Tuesday, September 30, 2003

Halloween is coming...

As I watched a lone airplane slowly buzz across a sky of puffy white clouds, I felt the cool, crisp air of fall on my face. That means... Halloween is coming.

My favorite time of year is the season that brings candy and dried leaves. This is my peak season, but it wasn't always this good. As a kid, Halloween was a mixed bag of tricks that didn't give me treats. First off, my father hated kids. So for two years, he gave out no candy, and I wasn't allowed to go trick-or-treating. In our neighborhood, in the 1970s, that was a pretty anti-social statement to make to your neighborhood, so out house got egged and toilet paper was thrown into our trees. The third year, my mother decided to give candy, and I recall she went out and bought gum, so my mother propped me next to the door to hand out this Zebra Stripe gum in foil to the kids. She was right on her hunch, we didn't get egged that year. But my father had this... thing about candy, so somewhere, my mother got these ungodly horrific plastic spider rings. She got more than a lot, she got probably several hundred in a huge plastic bag from some place that sold them to her in bulk. For years, I had to sit by the door and hand them out to kids, who went, "What, no candy? You SUCK!" At least they didn't egg us. But I did get famous as "the kid whose mom gives out spider rings." I hated that. And still I was not allowed to go trick-or-treating.

When I was 15, I was sitting around with some friends of mine who all bemoaned we didn't get to go trick-or-treating as kids. Julie said her mother didn't approve of it, and I think Ellen said the same thing. Kate was overseas as a kid, and they didn't have trick-or-treating in Germany, Thailand, or Japan. So, we all decided to go trick-or-treating at age 14-16, age limit be damned. And you know what? Only one parent made mention of it. In about a hundred houses we visited, one woman said, "Aren't you a little old...?" and I said, "Maybe." She gave us candy anyway, I guess because she didn't want to debate the issue. We did this for three more years. Four teens can cover a LOT of ground in one night. We'd actually have pillowcases stuffed to the point that they wouldn't close at the end anymore. When we got home at 10pm, we poured all our candy in a pile, and distributed it about based on individual likes, dislikes, and trades. I made out like a bandit because I was the only one who liked Smarties (still do, too).

When CR was old enough (one), I took him trick-or-treating. I still do, too. I also make sure I hand out the GOOD candy when I have door duty. The last few years have been pretty slow, though. We only got about 20 kids total in about 5 clusters. Part of this was due to 9/11, I think, but when I take the kids out (my friend Sean brings his kids because they live in a dark wooded area with no houses to go to), only about half the houses are lit, now. What a shame, I hope this tradition doesn't die. But since we don't have many kids, this year, we're going to try and make "goodie bags" with good candy, some fun stuff, and ... yes, plastic spider rings.

You can always make compromises.

Posted by Punkie @ 12:31 AM EST [Link]

Monday, September 29, 2003

My Jewish Heritage

I wish! No, I am not Jewish. None of my parents were, and I doubt very highly any Viking ancestors of mine refused to eat cheese just because it touched their meat. But there have been times I wished I had been raised Jewish. At least it would explain the guilt! Oy vey...

Seriously, when I was young, there was a family next door to me, the Hahns. I don't know who they were outside of just my neighbors, but they celebrated Jewish festivals quite highly. They had a HUGE back yard, and when they celebrated the high holy days, there would be a big crowd of people. Some of them were Rabbis. I had never met a Hasidic Rabbi in my life before these guys, but all I knew was that they were fun people who loved life, and thought kids were pretty cool. They wore black, and had curly things on the side of their head, which at first scared me a bit, but one of them let me touch them and thought I was so wonderful, being curious. Part of their joy was I was the only young kid there. I mean, there were teens there (the Hahn's kids), but they were older teens, and probably blew the whole thing off. The family gave me gelt, explained the dreidel to me, and told me a bit about Jewish history.

In my neighborhood, only about a third of the people I knew were of a pronounced faith. Most were "sorta Christian, I guess." But out of the third that said, "I am bred as..." were about half and half Catholic and Jewish. Now, not to rag on the Catholic kids, but many of the Catholic kids I knew were uptight and angry most of the time. Especially the boys. The Jewish kids were the coolest, though. No Jewish kid ever bullied me, for instance. I never knew a Jewish slut. Not to say bad Jewish kids don't exist, but it seemed if I was to map a "trend" that Jewish kids were pretty smart people who were more focused on the intellectual side. Some used Yiddish, and to this day, I still use a lot of Yiddish words that I think are common knowledge. Like I was watching TV on something with Whitney Houston, and I thought, "For a skiksa, she sure does kvetch. Typical meshugina for a pop star to go into the River Jordan, talking on her cell phone." (For a non-Jewish girl, she sure does complain. Typical craziness for.. all that)

There are a lot of Jewish people in fandom. I know this comes as no shock to fannish people, but I have met and known so many Jewish people, they're like family. Most are pretty modern Jews, but there are a few Orthodox people scattered about. My friend Lori, for instance, is a VERY Orthodox Jew, and all invitation to her family's house includes instructions for not bringing in food like pork, shellfish, and any dish where meat is mixed with cheese. My friend Bruce is pretty Orthodox, too, although not as strict except when it comes to his own personal diet. Even though he's not a rabbi, he could sure pass for one with all his knowledge of Jewish history, law, and just odd facts. I lived with him for a while, and learned how hard it is to eat food out when you have such strict laws. At a wedding a few years ago, he was disdained when the wedding hosts took measures with the caterers to have Kosher food for his Jewish friends, and they did ... but the caterers used the same tongs of everything, and when handing out pork cutlets, they let the juice drip on everything else. Bruce had to wait and eat at a restaurant later. My friend Albedo is also pretty Orthodox, and his parents are the coolest Jewish parents, ever.

Only when I got older did I realize that some people saw Jews as "weird." Even among the Catholics where I grew up, anti-Semitism was unheard of. I don't recall anyone ever saying, "He's Jewish, what a weirdo!" It seemed normal to me. Jewish kids celebrated openly. It seemed that Christmas at school was a mixture of "normal" Christmas with Jewish stuff mixed in. I always saw a menorah around the winter holidays. I recall thinking how cool that was, that the Jewish people had all that history and ritual. I went to three bar mitzvahs, and thanks to Brian and Lori, now one Bris! Temples always seemed so peaceful, like that a church was supposed to be. But it seems as an adult, I meet more people who think Jewish people are stereotypes. If there's one thing I have learned, it's that there is no Jewish stereotype that is true enough to be considered valid. I know many Jews who are no good with money (there aren't many rich fen). If the Jewish people control the media, who can explain Bible Belt rules that still dictate media decorum? And for the big nose/black hair? A girl I grew up with, Julie Pachter, was a redheaded, fair-skinned, green-eyed lass ... and as Jewish as they come. People would have pegged he Irish Catholic, but there she was, on the front page of a local Jewish newspaper, lighting a menorah. I know too many Jews to lump them into any one stereotype.

Sometimes I wonder, as a goya mensch, whether I romanticize it too much. The Jewish people I know are pretty peaceful, but I recall one guy who went "to the Holy Land" how different it was there. "These are not the 'Let's light candles and dance around the menorah' Jews here, but 'Hold my gun while I take a piss' Jews." I am sure many of my Jewish friends, reading this, are going, "Gowan! It's not so great. The food is terrible!" Yeah, but so is Swedish food, for the most part. Even the Swedes stopped eating it. "And the guilt! Such farkatka hkutzpah I put up with when I go home, already! And the Holocaust... hel-LO?" Okay, I don't know anyone who speaks "the Yid" anymore, but I know it may seem more glorious when you not in the thick of it.

Oh well. I'll just have to be "borrowed" by Albedo's parents for now...

Posted by Punkie @ 10:22 AM EST [Link]

Sunday, September 28, 2003

Hopefully the last thing about Sara A, and some thoughts towards 2004

I got yet another letter today from one of Sara A's friends (I won't name her in case there's some political war going on). They are good people. Not that she slammed Sara, but she said she missed me and "where have you been?", which was real sweet. It's nice to be missed, and I feel real bad about everything, but I just don't want to piss Sara off any more or even talk about her (because, after all, that's what she was pissed about in the first place). The trouble is that her message board has this "e-mail notification" alert that whenever someone sends me mail on the BBS, and I can't reply to it, so I have the awkward duty to locate their real e-mail address and inform them of, "Uh... see, Sara and I had this falling out see... please don't hate her, she's not a bad person, some people just don't get along..." This speaks well of Sara, IMHO, because if she's pissed at me, she's not taken the low road and bashed me to anyone. I'd like to keep it that way, but there's no real way to e-mail everyone and tell them what happened unless they read my journal. So I will get these notifications, and tell people one by one. But that sucks because I miss that community and feel like I am watching them through a windowpane on a cold winter's night (you know, like the cliche of a Victorian street orphan) and sometimes I see them at the table, wondering where I am. "I'm here, I'm here!" I shout, but they cannot see me though the glass. Okay, that's overdramatic and pathetic! :)

Yeah, I miss the board, but this is probably for the best. I think I spent a lot of time there that I could have been spending time elsewhere, like learning new technologies, writing, or something. My journal has certainly expanded, and I have proof when I see my download statistics from my backup. My web page, which used to fit on a floppy in 1999, is now 15.6mb! Yeesh! Why do you people put up with this stuff?

Which leads me to my next thought: 2004. I am curious if my diary will go on past 2003. When I started this diary/journal/blog thing, I thought there was only a 10% chance I'd be writing in it past March. I am glad I have kept up with everything, because this diary has gone thought a war, a space shuttle disaster, and many personal struggles. I read back on it a lot, and I know this journal will be valuable to me in many, many years. I hope my son gets a copy when he's 34/35, and compares his thoughts to mine. Here is my list:

Pros:
- I get many positive comments, which is always nice.
- The negative comments aren't so bad, either. They help me analyze myself.
- I can see where I've been.
- I have a repository of my life's stories I can just link to instead of typing it out because I am lazy.
- I have a permanent record (unless all backups fail) of my thoughts I made public.
- Writing this diary is cathartic, and the fact everyone can see it forces me to stay honest.

Cons:
- Vulnerability to people like Benny and The-BBS-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named
- Taking up Brad's hard drive space
- I have a permanent record (unless all backups fail) of my thoughts I made public.

Well, we shall see.

Posted by Punkie @ 07:36 PM EST [Link]

The Ancient Ruins of Awards

I knew this guy once who worked with a company for 13 years. He was there in the beginning, and had every job in the company from delivery warehouse to district manager. The company uprooted him from his home in Oklahoma and deposited him in several states. He left his family, his life, and his past behind. In those 13 years, he won countless awards, and was once known as the most valuable man in the company. I was at his house once, and saw all those awards. There were so many, he sort of stacked them where he could, and since his life as a single man was dedicated to his job, he had little else to decorate his place. "Besides," he'd say with a smile, "they may ask me to move again."

He was fired because his district manager, whom had once been his lover, grew jealous when he started dating another girl, even though the district manager had dumped him six years earlier. I always wondered what happened when this guy went home. He had company merchandise up the wazoo. He had one, huge award that he was proud of. It was about three feet tall, made of of a fine wood base and a slab of clear acrylic, and lit up from below so you could see his name and reason for the award etched in frosted letters. I wonder if he threw it away? I wonder if he used it to smash the other awards? Or does he still have them?

I have worked at my current job for a while, and recently, with so many near-misses of being laid off, I wonder what I will do when I finally get the golden bullet. Might be next week. Might be ten years from now. I don't know, since obviously job performance is only marginally related to how long they keep you. I have some awards for projects I have done, but it's sad seeing so many of them now, because they remind me of good people who got laid off over the years. One girl down the hall got laid off after working with my company for over eight years. She had tons of awards all over her office, plus she collected posters from our company's various ventures. Her loyalty to the company was far out of balance to how they felt about her. No chance for changing her jobs, just a cardboard box and a slap on the ass goodbye. My friend Sean got the same thing. I guess years of this experience has shown me that, "It's nothing personal, but you are no longer needed and we don't care enough to try and put you elsewhere." I feel bad that I only respect the company as long as they pay me.

I think I will put the awards, tee-shirts, keychains, mugs, and other memorabilia in a box, and put it away. Maybe in 50 years, they will make good donations to the Smithsonian for their "Internet Boom" exhibit. Along with the sock puppet from Pets.com, there will be my tacky award/clock celebrating the fact I was part of their "Y2K QA Team," and the slate-purple mug that showed I sat and listened to some Sun Systems rep try and sell me something I don't even have authority to buy. My donation to "The Nation's Attic" will stand like the ruins of a time long forgotten.

Posted by Punkie @ 02:24 AM EST [Link]

Saturday, September 27, 2003

Finally... a good day!

Today was one of those good days where nothing went wrong. Years ago, I might have considered this, "boring," but I quite like it now, and would like more of these days, if I could.

The sun was out, the temperature was just right, and Christine and I went out on our own. We ate at the Beacon Street Cafe, a small restaurant in the shopping center behind our house. The food is good and prices are on the low side. I had a fried flounder sandwich, and Christine had salad, soup, and a chicken sandwich with ham and pineapple marinate. The restaurant was quiet, and I got to sit across from her and realize, again, how pretty she is. We've been married for... 14 and a half years, and she still makes my heart race.

Then we went exploring Fairfax, because it occurred to me last week that I know very little about where I live. We saw garage sales, but didn't get anything more than a cooler for $3 from the woman across the street. We found new places around here, like Ranger Surplus (awesome), a HUGE Dollar Store (even better), and a pet store. I got Christine a video game I knew she wanted, "Ghost Master," and she's been playing it for the rest of today. I have been playing a little of GTA3, interspersed with some light yard work (I play a little while, work a little while).

We have been blessed that Hurricane Isabel didn't dump anything larger than a 4' branch that a toddler could have carried off. Most of what we got were leaves and what I called "leaf spatter," which were ground-up leaves spattered on the sides of our house from the sheer force of the winds. A rain shower a few days later cleaned most of that off, but today I blew all the leaves off my deck, the patio below my deck, and scrubbed remaining "spatter" of places the rain shower didn't reach. Boy am I glad I cleaned the gutters earlier this year. If I hadn't, I am sure the hurricane would have taken them right off the house like a lot of our neighbors are dealing with. There are still HUGE mounds of debris people cleaned off their lawns lying on the curb, and the garbage men are still behind removing them. I bet mulch will be cheap this year...

[added later: Arlington county has so much mulch that they are begging citizens to take any of it for free, because if it stays in those big piles too long, it will spontaneously burst into flame]

Not much of an entry, true, but boring is good for me right now. I just wanted to prove (if only to myself) that I do have good days now and then.

Posted by Punkie @ 07:33 PM EST [Link]

Thursday, September 25, 2003

Coveting thy neighbor's mess... or lack therof

I have always wondered how my house looks to others.

I feel bad that I cannot keep my house pristine at all times. Sometimes I wonder that the fact I have left dishes in the sink, sometimes for three days, if I am a total slob, or I am overreacting. I have been to friends houses where they have nothing special; just like George Carlin once said, "A house is just a pile of your stuff with a roof over it." Some friends work very hard to make everything mix and match, while others just put stuff up as they think about it. But I always compare my house and mess to theirs. And I usually lose.

I have only been in two houses that stunned me of their mess (besides mine). One was in 1988, when I was invited to a "friend of a friend" who was "paying people to move his stuff" because he was going to college. The guy had lived in this one large room since he was eight. He never cleaned it. When we started, his room was like a cave, with walls of trash and other assorted objects piled from floor literally to the 10' ceiling. Going through it all was like going back in time; the closer we got to the wall, the further back in time we got. His father had rented a small dumpster which we filled with over 40 bags of trash, plus broken furniture and other assorted items. We found the maroon carpet was once pink. We found a closet and a row of windows. We found a 10-speed bike he reported as stolen when he was 12. It was amazing, and we got to keep a lot of "treasures" we found, like books, a Lava lamp, a Rubiks cube, and so on. The second worst was one not so messy, but it was the apartment of a guy who hadn't moved since college 8 years earlier. A gamer. His stuff was piled against the walls, giving it a sloping effect, like living in a Tupperware bowl. Most of his trash, though, was non-organic. His stuff was mostly books, papers, and boxes of books and papers, and nothing over waist-height. He got married, and now owns a house which pretty much looks the same as his apartment did, neatness-wise. He's rich, though, so he doesn't care.

So, I have seen that end. And I grew up with people with immaculate and tasteful homes. On kid I knew grew up in a house that had a Louis the 14th flair to it. Everything what either white or gold, except for small lavender accents. She had a bedroom, but she was only allowed to sleep and change clothes in there, because it was decorated with fragile artifacts, possibly antiques. Luckily, she had a playroom to play in, but I always thought it was tragic that she couldn't have fun in her own room.

At about age 8, I did a lot of my own caretaking. I wasn't very good at it, looking back. My room was always a mess, and I wasn't very neat in the kitchen, either. My clothes weren't as washed as they should have been, and I didn't have very good hygiene. As time went on, and my mother depended on me to do more and more housework. This was partly due to "chores" all kids get (although I was never paid - I never had an allowance) but part of the underlying philosophy was that I was her "cover" for when she was drunk. I don't know if I came up with this myself, or my mother encouraged it, but I was always scared that if the house wasn't as clean as my father would have liked it, I would be in big trouble. He seemed calmer and quieter if things were not so messy. And since I was a pretty bad cleaner from the start, I was always on edge. I think I still am.

When I moved out on my own at 18, I lived with the FanTek people for a while. If you have ever seen their house ... well, oddly enough, both Bruce and Cheryl taught me a LOT about cleaning. Bruce taught me how to clean "in squares," which is great for control freaks like myself. The essence is this: you make invisible small sections of what you are cleaning in your head, and focus only on that. Then you go to the next section. Some people are task-oriented when cleaning, like "I'll do bills, then laundry," but I can't work that way. I go, "I'll do this place, then that place," and the system isn't perfect, especially when you have to put stuff away that exists in other parts of the house, and you get easily distracted. Cheryl taught me a lot about saving time and energy by saying, "If I have to go up the stairs, is there anything I need to take with me?" "If I am going to the kitchen, do I have to take anything back?" You get the idea. Sort of an energy and time management system. But the bonus with living with them was everyone cleaned. So although the FanTek house is ... always cluttered, it's never really dirty or messy.

