Deer

Yes, the deer surprised me.

Xena, Cecil and Nina, Chewie and Evi and I were just out enjoying the waning sunny afternoon while I was on break from work, wandering down the fence row, looking for "gold." I'm not sure which of us spooked the deer, which must have been bedded down in that copse of trees back in the field behind my house; suddenly she was just THERE, leaping up and away from us, moving so swiftly that she was almost out of range before I could even get the camera to my eye. It was only by the purest of luck that I managed to catch her in mid-leap.

I didn't get a great photo, but it sure was a great moment.

I am not a hunter, but I am not AGAINST hunting, and in fact recognize that it serves a real and valuable purpose: Deer herds multiply faster than one would imagine, and their ranks need to be thinned, plus the license fees hunters pay support conservation efforts--in fact may be the only financial support of conservation efforts, particularly in these lean days.
Still . . . How can you look at a deer flying across a golden field, and think, "Gee, I could nail that sumbitch!" How could you ever imagine that it would be more beautiful lying bloody and lifeless at your feet than flying freely across a mid-autumn bean field?

Yes, I'm a carnivore, I eat meat, and yes, I know that just a few short days or weeks ago, the steak on my plate was part of a steer happily grazing green grass in late summer sunshine (or more likely, crowded up to a trough in a feed lot). But I don't see that happy steer when I'm lifting the steak off the grill and cutting a small bite of it, "just to see if it's done." I am insulated by distance and time and geography, at least, from that steer, and so do not even associate the meat on my plate with the beautiful creature from which it came.

Then, there is the "familiarity breeds contempt" aspect, I suppose. Cattle are common, you see them everywhere (or, anyway, you did "back in the day" when I was a kid). Deer--again, when I was a kid--were much more rare, at least in the part of the country where I grew up. From the time we moved back to Missouri from Montana, when I was 8, until, well, I don't remember specifically, but it was much later, I recall seeing just ONE deer, a small doe that had somehow found her way to town, and, frightened and confused and hopelessly lost, happened to leap across a street in front of us one early morning when we were going into town for groceries or something. For us kids, or anyway for me, it was one of those magical moments that you dream about sometimes.

Now, nearly half a century later, a deer sighting is not so "special"--in fact, deer are probably more common than cattle around here. We see more deer than, say, quail, or even rabbits (which used to be common as houseflies).

Deer have become familiar.

So why, then, does the sight of one fleeing deer inspire wonder in me, rather than contempt?

Time Passages

West-northwest of me perhaps half a mile, there is huge old abandoned house. To the east of that, north-northwest of me, is a smaller, “newer” house occupied by an approximately 90-year-old World War II veteran and his wife. That neighbor’s father was born in the first house, well over a century ago. The veteran remembers walking across the field between our houses with my grandfather’s brother, on their way to catch a bus to go enlist.

The house I live in was built in 1947, reportedly by my grandmother’s brother, who, according to one of my neighbors to the immediate south (well, if you call 200-300 yards “immediate“), built most of the houses along this road. The former owners of the house, who died in their 70s three or four years ago, after having moved in after their parents, the original owners died. The farm this house and 1.6 acres were “carved out” of has been in that family’s name for more than a century, I’m told, and the “farm” part of it, the 30-acre part of it the house sits on plus 50 acres across the road, still is in their name. The house immediately to the south and the house immediately to the north (again, 200-300 yards away) also sit on patches of land that had been carved out of a farm to sell separately.

Everyone up this 2-½-mile stretch of state highway, besides me and the probably 40-something nurse who will be moving in to the house north of me, is in their sixties and seventies. I’m told the nurse has a couple of kids, so the virtually empty school bus that passes by mornings and midafternoons on school days will continue to pass by, still virtually empty.

Forty or so years ago it was different. I’ve got a second cousin my own age who grew up about a mile west; a neighbor (two miles away, on a different road) of about my own age grew up in a house a mile or so north down on the river bottom that I can see from my yard; in the house I live in were also two kids of about the same age.

