Author: Mark Alexander

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So I’m in Class All Week…

Elphaba has a hard-on for certifications, professional development, and “advancing your career.”

I am 18 months from retirement. I don’t give a shit about certifications, professional development, and advancing my career. My only professional goal at this point is keeping my head down, doing my job, getting vested for my retirement account, and getting the fuck out of this place at the end of January 2025.

The last time I had a one-on-one with her (thankfully, something I will never have to do again), I pointed out that I was retiring and therefore additional training for “career bulding” would be money ill-spent. She wasn’t having a bit of it. “I expect everyone under me to attend two training classes per year.”

Okay, I decided I wanted to take Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator classes. They aren’t applications I use professionally, but we do support those users who do use them.

DENIED. “Not job related.”

So this week I find myself in an online Sharepoint class. My boss called this “a learning vacation.”

I will readily admit that I do not understand Sharepoint. I had some company-provided training prior to COVID and WFH lockdown that allowed me to handle the few requests for minor changes that came in, but since we’ve been back in the office the entire infrastructure was changed and I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing any more. Add to that the fact that I simply don’t care about any of this shit.

Bad attitude? You betcha!

As if to add insult to injury, I don’t have rights to do anything in Sharepoint any more anyway. I’ve pointed this out several times to the people that have the power to do something about it, but—like getting a company cell phone because the greeting on my personal cell was deemed “unprofessional“—nothing ever gets resolved. So any tickets that come in that involve Sharepoint changes get ignored until someone else picks them up.

It’s going to be a long week. But at least I’m not in the office.

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Unacceptable

Who pays for medical bills after mass shootings?

When Ashtin Gamblin remembers the night she was shot nine times, she can picture herself lying in the ambulance and worrying about whether she could afford it.

“That’s how the American medical system is,” she told ABC News. “I just got shot and I’m concerned about how I’m going to pay for the ambulance ride.”

5-year-old children in Texas are being given Winnie the Pooh books that teach them how to survive a school shooting

The book, titled “Stay Safe,” was sent home in the backpacks of pupils in the Dallas Independent School District last week, according to the Oak Cliff Advocate. The book is being given out to elementary school children.

On one page, the beloved bear from the Hundred Acre Wood tells kids: “If danger is near, do not fear. HIDE like Pooh does until the police appear.”

Another piece of advice reads: “We should all hide without a sound in a place where we cannot be found,” showing Pooh peeping out from inside a honey pot.

[Source]

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Belief in Gods and Other Religious Concepts Has Declined Since 2001

There’s a bit of good news to report from a recent Gallup poll. Their strange title gives most of it away: Belief in Five Spiritual Entities Edges Down to New Lows. But what are the five entities?

    1. “God” (I’m unsure which one this is supposed to refer to)
    2. Angels
    3. Heaven (how is this an entity?)
    4. Hell (again, how is this an entity?)
    5. The Devil

It should not surprise (but may disappoint) you that 74% of their respondents profess belief in some sort of god. Sadly, the United States continues to be an outlier here. Still, this number has dropped quite a bit since 2001. And while only 12% of those surveyed say they don’t believe in gods, that number has increased.\

According to Gallup:

As the percentage of believers has dropped over the past two decades, the corresponding increases have occurred mostly in nonbelief, with much smaller increases in uncertainty. This is true for all but belief in God, which has seen nearly equal increases in uncertainty and nonbelief.

Those of us who don’t believe in these things should find this news encouraging. Perhaps more of our neighbors are beginning to come around. Caution seems wise, though, since some religious believers will see this as a reason to clamp down and push their beliefs with more force.

Gallup’s results also show that belief in these entities (or concepts) breaks down as you’d expect on political lines. Belief is much higher among Republicans than Independents or Democrats. This is consistent with most of what we’ve heard from leading Republican presidential candidates, and it is cause for concern. Electing such people would be bad for secularism and those of us who value it.

There are plenty of issues where Americans are divided. Religious belief seems like a big one. I watched an interview with several Republican voters recently where they were asked a number of thought-provoking questions. They agreed that nobody who supported reproductive rights was really a Christian. If nobody on the “other side” is Christian, we should not be surprised when we hear rhetoric about crusades or spiritual warfare.

“Christian” continues to be used as a proxy for moral goodness. If none of my political opponents are Christian, none of them are good people. These beliefs are harmful. They bleeds over to how I view my neighbors, and it affects how I treat them. This goes beyond division and ends up as hatred.

Image by Andreas Breitling from Pixabay

[Source]

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These Are Were Going Up in the Neighborhood

They started going up last year on a piece of property that has sat vacant for decades. I like them architecturally, even though they’re horribly out of step with the rest of the area (mostly built-up during the 1940s and 50s).

When we moved back over here in April, it looked like they were about 95% finished, but in the intervening months they’ve just sat there, still enclosed in a construction fence and no further progress has been made on them.  Looks as if the developer ran out of money because there’s now a for sale sign out front – not for the individual units, but for the entire property.