I lived with some uneventful neat freaks after that, and I stayed in my own rented room a lot until I got married. When I got married, it became quickly apparent I was to be the cleaner in the family. I feel bad about this because I feel as if I am in charge of an important task that I am barely qualified, at best. When we got married, it was sort of agreed that since I had the housecleaning skills, and I didn't mind cleaning so much, that I should do all of it. My wife, who is wonderful in more ways than I can count, did not like housework, and so it was meant to be this way right from the start. She does do some housework, usually when I am really slacking, or we have people coming over. But she still hates it, and I respect she admits that to me.

The first few places we lived in were always a mess. Mostly because we didn't have good storage. There was simply no place to put something but in a box on the floor. As I have always said about our house "flat space is prime real estate," especially tabletops. Stuff just gets piled up. We doubled my previous floor space in our last move, and now we're starting to live with piled boxes of stuff again. George Carlin was right again, "You lock up your stuff in your house, while you go out and get ... more stuff!" So we're back to Square One.

I have assessed the mess in my house, and looked at the problems. First, I don't have enough energy to clean the space we live in, especially with a two adults, a teen, four cats, and two small dogs. With all my various issues (weight, back, ankle), it's hard for me to stoop down and pick stuff off the floor. But if I don't clean ... no one does. So I prioritize to clean in this order: organic, public, and then private. Organic is stuff that will rot or attract bugs (kitchen/bathroom), and that always gets priority. My efficiency on this is about 75%, because sometimes I go a day or two without cleaning the kitchen. Public is stuff people see when they enter our house, which is the kitchen (again), dining room, living room, and then rec room. This gets 80% efficiency, and only so high because it doesn't get messed up as often, and Christine cleans those places a lot, too. Then the rest of the house is "private," which sometimes stays messed up for years in the worst cases. The other day, while looking for something else, I found a box I hadn't opened since the move. Hmm ... my old HP-11c calculator! Oh, so that's where the other serial mouse went... I'd rate myself at 30% or lower there because man... I suck. Where did it all come from? What am I going to do with it? I keep saying in my head things about a garage sale or eBay, but I never actually DO anything about it. That's for later. Like piling stuff in my den kind of later.

I'd love to have a lovely home, right out of House and Garden. And while I know and accept that's not going to happen (I'd have to get rid of all my pets, cut my social life in half, and make my son move out), I'd like things to be neat and straight most of the time. I hate coming home to clutter, and clutter has this nasty habit of interweaving itself. Like you'd like to make bread, but then you need counter space, which means you have to clean up, but you have to wash dishes piled up on the counter, but the sink is full, and the dishwasher is already full, so you have to put away the clean dishes, put dirty dishes in, run it, and then probably do another load, and after all that bending, stretching, and waiting ... you're tired! And the more you put it off, the worse it gets. Now toss an ant problem into the mix. And a leaky sink. Sometimes when I get home, I am so tired from the day, I don't have the energy to clean up, but I have to because I don't want ants everywhere. You begin to equate the kitchen with drudgery, and then you avoid it as much as you can. Which means no cooking meals. So you eat poorly. And then you are more tired, and so the cycle goes.

Energy does come in busts and waves, but I am so behind by the time I am up to a mass cleaning, that I wear myself out, and often I leave a lot of half-done jobs. Plus we have a lot of people come over, so we have to clean up for them, and thank God we have friends, because besides the obvious joy their company brings, we get the house clean. If we had no social life, our house would probably look even worse. Funny, huh? Our shame drives us more than our desire for neatness. Sometimes I try and get energy by making myself mad about something, drinking a lot of coffee, or ... and this is really bad, avoiding something I *should* be doing. I have often found so much motivation cleaning the kitchen when I should really be doing something about the cat box. Yecch.

Yes, we have thought about a maid. My father, who could not clean, and his wife Nicole, who did not like cleaning, had a maid. Our friend Renee had a maid, and she still lived in her parent's house (wow, your own maid for your own bedroom)! But I don't have an extra $60/week for one, I don't trust them around my stuff, I feel bad that I don't trust them, I feel even worse that I can't keep up with my own house, and I feel ooky about having a "servant," even though hiring a maid from a maid service isn't really technically a servant. I knew kids who had maids and butlers, and I didn't like those kids. But truthfully, if I had a lot of extra money, I might just hire someone to come in twice a week.

But... I don't. So I have to do everything myself. But sometimes I wonder, secretly, if everyone else's mess is as bad as mine. I know, I know, that's probably a form of coveting, but still ... am I normal? I guess we all wonder that at some level.

Posted by Punkie @ 05:18 PM EST [Link]

Wednesday, September 24, 2003

Beep beep... BANG!

When I was about... I think 13, I got for my birthday my first real digital watch. Before that, all but one were analog watches. My first watch was a fake gold Timex that broke. Then I had another watch that got stolen from my locker at a local pool. Then my mother gave me my father's watch he got from graduation in 1955, but the band was loose and made of some stretchy metal herringbone construction that pinched my arm hair like dozens of tiny pliers (I still have it, though). Then I found a digital watch in a park, but my mother was suspicious that I had stolen it, so she took it from me (I got it back years later, but by then, the batteries were dead). But this new digital watch I got was great.

It was a super Nelsonic Space Attacker watch.

In the early 80s, digital watches were becoming far more common. Just a few years earlier, digital watches were horribly expensive battery hogs. They usually only had one function: the time. Fancy ones had the time and date if you pushed a button. Then, in a "Fancy gadget catalog" I got from an airplane, I saw something so amazing, I thought I would pass out: a watch with a calculator on it. Think of the possibilities! Too bad it was $350 (in 1979 money, which would be $400 billion trillion today).

But years later, calculator watches were a lot cheaper. And the little LCD wonders had time and date and stopwatches, alarms, music, and in 1983, video games! So when I begged and begged for the Space Invaders watch I saw in a W. Bell & Company catalog, I was thrilled beyond continence to actually get one from my mother!

On my wrist, it was huge. The LCD was a wide screen where the date was on the top, a row of "Sun Mon Tue Wed..." in the middle with a horizontal bar to show what day it was, and the time was on the bottom. But there was more! It had a stopwatch, an alarm, tunes, and best of all, a Space-Invaders type game.

Sure, the tunes were nothing more than one tune that played a medley composed of bars from Star Wars, Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, and a few other sci-fi shows. And the Space Invader game wasn't really like Space Invaders, but a weird game where you manned a Missle-Command like silo that shot at three rings of invaders, ever closing in on you. It was crude, hard to play with those tiny buttons, and didn't keep the best time (it lost a few minutes a week), but I had it for two years.

This watch was like my Crown Jewel of Materialistic Nerdvana.

Twice, someone tried to steal it. One guy actually succeeded, but because he was dumb enough to wear it the next day, I got it back, although the vice principal "suggested" (sort of coerced, but in a friendly way) I not wear it to school again because it seemed to be "trouble waiting to happen." I was angry about this as a kid, but as an adult, I can see his point of view with more clarity (one of the plots for "The Gods Must Be Crazy" is about a Bushman who has to get rid of a Coke bottle for similar reasons). I forgot if I wore it to school ever again, but by that point, the watch wasn't doing so well, so I kept it at home for just the video game.

It died... horribly. One of my goals was to get over 999 points. The reason was I knew the counter only had space for three digits, and I wondered what happened after 999. The ships came with ever increasing speed as the game went on, and points were done by the ring they were on: I think it was Outer Ring was 3 points, Middle was 2, and Inner was 1. If the ship got past Inner, you blew up. You had three lives, a standard back in those days, based on I think older pinball game standards. I had gotten up to 800 before, but by then the incoming ships were so fast, I lost simply due to hitting those eentsy buttons with the speed needed. When the batteries had slowed to a crawl, the game slowed down, and one day, I got past 999... and the watch exploded.

No, really!

What happened was this: the button batteries must have had a short or leak or something. I didn't feel the heat of the watch at the time because in order to press those teeny buttons and not leave a painful dimple in my fingers was to hold the watch in a towel. The back blew off with a sizzling sigh, and the LCD screen cracked and turned a darkish-green. My fingers actually got tiny first degree burns, although I thought at the time that part of it was because of the battery acid (do button batteries even have acid?), but now I wonder if it was just the dimple/scars from the small buttons. The carcass I think I sent to my friend Neal in Texas as "wow, look at THIS!"

I was bummed. I was not devastated because at this point I was tired of the watch, but'd sure give a lot to have it again now. How cool would that be? I wonder how many died like that, because I can't find them anywhere. Ebay hasn't had them, although they have had other, newer cheaper pastel plastic Nelsonic game watches from the late 1980s. Online, I did find those photos, but little else. I wonder, did they all blow up? I thought it was just mine ... maybe not.

I have never had a cooler watch. I think I am still comparing that watch to every new one I get. The only watch that came close was an Omega Constellation my uncle gave me for graduation. It was an analog watch with a relief of the Palomar observatory on the back, and of such high quality, that it pretty much weathered everything. But then the glow on the hands broke off, and got caught in the gears. I took it to get repaired, but two different watchmakers have told me that they aren't authorized to work on Omegas because Omega says they have to send them back to Omega to be fixed. And that costs more than I can spend on it.

So every few years, I buy a crappy digital watch, and wear it until it breaks. Because nothing will ever come close to my memory of the ultimate geek watch.

Posted by Punkie @ 04:26 PM EST [Link]

Tuesday, September 23, 2003

What goes from my head, falls out into the blog in little piles

BTW: The Management-Crash-Course entry wasn't written in one day or stemmed from any incident, in fact, I started writing it when I worked at Cargo Furniture, but I have been working on it again nibble by nibble for the last few weeks, and I got sick of it hogging my e-mail box. Then I saw someone in a blog state they got promoted to manager, and are unsure what this entails, so I wanted to link to it for her.

The rest of today has been a mess. The morning started off wrong, and my brain has been groggy all day. I am excessively tired, and I can see in my writing for the last week, my writing style has been off balance. It's like I know what I want to say, but don't know quite how to say it. When I write entries, I try and do it in a concise writing style that I know people often like. I tend to ramble a lot, so when I write an entry, I often have to cut, paste, or delete things. I want every paragraph to have at least the semblance of good writing. In grammar school, teachers always forced paragraph style on me, and I feel a little bit guilty when I don't completely follow it.

That last paragraph was an example of sloppy paragraph style. The last sentence should have been a summary or conclusion of the whole paragraph, and it doesn't quite match the way it started. This is more like how my brain works, but it doesn't make for tidy writing. If I wanted this paragraph to be better, I would end it with a statement like, "so when I see that last paragraph, I feel a bit guilty and wonder if my writing is actually any good, or am I just rambling as usual?"

Punk: I am also a fan of dialogue
Dude: How so?
Punk: Sometimes I feel a few things can be better explained like a conversation.
Dude: Like this one?
Punk: No, actually, this is a weak example.
Dude: You could have just as well carried this idea as a simple paragraph?
Punk: Yes. Dialogues are better for "you are there" kind of humor.
Dude: You write very reflexively and with a lot of self-observation.
Punk: I also try and avoid to be self-congratulatory. No one likes that.
Dude: Sorry.
Punk: Or apologetic.
Dude: Ha ha. Funny.
Punk: Self-deprecating sarcasm *is* acceptable. Benny loves that kind of stuff.

This weekend, Travis's girlfriend April W (as opposed to my other friend April A in Boston) mentioned she liked my writing style (I think the other April does too, but I don't want to confuse the two... dang, what are the odds I know TWO people named after a month?), and she's not the only person who has said that, so I feel I should maintain some sort of standard. Writing while drunk, for example, would be unacceptable, and although I don't drink, I do sometimes have foul moods where I wrote some pretty, "So that's how it is, huh?" kind of stuff, and then once I have written it, I think, "Ewww... that might come back to haunt me," and I don't post it. I write in spellcheckers, edit, and then wait about an hour before I post to make sure I got it right, and don't say something I don't feel anymore. So if you see something intentionally spiteful in this blog, know that I pondered about it for a while, and decided that if I post it here, the whole world will know, and I don't care. My friend Neal also sends me letters commenting on certain entries, which are very helpful, and spark a lot of thought on my part (as I may have mentioned before, he's a linguist). The Gricean Maxiums entry are a good example.

(Sometimes, when I am whispering, I write in parentheses)

Writing for me is cathartic. It is like a craft of some kind. People in mental institutions create doilies with bunt scissors, I write in a blog. Rednecks shoot cans with guns, I... hey, that actually sounds kind of cool.

I'll be back later...

Posted by Punkie @ 05:40 PM EST [Link]

Management - A Crash Course

I am not a manager at my company, nor do I wish to be one. I don't know how some of my managers put up with the bureaucracy. I am blessed that my boss is the way he is, but I haven't always had good bosses. I was a manager myself for many years, and while these were retail positions, a lot of the same truths apply across many types of jobs.

There are some really bad managers out there. Some are bad on purpose, some are just lazy, or some are bad but would change if they only knew how. Tons and tons of books have been written about effective management, and most are worthless. Most cover the obvious, or tell you lies that contradict what you see in reality (most sales books are like that, too). I could write volumes on this topic, but that's also part of the problem. Too much information. I break down effective management into three jobs in one. You are part leader, part psychologist, and part diplomat.

Leadership
This is what most people screw up at. They think "leadership = personal power" like it's an asset. It's not. Leadership gives you nothing, really. Leadership = responsibility, and should be seen as a liability, which, like many things in life, is nonetheless a necessity. Leadership drains your resources, and while I don't want to make that sound like a "leadership = doom" statement, it should be seen as "leadership drains resources, and thus you have to be strong to do it well." Leadership means asset and talent management. To be a leader, you put your best people where they will do the best jobs to benefit the whole. You don't put an angry person to answer the phones, you don't put a person bad at math in accounting, and don't put your best and friendliest guy in some dark corner of the office where he won't get to talk to anyone. You put your friendliest person on the phones, the math whiz in accounting, and put the angry guy in the dark corner. Maybe it will soothe him.

Never, ever be afraid to hire someone better than you at something. You are a manager, not one of your employees. I knew a guy who was terrified of hiring someone who sold better than him because "it will make me look bad." I am not sure what kind of salesperson he was, whether he was good or not, but he would never get his store to sell more than twice what he personally could. If he made $10,000 in sales in a month, he didn't want someone to make more than that, so he hired people who made his sales look good in comparison. Such a plan can only double the sales he makes at most, which is a mere $20,000 per month for his store. I blame this partly on his district manager who said that a manager should be the best at everything, but imagine how much better his store would do if he hired a guy who made $50,000 one month? That's $60,000, which is a hell of a lot more than $20,000. He would have made quota AND bonus.

I have also seen people put the worst people in certain jobs because they think it's a "dumb job" or "maybe they'll quit." They "dismiss" some of the most important jobs as "lowly," and put "lowly" people there. Jobs like secretary, mail room, or "the person who answers the phones." You have to look at all your jobs, and see them for their raw value. Sometimes you have to imagine what it would be like if this job was unfilled. No one would answer the phones, file papers, or get the mail. That would suck.

I once knew a manager who tried to "be fair" by rotating jobs among his store staff. While some might see this as a good thing, it wasn't working for him. There were two people in particular who were problems. "Plain Jane" was a mopey girl with a stripe of red hair and a nose piercing who was not comfortable with herself. She was very anal and controlling. "Saucy Susan" was a girl who was terribly disorganized, flighty, and fit the dumb blonde stereotype pretty well. But Susan could sell. Boy, she could sell. Susan was all bouncy and jiggly, and had men nodding in her lap. Jane just grumbled and complained about how messy the back room was. The manager tried to get her to sell, but she just resented it. She also resented Susan, who was responsible for not putting stuff away properly, and then no one could find it. This manager bemoaned about Jane to me. The solution seemed simple. Make Jane's job to restock and inventory, do the books, and let Susan sell. "Oh, I couldn't do that," said the manager. "That wouldn't be fair." Why not? "Because then Susan would have to do all the hard work and Jane would be stuck with dull and meaningless tasks." Uh ... that's like complaining your sports car is too slow while off-roading and the 4x4 SUV keeps losing races. Dude. Manage. Manage your talent. This is not about how bigger a piece of cake your brother got than you. It's about putting the right people in the right places. The manager insisted how unfair this would be, and eventually Susan quit because of Jane, and Jane quit because she hated sales. What jobs did they get? Susan got a job selling, and Jane got a job in an office, managing supplies.

Most of the time, you don't have such clear-cut people. Maybe one person is great at programming software, but terrible at explaining it at meetings because he's shy. Maybe the guy who is great at making connections keeps forgetting to record his sales. Maybe you just have all grumpy and lazy people. Each situation and person is different. Sometimes you have to train them, and sometimes you just have to let them go. Leadership is knowing where to do each, and who to do it to.

That's why it's hard and draining. A hell of a lot of responsibility.

Psychologist
This part is hard, too. You have to guess between what someone is saying, and what they really mean. Some people are easy. They always mean what they say. Some people say one thing, but mean another. And some people are outright liars. And not only do you have to figure out why, but how to get around it or even use it to your advantage.

I had a boss who was really good at this. He never wanted to fire anyone if he could help it, even though he was not in charge of who he got. Even though he got people HR decided was good for the team, he still believed everyone had a purpose under him, and by gum, he took even the most annoying or no-talent people they gave him and found something, anything, they were good at. We had a guy who was an arrogant pathological liar with a big mouth and patronizing sneer whom everyone hated pretty much openly. My boss found out he had a talent for a certain Macro language no one wanted to learn, and so made him in charge, and put him in a pod far away from anyone else (actually, he was put among people who could not talk to him because they were on headsets, talking to customers). He thrived there. He ended up going to another company, and becoming a brilliant programmer under a guy who did the same thing: gave him tasks, and kept him away from people. Too bad his big mouth got him fired later on, but some things can't be helped, and at least he has a lesson to learn from.