Farms along here were in fact the “family farms” you sometimes still read about, and that do, I suppose, in fact still exist, here and there, scattered across the country. Fact is, though, few young families can afford to buy an existing farm, move in and go to farming. Most farms are bought by established farmers who plan only to farm the land, not live on it, as they already have houses on old family farms, which is why so many houses on farms are carved out and sold separately to people who usually are not farmers, like me (or occasionally to some who are, like my neighbor to the south, who farms something like 600-700 acres, I think--some of it land he inherited from his own father, some he bought on his own, some his wife inherited from her father, plus some he rents (including the land my own house sits on).

Equipment--combines, tractors, planters, field cultivators, sprayers, etc.--has gotten so big that one man can cover easily 3-5 times as much ground, or more, than the average farmer could even when I was a kid--and he must, in order to produce enough to pay for the equipment plus a living for himself and his family.

Every farmer I know is a descendant of farmers, but most descendants of farmers I know could never go into farming on their own, unless in partnership with their fathers, because of the enormous amount of capital required. My neighbor to the south considers himself one of the “little guys” in the farming business; forty years ago, he would have been a “pretty big operator.”

Yes, yes, times change, I understand this. What I can’t figure out, though, is WHO is going to be farming all this land in, say, 20 years, when all the farmers now in their late sixties and older either retire or get “retired” by death or disability. The youngest farmer I know is 50, and according to my father, the youngest farmer in the neighboring county is of about the same age, maybe a bit older.

The field to my immediate south and the one across the from it are owned by somebody who has gone out of the business and cash-rents the land to somebody every year. One day I was talking to another neighbor (actually the father of the nurse who will be moving into the house to my north), who said he used to farm both those fields, plus more land farther south. He pointed out some details about the contour of the land and said that whoever was farming it this year was doing it “wrong.” From what he said, I believed him. The guys who worked the land this year probably had never so much as driven over it before--they paid the rent, sent in some guys on gigantic tractors with disks bigger than any I had ever seen, along with a 24-row planter, and got the fields planted in a day. This fall they sent in two enormous combines, along with a couple of tractor-trailers to haul the grain to town, and got the fields harvested in about a day and a half.

They don’t own the land, only rent it, so they’re most interested in what they can get out of it this year, without the concern for erosion, loss of topsoil, etc. that an owner might have. Given the more environmentally friendly farming practices--specifically, no-till farming--these days, it probably doesn’t matter. Still, given what the neighbor told me, I wonder.
Interestingly, there is also a thriving Amish community in this part of the county. It is jarring to see a man with a 4-horse team pulling a 1-bottom plow on the other side of a fence from a huge 4-wheel-drive John Deere “Behemoth” or whatever they’re calling them now.

More or less across the road from me is a tiny old, largely forgotten cemetery, “home” to perhaps a couple of dozen souls, book-ended chronologically by a husband who died in 1871 and his wife, who passed in 1901. It is difficult, maybe impossible to know how many people have been buried there; there are at least three markers that have been broken off at ground level, another that at some point had been placed on top of a fence corner post. My neighbor to the south and I keep it mowed, a “tradition” assumed by my neighbor upon passage of the former occupant of my house, who had originally cleaned all the brush out of the cemetery and began tending it years ago. I’ve seen two people actually stop and look at gravestones there in the past two years or so, probably people working on family genealogies. There are perhaps half a dozen more, similarly sized cemeteries within a 5-mile radius of where I live, at least one of them still a “working” cemetery.

While in some ways it seems there is a lot of history in this little corner of an obscure Missouri county, white people have been here for less than 300 years, probably less than 200; I don’t know if there was a native American population here then or not, although arrowheads and other artifacts pulled out of the little river east of me suggest that they at least passed through occasionally. That’s not a very long history, as these things go.

What thinking about all this gives me most, I think, is a sense of how very briefly transient we all are. Certainly that’s not an original realization--everyone comes to it, at some point or another. It can be instructive, though, to look around you and try to imagine what it must have been like, a lifetime or two ago. Whether there’s any real value in it, I don’t know.

