Author: Mark Alexander

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Teh St00pid, it BURNS

At my last job, those of us in I.T. used to joke that the company hired by simply going out onto the street and asking random people if they wanted a job. This is because it was painfully obvious they were hiring folks who had no qualifications whatsoever.

Well, that’s nothing compared to the place I work for now—and I suppose it speaks more about me that I’ve chosen to remain there as long as I have instead of going somewhere else than it does about the quality of their candidates. I learned yesterday that in order to come work for us, not only do you not need any technical skills, apparently you don’t even need to know how to type! Seriously. The new hire (a concurrent review nurse) demanded a new keyboard because the letters had worn off the one at the workstation she was assigned to. “I can’t type if I can’t see the letters.” And then I watched in disbelief as she hunt-and-pecked her way into the system.

Seriously.

This came on the heels of them hiring—and then, less than a week later—firing an administrative assistant who came preloaded with an “I.T. is here to do my job” attitude and so incapable of actually doing the job that she didn’t even know how to schedule appointments in Outlook.

Seriously, how do these people even get in the door?

And while we’re on the subject of work (sorry, I need to vent, and I have no peers there that I trust enough to share this with), why is it that anyone with an “O” in their title such a flaming asshole?

With very few exceptions (most notably at my last job while working for the Health Plan), this has been the case everywhere I’ve worked, but it seems especially true at my present place of employment. I’ve never seen such a pampered, self-important group if ignorant, arrogant disagreeable assholes concentrated in a single building.

When the CEO (who reeks of alcohol every time I see him) went off on me yesterday for something I had absolutely no control over, I said that was enough. I smiled, nodded, and after he walked way, I flipped him off with both hands and immediately went on Monster to reactivate my profile and update my resume.

I’ve been doing this work long enough to know that I’m going to run into this kind of stupid no matter where I go; I suppose that’s the main reason I haven’t put more effort into finding another job. I think, “Why bother? Same shit, different company.” But yesterday pushed me over the edge. And as Ben pointed out to me after this happened, if I go somewhere else at least it will be a different stupid.

Never mind actually looking forward to going to work; all I want is to be able to wake up in the morning without my first thought being, “Well, what kind of assholery am I going to have to deal with at that place today?”

Is that asking so much?

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Guns in Schools: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Lapeer, MI — A security officer at a Lapeer charter school left a firearm unattended in a school bathroom on Monday, Jan. 14, a school official said.
The security officer “made a breach in security protocol” and left an unloaded weapon in a restroom “for a few moments,” said Chatfield School Director Matt Young.
Translation: The idjit unholstered his firearm, put it on the sink or shelf or somewhere in there, and walked away having forgotten he’d done so. The fact we’ve heard about it likely means someone else found it before he remembered his gun was gone.

Young said the school has been in contact with local authorities about the matter and wouldn’t discuss any possible repercussion for the officer, calling it “a personnel matter.” Young also declined to name the security officer.
Translation: If they won’t say he was fired or formally reprimanded or fined by the local PD for reckless endangerment, in all likelihood it was just a verbal reprimand.

“The school has put additional security procedures in place that follow local law enforcement practices and guidelines,” Young said in a statement.
Translation: We’ve told our armed guards they’re never to unholster their firearms, even when taking a piss, a dump, or merely washing their hands because they might forget them. Because apparently we needed to point out the obvious.

“At no time was any student involved in this breach of protocol.
Translation: This happened during class periods and we’re pretty sure the adult teacher or custodian who found the weapon was the first person to encounter it. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it. Because legally, if a child found it, we’d be in big $ trouble.

“We will continue to work on improving school security.”
Translation: We really hope you all forget this ever happened.

Young stressed that no children were exposed to the handgun or put in danger, and declined to comment more on specifics of the incident.
Translation: We really, really hope you all forget before some irate parent decides to file a lawsuit. Besides, we asked the kids if they saw anything and they all said ‘no’, and we all know kids never lie about anything if you ask them in your serious-voice.

The school recently hired the officer, who is retired from the Lapeer County Sheriff’s Office, as a means to bolster school security.
Translation: Because police officers never make dumb mistakes like the rest of us humans do. Like, for instance, shooting up a paper delivery truck that looks nothing like the one the police were looking for.

Source.

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iTunes

I have 13077 songs in my iTunes library. Of those, 3946 (11.5 days worth!) have never been listened to, and another 3237 have only been played once. I fear I have become an iTunes hoarder.