Some people do best when given sub-deadlines for every step and strict rules on how to do everything. Some do best when told to work whenever they like, as long as they get the job done on time. Most like a little of both. That's why you have to constantly communicate with your workers. Build up a loyalty instead of a people who fear you. People will work longer hours, produce better work, and provide a more pleasant work environment if they think they matter. Catch them doing something right more than doing something wrong. If the only communication you have is when they screw up, they will associate you with humiliation and embarrassment. This turns to anxiety, resentment, and poorer quality work. You have to kind of understand how people tick, and understand that everyone is different. Don't assume every one of the same cut of cloth is the same pattern, as they say. I had a boss who hired Asian people because "they have some sort of Samurai honor thing, and genetically they have bred themselves to be hardier workers for less pay." Kind of like reverse racism, almost. Except in his ignorance of "all Asian people are the same" he hired a lot of Vietnamese (Samurai is Japanese ... much farther north), and didn't keep his mouth shut about his "ancient Chinese secret" at hiring people. Too bad the Department of Labor didn't agree with his practices when a "Samurai employee" filed a discrimination suit. Everyone works differently, and hopefully you can figure out if they'll work out during the interview. And by checking references, the most valuable and overlooked tool on a resume.

But don't go too far and "be their friend," either. That backfires almost all the time. Some managers don't want to be the bad guy. I once was asked to fire someone else's assistant because she couldn't bear the thought of firing her new "best bud." I refused, and so she didn't fire her bumbling assistant for months until our boss finally fired the assistant. That's why I never hire friends to work under me directly, unless I am totally sure they will do a good job. I have been burned far too many times. I knew this one guy from a former job, and when I left, we still remained friends. I was totally sure would do a good job because he did a good job at the old place. What I didn't know was since the last time I worked with this person, they got hooked on drugs and I often had to do this guy's work because he was always "out sick," and when he did work, he was always goofing off. I grew red in the face when my boss said, "Why did you recommend this clown?" Luckily for my pride, we all got laid off, and so I never had to fire him. Another time, I hired someone as a favor to a friend, who convinced me this girl was really a great worker. This girl, while nice, turned out to be a complete flaky psychodramatic, who claimed all manner of ailments that prevented her from doing her job properly (like, say, showing up on time ... or all day without warning). Just before I was about to fire her, she quit, but tried to save face by saying she was being a martyr for "taking this sacrifice" because my boss obviously had it out for her (totally untrue), and I had a family and all, and she understood why I was "selling out to the man." Huh. An employee is not your friend. He or she is an asset. A valuable asset, yes, but ultimately has to be replaceable. Leave the friends to your social life, and keep work and social life as separate as humanly possible. Someday, you may have to tell that "friend" that their job has been eliminated due to cutbacks. Can you look them in the eyes and say that without remorse?

Diplomat
They say the true art of diplomacy is letting other people get your way. Diplomacy is best described as a go-between of two or more possibly opposing sides. As a manager, you will always be this diplomat. It's usually between your employees and the upper management or your employees and the customer. There are so many ways to approach diplomacy, and each situation is so unique, I can only give you examples.

One-on-one meetings are very good diplomacy. Especially in a private room. Bad diplomacy is reprimanding an employee in front of others. Even worse is to compare one employee to another in front of both. It's rarely a compliment to say Susan is a better seller than Jane, in front of both, because Jane will hate Susan, and Susan will feel awkward. Gifts are also dicey. I have found that just being a nice guy with a firm set of rules and a genuine care for the employee pays off a lot better than a free keychain, tee-shirt, and coffee mug in the long term.

Never, ever, ever, no matter how much you want to, gossip about an employee to another. Some of the worst diplomatic blunders happen when a boss says to you something like, "Your coworker Bill sure sucks." I had one boss tell me that a guy I worked with had herpes. That was none of my business. And even though you think it makes you look like "the good guy" to your employees, never badmouth your management. Even if you totally disagree with them, and think they are living scum that smell like lung tar. It's bad for morale in the long run, and if that doesn't convince you, let me scare you with one hard fact: someone will snitch. Everything you have ever said bad about someone gets back to them, even if you don't know it. Even if they never heard the words, "smells like lung tar," they know. Body language, averting eyes, and subconscious behavior give away a lot more than you think. They don't even have to be conscious of it, they will just "feel uncomfortable" around your workers.

Some people don't get along. I recall one company I worked at, the software development team and the marketing team HATED each other. If development would have their way, they'd sell the same software, over and over, as long as it suited them. If marketing had their way, everyone would be assured Godlike powers and continuous looping orgasms for eternity. And possibly their own pony. Marketing kept promising to customers what development didn't want to give, or in many cases, couldn't give. "Sure, we can do that," they to any customer without checking to see if we actually did. I think if development could sum up marketing, it would have been "do what I want, not what I ask for." Marketing summed up the development by saying they were slow-moving, cranky bastards who didn't play nice with others. My team was in the middle: we tested the software before it was released. Quality Assurance. QA. I don't know what they call it now. Our job was to take what marketing wanted, what development gave us, and try and make it work. Often, development sent us stuff that didn't work, and we had to send it back, pointing out explicitly where it had failed. Marketing would balk that we didn't give it a thumbs up fast enough. Once, they tried to "cut out the middleman" and released a software build that had a HORRIBLE bug in it during a trade show as a "preview of what is to come." Any Mac user that got our software at the Macworld Expo in 1997... I am sorry. Nearly one-third of its most vital design needs did not work, and even worse, it corrupted your virtual memory and crashed your OS if used repeatedly without rebooting. Dev laughed. Marketing blamed us, until it was exposed the build number was one we never received (which is how we found out). Oops. But I saw first hand how this opposition worked, and what my managers had to deal with. They not only had to keep perfect records, but had to explain why this happened without making a fool out of development or marketing. Our team looked good, and even valuable after that incident.

Worst line? Friend of mine who worked at large software company during its downturn and buyout said a new manager asked, "Who are these Beta Testers, and why are they so down on our software? We need team players, not complainers who bitch about bugs, and point out every obvious flaw they find. Who needs these Negative Nellies?" Uh ... isn't that their job, by definition? And those "Negative Nellies" were right in front of him.

The worst crimes of poor diplomacy seem to be when a manager loses sight of where the money comes from: the customer. Sometimes the customer is actually the customer who bought your company's product or service, and sometimes the customer is another department in the company (like employees are to the company mailroom).

Good Customer Diplomacy Example: Rewarding employees who fix customer's problems, whatever it takes. Settings soft time limit goals to reduce customer hold time.
Bad Customer Diplomacy Example: Specifying tech call times with a maximum average, and punish those that go over.

One term I hear a lot is "micromanagement." These are managers who control everything their employee does, down to where they put the stapler on their desk. I have been debating if this is a leadership problem, because it's poor talent and asset management: you are left doing all the work and decisions. Why have employees at this point? It's also very bad psychology, because it kills employee morale, and makes them feel stupid. But it the end I have put it under diplomacy, because it affects the whole company. You cannot be a diplomat if you have no common ground with the worker. My wife used to work for a company that handed out a "desk template" of where one puts they keyboard, pencil cup, stapler, and did not allow anything personal on their desk or cube like photos, plants, or art. Guess how gloomy that place was to work. Guess how they treated the customer. Diplomacy was so far gone, that people openly insulted each other, the customer, and management. No one felt like they had to deal to get anything, it was everyone for themselves.

This goes two ways, you know. You have to show upper management why your team is valuable, and ensure they know what kind of work they do, and

You can always find common ground, even if the sides hate each other. The company wants everyone to wear suits and ties. The employees want casual. You can make those that interact with customers wear nice things, and those that work in the mail room have more casual and comfortable clothing. Have casual Fridays.

If you are diplomatic, and give where you can give, employees will receive you much better.

That's it. I hope this wasn't too long winded.

Posted by Punkie @ 02:57 PM EST [Link]

Monday, September 22, 2003

Ghosts from the Past - Around the Table We Shall Kill

"NO NO NO!!! DIE DIE DIE!!! KILL HIM! He's getting away!"

"No," I said, "I think he's dead..."

"No he's not!" said Kate. "I don't trust him!"

"'Aw think she's dayd.'" quoted Julie in a deep voice from the Monty Python version of "The Death of Mary, Queen of Scots."

"'No ah'm nawt!'" said Ellen, finishing the quote with a high falsetto voice.

I watched the people around me repeatedly bash and stab the dead body of their nemesis, "Bizzodd," because none of them believed he could die unless they smashed every tiny bone in his body, burnt the remnants, and poured holy water on the ashes. Around the table were several people, all teens, who would later go on to become professors of medieval science and astronomy, a stay-at-home mom, a biochemist, a Navy Seal, and a computer geek.

"I swear to you guys," I tried to assure them, "he's dead. I know, I'm the DM." I went to put away my gaming screen. I knew the game was over, but I had built up such an animosity towards one of the great NPCs of my time, the players didn't want it to end. They wanted to kill the son-of-a-bitch some more.

"You could be lying!" said Kate, who actually saw me lie a few times back in those days. "Ow!" she screamed, because her long frizzy hair caught in the zipper of my gaming bag. Maybe on purpose.

It was the Last Great Game of our gaming group. It was JulieCon II, and it was time to kill Bizzodd. See, Bizzodd was this Drow elf, which makes no sense if you didn't play AD&D back then, but just think of him and a black-skinned, pointy-eared, silver-haired, and most terribly annoying enemy. For years, he'd show up at the WORST places, throw a knife at one of them, and vanish. He also got involved with every enemy they ever fought, stole stuff all the time, and was such an annoying pest they couldn't kill, that just mentioning his name made some of my players grit their teeth. He also had "minions," like "Robbie the Rust Monster," a Rust Monster who would follow you like a puppy, "Rarr Squoot," an annoying toadie who wasn't good at taunts but was too stupid to know it ("You guys smell like... fat cows, you do! Nyyyaaah!"), and "Wagotron," a wood golem that transformed into an ox cart, making my players very suspicious of all ox carts. The whole weekend of JulieCon II was one great game where they had to hunt down Bizzodd and kill him. I have never had a more animated game... ever.

I always smile when I think of my last gaming group. And recently, I have been asked to start the rusty gears of gaming again. I haven't set my eyes on these books for... ages. As I unzipped my gaming bag, strands of Kate's long blond hair were still there. I had forgotten how mad she got, but she shouldn't have stuck her face in my secret gaming stuff! Julie and Ellen were convinced Bizzodd wasn't really dead, and I must admit, I was entertaining the idea of him coming back as a Shade, but then came our senior year, and then life...

Christine set up a group for this Thursday. It has me, her, CR, Sara, and possibly Rogue if her cold gets better. Brad may join us next Thursday. It's an experiment, a geeky one, but an experiment nonetheless.

Can I DM again? Who knows. Will Bizzodd come back? Oh yes. Yes yes yes.

Posted by Punkie @ 07:20 PM EST [Link]

A Few Cool People I Know

I know a lot of cool people, some with very unusual talents. I can't list them all here, but I will list two professionals who not only do some cool stuff on a basic level (that is, people have heard of what they do), but also really like what they do.

Thomas R. Holtz, Jr., whom I have known for years as "Tom" in the pair, "Tom and Sue." Tom and Sue I have known for a while, ever since I joined Katsucon, and only two years ago, did I realize he was a Paleontologist. Not like someone who studies some obscure stuff no one has heard about (like gymnosperm parasites), but he specializes in Tyrannosauridae, whose most notable member is the big bad Tyrannosaurus Rex. He's been on the Discovery Channel from time to time. Of course, I know him best as one of the people who run the Katsucon Cosplay, but it's nice to know if I have a question about dinosaurs, I can just e-mail him and go, "So what's up with that dino-barf?" Even better, Tom is an interesting paleontologist, which is better than some scientists I have met who are boring and arrogant. Some can tell a great story, and some can't, and Tom certainly can. Which is also why he also teaches at the University of Maryland.

Dr. Jason Aufdenberg, on the other hand, is as dull as dishwater. Just kidding! He's actually one of the most well-rounded people I have ever known. I met him when we were taking astronomy together, both when we wanted to be astrophysicists. He went on to actually become one! But not only that, but when I first met him, he was an amateur stage magician, juggler, flute player, and cyclist. Now he's added cake decorating, cook, hiker, nature photographer, and banjo player to his list. Oh, and he's a postdoctorate fellow at Harvard. How cool is that? Every New Year's, he comes to our house, and we all watch Dick Clark count down the ball, and spend the whole evening discussing science, music, and whatever else he's picked up the rest of the year. He's also as funny as hell, with great wit and afterthoughts.

Posted by Punkie @ 01:05 PM EST [Link]

Sunday, September 21, 2003

Updates

I had a BAD head cold, and I think I caught some sort of ENT infection. So I spent a lot of this morning getting my net fix and updating my site. We had to take photos of everything we owned for insuranace purposes in the preparation for Isabel, and in this wave of digital photo taking, I culled out some stuff I meant to put up in my photos section. For you Widget/Ahfu fans, I have a picture of them sleeping together, two more smaller relatives, and a whole bunch of, "Look at the weird stuff I own."

Also, I fixed my SETI script up top there: I had a bug where if the SETI web pages were unreachable (which happens a LOT), the script would barf. Now it just keeps the old data until new data is found.

Posted by Punkie @ 01:35 PM EST [Link]

Travis is 30

One of my high points this weekend was my friend Travis achieved age 30, and had a party to celebrate. I am not sure how he does it, but he has some of the most interesting people and great parties. It was at his father's house, and his father is some retired... let's say he worked for the Navy. There were other people who... also worked with or for the Navy. I heard hours of "non-conversation" the likes of which I haven't heard since I lived in McLean. If you are not from here, you would be confused when people had conversations of, "I used to work for You-know-who when he was doing you-know-what, and I recall your boss what doing that thing with... the lake." "Oh, yes, I remember him. I served with him while we... worked on a boat. You know, THAT boat." "Yeesss... I actually worked on the... engine, of that boat..." "Oh. You worked for the tall man with the pistachios?" "No, I was assigned to... the walnuts."

Some of Travis's friends from work and his previous Boy Scout troop were also there. It seemed half of them worked for the government, the other half were still in college. Some I knew, back from the "Team Chicken Salad" days, and some from a previous party, and some I had never met before. I had great conversations with everyone well on into the night.

His father's property is in a wooded area, and his house has vintage slot machines (complete with a pile of quarters), a pool table, a pinball machine, a old-fashioned baseball-style pinball machine, darts, and a stripper pole. Truly a bachelor's pad, although Travis's father is married to a wonderful lady named Donna. In addition, there are all kinds of Asian and military artifacts scattered throughout in curio cabinets and on the wall.

We brought Ahfu with us, because he's a party dog, and he had a great time. We didn't brig Widget because he's not comfortable with a lot of other people yet, and he gets VERY car sick. Christine played "Cheapass Games" games with a bunch of other people, and CR beat people at pinball and darts.

It was a great Saturday!

Posted by Punkie @ 11:41 AM EST [Link]

Saturday, September 20, 2003

Random Story - Bad Job Interviews

I posted a long story about the worst coincidence ever, but I have also had other bad interviews that are kind of funny, now.

The Albino Twins
In 1995, I was trying to get a tech job, away from retail. One of my most memorable interviews (besides the one mentioned above) as some technical company I'll call Obscuretech (because I forgot their real name). I saw their ad in the Washington Post, arranged an interview with their secretary, and showed up early one morning in a nice suit. The office was in a building, I think the second floor of a small office building, and the front area was like a hundred others I had seen: a long receptionist desk, wood paneling, and the company logo in silver relief letters behind her. I sat in a leather couch for quite some time, mostly because I was early, but also because they were rather late. About 40 minutes after our scheduled interview, they called the secretary to usher me in.

As soon as we left the lobby area, the rest of the office looked quite different. There were stacks of paper leaning up against the walls, some in boxes, and some just loosely stacked. There was also a lot of other equipment, and I passed a kitchen area where two men were arguing loudly about something. The whole walk back to the owners' offices gave the impression that they never let people back here much, and stuff was just left on the floor as they tired of using it. The owners' office was the same way: it had two huge desks with stuff piled on and around it. The walls had no art of any kind; no posters, clocks, anything that gave the office a more permanent look. It looked like a pile in an office.

The owners were an odd pair. I call them "The Albino Twins," although I don't think they were truly albino. They were both twins, though, brothers that owned the company. Both had bright white hair, puffy pink skin, and were overweight. One wore a badly fitting yellow tee-shirt with some logo on it, khaki shorts, and high top sneakers. The other wore a white undershirt, corduroy pants, and flip-flops. It was like I had entered their rec room. But they were expecting me, and the first question one asked as the secretary left me there was, "Why are you wearing a tie? This is not a marketing position."

The interview went badly from the start. It seems what they asked for was not what they were actually looking for, but when I mentioned that their ad differed from their requirements, they told me that was on purpose to "weed out anyone was was not serious," and went on the explain they wanted people who had ABC as their qualifications, but if they advertised ABC, they got people they didn't like, so they advertised XYZ instead, hoping they also knew ABC. I found this stupid, but said nothing. They kept interviewing me, anyway, even though a lot of what they needed I simply did not have. One was eating a strudel from an Enteman's box, and when he saw me looking at it, offered me a chunk he broke off with his own hand. I took it, and ate it to be polite, even though the chunk was a little warmer than room temperature and I wondered how long it had been since it had been properly refrigerated.

One brother did most of the talking, while the other added comments as he saw fit. They talked about what they did, why they started the company (from their own basement), and even said the office looked bad because they had just moved in a few months ago. They seemed happy when they talked, and upset when I talked, so I think I talked about as much as the less talkative brother. They kept coming back to the issue that I had worn a tie, and when I said I wore it because it was an interview and this was the standard thing I wore to interviews, they got even more upset, and asked me things about "if everyone jumped off a cliff, would you?" I asked them if I removed the tie, would that be better, and I got, "Might as well keep it, it's how we see you, now."

The session lasted about an hour, or maybe it seemed that long, because while it was obvious they were looking for was not me, but they needed someone to talk at of a while. When I left, they didn't show me out, and I got lost for a while until I followed another, newly hired, employee to the main desk.

I didn't get called back, and I am not surprised or upset.

The Qualifications
I was trying to find another job in the retail sector at one time, and I called the number in an ad that was offering $33,000 for a manager of a Rental Storage Facility (you know, where people rent out storage areas to put all their stuff). This seemed a little high, back when managers in retail made about $20 - 25,000 at most. But I thought I'd give it a shot.