Perspective

In seventh-grade art class (yeah, we used to have to take art classes, whether we wanted to or not), we once did an exercise on “perspective.” I no longer remember exactly how it worked; seems like we made a point in more or less the center of the page, then drew lines from the corners and sides to that point, then drew buildings, cars, whatever, between those lines. Point of the exercise was to show how perspective worked (I think; I was not the teacher, obviously, and have never been an artist).

But, stand in the median of a long flat stretch of freeway, and you’ll see how it works. The eastbound lanes to your right (if you’re facing east, that is), run parallel to the westbound lanes on your left; drive your eyes down those roads, though, and eventually the parallel lines converge--they don’t stay parallel, at least not as you see it, and obviously they never diverge, start going in directions opposed to each other--unless you have a serious vision problem, some ophthalmologic disease that makes you see things opposite of how they are, or maybe how they “should” be.

What started me thinking about that was a visit from my father today.

Dad is a big-time conservative, although not so loony as, say, Sarah Palin or that clown from Texas or the pizza guy or the dog abuser or, well, I lose track of them all. His main focus is the Second Amendment, actually, and he will admit to such, although he is also not a huge fan of capital gains taxes and so forth. He is a farmer, has almost always been a farmer (while working day jobs simultaneously to keep food on the table; farming is not always the most profitable of occupations), comes from a long line of farmers. Interestingly, he is in favor of legalizing most illegal drugs, and also in favor of a woman’s right to choose, that is, abortion. He also hates liberals with a passion, has been known to talk disparagingly about Catholics (something I’ve never figured out, given that he gets along well with Catholics and doesn’t seem particularly prejudiced in his dealings with them), and would never slam the door on, say, a black person whose car has broken down and come knocking to use the telephone (now, THAT shows my age--EVERYbody has a cell phone, these days). In some ways, he is what Churchill said about Russia: “A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”

In short, he is an American, or at least one variety thereof. And there are a lot of varieties.

I do disagree with him on a lot of things. For instance, when I was a kid, I identified myself as a “Republican.” That was in the 1970s, and I was in my pre-teen and teen years. First time I voted in a presidential election was 1980, by which time I considered myself a libertarian. Over the three decades since then, working my way through all but a couple of months of them in a variety of mostly “pink-collar” jobs, I’ve begun to swing more towards the liberal point of view, if there is one.

Anyway, he came over this afternoon to pick up something stored in my shed, and we of course talked for a while. Talk turned to politics and economics, and somehow I wound up trying to explain Occupy Wall Street to him. “The occupiers are not bums or lazy or people who want handouts,” I said. “They are people who are working or have worked and want to work again, and are asking only for fairness.”

I told him that none (or mostly none) of the occupiers have any problem with capitalism or the fact that some people make more than others. The problem, I said, lay in perspective. You’ve got two lines, one the 99%, one the 1%. As the lines go forward on a graph, they should remain more or less parallel; look at them with “forward perspective,” they should ultimately converge. Instead, you’ve got the line of the 1% going up, the line of the 99% going down. Instead of converging, or at least remaining parallel, the lines diverge. And that is unnatural, the opposite of how things SHOULD work.  What was it Flannery O'Connor said?  "Everything that rises must converge"?  Yeah, it's like that.

Well, Dad isn’t a photographer, and he has probably never taken an art class, so what I was saying probably struck him as utter nonsense. To his credit, though, he DID listen.

So maybe there is hope for the Occupy movement.  "Real" people are starting to hear, and maybe even to listen.

Ted Bundy Rules!

Spent part of this windy, cold and mostly unpleasant morning contemplating the concept of “corporation” as “person,” which on the face of it seems a bit odd.

Contemplating such things with Google at your fingertips can wander you down some interesting corridors. First, for instance, I went to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary to look up “person,” just to make sure I had a complete understanding of the word. Well, apparently I did not. Definition number 6 says: “One (as a human being, a partnership, or a corporation) that is recognized by law as the subject of rights and duties.” It’s like that square/rectangle thing: A human being is a person but a person is not necessarily a human being. Similarly, I suppose, a corporation is a person, but a person is not necessarily a corporation. Or something like that.