Most played track? Clocking in at 40 times is Eppur Si Muove by Enigma from the A Posteriori album.

The most played albums didn’t come as a complete surprise, because for a very long time I was using them as my nightly headphones going-to-sleep music:

  • Engima: A Posteriori
  • Bear McGeary: Caprica Soundtrack
  • THP Orchestra: Good to Me
  • Cerrone: Variations of Supernature
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Right Out Of My Dreams

While it hasn’t happened recently, I used to often have dreams of walking in or actually boarding trains in the MUNI subway tunnels between the actual stations beneath Market Street in San Francisco. My dream tunnels were nothing like reality; while they often started out as the standard size you’d expect, they would often open into huge caverns, as if stations were constructed but abandoned at some point for lack of funding. Unlike the dark, damp tunnels of reality, these cavernous spaces—while no means bright—were decently lit from above. My tunnel dreams often centered around the Civic Center Station, one stop on the line whose energy I always found a bit odd.

Come to think of it, I have a lot of dreams about trains. Freight trans are often ominous, dark, frightening entities; passenger trains are the opposite, although they often take me places I hadn’t intended. To this day I remember a dream I had shortly after arriving in The City in 1986; I hopped on a train that took me to the beach, but it wasn’t like the real N- or L- lines, nor was it like any beach I’d ever seen in San Francisco. (Think sub-tropical with lots of lush vegetation.)

But I digress…

This morning, when I saw these photos of the big dig going on under New York City, it was as if they were pulled right out of my MUNI tunnel dreams. Even the lighting effects were spot-on.

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Ch-ch-ch-changes

“Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.” – David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Ben and I are about to have a long-term house guest. We are moving his mom up from Phoenix to stay with us until she can get resettled in Denver.

Having gone through enough familial drama of my own during the last two months to last the rest of my life, I was well aware of what Ben was facing. While not exactly the same situation, much like we’d reached the point with my dad that we realized he could no longer live on his own, leaving Ben’s mom on her own right now also wasn’t an option.

Julie is family, and I love her to death, but to be honest I had some strong misgivings about this happening until Ben and I had a long talk and he assured me this wasn’t going to be a repeat of her moving into his old apartment several years ago.

After Ben (who is in Phoenix this week putting all this in motion) reported the condition of her place there (a pipe broke in an adjacent apartment some time ago that was never properly addressed and mold is growing through the shared wall) to me yesterday, it’s more clear than ever that we made the right decision and getting her out of there and into someplace safe and healthy is essential.

Plus, the quote above keeps resonating with me. Am I paying Julie back for a past kindness, or paying her forward? I don’t know, but it feels like the right thing to do either way.

 

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To Be Filed Under Stating the Obvious

“What strikes me is we’ve actually gotten a glimpse into the mindset, though, of the pro-gun people like Wayne LaPierre and some of these others. It’s bizarre. They have this vision that we’re living in a ‘Mad Max’ movie and that nothing can be done about it. There are plenty of gun owners who are fine, but the lobbying groups—the NRA—is now revealed as an insane organization.” ~ Economist Paul Krugman

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Childhood Memories

It’s strange where your mind wanders when you find yourself wide awake at 3:30 in the morning. Fuckin’ insomnia.

Until they relocated to Arizona in 1972, every other year my maternal grandparents would fly my mother, sister, and I back east to spend the summer with them on their 22 acre property in western Massachusetts.

And by “the summer,” I mean about two and a half months—a period of time that as an adult passes in the blink of an eye: ten weeks, five paychecks. But to a child, two and a half months was a lifetime.

Those summers were idyllic times for me, starting with the incredible excitement of flying across country. This was obviously long before you had to submit to a rectal probe to be allowed past the gate; when people actually dressed up to get on an airplane. Hell, the first couple times we flew jetways weren’t even used in Phoenix.

My grandparents lived in what felt like the middle of nowhere. Their closest neighbor literally lived a mile away, it was a 45 minute drive to the nearest hospital, and “going into town” to pick up mail at the post office, or buy groceries, or take the week’s trash to the dump always seemed an adventure in itself. In addition to the 230-year old house and rambling barn that seemed to go on forever, the property had a running stream and pond, two enormous fields (that were leased out for cultivation), and several acres of completely undisturbed forest.

Many nights were spent on the home’s screened porch; a magical place where I learned to play Solitaire with my grandmother, built plastic models, put puzzles together, and drew and wrote stories.

