in and picked just one boat to lift out of the hundred tied up at the dock. There's something wrong, here.
To me it seems the OWS’s complaints are valid (of course, I am one of the 99%). They are not demanding handouts--or anything else, really. They want only to be heard, and they want everyone to become aware that this growing discrepancy between the 1% and the rest of us could very well end up destroying us. It has destroyed more than a few of us, already.
So then I read about a “backlash” organization, the “53%”--based on the “fact” that 47% of the citizens of this country pay no income taxes. That 47% just really pisses the 53% off. They don’t seem to be aware of precisely who comprises that 47% un(income)taxed people--elderly on social security, people who don’t make enough money (because the jobs they do have been annually devalued for at least 20-30 years), etc. There are a LOT of working people in that 47%, but the 53-percenters seem to be unaware of that.
They also seem to believe that OWS is demanding more government assistance, more “handouts.”
Obviously, they are not paying attention--they are not listening. They’re just seeing a bunch of goddamn lazy losers trying to get more of their hard-earned dollars. Or something.
“What we have here is a failure to communicate.” No matter how much “communication,” via email and Twitter and Facebook, et al, we seem to be doing.
Maybe we really are destined for the dustbin of history. And sooner, rather than later.
Still, I’ve paid enough attention to know that the OWS folks are not making any specific demands; that is even one of the knocks on them from some quarters.
I’ve also paid enough attention to know that a pretty broad spectrum of society is represented--the protesters aren’t all college students, or all poor people, or all urban or rural or Yankee or Californian or New Yorker or southern or Midwestern; they are not all unemployed, they are not all disgruntled post office workers; and, so far, at least, they’re not putting up guillotines or mobbing perceived “rich” people.
Seems to me that, mostly, they are interested in “fairness.” It’s not that 1% of the population is “rich,” but rather that the “more” they have has grown so geometrically quickly, while the “less” the 99% have has shrunken nearly as geometrically quickly.
Picture two snowballs: One, rolled downhill, adds layers, grows larger and larger; the other, rolled uphill, if at all, grows little, if at all. After 20 years or 30 years of rolling, the first snowball is enormous, couldn’t be moved with a fleet of earthmoving equipment; the other, despite working as hard as it can, could still be the middle section of a 3-snowball snowman built by happy 7-year-olds.
Basically they seem to be asking why, if "a rising tide lifts all boats," tide seems to be so picky-and-choosey in deciding which boats it will lift, in this particular case. It's as if the tide rolled in and picked just one boat to lift out of the hundred tied up at the dock. There's something wrong, here.
To me it seems the OWS’s complaints are valid (of course, I am one of the 99%). They are not demanding handouts--or anything else, really. They want only to be heard, and they want everyone to become aware that this growing discrepancy between the 1% and the rest of us could very well end up destroying us. It has destroyed more than a few of us, already.
So then I read about a “backlash” organization, the “53%”--based on the “fact” that 47% of the citizens of this country pay no income taxes. That 47% just really pisses the 53% off. They don’t seem to be aware of precisely who comprises that 47% un(income)taxed people--elderly on social security, people who don’t make enough money (because the jobs they do have been annually devalued for at least 20-30 years), etc. There are a LOT of working people in that 47%, but the 53-percenters seem to be unaware of that.
They also seem to believe that OWS is demanding more government assistance, more “handouts.”
Obviously, they are not paying attention--they are not listening. They’re just seeing a bunch of goddamn lazy losers trying to get more of their hard-earned dollars. Or something.
“What we have here is a failure to communicate.” No matter how much “communication,” via email and Twitter and Facebook, et al, we seem to be doing.
Maybe we really are destined for the dustbin of history. And sooner, rather than later.
Sacrifice
With some time off this week and, until today, nice weather, I’ve had time to spend sitting out on the front porch, reading an actual book (with printed pages and everything! I didn’t even have to plug it into surge protector!). Why I picked “Walden,” I’m not sure; certainly it turned out to be a serendipitous choice because it gave my mental kaleidoscope a half-twist and my whole view changed.