The guy who answered the phone said what he needed to manage a such a rental facility. I expected management experience, including accounting, hiring, and employee management. He expected a fully 10 years of computer programming experience, including C+, DB IV, plus extensive terminal installation, a college degree, and at least five year experience in software engineering. Uh... for a management job in a Rental Storage Facility? I didn't have near what he asked, but when I asked, "Why would you need that?" he said he only wanted smart managers, not the dumb ones he kept getting. I felt it ironic, thinking $33,000 was bit high for a manager, but now it seemed WAY too low for what he was asking. I told him so, and he got angry, saying I was insulting him. I told him that people who had those skills would probably ask for at least $50,000 a year, plus, they wouldn't look under "retail management" in the paper, nor would they consider running a Rental Storage Facility. He got mad, and told me to hang up. So I did.

I saw that ad for a year afterwards. I wonder if he is still looking?

The Water People
I applied to be an activist for a series of jobs, because I didn't know any better. One was a company that had the name "Water" in it, like "Citizens for the Clean Water Act" or something. I showed up to their Dupont Circle address in DC. I was 19, naive, and didn't know much about what being an activist was. The office was a rowhouse in Dupont Circle, which is an area known for their culture and activism, kind of like the "Greenwich Village" or "Haight Ashbury" of DC, only not as cool. Anyway, I got the standard one-on-one interview with a guy, who seemed to be a fired-up, charged kind of person. He seemed to like everything I had to say, and said he'd really be interested in putting me on a paid, "Trial Basis," on the spot. I was psyched! I filled out the paperwork, and reported downstairs to their basement for "orientation."

The basement was nice for a rowhouse basement. The ceiling was low, but they had nice gold carpeting, wood paneling, and mood lighting. They had set up about 40-50 chairs, and we all faced a guy at a podium. The guy went on about their cause, to make sure the citizens of the area would always have access to clean water. He showed slides about government policies, bills passed, waste management, and water treatment plants. He then started to talk about home filtration systems, and stayed on that topic for a long, long time. He even had samples. To make a long story short, he wanted us to "liberate the citizens" by selling them water treatment systems. Then there was a lunch break (free catered deli), and then the rest of the day was a lecture on how to sell these door-to-door, or in malls. I got REAL uncomfortable, especially when they mentioned that the "up front cost" was "only $400" (in 1988 money). I seemed to be the only one who didn't feel comfortable, and some (probably audience plants) seem enthusiastic about the "opportunity." Then we had to go to a table to sign up and buy our first kits. The following is not exactly what happened next, but an idea of how they had an answer for everything.

Me: I don't have $400.
Them: We accept credit cards.
Me: I don't have a credit card.
Them: We'll take a post-dated check.
Me: I didn't bring my checkbook.
Them: There's an ATM around the corner.
Me: I don't have $400 in cash.
Them: Call your parents.
Me: They are dead.
Them: Call your siblings.
Me: I don't have any.
Them: Call a relative.
Me: I am alone, I don't know any that have money.
Them: I thought you were willing to win.
Me: I didn't know I had to sell water treatment systems.
Them: Don't you want your fellow citizens to have good, clean water? Don't you care?
Me: I don't have $400.
Them: I am sure your roommates can help you out. You'll make back three times that in one week, we swear! Take 'em to a nice steak restaurant. You like steak, don't you?

I guess they figured if they guilted me, the "nice guy," enough, I'd "find the money." Truth was, I really did not have $400, and did not have anyone to borrow it from. Then things got a little ugly. They mentioned I signed paperwork agreeing to sell the systems. I said I was told that was my W9 tax forms and such. Then they got a guy to "work on the difficult cases," and lumped me with another woman who didn't have the money, either. They guilted her by stating she was saying no to her own children having a better life. Turns out these guys had a LOT of ads, for different jobs, but all led to selling their water treatment systems. We had three guys badgering us for about half an hour about how we had broken promises, and how disappointed they were in us. I swear, I would have caved in and gave them $400 if I had it. I was scared and felt so guilty, they were really good at this. But the woman and I gained a little strength by being together, and finally they let us go. By this time, it was dark out.

They called my house several times, and my roommates screened them for me for a few weeks until the calls finally stopped. I think they were mad at me for being this stupid, and I feel bad about this whole thing to this day.

Asshat water people.

Last Bit of Silliness
I was once turned down for a job because I was a man. "We uh... were expecting a female to apply for this position," said the boss when I interviewed for "administrative assistant." I wonder why...? Yes, that was illegal, but that was 1988, I didn't know better, and I am sure they got what was coming to them.

So I have had some bad ones out there... but someday I'll post the worst *applicants* I ever got when I did interviews.

Posted by Punkie @ 11:52 AM EST [Link]

Isabel's Gone, and Thank God

Well, it's over and blown off.

After having my ankle up in a brace, I had to get it all bent up again on Thursday as I hurriedly grabbed anything I thought would fly into my house or a neighbor's torso that I could, and either put it in my shed or in my home. They canceled school, the government, all Metro, and eventually my workplace sent all "non-essential" people home.

After we tied everything down, we watched wave after wave of wind and rain go by, each worse than the previous wave. We actually had power until 9:45, although it went off an on a lot toward the end. Then the power went out for good. While we had power though, we sat in our rec room (near the brick chimney), and watched the news channels for the latest updates. When it finally scared us to the point we couldn't watch anymore, we watched "The Two Towers," and "Animal House," on DVD. Halfway through Animal House (at the Delta Tau Xi hearing scene) is when the power went down for good.

Then it was dead quiet inside... but the outside we listened to the wind howl, interruped by flashes of light, banging noises, and the sound of buckets of rain poruing on our windows. The Hello Kitty radio worked great, but the radio channels were unhelpful except for gratuitous closings announcements.

We sat in the rec room, with candles, even though everyone on the news told us over and over again not to use candles because of fire. Since the only gas we use was to our hot water heater far away, and we never smelled a gas leak, we thought we were okay. Besides, I learned at an early age (not by bad experience, but by lesson) never to leave an open flame unattended. So nothing bad came of our candle use, except we discovered reading by candle is nigh impossible. Also, we rediscovered having no power sucks. It wasn't a surprise, but it brought back bad memories of childhood where my father vacationed on the yacht (no power except when generator was on, and that was rare), and when I was a kid, one of my "punishments" was my all my electrical power was cut off from my room for up to a week.

Darkness. Humidity. It sucks.

Of course, it could have been worse. It could have been really hot or really cold. Any by 8:03 pm, less than 23 hours later, we had power back on. Phone and cable is still sporadic. Some calls come in, some calls do not.

The total damage is slight, and we fared a lot better than our neighbors. We lost some siding and some refrigerated food, but no major calamities. Some lost a lot of siding, parts of their roof, and of course, lots and lots of downed branches and trees. There were also small fires here and there from downed power lines and auto accidents. Oh, and my arthritis and sinus hurt like a mofo, but that's to be expected from this weather.

As I type this, my painkiller are taking effect, so I'll have more later when I am more coherent. But I wanted to tell everyone we are okay.

Posted by Punkie @ 12:19 AM EST [Link]

Wednesday, September 17, 2003

Stop this ride conductor, I wanna get off...

I don't know how I do it, but I still have a job.

I think I am starting to break down. The constant stress in my life has been hitting me so many times, I don't think I believe in the "makes you stronger" part anymore. As a kid, I think the only reason I never went mad, and there were times I almost did, was the resilience of youth. But the structural damage of 18 years of insecurity, added to another 17 years of trying to build on a faulty foundation, is taking its toll. Sometimes when a car is skidding out of control, and you try and grab the wheel, the world flashes by so fast you fear you might miss seeing something before you collide with it. Light and sound become a blur, and suddenly, you begin to separate yourself from your life. All the screaming of the other passengers, and the spinning scenery around you start to wash out to a neutral grey static. Its almost like there is a numb feeling that starts to take over your senses, a kind of acceptance of death.

I had that feeling once when I came very close in a suicide attempt. Before the tunnel of light, before the feeling of peace and one with the creator, you suddenly don't feel like you're in your own body anymore. It feels as if your spirit becomes separate from the flesh. A weird calm takes over. A numb, warm, calm. No, I am not going to kill myself. One of the things I have realized is I don't have to. Death will come when it wants to, and despite my futile "control" efforts to bring on or postpone death, it comes when it wants to. I attempted suicide five times in three years as a teen, and failed every time. Twice I came close, but I always came back feeling worse. "I am such a loser, I can't even end my own life," I'd say. Now I say, "I don't even want to bother." What I really fear is that my mind will just shut down, like an overheated computer. I fear that I will wake up somewhere, dazed, confused, and not remembering what happened or even who I am. I fear not being there for my family and friends, who while they can exist without me, would probably be mad if I just suddenly was gone with no warning.

Maybe I will have been gone for years; like an autistic vegetable in a hospital somewhere who wakes up because of a new drug added to my IV. Or maybe I ran off into a cold night and just kept going. Suddenly, I am cooking a batch of fries at a Whattaburger in Dallas, and I overhear something from my past, and it occurs to me I am not Nevada Storm Raven, half-Cherokee homeless man who decided to finally get a job so I can get out of the homeless shelter. No, no I was once someone else, but this thought never occurred to me when a volunteer asked me if I had any family somewhere. It would be like amnesia, and not the kind brought on my a head injury, but by my own faulty wiring who couldn't take one more piece of worry on his plate. Now it's 2020, and suddenly, I don't know who I am anymore.

Maybe the sweat lodge would know.

Naah... I couldn't pass myself off as half-Cherokee. I look too much like a fat Viking with glasses. Besides, I doubt I'd go far without SOMEONE recognizing me, and returning me to my family. I could see some random fan drive by in her car, and go, "Oh my god, that's Punkie! Hey, man, people are looking for you, and boy are they mad! Hop in!" I guess that's my God gave me so many friends.

So as I sit here, watching the Weather Channel, seeing the Outer Banks which I love so much getting battered about, knowing that this storm is headed our way, and feeling like I just got shot at by a career sniper I thought left on vacation for a few months, wondering how long I will have my job, nursing a sore ankle, hating that my Saturn wagon died, unable to do more than hobble about, feeling lonely and scared, wondering if my whole ego will explode like a supernova, and generally trying hard to drown out my thoughts while thanking God I don't drink.

Because I'd never stop.

Posted by Punkie @ 08:04 PM EST [Link]

Wednesday from hell

Okay, last week was not so bad. THIS week, however...

Yesterday, I got some supplies for the hurricane because they say it's coming. I got water, non-perishable food, batteries, and duct tape. Everyone was out of "D" batteries, so I got the few remaining "C" batteries and a radio that took "C" batteries. I can't really fault the stores for not having enough "D" batteries, because they aren't used that much: most people use the electric cord on their boom box or whatever. Some of these machines, even my small sports TV, take like 8 "D" batteries for only 8-10 hours of use. What a waste! So this new radio is also a CD player, takes the "less popular" C batteries... and... oh, man, how embarrassing: It's frosting-pink colored "Hello Kitty" boom box. Well, at least it was on sale, and the end result is I have a working battery-powered radio. That's pink.

Anyway, we still don't have a fence. This sucks for reasons I have already mentioned, plus the fact that now there are piles of loose, wet lumber behind my house. Why does this suck...? Think about it. My house is next to piles of loose lumber. Oncoming hurricane. Dammit!

So, with all the crazy weather, my ankle has been bothering me, but it's been so frequent, I just sort of ignore it... until it collapsed last night. So I put the brace back on it, and assumed it would stop hurting. Well, it still hurts, and while it will support more weight, it is swelling like a sprain. Dammit! So I stayed home from work. I still have to haul all my loose stuff in from the yard, and I don't know how the hell I am going to do all that.

Then, even though I dial in from work, I find that there was a network crisis last night where some idiot has his box on our server's IP address, so the WINS server is all confused, and files can't be copied from one place to another. I could have easily fixed it if I was there. But no. I am not. I had to do everything through a 56k connection, including VNC, ssh, pcAnywhere... all on this little laptop. Windows keeps crashing. Mapping is not working. VPN connection constantly timing out. Network is crazy. Blood pressure really high.

THEN, if all this wasn't enough, I get a call from my wife that says our friend Sean said that we're having layoffs at work. AGAIN! I am not allowed to talk about it, but I don't know if I have a job at this time. Dammit! Massive company wide exchange, too, is on the news. Great. Maybe I'll know by the end of the day. Who knows.

I wish I had a mommy.

Posted by Punkie @ 11:37 AM EST [Link]

Tuesday, September 16, 2003

An Ill Wind that Blows Nobody Good...

in a tower of steel nature forges a deal to raise wonderful hell like me like me my name isobel .... Björk - "Isobel"

So, here we are. Hurricane Isabel is coming ... maybe. Since this is worrying me to death ... probably needlessly, but you know how I like to worry... I have decided to talk about it.

It was 1979... I think. Somewhere around when school started, at any rate. Hurricane David was a horrible storm that had flattened the Caribbean Islands, smashed into Florida, and then like a gutter ball, rolled up the coast, up the Chesapeake, and hit us in McLean (in the DC Metro area). By the time it got to us, it was barely a hurricane, but boy, what a wallop. My father didn't get any supplies, he didn't board up any windows, and in his defense, we didn't suffer afterwards, but boy did the neighbors waggle their fingers at us. I watched the huge ornamental black cherry trees in our yard bend back and forth, but we didn't loose more than a few larger limbs. We lost power for about 3 days, and school was closed because the roof of my elementary school had sustained major water damage, and a few windows broke inwards. Almost all of the old-growth willow trees in our neighborhood were blown down. Later that year, Hurricane Frederic blew through, and the storm that nearly flattened Alabama was just a lot of wind by the time it got to us.

Later in life, Hurricane Bonnie was right behind us as we left Hatteras after a glorious one-week vacation in 1998, and the next year, the evacuation orders for Hurricane Dennis hit the day we arrived, so we had to turn around and go home.

I am not fond of Hurricanes.

But I will say one thing: they always give you plenty of warning. Unlike an earthquake or a tornado, they don't sneak up on you. I will give them that. And living in DC is almost natural-disaster free, except every 4-5 years we get a blizzard of some kind, and every 25 years or so, when we get a strong hurricane. So I guess it was time. The last BIG one to hit us was 1954, and that one was barely a category 2. As I speak now, the storm is weakening down to a category 2, although they think it will pick up some steam in the next 24 hours. Or not. It's hard to tell with hurricanes. Sneaky bastards.

I don't know what I will do if it hits us. If it's a category 1 or lower, I'll probably stay home. If it's 2 or greater, we're evacuating to West Virginia. We can't go to a storm shelter with 4 cats and 2 dogs. I tried to get the Saturn wagon to work, but it wouldn't start, and I don't have the time or money to figure out why at this time. So we'll have to pack everyone in the blue Saturn. That will suck. Christine's out now getting supplies.

Funny ... we had an Equinox meeting this weekend at Haven. I wonder if that will be canceled or ... intensified? Of course, by Saturday, it will be too late to do much of anything. A hurricane is like a wall, you have no idea what it feels like until you feel one coming. I felt the Dennis one coming, and it was absolutely incredible. Imagine this: you lie face down on the ground, with your arms outstretched, and your feet pressed flat against the wall. Imagine you are not lying face down, but standing up and pressing your face and arms against a wall. Your feet are "standing" on a floor (yes, the wall, but imagine its the floor ... trick your brain). Now fool your brain over and over again that you are not lying down, but that you are standing up. Press yourself to the floor. After a minute of this, your brain starts to believe what you say. You may even adjust your feet to "keep from falling to one side." Now that you think the floor is your wall*. Feel the Earth in "front" of you. Imagine the earth is one ... big ... wall. When your brain thinks this, you will feel very, very small, and slightly panicked.

That's what a hurricane feels like, when feeling it come in while on a beach. It seriously humbled me.

*Many thanks to my old friend and ex-Prune Geoff Adams for this exercise.

Posted by Punkie @ 02:14 PM EST [Link]

A little lesson on other's reality.

I repeated something to someone the other day that made me want to write this all down for others to read: Just because something's real doesn't force people to believe in it.

Hard lesson to swallow. It was hard for me, but I think I have accepted it, and so I try and teach this to others. There are all essences of denial that everyone has. Some can't face their own fears, and this leads to all kinds of interesting side effects you'd never even dream of. Just keep that thought in the back of your mind for a moment while I explain the reality part.

I hear a lot of people complain about someone else "not facing reality." Some even become incensed that the OBVIOUS truth, right in front of them, is ignored. I usually hear this about things that are so subjective, it may not even be an issue of denial, but let's take this to the extreme and work our way back. Let's say you have a friend, Bill, who does not believe in the existence of trees.

"Ha ha!" you might think at first, "trees are a real, you see them every day!" But Bill says that you only THINK you see them. They are illusions caused by ... say the sun hitting you eyes at the wrong angle. You may get mad at Bill, pointing out that you climbed them as a kid, watched them grow, and even have a few in the yard. You can see them, touch them, smell them ... even hear the wind whooshing through the limbs. But Bill says it's all in your head. Let's assume for the moment that Bill is NOT being patronizing, arrogant, or mean. But let's say that Bill is humoring you because, in his heart, trees are a phenomenon of misplaced faith, like how some see UFO Abductions. He just thinks you're misinformed, like so many people he meets.

"I will prove it!" you claim, and take Bill outside. Bill claims to see none of the trees you point out to him. Let's say Bill runs into a tree rather hard, causing a nosebleed. How could he deny that? "Don't assume my spontaneous nosebleeds are a result of your so called 'trees.' That happens from time to time, I get blinding headaches followed by nosebleeds. It is a migraine-related issue, and in the future, I'd rather you not use my medical problems to support your faulty, however well-meaning, theories."

Doooooh! I bet you'd be furious, wouldn't you? Don't. It's the essence of all wars. That's my point. You won't be able to do anything to convince Bill, because you do not control his perceptions.

I spent years of free time trying to define reality. Why? Well, because I was told it couldn't be done easily. "Philosophers have spent years debating this... yatta yatta yatta..." So I set to define it. Of course, in truth (or my truth), I only set MY definition of it. And this is it:

Reality is a response to perceived stimuli.

Let's break that down. A response is how an organism reacts. Perceived means it's a personal experience. Stimuli is what interacts with the organism in the first place. So something happens, the organism's senses pick it up, translate it according to experience, and reacts to it. I have an essay of this on my site, but it's rather old and outdated, so I won't link to it. My point is this: to a paranoid person, people are out to get him. You will never prove it otherwise. Reality is such a personal experience, it's impossible to change it in someone else.