From there, wondering how that might apply in what I had thitherto considered a person-vs.-person crime, I looked up the legal definition of murder, which, it turns out, is “the unlawful killing of another human being without justification or excuse.”

So, purely from a semantic point of view, it would not be murder for a corporation to kill a human being because, according to law, murder is the unlawful killing of “another” human being. A corporation is not a human being, despite being a person, so, yes, it can indeed get away with murder. But I guess we all knew that already.

This somehow led me to sociopaths, or people--persons--with “antisocial personality disorder.” (More “a human being is a person but a person is not necessarily a human being” stuff to follow). A sociopath (a subset of ASPD, the other subset being psychopath, I think) essentially is a “person” with no conscience. That is probably oversimplifying, but I’m pretty good at that (when I’m not overcomplicating things).

Which led me to, “It’s not personal, it’s business.” Remember that? It’s from “The Godfather,” but probably more widely known from the movie, “You’ve Got Mail,” wherein it was quoted.

A corporation lacks conscience--”it’s not personal”--despite the fact that a corporation is a person. Therefore, if indeed it IS a person, a corporation is by definition a sociopath, and probably a psychopath as well, although I didn’t delve that deeply into the distinction between the two.

Which means that we’re all working--those of us fortunate enough to be working at all, that is--for the equivalent of Ted Bundy.

Isn’t that just sooooo cool!

More on this vein later, maybe, but right now I have a large cat in my lap who is complicating even something so simple as reaching the keyboard, plus I owe him some attention (according to him).

Sorta random notes, on account of I'm tired.

100.  Million.  Dollars.

For quitting, sort of, at age 81.

100.  Million.  Dollars.

One man.

Who had already "earned" three-quarters of a billion dollars over the past quarter-century or so.

Poor guy.  The 100 million was barely more than a third of what he HAD been promised, until shareholders realized that 267 million was actually a lot of money (and money out of their pockets) to pay a guy for dying or getting fired.

100.  Million.  Dollars.

In a world, and a country (ours), in which 100 (no million) dollars would make the difference between living--you know, "eating," stuff like that--and dying--you know, dead, not breathing, "disassembled" to quote a long-ago movie robot--to a huge number of people, maybe even 100 million of them.

I cannot even wrap my mind around a number like "100 million," or even tease it into any tiny cracks in that number.

Eugene Isenberg must just be loving how he managed to game the system and suck the blood out of everybody who ever worked for or held stock in him and his company.

The shareholders in Nabors, Inc. must be wondering who in hell ever thought that contract with Isenberg was "good."

Gotta wonder sometimes how "value" is assigned to different people at different "ranks" in our originally "rank-less" American society. 

I'm running out of steam on this post because it wasn't what I originally intended to work on tonight.  I was thinking instead about how we have become all about "bread and circuses," without having really voted such for ourselves.  I do NOT remember where I first heard that phrase, "bread and circuses," but think it was from a Robert Heinlein novel and his assertion that when people are allowed to vote themselves bread and circuses, the world immediately spirals downward, or something like that.

Well, we DO have "bread and circuses" now, but we are not voting for them.  We are having them tossed to us like so many scraps to hungry dogs.

A few years ago I worked at a children's hospital.  We were (supposedly; we only knew what our "masters" told us) going through some tough economic times, and we were going to have to cut some corners, shave our expenses, etc.  I was an office coordinator then, sort of a glorified secretary who supervised other, less-glorified secretaries, and, as such, had to attend monthly meetings with other glorified secretaries and our immediate masters.  At one or two or a few such meetings, we discussed how to keep the "masses"--those we supervised--happy, and how we could retain them.  There would be no pay raises, of course.  But the head master confidently explained to us that "job satisfaction," for people like us, had very little to do with income, with fair payment for services provided--"no," he said, "they care more about 'other' stuff, about 'recognition'" and so on.  Basically he "educated" us that we care more about pats on the back than food on the table, and he had studies to prove it (although he never produced such).