Perhaps most important, it changed my view of the “1%” to whom the share of America’s wealth has so inequitably shifted (or been transferred to by tax policies, among other factors). Instead, now I see that our corporate leaders have all embraced Thoreau’s espousal of a simpler, less encumbered life, and collectively they are striving to channel American workers to the same. In order to do this, they sacrifice their own potential freedom from luxury, opulence and all the hindrances to a truly “good” and “well-lived” life so as to preserve our freedom from the same. They know, as Thoreau said, that we are often more possessed by our possessions than the other way around, so they struggle mightily to ensure that we can never afford to be encumbered by so many of them.
It strikes me also that many of them have taken up Michelle Obama’s fight against childhood obesity. A diet of beans and rice would be a healthy one, and so the children of the 99% will be channeled economically to beans and rice, simultaneously sparing them life-threatening temptation of richer fare. If to do that means keeping the 99% from being able to afford a more varied diet, well, the 1% will sacrifice by carrying more of the burdensome profit themselves.
It stuns me that I’ve missed until now the incredible generosity of the 1% and how they’ve so sacrificed their own freedom from wealth in order to ensure our own. It is the economic equivalent of throwing themselves on a hand grenade, just to save the rest of us. I am humbled by my belated recognition of this.
Perhaps most important, it changed my view of the “1%” to whom the share of America’s wealth has so inequitably shifted (or been transferred to by tax policies, among other factors). Instead, now I see that our corporate leaders have all embraced Thoreau’s espousal of a simpler, less encumbered life, and collectively they are striving to channel American workers to the same. In order to do this, they sacrifice their own potential freedom from luxury, opulence and all the hindrances to a truly “good” and “well-lived” life so as to preserve our freedom from the same. They know, as Thoreau said, that we are often more possessed by our possessions than the other way around, so they struggle mightily to ensure that we can never afford to be encumbered by so many of them.
It strikes me also that many of them have taken up Michelle Obama’s fight against childhood obesity. A diet of beans and rice would be a healthy one, and so the children of the 99% will be channeled economically to beans and rice, simultaneously sparing them life-threatening temptation of richer fare. If to do that means keeping the 99% from being able to afford a more varied diet, well, the 1% will sacrifice by carrying more of the burdensome profit themselves.
It stuns me that I’ve missed until now the incredible generosity of the 1% and how they’ve so sacrificed their own freedom from wealth in order to ensure our own. It is the economic equivalent of throwing themselves on a hand grenade, just to save the rest of us. I am humbled by my belated recognition of this.
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
We're all riders on this train . . . .
A long time ago I worked briefly (2 days, or maybe 3 or 4 days if you count the orientation--I've managed to forget how interminably long that orientation seemed to last) for a "big box store." I was going to be a night stocker (not stalker)/cashier, which sounded like a good fit for me at the time, for a variety of reasons I may or may not enumerate here. The job paid minimum wage or thereabouts, so you would think the expectations of its performers would be, um, minimal.
"Minimal" has been redefined over the years, obviously.
Minimum-wage me was expected to average somewhere north of 100 "swipes" across the scanner per minute, for instance--again, don't remember exact numbers, but more than one swipe per second. Probably that is possible if someone trundles up a cart full of, say, canned mushrooms; if instead the trundled cart is full of kids' clothing, well, it gets a bit more complicated. Or impossible. Plus, as a night stocker/cashier, you were expected to be at restocking the department at the far northwest corner of the store while at the same time keeping an eye on the cash register at the southeast corner--and woe be unto you should you make the customer wait more than 22 seconds for you to arrive.
There ARE people who can do this. I wasn't one of them.
Sometime before that I worked as an office coordinator (glorified secretary) in the general pediatrics section at a children's hospital. I happened upon that job at a time when that particular section was being "studied" by some sort of "efficiency expert." The efficiency expert basically wandered around, probably with some sort of design or purpose although it was impossible to see from the "outside," taking notes and making checkmarks on a clipboard. After a few weeks I asked him how I was doing, checkmark-wise. "You actually come out pretty well," he said. Too-long conversations with physicians I worked with/for were marked as "work discussion," whether they were or weren't, for instance. A lot of what I considered "time wasters" were, in the statistician's view, necessary and valuable and, whatever. And I suppose there was a case to be made for that, from a purely human standpoint--I would have been able to "produce" more without the human interaction, but the human interaction, the time I spent talking to, or, more often, listening to the human beings with whom I worked probably made for a better workplace environment for all of us--and that in itself probably increased our "productivity."