But yet we try. I mean, every time we communicate, we're creating a stimulus. But that's all we can control, we can't control how someone reacts to it. Now, we can, based on our experience of the person, control their reactions. Like I know if I hit a guy, he'll probably be mad. But I can't control what he does next, but I am assuming I personally would only hit a guy if I wanted them to stop doing something. I am taking a gamble on their reaction. But he may hit me back, which is why I haven't hit a person since I was a teen. But taking this down a few levels, I know if I say "Do you think your wife is sleeping with anyone?" will more than likely cause a paranoid person a level of instability. Some people excel at this level. They know "what buttons to push," so to speak. Sometimes only in a few special people (like their kids), sometimes more people, and some people are experts at manipulating stranger because they exploit other's fears and rules. Magicians know this, and use them to force people to do something that SEEMS random, but in reality, actually isn't. Like they know if most people are told to choose a number in their head from 1-4, they will usually choose 3.

Most of us are not that good. And this is what I try and tell my friends who are upset that another friend they care about is destroying themselves. It's not easy. It took me YEARS to get to this point, and I am still not wholly practicing this. It's not that I don't care so-and-so is addicted to marijuana, it's that I now know trying to get someone off that drug is a waste of time. I have to focus on where I *can* help, like driving them to the detox center when they call me up at 3am, saying they are sick of it, and want professional help. I can't force my friend who has a bad choice in dating men to stop picking jerks who abuse her. I can't force her not to go back to the jerk, no matter how many times she complains about how he treats her, leaves him, and then goes back to him with the same lies that "he's changed this time." All I can do is be there for her when she needs a place to stay for a little while.

Remember when I said to keep in the back of your head that some people's fears make them do odd things? Keep this in mind if you have a friend acting strangely. Here's an example:

You: I saw a blimp yesterday. It had "Fuji Film" written on it.
Them: So what?
You: So what? Well, it was pretty cool and everything.
Them: Is that all you can talk about?
You: No... I have only said this once, just now.
Them: Yes, I heard you! Now can we please drop it?
You: Why are you so uptight about a blimp?
Them: Again with the blimp! Maybe some people don't care about blimps!
You: I just said--
Them: Un-bel-IEV-able! You won't let it drop, will you? Shut the hell up!
You: Okay, okay! Whatever!
Them: Yeah, whatever.

Seems pretty stupid they got upset at a random comment, didn't they? What you didn't know is that your friend was fat in elementary school, and "Blimp" was his nickname. He hasn't been fat since he was 13 (you met him when he was 30), but he still bears the scars, and fears the word "blimp." You may think, "How stupid!" or "Jesus H. Christ, that was 20 years ago!" But to your friend, that one deep fear, that sore point still hurts, and you may never know why he flipped out because you mentioned a blimp. That's his reality, you have to find a way around it, but if you don't know the root cause, it may take a lot of trial and error. After a few years, you just learn that your friend doesn't like to talk about blimps, turkeys, lard, or wearing shorts. Some may be even less obvious, like if her best friend in grade school was killed at a carnival, that's why she fears the Ferris Wheel (not because, as many assume, she is scared of heights, but fears the exposed gears of the machinery).

So, when you are trying to help someone who may be acting irrationally, don't focus on what you can't change in them, but focus on what you can change FOR them to make life a little more bearable until they weather through whatever they are facing. THAT is what friends are for.

Posted by Punkie @ 09:18 AM EST [Link]

Monday, September 15, 2003

Money money money...

I hate doing bills because it depresses the crap out of me. I was up until 3:30 this morning trying to find money to pay everything on time. I do this a lot. And I am sick of worrying about money.

Part of me wonders if I should. I mean, I have made it this far, and I doubt my worrying has brought me any more success than not worrying has. The problem is I have this self congratulating worry complex. I mean, I worry something terrible is going to happen, and then when it doesn't, some deep part of me thinks, "See, worrying made things better!" It all goes back to that control issue where I don't like surprises. It's what made me such a gothy pessimist as a teen. I even thought this was a clever idea back then, "If I assume the worst, then if the worst comes, I am prepared for it. If not, I will be happy the worst did not come. Ha ha, I am so damn clever." No. No, I wasn't. See, what happened was that I ended up fretting over everything, and then when I didn't predict the worst, and something even worse than I imagined happened instead, it set the bar of worry even higher. So, over time, I worry constantly and needlessly, and the limit of my worrying creeps slowly towards total panicked immobility. This might have been okay up to the age of 18, because, frankly, I was living in a surreal hell up until then. But since I left home, this has not been the case by a long shot. Yes, I have had moments of hell here and there, like everyone else, but for the most part, my life is pretty good. I feel like an ingrate for not fully taking advantage of this.

But our money situation is never where I'd like it. We're not saving money outside of our 401k plans (and some languishing stock), and while the cost of living gets higher, our pay rate is not climbing with it. Gas has gone up, as an example. So has the cost of power, water, cable, and other utilities, but natural gas and gasoline has more than doubled in cost in the last two years. ATM fees have gotten ridiculous. Now I usually pay $3.50 for a transaction. That's like $58/month on average. I hate banks, and how they slobber money as they shovel globs of their customer's cash like pigs in a trough, and they cry because they are so hungry. Our bank just got bought out, after holding out for nearly 12 years, to HugeMegaCorp Bank. I suspect we'll be charged "convenience fees" soon for the privilege of having a checking account (unless our balance is $5000 or more, which I have always said, "If I had $5000 to keep in the bank, I wouldn't care about an $8/mo fee so much!"). Interest rates? Great for loans, terrible for investing. But I have already rated about that. Car insurance has also gone up, even thought the values of our cars have gone down. So I am seeing an increasing loss almost monthly. If our family was a company, we'd be in trouble with the shareholders.

About two years ago, I decided to educate myself on how money really works. I have slacked off on that this year, but last year I did learn quite a bit. Not enough to give anyone useful advice, but enough to make me go, "Wow ... that's messed up!" Okay, maybe not. I can't be a hypocrite: if I was a rich person, I'd want to keep my money, too. But it amazes me how much I didn't know, and how much I have yet to learn.

Of course, as I recently worried about, I felt that if I lost my job, we'd be toast, financially. Two months, and we'd have no money to pay for the mortgage or anything else. But we formed a backup plan for that, so at least I worried for SOMETHING. I don't want to live in Cumberland, that's all.

So... if I seem cheap in the next few months, at least you'll know why.

Posted by Punkie @ 12:10 PM EST [Link]

Saturday, September 13, 2003

Blog Redux

You might have noticed I finally got around to cleaning this Blog up. Part of it was just getting around to it, and I finally got a background that I liked. I think it looks elegant without being overstated. I call it "Coffee and dice." Let me know what you think.

I am telling you, playing "Grand Theft Auto 3" a lot will mess with your head. Now when I am in a car, I think about the game, and how reality looks like the game. Except when it comes to hitting people, the drugs, the cops, and all the other stuff.

"The Fight"

And on your right is a gif-rendered AVI I made back in 1997. It was my first stop-motion movie, made by a Connectix B&W Quickcam, a Transformers Sharkticon ("Gnaw"), and some Purple Alligator villan ("Al Negator") from "Bucky O'Hare." I have had it on my hard drive for years, but today I fooled with it, cropped it, and tranformed it into a 131k gif animation. Hope you like it.

Posted by Punkie @ 06:21 PM EST [Link]

Working weekend

It's early Saturday morning, and I am at work. I was off on Friday because I had to work today, and I have been here since 6:00am. The brilliant people at our internal network decided to bring down the network for emergency maintenance... during one of our report cycles. Which means I have to be here to manually restart everything and assess the damage a total network outage wreaks when your systems are interdependent on each other through the network. So far, the damage has been contained, mostly due to my programming. I do a lot of "what if?" loops in my programming, so when something like this happens unexpectedly, it has a default action and backup plan. Being a pessimist can come in handy when programming. "What if I run, and I can't find the network?" and "What if I run, but I can't find my startup preferences?" are two I use a lot. Right now I am paring back my log files, which are filled with errors, but nothing actually broke. All WAD ("Works As Designed"). This morning was a severe stress test of everything I have built for my team, and if I may toot my own horn, it's going fairly well.

I am taking this time to also to "strip and build" some old machines we have. We inherited a whole bunch of boxes, with various levels of functionability. My job is to take all the junk from boxes that don't work, and make a few boxes that do.

Yesterday, I slept in late. I spent most of the day watching movies, and saw "American Pie," "American Pie 2," and "Bringing Down the House," all which I enjoyed. I was going to do more lawn work, but it started to rain again. I still have no fence, and the dogs resent being tied up when let outside. Ahfu keeps getting tangled up with the line and various items in the back yard like the deck, bushes, and deck chairs. Widget is so light, he practically is outweighed by the leash line, and has to drag his own body weight over again just to pee. I saw that they marked out a line where the fence is supposed to go, and there were piles of lumber back there, spaced in clusters. I even heard people working, but in that alley, it's hard to tell who is making what noise. And of course my backyard is open to anyone wandering around that huge alley.

Someone used our backyard for a breakfast break, left some McDonald's trash, and ate some tomatoes off my huge tomato plant. I am very annoyed at this, because they apparently took some bites out of a few still unripe tomatoes, and decided they didn't like them, and threw them back in the yard. So I had three tomatoes with huge bites taken out of them. Dammit! I took some of the under-ripe ones off the vine, and we're going to let them ripen in the house (we've done that before successfully). Asshats.

I have had problems with this from time to time. In one of my previous houses, all the front yards were fenced in with very tall shadowbox fencing, and apparently our house had been abandoned for quite some time, because people kept heaving trash over the fence. Back then, it was only small items, like beer bottles and cans, gum, and assorted small pieces. In this house, since the back is to an alley, we have had people dump HUGE items over the fence, like shipping pallets, home renovation refuse (countertops, sink basins, old gas canisters), and we even had someone ditch part of a bike, some orange traffic cones, signs, and of course, huge amounts of tree pruning debris. Most of that is gone now. I can imagine when they ripped out the fencing in back of us, all that avalanched down on them. Kudos to them for removing most of it (at least from my area). I can't do anything about it because I don't own that part of my "back yard" (they own everything up to the trees, remember?). One day, I fear they'll find a body there.

Well, I now have to work on the next stage of babysitting. See you next entry.

Posted by Punkie @ 07:48 AM EST [Link]

Thursday, September 11, 2003

No Fencing

Well, I don't want to talk about 9/11, but my previous prediction this week would suck has so far proven untrue. Sure, it's been interesting...

My house is behind a shopping center. I think I have said that before. It goes like this: back of house -> back yard -> a row of juniper trees -> slope -> alley -> the back of the Ross store. "Wait," some of you may say, "didn't you have a fence in there somewhere?" Yes. Yes I did. Did. Well, a few months ago, we got a certified letter from Combined Properties, Inc., the company that owns the shopping center (up to an including the juniper trees) that said they were sick of repairing the fence (trucks kept backing into it, and it was nearly demolished during the last big snow when snowplows piled snow against it), so they were going to make some serious changes.

Now, the properties along the back alley don't all have a fence. Half of them have a huge brick wall, which I would LOVE, but they aren't going to replace the fence with a brick wall. Instead, they are going to dig into the slope about 10 feet, and put up a shadowbox fence (now it's just a tall closed picket design). They said they would call us and let us know. Well, of course, they didn't. And to make matters stranger, they did it last night in the middle of the night. We never saw or heard them, but this morning, just before we let the dogs out ... there was no fence! Good thing CR saw this before he let out the dogs, because they would have just run off into the alley, barking at cars and delivery guys.

Our hope is they replace the fence fairly quickly. My fear is they will mess up the juniper trees (or cut them down, nooooo!!!) or damage the small chain-link fence that separates us from the neighbors. The chain link fence is apparently "part of the neighborhood property," according to their letter, and will not be removed, but will be cut back. Their theory is, if they dig into the slope by ten feet and put up the fence back ten feet from the current curb, trucks won't back into it. I seriously doubt this will stop accidents. But maybe they'll put up those metal tubes filled with cement like the currently have around gas and utility meters back there. Who knows.

I don't have much faith in Combined Properties. Why? Because I used to work in their shopping centers, back when the Haft empire owned them. Now maybe things have changed since 1989, but one of their major problems was they outsourced everything to the cheapest contractors. And it was not done intelligently: there was no general contractor. Outsourcing to multiple companies in itself isn't dumb, but having no GC to manage all of this is very dumb. Like when I managed a Crown Books, a warehouse truck backed into our sign, we had one guy who did the sign work, another guy who did the neon in the sign, another guy who did electricity behind the sign, another guy who had access to the shopping center roof, another guy who handled the store electricity, another guy who did the store sign timer ... and so on. The total was like 8 guys, all from different companies, none of whom knew each other, working to fix the sign. It took over nine months from crash to fix. For nine months we were "Crow ooks." A few months after I left, another warehouse guy crashed into the sign, and the store became "Cr n oks." It was like that for over a year. Birds nested in the broken letters over the spring. The funny punchline? My store got fined every week for having a broken sign. By Combined Properties. Who also owned Crown Books. Finally I said to the guy (a guy would show up with a clipboard and yell at us), "Look, we all have the SAME BOSS! You tell HIM to pay it." We never paid it.

Gees, I hope they actually replace the fence without too much damage.

Posted by Punkie @ 10:21 AM EST [Link]

Wednesday, September 10, 2003

Flame off!

Summer is ending, and flame wars are erupting. Over the years, I have found that either flame wars spread a lot on their own, or they are triggered by something unseen outside the Internet. Two places I visit are in the huge throes of people yelling at each other for something. One is a board, and one is a moderated e-mail list. Flame wars seem to erupt in this pattern:

1. Person A says something
2. Person B takes offense to Person A's comment, personally
3. Person A takes offense to the offense
4. Escalate and repeat

That's the simple loop. If it was just that simple, it could easily be ended by removing one person. But flame wars are never that simple. Here's why they get complicated so quickly:

- People start to chose sides. Now you have Persons C-J and K-P all taking offense at each other taking offense. Multiple loops form, all feeding off each other. A complex chaos pattern emerges.
- Time delay. Some people read the posts as they come in, or right as they are listed on the board. Others wait days or more. So a flame war could have died down, but then someone seeing it for the first time may restart it again.
- Some people agree, but would never admit to it, and constantly fight with each other... but saying the same thing. It's like a dominance game. "I know you agree with me, but I want you to be wrong anyway so I can crush you!"
- Some people don't know the difference between an opinion and a fact. "Dogs are better looking than cats," is an opinion. "Dog breeds have more variety in body shapes than cats," is a fact.
- People often exaggerate claims, or make unfair comparisons like "Dogs are FAR smarter than cats because of their lungs allow more oxygen to the brain," or "Saying dogs are smart is like saying Nazis are cool."
- The people, complaining about the flame wars or trolls, just add to the noise by... being noisy and off topic. Trolls evaporate really fast when you don't respond at all to them. Flame wars run out of fuel if you don't reply to the flaming topic.

Part of the problem is many people don't know how to properly phrase a provocative comment. For instance, saying "I think you are full of crap" is slightly more offensive than saying "Your opinions are full of crap," but the best way to express distrust in someone's opinion is, "I simply disagree." The passive approach is best, and while not foolproof, it takes someone with a mean streak to say, "You disagree because you suck." Even better? Do what I do: say nothing. I watch more flame wars go by like one watches a tornado a few miles away: I have a lot of awe and amazement at the wreckage, but glad I am not a part of it.

Some people just can't let a topic go. It's like they have to be right at all costs. Losing face or being wrong is so terrifying, that they simply will not allow it. These are self-fulfilling prophesies, of course, since people like this can't have a give-and-take friendship of any kind. Even when these people apologize, they do so in such an aggressive manner, it's almost in retaliation. Like, "Yes, I am SO SORRY. You happy, now?" They may harbor a grudge against you for days, weeks, years, even. I know one guy who still hates me to this day because I smacked him down on Usenet in 1992. They'll pick on everything you say, like they have to prove to everyone that they are better than you.

Tech boards are RIFE with this. I am not sure why, but I tend to think a lot of stereotypes when I see people arguing heatedly, passionately, and angrily about Operating Systems. I mean, I use Windows a lot, but dislike Microsoft's business practices even more. I like Linux, but I am still not 100% secure with it. And OpenBSD is great, but still a lot of it is a mystery to me. I haven't been on a Mac in a while, but I respect them. If someone says to me the the Mac is the greatest thing in the world, fine. If they say Linux sucks, fine. Linux may not be the OS for them, like how some people don't like soda or are allergic to nuts. All of them have their good and bad points. But the religious fanaticism to certain technical choices are blind alleys that could form a dead end. Ask all those Atari ST enthusiasts I used to hang out with. They used to HATE the Amiga. They made personal enemies over it, and you know what? Both are pretty much dead (although the Amiga isn't quite dead yet). Just think, two people out there still hate each other because one guy made fun of Tom Hudson (ST software guru). I found that the people who tried to divide the line between US and THEM were jerks in the real world anyway.

I am not sure why they come in waves. I just hope they go away soon, because I want to read a board or e-mail list for serious on-topic subjects, not that So-and-so is a scumbag.

Posted by Punkie @ 11:52 PM EST [Link]

Just Doing My Job...

I have an actual job title. No, really! While in the past I have had job titles like, "customer care consultant," and "call center support technician," I am currently a "programmer/analyst." I have been for years now at this company. Of course, as my friend Dawn used to say, I'd be a liar in freckles if I told you that's really what I did all day. See, I am proud of my title because I love programming. But I am dismayed that less than 20% of my work is actual programming. My job title reflects that I should be doing, a majority of the time at least, programming and analyzing data. But in reality, I am an "emergency repair technician" or "assistant to chasing down people" or "meeting warming unit." A majority of what I actually do is to arrange stuff so I can actually do programming to begin with. But then I get assigned projects that go nowhere, or people change their minds, priorities, or whatever. I think half my problems are people who say they will get back to me, and then lose interest without informing me of the change in priority. A lot of "HURRY! Hurry, hurry, hurry... wait wait wait wait... wait some more..." Half my projects are left unfinished because they wait for someone who will never get back to me. A lot of times I find out something been canceled, and the reports I have been creating for the last year haven't been read since six months ago.