So we wound up, at his direction, coming up with "awards" for our underlings--plaques or gift certificates, accompanied by admiring speeches, etc.--that would keep the masses happy, and at very little cost to the hospital, the "corporation."

It was like an occasional treat, a milk bone, would prevent the masses from bailing on us, keep them feeling all warm and cuddly to us.

"Demeaning" was what I thought at the time.  Dehumanizing. 

We have become "worker bees," somehow less than human.

"All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others."  Orwell (more or less; I don't swear this quote is verbatim--it is from memory).

I don't care if somebody makes more money than I do--a LOT of people make more money than I do.  But dammit, I am no less human simply because I make less than you do.

At its heart, I think that is what Occupy Wall Street is all about.

Winchester Legs

Those of us involved in the brave new world of medical transcription, that is, editing of reports produced by speech recognition programs, probably should take some solace in the face of ever-diminishing income by the fact that we at least have our "no time to be anything but a machine" days lightened by the stream of what may loosely be termed "malapropisms" spewed out by the ever-creative speech rec.

Today was relatively boring on that front, I suppose, but I must admit that I chuckled at "Winchester legs" when I saw the term a line or two ahead of where I was in the audio (we're told by the geniuses who designed the programs that we should always be reading ahead of the audio, although they never present anything but vague reasons for that).  Sometimes I try to think ahead of the audio, try to guess in advance what speech rec "transcribes" actually might be.  For instance, if I see "at a band" or "had a van" in a list of medications, I'll know even before I hear the dictator say it that the drug in question is Ativan.  Speech rec NEVER gets Ativan.  I hesitate to say that the program has a personal problem with the medication, but sometimes I wonder.

It also never gets GERD, which seemingly just about every patient gets at one time or another.  If I see a blank in a list of diagnoses produced by speech rec, and if I were a gambling man, and if Las Vegas somehow offered odds, over the long term I would make a ton of money just by plugging "GERD" into the blank spaces.

It is almost unfair even to mention cabbage/CABG.  First thing we were all told is that speech rec "learns," that if it "hears" and mis-reproduces something 3 consecutive times and we correct it three consecutive times to the "right" word, the program will pick up on it and "learn."  Now, I type "CABG" (coronary artery bypass graft) probably 12,587 times, any given year; I doubt that I have EVER typed the word "cabbage" in a medical report--it's just not one of those things that ever comes up.  Nevertheless, despite all my teaching, speech rec persists in referring to an open heart surgery as a vegetable--and not even a particularly tasty vegetable.

It is EASY to make fun of some of what speech rec comes up with.  (I won't touch too much on "prepped and draped"--a phrase in almost every operative report ever dictated--coming up as "prepped and raped").  Sad thing is, though, back when I trained medical transcriptionists, some actual human beings, with actual brains and actual life experience and so on, would commit the same kinds of malapropisms.

Sometimes maybe we just let our "critical thinking" go to sleep or take the day off.

Oh, about those Winchester legs?  Don't count on taking them deer-hunting this year.  What the doc actually said was, "when I touched her legs" (nothing pornographic--the lady was just being seen for pain in her legs).

(And about the quote way up there, about "no time to be anything but a machine"?  That's from "Walden," H. D. Thoreau.  Credit where credit is due.)

Cognitive Dissonance and Other Stuff

Experienced a bit of cognitive dissonance today when wandering into Google to research work-at-home jobs. The reason I was doing such research was that, from where I sit as a medical transcriptionist (MT) for a large transcription company, it looks like technological advances such as speech recognition software and “point-and-click” electronic medical records are going to render us obsolete, probably within a very few short years (one private-practice doctor to whom one of my colleagues spoke said that it would be less than 2 years, and it doesn’t sound like he was a “gloom-and-doomer.” Basically he said that doctors, whether they liked change or not, were going to be forced to adopt point-and-click medical records technology).

You won't hear/see any gloom-and-doom about the future of the transcription industry on Google, however, at least on the first two pages or so of search results.  Everything I looked at painted a rosy future for us, a growth industry.

Of course, most of what you run into on a cursory search comes from companies trying to sell you a foothold into this rosy-futured industry.  We always must consider the source.