It has been close to 20 years since that experience, and I no longer remember what, if any, recommendations the efficiency expert made. He was a consultant--a pigeon who flies in from more than 20 miles away, craps on stuff, then flies back on out, or something like that.
In my current job--medical transcription--we get these reports every week or two telling us how many "gross" lines per hour (and a lot of the operative notes really are gross) we've produced, compared to "net" lines per hour--that is, the lines we produced while actually typing/editing, not counting time we spent researching stuff or going to the bathroom or letting cats/dogs in/out the door, etc. The reports are essentially meaningless to us, because they never provide benchmarks to which we can compare ourselves (and if the company for which I work DID provide such benchmarks, I would automatically doubt them, would assume that their numbers were just pulled out of the air or the head of a corporate suit).
We've all become so "quantified." Any humanity to which we once clung has been "bean-counted" out of the workplace.
I understand the "need" or craving or whatever it is we seem to have for statistics, for numbers--but if we rely only on numbers, how can we quantify or qualify the human element, the "Human Touch" (my subject line is a line from the Bruce Springsteen song of that name, by the way)? The talking/listening I did with/for my co-workers/bosses at that children's hospital may not have shown up in the "bottom line" for the hospital or even for our particular clinic, but I think it mattered. That I can produce 250 lines an hour or whatever in my current job may also matter to someone's bottom line--but maybe I could do 300 if I didn't spend so much time researching/googling terms, or trying to catch an ESL ("English as a second language," you know, foreign) dictator's accent and trying to figure out what he MEANT to say, as opposed to what he actually DID say. Maybe the time I spent chatting about the day's heavy snow and the horrendous heating prices, mostly to fill time (not KILL time), with the elderly lady who was fishing with trembling hands and painstaking slowness for the few items in her cart killed my productivity stats for the two days I worked at that box store (in fact I know it did), but how much of "me" would it have killed NOT to spend the time with her?
At some point, doesn't humanity have to count for more than numbers?
"Minimal" has been redefined over the years, obviously.
Minimum-wage me was expected to average somewhere north of 100 "swipes" across the scanner per minute, for instance--again, don't remember exact numbers, but more than one swipe per second. Probably that is possible if someone trundles up a cart full of, say, canned mushrooms; if instead the trundled cart is full of kids' clothing, well, it gets a bit more complicated. Or impossible. Plus, as a night stocker/cashier, you were expected to be at restocking the department at the far northwest corner of the store while at the same time keeping an eye on the cash register at the southeast corner--and woe be unto you should you make the customer wait more than 22 seconds for you to arrive.
There ARE people who can do this. I wasn't one of them.
Sometime before that I worked as an office coordinator (glorified secretary) in the general pediatrics section at a children's hospital. I happened upon that job at a time when that particular section was being "studied" by some sort of "efficiency expert." The efficiency expert basically wandered around, probably with some sort of design or purpose although it was impossible to see from the "outside," taking notes and making checkmarks on a clipboard. After a few weeks I asked him how I was doing, checkmark-wise. "You actually come out pretty well," he said. Too-long conversations with physicians I worked with/for were marked as "work discussion," whether they were or weren't, for instance. A lot of what I considered "time wasters" were, in the statistician's view, necessary and valuable and, whatever. And I suppose there was a case to be made for that, from a purely human standpoint--I would have been able to "produce" more without the human interaction, but the human interaction, the time I spent talking to, or, more often, listening to the human beings with whom I worked probably made for a better workplace environment for all of us--and that in itself probably increased our "productivity."
It has been close to 20 years since that experience, and I no longer remember what, if any, recommendations the efficiency expert made. He was a consultant--a pigeon who flies in from more than 20 miles away, craps on stuff, then flies back on out, or something like that.
In my current job--medical transcription--we get these reports every week or two telling us how many "gross" lines per hour (and a lot of the operative notes really are gross) we've produced, compared to "net" lines per hour--that is, the lines we produced while actually typing/editing, not counting time we spent researching stuff or going to the bathroom or letting cats/dogs in/out the door, etc. The reports are essentially meaningless to us, because they never provide benchmarks to which we can compare ourselves (and if the company for which I work DID provide such benchmarks, I would automatically doubt them, would assume that their numbers were just pulled out of the air or the head of a corporate suit).