For the last week, I have been on hold with someone who put a number one, balls-to-the-wall priority on this project. I get the fear of God put in me to do this ... and then, you guessed it, I was in a holding pattern for a week until I realized that he's never going to get back to me. So I blew him off today, and got a TON of programming done. It was cathartic. Dan Millman, in his book, "Way Of The Peaceful Warrior," said he realized that he liked gymnastics so much because it shut off his mind: he could focus. Just before he did a jump or something, his mind was clear, empty ... in the zone. Programming is like that for me. Writing is, too, but at least with programming you have a defined end-product: a clear goal. Like right now, I have NO idea how this blog will end. But today I knew I had to overturn a whole log backup process, update some config files from static to dynamic, and fix three small bugs. I did them all. And I wanted to keep going, but I can't until the process has run through every possible scenario, which will take days.

So I programmed a SETI count for my web page. It's in the sticky entry on the top. It's written with a combination of Perl and a shell script. It's still kind of shaky, and I am writing the bugs out, but is you have some browser version 4.0 or higher, you should see it in a yellow box. I won't tell you how I did it because it's such a kludge, I would be mocked by a real Perl programmer.

Well, it seems Microsoft has yet another security hole... gotta go update my machines...

Posted by Punkie @ 07:25 PM EST [Link]

Tuesday, September 9, 2003

Ha ha... me so funny...

I had this writ I was going to do on Trolls (the Internet kind), but I decided it was too negative, and while the story was apocryphal, it was too close to many real people I knew. So I wanted to share with you a more happy moment when I ran across a .sig someone had where they quoted Tom Lehrer's "New Math." It reminded me way back when I was a kid, and how I gained my taste in comedy.

When I got my first radio, it was an AM transistor radio; a gift from my grandfather. My mother thought my father might disapprove, so I was to hide it. I successfully kept it from him until it finally broke, but then I got a clock radio, and he didn't seem to care if I had a radio, so I don't know what all THAT was about. Back when I had the small AM transistor, I listened to a few stations that came in my room, which was sort of a basement-dungeon-like place, and poor for reception. Only a few miles away lay the radio station WEAM. WEAM was 1390 on the AM dial (now it's moved to 1580 in Georgia), and they played a lot of current rock music, which back in the 1970s was a combination of everything from 60s folk to disco. I heard my first punk tune on them, the Ramones "I wanna be sedated," I think. They had this DJ, Johnny Dark, who was possibly the funniest guy I had ever heard (I wonder how funny I'd think he was now; a lot of DJs annoy me these days). He advertised a show they had on late on Sunday night called "Dr. Demento." One night, I remembered to listen to it, and I was HOOKED!

Dr. Demento played some of the strangest and wackiest songs I had ever heard. Through him I learned about Tom Lerher, Cheech and Chong, Monty Python, Mel Brooks, Barnes and Barnes, and a ton of one-hit wonders that played strange songs about current events or just irreverent weirdness. One day, he had some guy named Eric Idle in the studio, who was advertising a new movie called "The Life of Brian." I begged my mother to see it when it came out. She had my father take me, and we both enjoyed it, so we went to a Monty Python film festival at the Biograph theater in DC. Then I found out they had a show, which was premiering on PBS (it was far into reruns, but WETA was the first to show them in our area). But back to Doctor D. I also gained my first taste of punk and new wave from him, because he also played obscure punk tunes, which during that time, had almost country and western titles to them, like "I Shot My Girlfriend and Boy is She Mad," and "The Punk Polka." New Wave I can recall was Devo ("Are we not men?"), The Talking Heads ("Same as it ever was"), and the B-52's ("She Came from Planet Claire"), which was the first "rock album" I ever bought.

When I got an FM clock radio, I'd listen to 88.5 WAMU's "The Big Broadcast," with Bill Hickman. This was a series of radio shows from the 1930s-50s that were being rerun. While I loved some of the mystery and sci-fi, I also liked the cop/PI shows ("Yours truly, Johnny Dollar"), and the comedy I was now feeding my head was "classic" humor. G-rated, PG-aimed, classic post-Vaudville jokes and shtick. The old Jewish comedian humor I identified with, because I had a lot of Jewish friends. There was Mel Brooks, Sid Caesar, Milton Berle, and my favorite, Jack Benny. Then there were shows like "The Great Gildersleeve," "Fibber McGee and Molly," and "The Life of Riley."

Around this time WDCA, Channel 20, started to play Benny Hill specials. Now, I know a lot of guys liked his titty humor, but I liked some of his other comedy as well. I found that I was really tuned into British humor, which I have been told is a counter to control freaks. I also got hooked onto some of the British TV shows, like The Avengers and Dr. Who. I must confess, while I knew they were reruns from the 1960s and early 70s, I always thought of people in the UK as if they were always wearing out-of-date clothing and driving old small and noisy cars. I thankfully no longer think that. I know now it's the French [rim shot] ... just kidding!

My father's taste in comedy was strange. He used to take me to those teeny-bopper titty movies that flooded the theaters in the late 70s and early 80s. You know, like Porky's, Animal House, Meatballs, Joystick, etc... I must confess, I have always had a rather subdued libido, and never really liked the nudity in those films, but I did like the humor, and got an extra "cool factor" bonus of kids going, "Daaaag! My parents would NEVER let me see THAT!" When other kids were obsessed with porn, I brushed it off as "seen it, been there, done that..."

Then I met Neal in 1980, and he upped my standards. Neal had a deep appreciation for obscure humor, some of it a brand of his own. Which I stole. Later he thought he got his sense of humor from me, but I always thought he was funnier than I was. At our last visit, he reminded me how insane I was back then. I remembered enough of it to convince me he wasn't making it up. I used to draw on my hands and arms a lot, and had strange games I made up with them. Señor Wences had nothing on me.

Notice I don't mention TV much. Apart from PBS, I was not allowed to watch TV as a kid, and even PBS was strictly regulated. This rule relaxed as my father spent more time out of the house, and my mother spent long times passed out drunk. My sober-side mother didn't care as much when we got older, because she liked some junk TV shows (usually cop shows) that my father did not allow (odd fact: my father didn't hate the shows, he just HATED commercials so much, it was always a principle with him), or she was unconscious and I watched pretty much what I wanted to. TV really started for me when I used to spend time after school at Kate's house.

Kate was my best friend (apart from Neal, who moved to Texas) all though high school, and I wouldn't have survived high school without her. A while ago, a show called "Daria" came out on MTV, and Daria was like Kate in so many ways, for a while I wondered if a friend of hers wrote it. She had a dry, "we are not amused" punk/goth humor. She was hysterical in her calm and collected demeanor. She didn't speak much around other people but her closest friends, but when she did, it was pretty witty and insightful. We used to do our homework and watch TV together, usually MTV (which didn't take itself seriously back then), SNL reruns, and Nickelodeon's "Turkey TV," a collection of oddball humor clips from all over the world. Our friends Julie, Ellen, Mark, and Jason were pretty damn funny, too. Julie had a similar sense of humor as Kate, and Ellen has some goofy giggly British zany humor about her. Mark was insane. Jason was subtle and had the best "after-comments" of any group. He would comment on a funny line made by someone else, and make it even funnier. All of together ... damn.

Kate: That is the dumbest commercial I have ever seen. I can't believe how much money they had to pay to convince those people to act like they enjoy the product.
Julie: Maybe they are not paid, but threatened.
Mark: YOU WILL PRETEND TO LIKE ELECTRONIC PARCHEESI OR WE'LL BEAT UP YOUR GRANDMA!
Ellen: Eww... poor grandma! She never did like a beating.
Jason: That explains why she doesn't call anymore...
Punkie: Maybe because we beat her WITH the phone...

Okay, that's funnier when you are a teenager, although I am still laughing. I don't know if we actually said those very lines, but it demonstrates everyone's humor.

The next big break was when I was a writer for the DC/Baltimore comedy group, "And the Prune Bran Players..." I met some funny-ass people working for a comedy group. There was Rick, the sly commentator, and Brad, the all-around funnyman and character actor. We had Kelly, the girl who was a great interviewer, and Adam, who perfected zombie comedy. Tynie was our resident Klingon with a wry wit and good punchlines. Joe, who was an expect at dry humor and Casey, our rubber-faced double-take actor. There were also many other great actors and writers. We also worked with a group, "The Mad Women of Schlock," a singling/dancing troupe consisting of Missie, Marni, and Lori (now a librarian, a script editor, and a beekeeper). I am still good friends with most of them.

I still study and write comedy. I watch Comedy Central a lot, especially SNL reruns. Having worked as a skit writer, I can identify with them when a scene goes wrong, or dealing with a guest star who is more famous than he or she is funny. I also like to see new trends, and I watch a lot of standup. I dissect sitcoms, but except a very few, I don't like them very much. Most of it is generic canned pap. Apart from my book and some articles, I don't get paid to be funny much, which takes a lot of stress off me. I am sure if I got paid to be funny, *I* would be writing those sitcoms after a while.

Posted by Punkie @ 06:56 PM EST [Link]

Monday, September 8, 2003

Liars vs. The Gricean Maxim of Quality

I keep getting burned by the same problem: liars. Oh boy, this will be long.

While cleaning out my mailbox this weekend, I came across a few letters where people had very obviously lied to me about something or another. I mean, most of it I was totally unaware of it while it was happening, but now two years later, I look back on the whole thing and get pissed off. Like So-and-so says one thing, and then a year later, claims another thing, or worse, like I made it up. I forgot I had some of the evidence in my mailbox I could have used. "Uh, no," I could say, "on January 23rd, 2001, you said it was true, and swore to me that yadda yadda yadda..." but then the whole incident was over by late 2002, and I don't want to bring it all up again. And knowing some of these people, they'd still claim they never lied to me.

Or worse, and I find this REALLY irritating, they try and "call me out" like I am the liar. My father's second wife did this in a letter which I fumed about for years, then forgot, and now I am fuming again. A game they played was, "Let's not allow Grig access to his old stuff." They lived in the house I grew up in for 12 years, and I was only allowed in once, and even though my Christine was really pregnant at the time, they wouldn't even let us past the living room to use the bathroom. My father never allowed me back into my old room, which he said he used for "storage." Of course, some of my stuff was stored there. Same with the attic. I could have come over one day, helped them clean up, and been on my way. I wasn't going to walk off with anything else that wasn't mine, or plant a bomb or something. Christ, Arvid, I lived 20 minutes away from you, if I wanted to harm you I would have done so. Why were you so afraid of me? Okay, I know. You were afraid of the truth. You always have been, which is why you are afraid of confrontation and when we do confrot each other, you are the first to claim I'm some sort of liar. That's probably what Nicole thinks, too. The example was when I said I wanted some of my stuff from the attic, you said, "Squirrels got in and ate everything." Yes, that was a pathetic excuse, but hell, maybe they did. I was willing to go along with that because, hell, why not? Of course, when Nicole said she'd send some of my old baby stuff they found in the attic, and I said, "I thought you said squirrels ate everything?" she replied with, "You have a very fertile imagination." That so sounded like my father; patronizing and dismissing. I was FUMING because I didn't make it up, they did, and if I WAS going to make something up, I'd have picked something better than "squirrels ate it." So I get lied to once, and when I go along with it, I get lied to again. I had to let it drop, because she was holding some memories hostage. The end joke to this is that she obscured the return delivery address on the package she sent, like if I found out where they live, I am going to... what would I do? I dunno. I didn't do it when they lived in McLean, at an address I knew, and I sure as hell won't fly to San Diego and do it there. My father knows I represent a truth he can't face. Hence, I am a liar. I mean, I have to be. The implications of what he did to me for 18 years is pretty horrible, so maybe if he acts like it never happened, it will go away. Of course, I have court papers, eyewitness accounts, and a huge paper trail to back me up, but maybe I just made those up, too. I am crafty that way.

That brought me to a point I hate about some liars: you could have documented hard-core evidence right out in the open, and they still deny it with a straight face. Maybe I am jealous I don't have the balls to do this, but I am always floored when someone lies that boldly. I think I was kind of led to expect that in the real world, people speak the truth most of the time, and now I don't know at all. Some of the most traumatic experiences I have had were due to someone lying to me or about me, and while I can logically say, "Oh, that person was an idiot, or young, or chemically imbalanced, or whatever," but deep down, I still question, "Is it me? Did I make this up?" I hate that. Especially now that I am older and my memory is going a bit fuzzy. I have always tried to lead a life of truth, no matter how painful, because I feel if I lie, I am giving up something pretty vital of myself. Maybe I fear I will become "one of them."

On a related topic, while Neal was visiting, he said some incredibly fascinating stuff about four laws of debate, where the first law is that you have to assume the speaker is telling the truth as he or she knows it. I am not quite getting this right, and he sent me a link which I bookmarked ... on my other computer. But a search on the web brought links on Pragmatics and Gricean Maxiums, which I think is the same thing. There are four maxiums, which I will attempt to make interesting (I am going to try and avoid big fancy-sounding words these sites usually are written in so I don't come off as some elitist snob that gives the illusion I know more than I actually do), and show how a lot of lying is lookd at by linguist. This has been studied in depth by linguists and debaters for a long time, since at least 1975, when H.P. Grice introduced them at his lectures at Harvard.

There are four "maxiums" (rules) which attempt to define a conversation. You are to assume that the speaker is following these rules in order to have an intellectual debate of some kind. There's something called "The Cooperative Principle," which is a kind of moral rule of conversation, stating that participants expect that each will make a "conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange." That means you expect that the reason you are talking to this person is for sharing what you know, the reason anyone has a conversation. Of course, people don't usually follow the proper rules in real life, which can lead to confusion and intentional misleading statements. But knowing this can call your liar out in the open.

Rule 1: Maxim of Relation: Be relevant.
Rule 2: Maxim of Quantity: Be only as informative as required for current conversational purposes.
Rule 3: The Maxim of Quality: Say only what you believe to be true and adequately supported.
Rule 4: The Maxim of Manner: Be clear: be brief and orderly and avoid obscurity and ambiguity.

It's so hard to define what this means, because a lot of them sound the same. Rules 1 and 2 are hard to say why they are different. Relevant means on topic, right? It's easier to explain with examples of thing that violate these rules. These conversational rules are exploited in at least two ways to a normal listener, who, though growing up in a normal world, would make two assumptions. First, when the listener assumes that the speaker is obeying the rules, he or she assumes what they say is true as far as the speaker knows. Second, if the speaker violates some rules so flagrantly that the hearer must conclude that the violation was purposeful, this is where the "red flag" of lying comes up (or should, unless you are me, and are still stuck on the first rule until I am hit with a clue-by-four).

Clever and cunning linguists (har har, me make joke) say there are two ways someone disobeys the rules. One is by "violating" the rules, meaning the speaker doesn't know he or she is breaking conversational rules, and certainly doesn't mean to. But the more commonly used "flouting" the rules means that the speaker wishes to sway the listener's opinion on purpose. Many comments can break several rules at once. Let's look at some things a speaker might say, and why it breaks the rules.

In a job reference, a former employer states, "Margaret was a very punctual secretary, who always dressed well and typed neatly." That does sound like a form of praise, until you realize it "flouts" Rules 1 and 2. It flouts rule 1, because while these statements may be true, it's not relevant to what kind of work Margaret produced. It flouts rule 2 because it is assumed that any secretary should dress neat, type well, and is on time, and you really didn't release any helpful information.

A comment like, "Damn, Bill, Use salad tongs! What, were you raised by wolves?" is a flout of rule 1 on purpose, because Bill was probably not raised by wolves. Bill knows this, obviously, and knows the speaker is not asking in ernest if he was raised by wolves, but alluding to something else: Bill's social faux pas with his unhygienic practices at the salad bar.

"Your son has such a regal shape," is considered a form or irony called "sarcasm," something most are not a stranger to. Sarcasm and irony is a flout of rule 3, because it is a form of lying meant to deliver a subtle blow by saying something quite opposite to the truth. The speaker did not mean that your son's shape was akin to royalty, except possibly to King Henry the Eighth. Sometimes, the subtlety is so slight, in group conversations the speaker flouts rule 3 simply by a slight flatness in the tone of the praise, like "This is a lovely party," said by a flat tone of voice is quite opposite to the normal exuberance that goes along with such a comment.

Choice use of pronouns is also subtle, like "You must be very proud of your work," will flout rule 3 and 1. It singles out the listener away from everyone else and states not what was good about the work, but that the listener probably did his or her best, but would be the only one who noticed.

I am still wondering about which was meant by "You have a very fertile imagination."

Flouting rule 4 is something I hear a LOT of in the tech world. For instance, when getting an RFO (Reason For Outage) on a ticket, we would sometimes get, "Technician went on site, and traced the wiring to a failed singularity on a CCS 2674. He then power cycled the unit, and tested for throughput until all was clear." What that really means is "We sent a guy out there, he found a problem led to a switch, which then turned off then on again. Then he asked if we still saw the problem, and when we said no, he left." The first phrase makes it look like the tech was really skilled, but when you dissect the tech speak, it's just the same fix some average Joe might do if their computer froze up: wiggle the mouse and reboot. You also see it in stock reports and political "state of the union" speeches with words that don't appear in dictionaries, but almost sound like they do. Another method is to use words in a different context, or "verbalize nouns," as the joke goes. "Our new CEO has declared a new 'Financial Strategery' with a declared cost-reduction plan for the new fiscal year." Another violation of this is when you "say a lot of nothing," which can flout rules 1 and 2 in the bundle. "The management has heard your complaints, and will address them at a joint meeting with other vendors."

Deliberate lies are flouts of one of these four rules, which are used for misinformation or to use the listener's assumptions in your favor, even if they aren't necessarily true. I saw that a lot in President Bush's speech last night, but I am not surprised because almost all presidents and their speech writers do this. Some are just bad speech writers, and some are trying to placate the ignorant. For example:

"America and a broad coalition acted first in Afghanistan, by destroying the training camps of terror, and removing the regime that harbored al-Qaeda."

"Broad coalition" almost violates rule 4 and 1 because it's a vague statement that doesn't seem relevant. Who is in this coalition? Makes it sound more unified than "Us and Britain, without the UN's approval." Same with "training camps of terror," because it's not even defined, and the "regime that harbored al-Qaeda" flagrantly violates rule 3, because it isn't really removed or else we'd stop sending troops there, and send the red cross and Jimmy Carter instead. The whole thing seems to violate rule 2, because it seems irrelevant to the current "state of the union," which is what the speech is supposedly about. It seems more a "state of stuff we did a few years ago that we're trying to gloss over."