But I'm in the trenches, and the proverbial writing is on the wall. Speech recognition alone has vanished a lot of transcription jobs; point-and-click will disappear the rest.

There's a little "cognitive dissonance" for you.

For me, of course, the probable disappearance of my livelihood is a bad thing, but part of me also feels that, well, this was a long time coming, and probably is the right way to go. It will suck being out on that unemployment line, though.

More packratting, actually kind of related, from a July 27, 1994 journal entry:

I’m going to try to summarize briefly a conversation held in the hallway by my desk yesterday afternoon among Joanne, Mary and Ken. Part of it I only heard pieces of, and I came in after it started, but apparently they were talking about the future of medicine. In some places this is already happening. Doctors as we know them are being replaced by a combination of standardized protocols for the diagnosis and treatment of all kinds of illnesses ranging from urinary tract or ear infections to, presumably, appendicitis, etc., and highly trained technicians who apply the protocols.

“What happened to the ART of medicine?” Mary wailed a time or two. Joanne sounded as though she had had her legs knocked out from under her when she cried in sad desperation about investing so much time in becoming a physician, only to see her job apparently vanish. “Welcome to the club,” I thought, having been troubled for a couple of months, ever since the advent of voice recognition software, by visions of my own impending obsolescence. There was much desperate discussion about doctors’ own failure to protect their profession: “We brought it on ourselves,” Ken said. “People go into specialties so they don’t have to be responsible for the whole patient.” Jean used to say much the same thing--doctors specialize so they don’t have to care about the whole kid, don’t have to worry about the kid’s home life, family substance abuse and its toll, etc. “Specialization is for ants,” Thoreau or somebody said, and that is what has happened or is in the process of happening to medicine. Take specialization to its logical conclusion, and a specialist becomes a technician. Why send a medical student or resident through all the various rotations, if you can take the same person straight out of college, or even high school, and train him to do, say, appendectomies or bilateral myringotomies and tubes? Why would he even need to know about the pancreas or the penis if all he is ever going to do is stick tubes through tympanic membranes, all day, every day, throughout his professional life?

When we were talking about the probable disappearance of my job with the advent of voice recognition software and computers that can transcribe dictation, Mary asked, “But who would edit us?” “Who edited your article in ‘Pediatrics’?” I reminded her. Answer: A computer program. “I still can’t believe it,” I admitted. “I mean, I can see how a computer program could proofread something--that’s what spell checker does, sort of. But I don’t know how it could actually edit,” which, of course, is very different from mere proofreading, looking for spelling and typographical errors. “Program it to write in different styles,” Ken said. “Then you can tell it to write in D H Lawrence’s style, or Hemingway’s.” “What you would do, I suppose, is feed into it every book that has ever been written,” I said. “That’s really how writers learn to write--by reading.” (IS it that simple, I wondered? How could a machine that cannot see, hear, smell, taste or feel--physically or emotionally--learn to write? It could create clear sentences, but could it describe a pastel sunrise or the smell of sizzling bacon on a clear, cool summer morning at your grandparents’ house and all the memories that smell will forever evoke in you? Would it have to be able to? In a society that doesn’t read particularly well, isn’t great writing obsolete, too?).

To say that our world is wobbling would be to understate the case. We’re losing our all-important sense of place in this brave new world of health care and technology. Referring to computer doctors, etc., I told Ken, “Once that particular cat is let out of that particular bag, we’ll never get it stuffed back inside.” He agreed, surprisingly.

Which leaves us where? Beats the hell out of me. I told Mary that, given the rapid approach of the new century and new millennium, if I were religious I would probably be one of those people walking around carrying a sign proclaiming “the end is nigh” or whatever, and start looking around for the Antichrist. “Bill Clinton would do in a pinch,” I said. She laughed.

I’ve cut a lot of this out, mostly on account of being too lazy to type so much after having typed so much already over the past few hours. Obviously I didn’t become obsolete as quickly as I had feared, 17 years ago, and, obviously, doctors haven’t become obsolete. All our lives have changed, though, in some cases very dramatically.