We've all become so "quantified." Any humanity to which we once clung has been "bean-counted" out of the workplace.
I understand the "need" or craving or whatever it is we seem to have for statistics, for numbers--but if we rely only on numbers, how can we quantify or qualify the human element, the "Human Touch" (my subject line is a line from the Bruce Springsteen song of that name, by the way)? The talking/listening I did with/for my co-workers/bosses at that children's hospital may not have shown up in the "bottom line" for the hospital or even for our particular clinic, but I think it mattered. That I can produce 250 lines an hour or whatever in my current job may also matter to someone's bottom line--but maybe I could do 300 if I didn't spend so much time researching/googling terms, or trying to catch an ESL ("English as a second language," you know, foreign) dictator's accent and trying to figure out what he MEANT to say, as opposed to what he actually DID say. Maybe the time I spent chatting about the day's heavy snow and the horrendous heating prices, mostly to fill time (not KILL time), with the elderly lady who was fishing with trembling hands and painstaking slowness for the few items in her cart killed my productivity stats for the two days I worked at that box store (in fact I know it did), but how much of "me" would it have killed NOT to spend the time with her?
At some point, doesn't humanity have to count for more than numbers?
Monday, October 24, 2011
Amazing stuff
Or weird, anyway: Just popped over to see how Monday Night Football was doing, and saw Baltimore quarterback's stat line for the first half: 6 of 16 pass attempts completed, for a total of 8 yards. That's amazing. Must set a record for "bad day at the office."
Language
As noted before, I'm a medical transcriptionist, or, as they've begun calling us now, a "medical language specialist." Whether that change came about as a way of trying to describe more accurately what we do--it ain't all about typing fast--or whether it was just another managerial bone tossed to a bunch of dogs in order to make them feel "better" about themselves or "more empowered," I don't know. Given that the change in title did NOT bring with it more actual income, I suspect it was just a bone.
Whatever we are--medical transcriptionist (MT) or medical language specialist (MLS)--we have to possess some facility with the language. We are not necessarily all writers, but we all DO--we MUST--pay attention to, and CARE about, words and their meanings, and MUST forever be aware of the context in which they're used. We HAVE to know, and care about, the difference between "its" and "it's," between "they're" and "their" and "there." We MUST care about "nuance," how the same word may mean one thing in one context, something altogether different in another.
The majority of people apparently care about none of this, and I suppose that's okay, in everyday life--as long as communication is happening, fine. With a medical report that's carved in proverbial stone (or computer program, ether, whatever), it DOES matter, and we have to care.
So, we--MTs/MLSs--maybe have a more acute sense of linguistic bullshit than many other people do.
And there is a lot of linguistic bullshit flung about in today's workplace.
"Personnel" offices became "Human Resources" quite a while back--it was an "empowerment" "thing." "Layoffs" became "downsizing" became "reallocation of resources" (as a nurse manager I used to work with said, it means "you have been reallocated to the unemployment line") became (my personal favorite) "headcount reduction."
A "head" is a person, by the way. Just in case any of y'all lost sight of that uncomfortable fact.
I can barely remember a time--think 1970s--when corporate bosses used to seem to be honestly sorrowful when economic forces of nature forced them to "lay people off." It wasn't long after that, though, that they became sort of "matter-of-fact" about it. Not long after THAT, they began taking pride in how many heads they could count, how many people's lives they could destroy--hell, they got BONUSES for it.
But they're not to blame. They've invented language to absolve themselves from any of THAT. For instance, I once-upon-a-time worked at a hospital in Kansas City. We got a new CEO in about 1992 (with "connections" to the Clintons, everybody said all breathlessly) who promised "NO LAYOFFS." But there might be, um, "reductions in force" via "attrition," etc. He wouldn't be personally responsible for that, of course--he would direct his "people" (and he brought a whole herd of them with him) to direct THEIR people to cut their budgets by 10%. In our section, we'd already carved costs to the bone--our budget was 90-something percent "personnel"--you know, "people"--and we didn't really have as many of those as we needed. Yes, people saw their jobs disappear. But the CEO wasn't to blame--the department heads were.
Sometimes I find it difficult even to fathom what incredibly self-centered, selfish assholes these CEOs can be. I accept that they must sometimes make hard decisions, and that the decisions may, will hurt real people, but that those decisions MUST be made. If you're going to MAKE those decisions, at least have the balls to own up to them, and to take the responsibility for them.