Of course, all THAT could be debated as well. I am still learning.

Posted by Punkie @ 12:04 PM EST [Link]

This is going to be a bad week.

Sorry to be a pessimist, but already the airwaves are full of 9/11 stuff, and it's only going to get worse. It seems like 2 years is a magical number that will replay the clips and scenes from 9/11 playing on every channel. I, for one, am not ready for this. As evidenced by me being awake, when I should be sleeping.

I am not ready because apart from picking up the pieces, we've done nothing. The US has become more paranoid, more freedoms have been restricted, and we haven't caught anyone. Where's Osama Bin Laden? Who knows. Saddam Hussein? Anyone's guess. I am still not sure what we're going to do with Iraq and Afghanistan. I don't know if we made things better there or worse. Now with this week, the "terrorists" have said more people will die. Of course they say that, they are terrorists. I'd be more concerned if they were silent. But now security will be stepped up at work... again. Even with all the new turnstiles, gates, and armed guards, I suspect they'll X-ray everything next. The economy is in the toilet, my perfectly employable friends are unemployed, while idiots answering phones at the telcos I deal with get dumber and dumber... and still keep their jobs.

I thought I'd sleep like a baby tonight, because I worked pretty hard today. My ankle felt better, so I went ahead and did a lot of backed up lawn work. I mowed, raked, edged, and cleaned up after numerous storms that kept sweeping through. I swear, those sycamore trees in my backyard shed more branches than a hostile bank buyout. I couldn't do this for the longest time because it was damp and humid all the time. It was too wet to mow, and the grass thrived, became really tall, and then got too tall to dry out between rain spells. And the one rare day I *could* mow, I had to either work late, or do other more important errands. One part of my lawn had not been mowed in two months. Grass was knee-high, and hosting tons of small crickets. Many saplings that started from seeds were now up to my waist. Snip snip, and now I felled about 20 mini-trees. For years, I have been dealing with this small (less than a foot in diameter) stump in my back yard the previous owners left when a tree fell down or something. It wasn't tall enough to see right away, but when my mower went over it? CCRRNNKKK! It finally rotted enough for me to dig out, which was a great victory for me. I also trimmed hedges and pulled weeds from the tomato garden.

I have mentioned the "ancestral tomatoes" we have a few times in my blog. This year, Christine didn't grow them, so I decided to try, and buddy... mine grew big! I planted four, and two survived. Then I accidentally stepped on one of them, and now only have one left. But it's HUGE! The last time we grew these, the plants were big, but this single plant is a monster which has taken over the whole garden and is still flowering this late in the season. Several tomatoes are still ripening, and they are bigger than my fist. The one plant has a base stalk thicker than my thumb, and is covering 60% of the entire garden, plus where it's just grown out of the garden and up a tree. I took pictures, but I have to wait until I find the digital camera cable before I can upload them.

I worked until my asthma forced me to stop, but I got a lot done. So I figured, I'd sleep like a log when I went to bed, but now it's 12:30, and all I can think of is those two towers collapsing again. And the Pentagon on fire. And all the screaming and yelling.

Damn you, TV.

Posted by Punkie @ 12:25 AM EST [Link]

Saturday, September 6, 2003

Lots of friends... good times.

Yesterday was a day full of mirth. I went to "On the Border," a Mexican restaurant near where I work. I took Nate out as a thanks for putting up with me for the last few weeks, and he described his college experiences (he just went back after a several year absence). Christine joined us, and we talked about technology because we're all geeky tech weenies. Christine's work is getting DSL and a whole new system upgrade, of which she's in charge of. It all has to do with SABRE, a travel company system, which their travel office division uses. They are going from dial-up to broadband, and this opens up a lot of headaches.

After lunch, we went to Best Buy to buy her company supplies. We also got a copy of the PC game "Grand Theft Auto III" and a DVD copy of the "LOTR: The Two Towers," which we missed in the theater. I played GTA3 for a little bit, and was reminded why I don't drive. Man, I suck. I did manage to get two assignments done, but I suspect both were more "training" assignments (Pick Up a Girl, Beat up a Dealer and steal his car).

Later on, we went to "Red Lobster" with Anya. I have never liked that place. No matter what Red Lobster I have ever gone to, it's been the same feeling, like they are trying to be fancy, but don't really know how. Their decor was very "Bennigans/TGI Fridays"-esque, but the quality of the food is sub-par. I have been to a few, and the places always seem cheesy and a little run down, but the prices want to tell you otherwise. Behind our table was someone who looked like a pimp with two very skanky girls, and to the right of us, someone with a bratty kid they weren't even trying to control. The food was okay, but not for the elevated price. Some of the crab legs were damp and stale. My fish was NOT Mahi-Mahi as they advertised (it was a white fish, but the grain was too small). The bench I was sitting in was worn and uneven, and was painful to sit in for a long period of time. I was glad to leave. I ended the night by watching "Clerks" for the first time. Not bad, but not as good as I was led to believe.

Today I am in bed catching up on some home computer maintenance. My ankle, which has been bothering me for some reason for the last few days, finally decided to stop supporting my weight. This happens from time to time, so it's no big deal. So I am wearing Christine's old ankle brace, watching TV, and working on the laptop. I am going through my Yahoo mailbox, cleaning out my "sent-mail," which hasn't been cleaned since December 2001. I also have a log of all the online purchases I have ever made since then, and it's amazing how much stuff I order. It's also time to change all my passwords on my accounts again. But first, a small observation...

As I start to watch another episode of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," I am reminded of several things these makeover shows never seem to understand. The first big problem is that many designers have no sense of utilitarianism; that is, they sometimes they put stuff where it's not very practical. I was watching an episode of "Trading Spaces" where they put the large TV set in a corner, facing the window, and not facing any seating area. So you'd have to carry the TV across the room so people on the couch could see it, or give up TV altogether. Yeah, putting the computer setup in the armoire where the monitor is at knee-height may look chic, but it's hard to browse the web when you have no space for your keyboard and mouse as you sit on the floor to use it. The second things is that a lot of designers put out things that get in the way. Like art in the middle of the kitchen table, fresh fruit and candles that rot or run out, and stuff that looks great in a magazine, but in real life... very hard to work around. The third thing I see is that they make the assumption if they clean up a guy's room and give him expensive hair products, he'll do that forever. Habits are hard to break. I'd love to see these shows "A year after the makeover." I bet things went back to the old ways within a few months, if not days after the camera crew went away.

Well, I am off back to my mail and hard drive defragging. Christine has her friend Anne over, and they are still watching Kevin Smith movies.

Posted by Punkie @ 05:23 PM EST [Link]

Friday, September 5, 2003

The Worst Coincidence Ever

I have a lot of ... luck, in my life. I can't call it bad luck, really, because sometimes fortunate things happen to me. But weird things happen to me SO much that after a while, I just can't tell what's good or bad. This is one of those experiences. This occurred in 1995, at a company called Digex. My friend Brad worked there, and he was doing really well. I was trying to get out of retail, and into the tech industry, and friends were helping me out. Brad got me some interview time.

Digex used to be one of those "progressive" offices you used to hear about back in the Roaring 90s Tech Bonanza. They had ping pong. A Lego pit. People came to work in jeans, a tee-shirt, and I ever heard smoking breaks weren't always tobacco. You could bring your dog to work. Some Fridays, everyone went out to drink at a bar. Or shut down the office to see a movie. Those sort of wacky fun things. The employee base were a weird bunch of fun people. And I wanted to be a part of it.

When I got there, it turns out that a LOT of people I knew worked there. The interview was going really, really well. The girl interviewing me was named "Heidi," a kind of peppy girl who was very casual to talk to. For the next few hours, I wandered about this fantasy land, saying hello to people, and then had lunch with one of the company's owners who shook my hand and said, "I look forward to working with you." I had everything down pat, there was NO way I could not get this job. The place was great, I totally fit it, I was more than qualified, and one of the owners loved me! So what could go wrong?

After lunch, Heidi took me back to her office. She had Warner Brothers memorabilia and Koosh balls everywhere. She wanted to finalize some paperwork, make sure she had my references, and when I'd be able to start if I was offered a job. We talked about a lot of random stuff, too. I positively commented on her decor. She became all girly-cutsey about everything, so, again, what could go wrong?

My eyes rested one of the many photos she had in her office. She pointed out who everyone was in them, and one guy she pointed out look familiar. Now, up to this point, I had seen about 5-6 other people during the interview who knew me, and said, "Wow, Punkie wants to work here? All-RIGHT!" Fandom people. My pals. So when Heidi showed me this photo, this guy looked really familiar.

[FLASHBACK]
It was 1987. I was moving out of my house I grew up in since I was 5. My father had made living conditions impossible (long story), I was 18, had a steady job, and I saw the writing on the wall: GET OUT. Because my father was being impossible, I waited until a weekend he was out of town to do my move to my new living situation with a bunch of people in the FanTek house.

I had helped them move out of their old house in Hyattsville and to the new one in Mount Vernon. One of their roommates was a girl named Diane, whom one ex-roomate (I think his name was Wendell) was obsessed with the fact she was into bondage. In fact, he seemed to have to mention it every damn time he brought up her name. "Diane, who's into bondage, said she needed..." or "Diane, who's into bondage, asked that her mail be forwarded to..." or a lot of "Diane, who's into bondage, and has a boyfriend named Quasi..." I don't know if Diane was into bondage, but she left a lot of porn behind that we had to clean up out of Hyattsville. This roommate mentioned this SO much, it became like one word: "Dianewhosintobondage." I mentioned Dianewhosintobondage has a boyfriend named Quasi, didn't I?

Quasi was a real nice guy. He was so named because he was huge. He was a broad-shouldered guy who towered over everyone else, and he was very hairy, too. Look at the picture on the left. That's how I remember him, with Dianewhosintobondage at some convention (I think Balticon) in the late 1980s (sorry it's so grainy, my camera used to be one of those Kodak Disc cameras, and convention hotel rooms are very dark, but look at the picture and realize that Diane is average height for a human... Quasi was very tall). I haven't seen these guys in a while... no, I take that back, I saw Dianewhosintobondage at the last Balticon, I think. She didn't remember me, which is good because of the damn Wendell, I will always think "That's Dianewhosintobondage!" I fear I might call her that to her face, and she'd get upset. Diane's nice, I don't want her to be upset.

Anyway, Quasi had a pickup truck, and Quasi was a strong guy, so Quasi, Diane, and my good friend (and a new roommate) Bruce helped me move. I had moved about 90% of my stuff, and came back for a final trip, when my dad suddenly came home early. We would let me get the rest of my stuff. A heated verbal discussion ensued. Bruce had to calm my dad down, and Quasi offered, I think, to teach my dad a lesson physically, but I didn't want my dad beaten up, I just wanted my stuff! My father suddenly grabbed my house key from around my neck, and nearly strangled me to get it off (it was on one of those ball-bead chains), and Quasi had to hold him back. Yeah, it was ugly. I never got that stuff, either, and I was never allowed back in my old house again, even though my father lived there another 13 years. Last thing he said to me as we drove off was, "I don't trust you anymore hanging around with such losers." Quasi said on the ride back he understood why I needed to leave. I had a bruised imprint of that ball-bean chain around my neck for days.
[/FLASHBACK]

So, you know, I had positive memories with Quasi. So I said, "He looks like a guy I used to know, but haven't seen for almost 7 years." I didn't want to say "Quasi," in case that sounded like an insult. She asked me who, and since I couldn't remember Quasi's real name, I said, "Well, it was this nice guy who had this nickname of Quasi--"

"You know Quasi?" she asked, incredulously. "How do you know Quasi?" she asked. She was very excited I knew him.

Sadly, I replied. I was preparing to tell the story above, unconsciously rubbing my neck where the chain had nearly choked me. But then I said something really, really dumb. I play this part in my head over and over because it was so dramatic. I mean, I saw the photo she had, she had her arm around his waist, head leaning against his chest. It was obvious they were together. I was all of 25, so I should have known better. But this phrase left my lips:

"Yes, I used to know him wen he was with Diane and..."

I swear the second I said "Diane," Heidi's who face changed shape. It was like her smile and perky personality ran off her face like hot, runny cheese. If this had been a movie, the lights would have dimmed, clouds would have formed in the sky, thunder would have rumbled, and the filter on the camera lens would have turned burnt umber. A raven would have cawed from a distant dead tree limb.

"We do not speak of her," she said, like she suddenly became possessed. "He is MY Quasi now..."

I will never forget that phrase, "He is MY Quasi now..." Her voice was filled with some sort of ancient curse, like some great battle had happened in the distant past where Quasi was won at some great cost.

She became angrily quiet, and the interview abruptly ended. She did not show me out the door. And I didn't get the job. I am not sure if she specifically didn't hire me because of mentioning Diane, or if there were other reasons, but Brad later said, "What the HELL did you say to Heidi? She was pissed off the rest of the day!"

Eugh. I have played those last moments over and over in my head, crying out, "Who knew? How was I supposed to ... damn, what are the ODDS?" Brad assured me it was for the best, because Heidi was moody that way.

In the long run, the company got sold, did badly, got bought out, did even worse, and in some political coup, Heidi and all her "children," (meaning people she favored, hired, and "protected under her wing") got booted out. Apparently she considered herself some sort of mommy figure. Digex was bought and sold many times, and finally got so watered down and thinned out, I don't think anyone I know works there anymore. Brad left years ago, and recently Rogue got laid off from the latest company to inherit their stuff, I think it's Intermedia or something. So if I had stayed there, I would have had a different and more turbulent career path. I wouldn't have made friends with people like Nate, and I certainly wouldn't have gotten all that Internet stock to cash out and buy a house. I would be unemployed by now.

So I don't ... really fault Heidi. Or Diane or Quasi. I don't know what happened. Maybe something totally horrific. Maybe the three of them fought demons from the gates of hell, and their trust was nearly broken for the sake of saving humanity. Some complex love triangle that got into a bitter legal battle. Or maybe Heidi didn't care about Diane at all, but I had a big booger hanging from my nose, or some guy behind me took one look at me, and secretly shook his head, warning Heidi I was not to be trusted. Who knows.

But that has to be the worst luck I ever had. At first ... now it's just a great story. Maybe it would have been different if I had called her, "Dianewhosintobondage..." Naahhh...

Posted by Punkie @ 10:49 AM EST [Link]

Thursday, September 4, 2003

And the past shall come back to haunt thee...

Back in the early 1990s, when I was on the Bessel account at the University of Maryland, we used to have a Usenet Newsreader called, simply, "trn." Before you sent a post on Usenet, it said:

Good warning. I have always felt this warning should still be used, because the Internet achives almost everything. While looking myself up to link to an article I had written, I found my old signature.

From 1992.

I was 23 years old. Forgive me:

=================<<< < < < *Punk Walrus* > > > >>>================= [ \||/ | --------------------------------------- | \||/ ] [ (o-) | "It might be in the || walrus@bessel.umd.edu | (o-) ] [ /\ | basement, I'll go up- || Punk Walrus on the | /\ ] [ Punkus | stairs and check..." || FanTek BBS 301-203-9582 | It's ] [ Walrus | -- M.C. Escher -- || SF&F Author Extrordinare| Punkie!] ========================================================================= All whales are mammals... all mammals have hair... so all whales have hair. ....SHAVE THE WHALES!

Posted by Punkie @ 01:24 PM EST [Link]

Good Feelings - Early Morning Work

I have this paranoia that when I am in a good mood, things will go horribly wrong because God puts me in a good mood to prepare me for some oncoming disaster. How screwed up is that? But today I am not worried about exams, layoffs, health, or money ... at least as I am writing this. In an hour, who knows? So I thought I'd list some good memories to remind me I have them from time to time.

One of my happier retail memories occurred when I worked at Cargo Furniture at Tyson's II Galleria. This would have been... 1995 or so. Yes, that store was dull, rarely made quota, and days would go by (literally, I had days of $0 in sales, and saw no one) between customers. But sometimes, I'd arrive to work early, like about 2 hours before we opened. The store would be all neat and clean. Sometimes, I had money for breakfast, so I'd go to the other end of my floor (the top floor, I think floor 4), where the food court was. Burger King was the only place open that early. I'd get 2 Bacon, Egg, and Cheese Crossandwiches, a huge Orange Juice, and small hash browns. This particular BK had a stack of newspapers every morning, so I'd pay 25 cents for a Washington Post. I'd go back to my store, sit at out dining room table display, spread out the paper, eat breakfast, and read the paper. Store wouldn't open for a while yet, and since this was a dead mall, no one would pass by except other mall employees. The sun would come in through the mall's skylights, and warm my face. It was very peaceful.

In fact, working in a mall has some good moments like that. I recall how peaceful, clean, and crisp Springfield Mall was before it opened. Most people see malls as crowded places with a lot of hustle and bustle. But if you work at a mall, or just arrive there way before it opens, a mall can be very calming. There's usually plants and skylights in today's malls, and since they usually have a night crew clean everything, the mall smells nice and fresh. What few voices you hear are guards and other store employees echoing in the distance. Malls echo a LOT, which you don't think about when it's filled with people. Some mornings, there'd be "Mall Walkers," a bunch of senior citizens who would speed walk through the mall in clumps. Some would have a coach who'd stop them every now and again to stretch. Malls are great for walks like that, since they always are the same temperature, and never rain, which make it even better for older folks who have trouble getting around outside.

I probably a carried that over into the tech world. My first tech job was 3pm-midnight, which while worked great with my sleep cycle, wasn't so good for my family life. Next, I worked 10 to 6, which was okay. Then I worked 6 to 3, which at first was very tiring, but I got hooked. Office buildings, while not nearly as pretty or calming as malls I have worked in, were still pretty peaceful until people started to come in at 9. I was also on call 24x7, though, and HAD to be at the hotline from 6 to 3 on weekdays, so I didn't care for those total job hours, no sir. I could have worked a problem from 8 at night until 2 in the morning, and then had to do the hotline from 6 to 3, and then I might get paged again ... ugh. I lost a lot of sleep. The next job was midnight to noon, which was odd, because now I was in a locked down office building at like 3am. We couldn't go very far because doors were locked, no restaurants were open that late (except one local diner), and our building is sort of down in a hole, so when you looked out of the windows, all you saw was sloping grass. I wouldn't say it was so peaceful, because my sleep cycles were so ruined by then. I was usually wandering around where I could wander, passing by empty pods, quiet conference rooms ... like some sort of sea of nothingness where our Operations Center as an isolated island of activity in a quarter of the building. The rest of the building was as quiet as an ancient ruin.