It was an interesting conversation, at least for me. Revisiting it made me think of those coal-mine canaries, again, and how we all sensed that something was going badly wrong. The thread I see now is that we were all sensing the slow but inexorable loss of our humanity. We were/are all being reduced to numbers.

On reflection it strikes me that maybe “reality TV” is just one more, well, reflection of that. We’re all screaming to be seen as individuals. We all want to be recognized as human beings with genuine worth and all that psychobabble stuff.

And we all want to be heard, if only for one brief, life-affirming moment.

Speaking of Packratting . . .

I somehow got involved in a "workplace" (using the term loosely, given that, as "remote" transcriptionists we are separated by hundreds or thousands of miles, yet work on the same account, which is hundreds or thousands of miles away from us) conversation about photography today, and somehow--with this onlline stuff, there is always a "somehow" involved--that led me to this picture of Sabrina, mother of Chewie and Muffins, as well as the departed Mini and Sally and Gerbil.  Sabrina is a special girl, born in the back of an old truck parked on the property where I used to live, way down in Mississippi; discovered and rescued by a neighbor, ultimately adopted by my ex-wife and me; a few months later a devoted mom, and now, years later, one of the keepers of my household and the discipliner of all newcomers to it.  She's just a mom, and she does it well.

Packratting

I’m a terrible packrat when it comes to pictures I’ve taken or words I’ve committed to paper (or email or fax). For instance, I have more than 35,000 pictures stored on Flickr, a notebook full of copies of letters I’ve sent to one old friend, still MORE notebooks full of printed-out email “conversations” with people. This may strike people who’ve grown up with computers as a huge waste of time, and I suppose it probably is (well, except that technology has a bad habit of replacing itself every so often; whatever words I saved on 5-¼” floppy disks, for instance, would be lost forever had I not also printed them out, and the same can be said for whatever I saved on my old Smith-Corona word processor. Paper takes up space, and takes time, but at least it is more or less “permanent”).

Going through some of that today I came across a letter I’d written to a former boss about 16 years ago, part of which I’ll reproduce here just for chuckles, grins, and because it may show some of the roots of my “99-percentness” (which of course is not a word). (Names of specific people and the institution for which we worked are changed).

One of the hospital’s ubiquitous vice-presidents came by PCC yesterday to give a brief presentation on our “Mission Statement” and “Strategic Plan.” She talked of downsizing, reduction by 20-25% of FTEs and so forth, cross-training remaining workers so that they can be moved hither, thither and yon, wherever the work happens to be on any given day. Robert, your ever-so-shy former secretary, had the temerity to ask how the hospital’s administrator-to-worker ratio compared with that of other hospitals. “We have a CEO, COO, executive vice-presidents, senior vice-presidents, administrative chief of staff (whatever HE is), vice-presidents. For two years we’ve heard nothing but 'do more with less,' yet you bring in a whole herd of administrators to tell us how to do it.” Barb--the VP--blushed and admitted that, yes, our hospital has more administrators than the average hospital.

She also talked about “outsourcing” certain services, like food services and housekeeping. After the meeting I took her into the hall and showed her the stained carpet. “This is subcontracted housekeeping,” I said. “What I would ask, as a customer, is, ‘if you can’t keep your carpet cleaned, how are you going to do all the fancy stuff you brag about?’” Barb admitted I had a point.

Listening to Barb chatter on about the hospital’s “vision” and where it wants to go in the next few years, I found myself imagining a huge beehive full of interchangeable “worker bees” completely devoid of individuality, all hustling and bustling noiselessly in service to some sequestered queen. This is not the first time that image has appeared in my mind; I see it whenever I listen to Steve at one of our office coordinators’ meetings, too, especially when he talks about “leveling the playing field,” which basically means reducing every support job in the hospital to the least common denominator, thereby allowing us to hire nothing but Secretary 1’s at right around minimum wage. The ultimate purpose is to reduce us all to the point of easy expendability.