Yeah, yeah, I know--it's just business, not personal. But it can become pretty fucking personal when you're the one suddenly without a job. The CEOs, and the politicians, too, need to stop hiding behind words and simply take responsibility. Stop feeding us bullshit. Tell us the truth: "I'm here to feather my own nest, and to hell with all of you little people."
Whatever we are--medical transcriptionist (MT) or medical language specialist (MLS)--we have to possess some facility with the language. We are not necessarily all writers, but we all DO--we MUST--pay attention to, and CARE about, words and their meanings, and MUST forever be aware of the context in which they're used. We HAVE to know, and care about, the difference between "its" and "it's," between "they're" and "their" and "there." We MUST care about "nuance," how the same word may mean one thing in one context, something altogether different in another.
The majority of people apparently care about none of this, and I suppose that's okay, in everyday life--as long as communication is happening, fine. With a medical report that's carved in proverbial stone (or computer program, ether, whatever), it DOES matter, and we have to care.
So, we--MTs/MLSs--maybe have a more acute sense of linguistic bullshit than many other people do.
And there is a lot of linguistic bullshit flung about in today's workplace.
"Personnel" offices became "Human Resources" quite a while back--it was an "empowerment" "thing." "Layoffs" became "downsizing" became "reallocation of resources" (as a nurse manager I used to work with said, it means "you have been reallocated to the unemployment line") became (my personal favorite) "headcount reduction."
A "head" is a person, by the way. Just in case any of y'all lost sight of that uncomfortable fact.
I can barely remember a time--think 1970s--when corporate bosses used to seem to be honestly sorrowful when economic forces of nature forced them to "lay people off." It wasn't long after that, though, that they became sort of "matter-of-fact" about it. Not long after THAT, they began taking pride in how many heads they could count, how many people's lives they could destroy--hell, they got BONUSES for it.
But they're not to blame. They've invented language to absolve themselves from any of THAT. For instance, I once-upon-a-time worked at a hospital in Kansas City. We got a new CEO in about 1992 (with "connections" to the Clintons, everybody said all breathlessly) who promised "NO LAYOFFS." But there might be, um, "reductions in force" via "attrition," etc. He wouldn't be personally responsible for that, of course--he would direct his "people" (and he brought a whole herd of them with him) to direct THEIR people to cut their budgets by 10%. In our section, we'd already carved costs to the bone--our budget was 90-something percent "personnel"--you know, "people"--and we didn't really have as many of those as we needed. Yes, people saw their jobs disappear. But the CEO wasn't to blame--the department heads were.
Sometimes I find it difficult even to fathom what incredibly self-centered, selfish assholes these CEOs can be. I accept that they must sometimes make hard decisions, and that the decisions may, will hurt real people, but that those decisions MUST be made. If you're going to MAKE those decisions, at least have the balls to own up to them, and to take the responsibility for them.
Yeah, yeah, I know--it's just business, not personal. But it can become pretty fucking personal when you're the one suddenly without a job. The CEOs, and the politicians, too, need to stop hiding behind words and simply take responsibility. Stop feeding us bullshit. Tell us the truth: "I'm here to feather my own nest, and to hell with all of you little people."
Please allow me to introduce myself . . .
I'm a man of no wealth and little taste, to paraphrase the bard of wherever he's from, Mick Jagger.
My day job (well, more accurately, early afternoon/evening job) is medical transcription: I transcribe medical reports dictated (spoken) by doctors and others (nurses, social workers, et al) who live and work a thousand miles away from me, in a place I've never been and to which I likely never will go, which is kinda weird, when I think about it, and NOT, at the same time--I number among my Flickr friends and Facebook acquaintances many people who live and work multiple thousands of miles away from me, in places I've never been and to which I likely never will go.
Physically, I live out in the country, 9 miles from the nearest tiny town, 18 miles from a town somewhat larger, yet probably not quite qualifying as a "city," no matter what it calls itself and no matter that the local university has a nationally known (among universities of a certain size, that is) football team. I'm dead smack in the middle of what people on the coasts like to call the "flyover zone," and I like it here--keep right on flying over, thank you very much. When the light hits them just right and the sky is blue enough, the contrails of your jets are wayyyyy cool!