Then I got this job. I started with International, so I had to work from 6 to 3 to make sure I was awake during European business hours, and then when my job got shifted to domestic, I was perfect to be in this hour set because all our systems would have been done by 6am, and start reporting. My main job is to check some 300 systems and make sure they all are working. There's usually a few which are not, and I have to follow up with the people that maintain these machines, and generate a report. "Machine 705 is having network problems," or "The test running on 211 is generating blank reports." By the time people get to their desk at 10 or so, I am their "Good morning. Here are last night's results." Morning here is pretty dead, and people come in late a lot (usually because they know they have to stay late). The morning is peaceful, calm, and while I don't have a newspaper and Crossandwiches, I have the Internet and free coffee.

Good times.

Posted by Punkie @ 08:44 AM EST [Link]

Tuesday, September 2, 2003

The Pedestal Syndrome

I am full of writings today, mostly because I am waiting for someone to contact me about a project at work, and can't get involved in much else. While I wait, I decided to explain what I have called, "The Pedestal Syndrome."

This is where someone make a lot of people happy for a while, and becomes so over exalted to the point where they are placed high on a pedestal for all to see. But then this causes a lot of eventual scrutiny, some jealousy, and then some "revelation" period where they fall from grace, and because they were put up so high, the fall very far and smash to pieces like a cheap plaster vase from atop a high shelf. This happens everywhere, but is especially bad in Hollywood and other arty communities. The pattern goes something like this:

The Discovery:
- Look at this! A new person with fresh ideas!
- Things she says and does are so witty!
- She represents a change we have badly needed!

The Shooting Star:
- She's EVERYTHING we have needed!
- Almost everything she says is right!
- What a gal!

The Zenith:
- How did we get along without her?
- She's so great. Just, wow!
- A little ... too great, don't you think?

The Fall:
- She's made some mistakes, she has flaws...
- She wasn't as great as we thought...
- We look like fools for trusting her...

The Crash:
- She thinks she's so great, but she's not!
- She fooled a lot of people, I bet on purpose!
- She's wicked! Burn the witch!

Picking up the pieces:
- What did anyone ever see in her anyway?
- I am glad she fell. She lied to us.
- She represents the mighty we have fallen.

Often this happens whether the person wanted to do this or not. Some are born into greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them. The sad thing is, this person's social standing is almost always totally out of their control. The rising starlet become the whore. The social jewel gets turned in for insider trading. The guy who saved the company from financial ruin is thrown out three years later. Gossip columns THRIVE on this feed, they'll make it up if they have to! This sort of thing destroys careers, ends marriages, and wipes out good businesses.

On a lesser note, in fandom and online communities, this happens, too. It's happened to a lot of people I know, and has even happened to me. The best way to avoid it is to be very humble and channel the energy to others as quickly as possible. Stay out of the limelight, let others take credit who need it more than you do. Fame is a fickle beast, it does not care who you are. It is both the fuel that feeds you at the start and the fuel that burns you at the end. The trick is to be like the Phoenix, and rise from the ashes. President Clinton was like that. No matter what you did to the guy, it slid off him like a fried egg off of Teflon. So was Reagan, I mean, they even called him "The Teflon President." Clinton even went further by turning the accusers upon each other. The whole "conservative conspiracy" fell apart when they tried to bring him down. Where are Newt and Rush now?

In fandom, I see it a lot when someone takes over a convention that was small, or maybe failing. Like SnuzbariCon, a fake con I just made up. Sci-fi and gaming fans from Snuzbari, New Jersey form their own little convention. The first con was okay, had 200 people. The second did well, and had 600 people. The third had 900 people, but due to a lot of mishandled money and politics, the head of the con falls out of favor and leaves before he's lynched. A New Guy takes over. Number four is only 500 people, but they make it through. By number 6, they are over 1000. By number 10, they are a huge gathering of 4000 people. The New Guy is worshipped and adored ... by most. The fall starts when someone gets disgruntled (or maybe it's not one guy, but a few people who independently came to this conclusion). Who knows why. Maybe they felt snubbed, or were friends with the old guy, who is now bitter. Maybe they have other ulterior motives, or are just a jerk. They start to badmouth the New Guy. The disgruntled guy has friends, who also don't like him. Poison starts to spread through the group. Those who are unsure and swayed or at least left more unsure. Two groups begin to form, one with a good leader, one that's more like an unorganized mob who doesn't know how many members they have. By SnuzbariCon 11, there is definitely a disgruntled force. Maybe the disgruntled guy is in charge, or maybe he's moved on, leaving his poison behind. Some things go wrong at SnuzbariCon 11, which if they happened just a few years earlier, they would have been smoothed over as "it happens," but now they seem like more "obvious flaws." The New Guy suddenly becomes a target. I'd say there's a 50/50 chance the New Guy would step down after the con in disgust. Maybe he won't. But now everything he does is overanalyzed and scrutinized, looking for more flaws. Everything from what he approved, to anyone new he promoted is suspect. Even personal issues are put under the microscope. No one can survive such scrutiny; even Mother Theresa must have farted every now and then. His days are numbered now. Finally, he either quits in disgust, gets fired, or the whole convention structure collapses. People leave wondering what the hell happened, and some go away thinking the New Guy was to blame all along. Anything good the New Guy did was wiped from memory, and all anyone can remember is some final event that defines everything the suspected all along, like when he blew up at the hotel bar, or was caught picking his nose. It never matters.

Substitute "con" with "workplace." I see that a lot, too, although it seems to me people are meaner when money and jobs are at stake. At least with a con you can go, "Well, it's not like I'm paid to do this..." At work such politics can cost you your job, and all you ever wanted to do was to do good work in the first place (or maybe not, but still ... unfair). That's why some people come back with guns. I have never heard an ex-con chair going on a shooting spree, and hope never to in my lifetime. Stakes are different.

This, of course, is NOT an inevitability. Take comfort in that. Remember Clinton? He never got impeached, and it almost like people miss him, now (although I think they miss the era more than Clinton personally). Nixon quit before he got he boot, and even ended up as "not so bad" at the very end. I have seen many cons run under the same person for 5, 10, even 20 years, through thick and thin. I have seen intentional political coups fall flat on their face. The guy who helped found NetBSD was thrown out, and he rebounded with OpenBSD. Drew Barrymore reinvented herself. Sly Stallone and John Travolta keep going through the cycle. Madonna probably has a few more comebacks coming to her. Hell, I expect Duran Duran to come out with a new hit album soon, since they seem to do every ten years. And who can forget the many rises and falls of the Rolling Stones?

But for those not used to it, those without a press corps or talent agents, the Pedestal Syndrome can be painful. Your average Joe Schmo will have a hard time wondering why he got fired even though he was "Employee of the Year" twice in a row. The king of the Great RPG Chat Room may wonder why he's so hated all of the sudden. The popular girl in high school suddenly becomes the outcast. I don't know what advice I can give, since I seem to have fallen on the floor like a ragdoll more than once. I just lay there like a bomb went off, thinking, "What the hell was THAT?" Of course, after a few of them over a period of 20 years, you begin not to take them so seriously anymore. "Oh... I see. It was my time. God's reminder we're all supposed to be humble." I see it happen to other people, like watching a film of car accidents in slow motion. I feel helpless to stop it, no matter what I shout at the screen. "N-n-n-n-n-n-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-oooooooooooo...!" (see, that's me yelling in slow motion, and then trying to convey it in HTML). I think, "I know how THIS is going to end," but I'm not always right.

I just think it's inevitable. Maybe it's some ancient survival tactic from our prehistoric brethren. Maybe it's God's way of trying to give you a sense of irony and humor (I can see him, up there, going, "See? See what I have to deal with? Now imagine this on a huge scale!"). I don't even know if it's a good lesson, but I just try and learn from it as best I can.

Okay, one last thing to add. That guy? Never called me back. Screw this, I am going to move a server.

Posted by Punkie @ 02:36 PM EST [Link]

Excuses, excuses, excuses!

I am tired of people who always have excuses.

I mean, it's one thing to have tried all options and you are open for more suggestions. That happens in life, and why you ask friends for advice. But closing all options and just whining for sympathy is starting to bore and annoy me. We have people at work like that. I see it in fandom far too many times. Some people get addicted to the "teats of sympathy" (I think my friend Suzi coined that one), and milk it for all it's worth. You know the type: always has a crisis, never takes up any offer to fix it. Here's the type of conversation I am talking about:

Mopey Bill: I am starving.
Perky Punk: Have some food.
Mopey Bill: I can't afford it.
Perky Punk: No, here's some free food.
Mopey Bill: I don't like meat, I am a vegetarian.
Perky Punk: Don't eat the meat.
Mopey Bill: The rest has touched meat.
Perky Punk: Here's $5 for some lunch.
Mopey Bill: I can't get a decent lunch for $5 that doesn't cater to my Kosher Vegan diet.
Perky Punk: Can't you go to the store and get a bag of veggies? Some carrots?
Mopey Bill: I am allergic to carrots.
Perky Punk: Beets?
Mopey Bill: All roots.
Perky Punk: How about cauliflower and broccoli?
Mopey Bill: Gives me gas.
Perky Punk: Surely their salad bar will have some fruit.
Mopey Bill: People sneeze on the salad bar and mix tongs.
Perky Punk: Have you seen a doctor about your allergies?
Mopey Bill: I can't afford to.
Perky Punk: Don't you have health care?
Mopey Bill: I don't have a job.
Perky Punk: Why not?
Mopey Bill: Market is bad.
Perky Punk: Where did you last apply?
Mopey Bill: I don't know.
Perky Punk: Are you actively looking for work?
Mopey Bill: The man is bringing me down.
Perky Punk: Maybe if you cut your hair, died it a normal color, and took out some of your piercings. Oh, and bathed. Did you wear a suit to the interview?
Mopey Bill: I'll never sell out!
Perky Punk: So what will you do for money?
Mopey Bill: I dunno. Art, I guess.
Perky Punk: What did you last sell?
Mopey Bill: I can't afford paint. Or a canvas.
Perky Punk: How about find out if some local artists have some extras.
Mopey Bill: All the artists here are snobs.
Perky Punk: Surely not all of them?
Mopey Bill: Might as well be.
Perky Punk: Have you thought about talking to a therapist?
Mopey Bill: They never help.
Perky Punk: Maybe you need to move out of your parent's house?
Mopey Bill: I can't afford it.
Perky Punk: Maybe your parents can work out a deal with you.
Mopey Bill: Why bother? The world sucks. Why must I be alonnne??

You know what Bill? I don't feel sorry for you. While Bill is a fictional character here, he represents conversations I have with psychodramatic people from time to time. They don't want a solution, they just want the sympathy. And why not? Many of these cases have gotten along just fine with limping along through life. I don't really approve of such behavior, unless their benefactors don't mind, and then it's filed under, "Whatever floats your boat." But I'll never enable these people. Time is too short to waste answers on those who don't want them.

Posted by Punkie @ 10:36 AM EST [Link]

Can't sleep... Parents and Writing

It's 3 in the morning, and I can't sleep. I am not sure why, but my brain won't turn off. Here are some random things I keep thinking about.

"Whatever happened to your parents?"
Friends who know me don't ask these questions, but sometimes I am in a situation where I have to explain why I don't have parents. I feel awkward, like an orphan who has to explain, yet again, he was adopted, and no, he doesn't know who his real parents are. I usually say, "My parents are gone," but that's not working, because most people want to know why right away. I hate laying down, "My mother committed suicide when I was 18 and my father took the opportunity to get rid of me. I don't know where he is, and he refuses to tell me." This concept seems weird to a lot of people the first time around. I am sure there are assumptions made, and frankly I am sick of it. Some people assume there's something wrong with me, because parents just don't kill themselves and then abandon their only child. Some feel real bad they asked, and awkwardly steer the conversation in another direction, like how some people suddenly avoid eye contact with the handicapped. Either way, I wish I could just make something up, like "I was adopted," which has slightly less of a stigma to it, for some reason. Maybe, "I was an orphan, raised in a variety of foster homes in the system until I turned 18," but then everything else in my life wouldn't fit. I have even considered saying they were murdered, or their plane went down and the bodies were never found, or something. But I consider lying to strangers as despicable as spitting on random people from a balcony, and so I cannot make up such tales.

There are many times I wish I had parents. My parents growing up were sort of "half-parents," in the sense they gave me a place to stay and food most of the time. But it always seemed that any attempt at love was an awkward glance away from eye contact. My mother was the only one who provided love, but it came at a price: I had to take care of her and the mess she left behind during her alcoholism. It was a price I was willing to pay, because I was desperate for love and attention, like any kid, and at times I felt proud that I could keep up appearances, clean up house as best I could, so my father wouldn't get mad at me. My father never liked me, and any outing we had was usually forced by my mother, who held the belief that if we were forced together enough, we'd bond on some level. I think I despised my father more because I feared him so greatly, and never saw him as a provider that my mother kept telling me to be grateful for. I am turning 35 this year, and REALLY trying to forgive him. I mean, it must have sucked being married to an alcoholic, and forced to have a child because my mother felt is fit some sort of mold. I have been trying to forgive him under the "insanity clause," where I just tell myself he's such a mentally ill person (his side of the family has a lot of crazy people), he can't help the evil that he does... but there's still a lot of unresolved hate I have to work through. So my parents were no more role models to me growing up than any random roommate you might get in college. So during times of stress, when people have mom or dad or even siblings they can turn to... I have nothing. I never really had anything but friends, and there's only so much intimacy you can get from them. I mean, I have Christine, but when you share the same stress (money, health, etc.), I have no one else to turn to, to pat me on the head, give me a hug, some warm cookies, tell me they love me, and give me some sort of warm confidence. I suppose that's supposed to make me tougher. But all I see are people who have that who are still stronger than me every day.

The right track
I have set a track for myself for 2004. It's the year I write and start trying to make money doing so. I said I'd goof off for 2003, stop my convention work, and so on, but after the recent wave of layoffs at work, the weary cracks of my life started to grow a little wider. Why am I doing tech stuff? Do I *really* enjoy it? My friend Brad, after several bad jobs, layoffs, and misdirection, just burned out on the technical scene. I mean, he was GOOD at what he did, but then got laid off company 1, laid off company 2, quit company 3, and then laid off just last month of company 4 in just six years. He saved all his money, though, and is taking an year off. Then he's thinking about becoming a bartender. I am sure many people would say, "That's stupid, you won't make NEAR the same amount of money as tech!" But it's not really about money for him. I am watching him to see how this pans out. I think he'll make a good bartender.

The tech industry is very unstable right now. There's outsourcing, layoffs, automation, and the tree keeps getting shaken. Part of the good from this is that all those people who joined the tech industry just for the money are now no longer attracted to it, and those that got in early are either fleeing for the hills or wedging themselves in tight. I think for a while, the tech industry was being watered down by too many people who didn't love what they did, but could fake it enough to get the serious moola we were all making in the late 90s. Now you see more and more people who stay because they love it; the fakers are getting out. The tech industry is as interesting as it's ever been, and I am excited to be a part of it, but it it my true path?

Ever since I was 12, I wanted to be a writer. I always had a keen knack for observation; an "outsider's view" of the human experience, so to speak. There have been many lessons I have learned since then, like how to keep your writing interesting, and how some people won't like what you have to say. I was taught from a very early age that honesty is the best policy when it comes to journalism, but I have since learned this isn't usually upheld. One of the major flaws I see is that "truth" is considered subjective, even if you report only the facts. The other problem is that no matter what the truth is, or how clearly you tell it, someone will skew your intent with their own spin. Like you could say, "I see six trees on the hill," and get a response, "The fact you didn't mention there were also rocks shows you are a rock-hater and therefore, not to be trusted as an impartial observer." If you don't believe me, watch an "online community" of some sort, and see if everyone gets along. So apart from this journal, I stay closer to fiction when I publish, although a lot of what I write is truth in disguise. Nothing's better or funnier than reality, which is why I also write comedy. But can I make a living at it?

The writing community is an art community, and thus, WILDLY unstable. You have a lot of snobs, unstable people, crazy people, constant lying, and it's all really a shill game of popularity. Since there is no real concrete way to "prove" someone is a good writer or not, I don't see this changing. My best approach with be not "Ars Gratis Artis" ("Art for the sake of art"), because while that make appeal to some, it's not very lucrative, and since art is so subjective anyway, that whole concept is essentially meaningless. I think "art for the sake of money" ("Ars Gratis Pecunae," I think) is closer to home, and "art for the sake of the audience" (I call my friend Neal, a Poet Latinate, to translate this for me) is even better, because money WILL follow as long as you play your cards right. I am not that innocent to think I am just going to waltz right into some publisher and get a book published and be rich. For every JK Rowling there are a thousand other authors we have never heard of. No, I have to play this like you play Hollywood. Flakes, liars, and shills. Endless travel and parties. Hobnobbing. Making friends in the right places. All that I learned in retail and more. So I feel that, as those kids of the 80s knew G.I. Joe to say, "Knowing is half the battle." (Hey Neal, translate that too!)

So I see tech as both a fallback and a transition. It's carried me from retail, given me a good house and everything, but it's probably not the track that will take me to the end station. I realized that when our family planned for the layoff. We realized that we could survive on one income if we moved to, say, Cumberland, Maryland. We had an emergency plan if I lost my job, and it was decided that my writing would be the next logical choice. But of course, I don't want that to be forced. I'd rather live off the two incomes at first, because I doubt my writing will give me NEAR the amount of money I make now for several years... if ever. I have to be realistic. But at least I LIKE working with computers, which is more than I can say for some of the coworkers around me, who seem to despise new work and challenges. I say, "Woohoo, new job skills!" while they say, "Aw man, now stuff is CHANGING again! Ugh!" I worry about them much more than I worry about me.

Posted by Punkie @ 04:16 AM EST [Link]