I’m not a complete idiot or idealist--I KNOW that we are all expendable, as inherently worthless as a Confederate dollar or a politician’s promise. Nevertheless, that the hospital’s administration has decided, apparently, that it is perfectly okay, even preferable, to slap us in the face with that knowledge every day, while at the same time telling us how “important” we are, is disconcerting, at best.

I should have become a plumber (NOT one of Nixon’s).

In retrospect, I wrote that particular letter at about halfway through the 31 years since Reagan’s election and maybe even about halfway into the “housing bubble,” the stock market’s “irrational exuberance,” etc., all the bad banking practices (or outright thievery) that nearly collapsed the world financial system a couple of years ago. Nostradamus I am not, but, like some kind of weird coal-mine canary, I think I--and a lot of others--sensed the shitstorm about to crash down around us, even if we couldn’t describe it with anything more than, “the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.”

If I were going to dress up for Halloween today, I think I would go as a vampire (speaking of coal-mine canaries, isn’t the recent popularity of vampires a neat coincidence or something? Maybe there are a LOT of coal-mine canaries out there) with a big Goldman-Sachs or Wells Fargo logo on my back, or maybe a photo of our congressmen/women clustered around a TV, guzzling Dom Perignon and laughing at OWS people being tear-gassed.

Trickle-up Economics

When I first went to work for a herein unnamed transcription company in 2002, I was paid a given amount per line, plus a differential--if I scheduled myself more than 50% after 5 p.m., I would be paid more per line for ALL lines I produced; I was also given a differential for scheduling myself at least one weekend day per week. The company also provided our internet access. Accounts back then also were assigned a level theoretically representing their degree of difficulty, and our pay was based in part on that--higher difficulty level, higher line rate.

Let the “trickle up” begin:

1. Instead of paying the differential for all lines produced, pay it only for those produced after 5 p.m. or on weekends. Small thing, right--but dollars out of my pocket, right back into the company’s.

2. Eliminate the weekend differential. Dollars out of my pocket, right back into the company’s.

3. Stop providing internet access, but “generously” give the transcriptionist a small monthly amount to cover about 1/3 of the cost. (Sounds like a small thing, right? But if you were taking home $2000 a month, the net difference between what the company gave you for internet access and the actual cost, say $20, amounts to a 1% pay cut after taxes. Money out of my pocket, etc.

4. Never raise the line rate. After not many years, the company is paying much less per line when adjusted for inflation (but you can bet, although of course mere employees weren’t privy to such information, that what they were charging hospitals for our services didn’t stay the same or go lower).

5. “Restructure” the pay scale so that pay wasn’t based on account level of difficulty anymore, but rather on experience/ability level of the transcriptionist. At some point or other we lost the level 6 account that I had been working on, and I was shifted to what had previously been a level 8 or 9 account. Under the “old” system, I would have received about a 10% increase in line rate. Under the new system, I not only didn’t get a raise, but was in fact basically informed that the company graciously and benevolently wouldn’t be reducing my pay by a tenth of a cent per line, which logic I never really got, but then, I was a mushroom.

6.  Keep raising the percentage of the health insurance cost paid by the employee (and reducing the percentage paid by the company).

(My "favorite" line uttered by a supervisor, a woman whom I actually liked, during this period:  "We can't keep being the highest-paying transcription company.")

And that is how a corporation can nickel-and-dime its employees from relative “comfort”--that is, ability to pay the mortgage or rent and keep food on the table, with maybe a little left over for “extras” like, I don’t know, new clothes once in while, or dinner out, a movie, etc.--you know, luxuries--to edge-of-the-precipice, how-can-I-pay-for-an-oil-change or something besides chicken or beans or rice, day-to-day uncertainty.

You wonder sometimes how your employers can live with themselves or even sleep at night, knowing what they do to the workers who keep their companies alive, even as you know that they simply don’t care--and in fact, some corporate heads or other higher level executives actually get bonuses based on how much they “reduce costs” (that is, how many workers’ lives they destroy).

This is partly why “I am the 99%.” And, Dear Mr. 53%? I’ve been paying taxes all along; I’ve gotten no government handouts and haven’t asked for any. So please, shut the fuck up.