Somewhat surprisingly, I don't miss living in the "big town" ("still hayseed enough to say, hey, look who's living in the big town!" Thank you, Mr. Mellencamp). Sometimes I wish I could get a pizza delivered, or Chinese, and sometimes I wish there were someplace I could go to walk where there were actually other people to gawk at and wonder about, try to imagine the lives of, but those wishes come less and less frequently with every sunrise I view from my front porch, in the company of my dogs and cats, especially when I've accidentally made a good cup of coffee and it is steaming in my hand.
I haven't figured out yet what this blog is going to be "about." When I first set out to do it, I had a pretty clear idea (well, for me it was clear): The "Occupy Wall Street" movement, or whatever it is, had set me off on a soul-searching meander through my working past and working present, and determined me to turn on my inner rant--and we all have "inner rants"--let "my voice be heard," etc. We all want our voices to be heard, right?
But then it occurred to me that my ranting voice, while valid and all that, is not my only voice, or even my main voice.
While there would be no shame or embarrassment, or whatever, in being defined by my ranting voice, neither would I want it to define "me," any more than I want to or can be defined, as a person, by the job I do. My ranting voice is part of me, my job is part of me, but neither one is "all" of me.
So I've decided that, yes, I will rant sometimes (eloquently, I hope, but at least with all the words spelled right), but other times I will talk about dogs and cats and wayward possums and maybe the occasional bald eagle. My job, my status as a worker in a decidedly worker-unfriendly age, is a part of my life, but the other stuff--the dogs and cats and possums and eagles--is what fleshes it out, what makes life matter to me. The "other stuff" is my life; work is just a helpful way to structure my day (and pay the mortgage, of course).
My day job (well, more accurately, early afternoon/evening job) is medical transcription: I transcribe medical reports dictated (spoken) by doctors and others (nurses, social workers, et al) who live and work a thousand miles away from me, in a place I've never been and to which I likely never will go, which is kinda weird, when I think about it, and NOT, at the same time--I number among my Flickr friends and Facebook acquaintances many people who live and work multiple thousands of miles away from me, in places I've never been and to which I likely never will go.
Physically, I live out in the country, 9 miles from the nearest tiny town, 18 miles from a town somewhat larger, yet probably not quite qualifying as a "city," no matter what it calls itself and no matter that the local university has a nationally known (among universities of a certain size, that is) football team. I'm dead smack in the middle of what people on the coasts like to call the "flyover zone," and I like it here--keep right on flying over, thank you very much. When the light hits them just right and the sky is blue enough, the contrails of your jets are wayyyyy cool!
Somewhat surprisingly, I don't miss living in the "big town" ("still hayseed enough to say, hey, look who's living in the big town!" Thank you, Mr. Mellencamp). Sometimes I wish I could get a pizza delivered, or Chinese, and sometimes I wish there were someplace I could go to walk where there were actually other people to gawk at and wonder about, try to imagine the lives of, but those wishes come less and less frequently with every sunrise I view from my front porch, in the company of my dogs and cats, especially when I've accidentally made a good cup of coffee and it is steaming in my hand.
I haven't figured out yet what this blog is going to be "about." When I first set out to do it, I had a pretty clear idea (well, for me it was clear): The "Occupy Wall Street" movement, or whatever it is, had set me off on a soul-searching meander through my working past and working present, and determined me to turn on my inner rant--and we all have "inner rants"--let "my voice be heard," etc. We all want our voices to be heard, right?
But then it occurred to me that my ranting voice, while valid and all that, is not my only voice, or even my main voice.
While there would be no shame or embarrassment, or whatever, in being defined by my ranting voice, neither would I want it to define "me," any more than I want to or can be defined, as a person, by the job I do. My ranting voice is part of me, my job is part of me, but neither one is "all" of me.
So I've decided that, yes, I will rant sometimes (eloquently, I hope, but at least with all the words spelled right), but other times I will talk about dogs and cats and wayward possums and maybe the occasional bald eagle. My job, my status as a worker in a decidedly worker-unfriendly age, is a part of my life, but the other stuff--the dogs and cats and possums and eagles--is what fleshes it out, what makes life matter to me. The "other stuff" is my life; work is just a helpful way to structure my day (and pay the mortgage, of course).
Sunday, October 23, 2011
The Habit of Seeing
There is a certain freedom that comes to you when you both realize and acknowledge that your life will never be fodder for a "reality" show, that you are distressingly normal and undoubtedly never will become a rich reality star or even a Kardashian (what IS a "Kardashian," anyway? Is that from "Star Wars," one of the prequels? Certainly it sounds like a creature that would drive Captain Kirk or Spock or Deanna Troi to distraction).
The realization/acknowledgement, conversely, gives one freedom to blog. Like those people out in Arizona or wherever who doggedly send radio signals randomly out into space, in the mostly forlorn hope that someday the signals will be heard by an alien culture that doesn't want to turn them into food, and might even message back, you can sit down, write words, and send them out into the ether, then come back and do the same thing tomorrow. Of such are our tomorrows made, right?
I'm a newbie to this whole blog thing, and had a hard time even coming up with a title. My first choice, "The Habit of Seeing," was already owned by somebody. (Which is irritating because it would have been perfect for me, damn it! It's a play on my photography hobby and on a book by Flannery O'Connor, "The Habit of Being," which really was just a collection of letters she had written over several decades. Read that book and you feel you come to know her, which is a trick.)
The title I eventually settled on--"Slow Change, Troubles and Doubts," comes from an old song by Simple Minds (which aptly describes me, albeit in the singular form), "Don't You Forget About Me." "Slow change" was part of one line, "troubles and doubts" part of another. I've always loved the song, and figured that my mixing-and-matching lyrics, chances are no one else would have come up with that particular combination before. It also works for me because I'm slow to change, and have ALWAYS been about "troubles and doubts," it's what I do best.
(It's so weird calling that song "old," by the way--I still hear it on the radio from time to time, but it dates from the early 1980s. Which makes it old, but new at the same time.)
Thought briefly about calling the blog "Ritalin," for more or less the same reason Simon and Garfunkle, or Simon, anyway, named a song "Kodachrome"--"don't take my Kodachrome away." I could sing the same about Ritalin, if I were actually on it (probably should be).
To get back to "the habit of seeing," I occasionally take pictures, and likely will post some of them here. Carrying a camera around, with the intent of actually using it, forces you to develop the "habit of seeing." Among all the habits I have, and all the habits I could name, that might be the only one worth any kind of while.
Once I get through this introduction stuff, I'll actually get down to blogging.
The realization/acknowledgement, conversely, gives one freedom to blog. Like those people out in Arizona or wherever who doggedly send radio signals randomly out into space, in the mostly forlorn hope that someday the signals will be heard by an alien culture that doesn't want to turn them into food, and might even message back, you can sit down, write words, and send them out into the ether, then come back and do the same thing tomorrow. Of such are our tomorrows made, right?
I'm a newbie to this whole blog thing, and had a hard time even coming up with a title. My first choice, "The Habit of Seeing," was already owned by somebody. (Which is irritating because it would have been perfect for me, damn it! It's a play on my photography hobby and on a book by Flannery O'Connor, "The Habit of Being," which really was just a collection of letters she had written over several decades. Read that book and you feel you come to know her, which is a trick.)
The title I eventually settled on--"Slow Change, Troubles and Doubts," comes from an old song by Simple Minds (which aptly describes me, albeit in the singular form), "Don't You Forget About Me." "Slow change" was part of one line, "troubles and doubts" part of another. I've always loved the song, and figured that my mixing-and-matching lyrics, chances are no one else would have come up with that particular combination before. It also works for me because I'm slow to change, and have ALWAYS been about "troubles and doubts," it's what I do best.
(It's so weird calling that song "old," by the way--I still hear it on the radio from time to time, but it dates from the early 1980s. Which makes it old, but new at the same time.)
Thought briefly about calling the blog "Ritalin," for more or less the same reason Simon and Garfunkle, or Simon, anyway, named a song "Kodachrome"--"don't take my Kodachrome away." I could sing the same about Ritalin, if I were actually on it (probably should be).
To get back to "the habit of seeing," I occasionally take pictures, and likely will post some of them here. Carrying a camera around, with the intent of actually using it, forces you to develop the "habit of seeing." Among all the habits I have, and all the habits I could name, that might be the only one worth any kind of while.
Once I get through this introduction stuff, I'll actually get down to blogging.
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