Caution! Future blogger at work!

Every night my grandmother would read to us. Children’s classics like Alice in Wonderland, Winnie the Pooh and The Jungle Book were all on tap.


It was there that I discovered the joys of Pepperidge Farm cookies (at the time only available on the east coast), my love of seafood—especially lobster—and the practice of using half-and-half on my cereal instead of milk. To this day, in my mind there’s no more comforting breakfast than a bowl of corn flakes with fresh peach slices drenched in half-and-half. Toward the end of the summer (always marking our sad, eventual departure and the return to the reality of school and Phoenix) we would gather fresh wild blueberries and enjoy homemade blueberry muffins and blueberry pie.

My grandfather was an accomplished woodworker, and in my mind, he could build anything. I still have a “work table” he built for me one one of our first trips back east:

The last summer we visited before they moved to Arizona, I was obsessed with Lost in Space, and enlisted Grandad’s help in building a “life-size” model of the LIS robot. He was very accommodating, but while I initially started off actively engaged in the construction, being a kid I eventually grew bored and spent more and more time wandering off, exploring the rest of the barn. The place was  chock-full of all manner of intriguing things, leading to me eventually being called out in no uncertain terms by my grandmother; the one time in memory I can ever remember seeing her genuinely angry.  From that point forward, I stayed in the workshop—assisting where I could—until the project was completed.

While the final product actually ended up bearing only a passing resemblece the original (I’m not posting photos; they’re on a hard drive in the other room and I’m not waking Ben up to get it.) and because of an initial miscommunication it slid sideways instead of front to back, I was quite amazed that we managed to pull it off at all. It’s amazing what a loving grandfather can do with a bit of wood, plaster, and several feet of chicken wire. When my grandparents moved to Arizona, they actually brought the thing with them, but by that time I was “all grown up” and in high school—totally embarrassed at the way it looked—so it lived at the back of our garage until I finally disposed of it a couple years later.

The only real downside to these northeastern getaways was my grandparents’ dog: a feisty gray poodle they’d acquired shortly after my family got ours. The disposition of the two animals could not have been more different. Our poodle was affectionate; theirs was an aggressive hellhound. I still have the scars on my right hand where the little beast attacked me one evening as I kissed my grandmother goodnight. When the little monster died years later, I did not shed a single tear.

My sister and I have often talked about flying back east to see how the place has changed; I have found it on Google Maps, and while there’s no street view yet available I’ve seen enough to know that memories are best left in the past. The property has apparently been subdivided with two new houses built in the aforementioned fields. The barn has been torn down and rebuilt, and a second garage seems to have been added onto the house. So yeah, as much as I might like to make the pilgrimage, the fact is I think I’d much rather just keep my memories intact of the place that left such an indelible impression on my young life.


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Exactly.

From the Daily Kos (bolding mine):

The Connecticut Post, via Joe. My. God.:

A false fire alarm, 45-minute waits to get into the Capitol complex, even the heckling of a bereaved parent of a Newtown shooting victim marked Monday’s day-long legislative hearing on gun control.

“The Second Amendment!” was shouted by several gun enthusiasts in the meeting room as Neil Heslin, holding a photo of his 6-year-old son, Jesse Lewis, asked why Bushmaster assault-style weapons are allowed to be sold in the state.

I’m going to put “heckling the father of murdered six year old” right at the top of my updated list of signs that America can safely ignore you, or at least not give a single flying shit as to what supposed rights you think you have, but I do want to reiterate one point: For a sizable percentage of America’s most aggressive gun fetishists (not “enthusiasts,” please—there’s a difference between shooting as a hobby and stockpiling guns as your own personal anti-government, anti-society religion) the ability to quickly murder a classroom or two of elementary school kids isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

This would be the prime argument of all the loons citing incipient “tyranny” as the reason they deserve guns, and all possible guns at that. If you’re claiming that you need your guns because you might need to murder members of the government (yes, that is what “fighting tyranny” comes down to, when you’re doing it with stockpiled ammunition), then the ability to murder a large number of people quickly is a prime feature. These aren’t people who mumble about needing high capacity, military style weaponry because today’s modern deer really need 30 or so shots pumped into them before they’ll stay down—they’re perfectly blunt about saying they need it because someday, there’s gonna be “tyranny,” and if they themselves wake up one morning and decide that “tyranny” has come they need to be able to go to their closet, arm up, and start killing people who think otherwise. Often, for some reason that most of the rest of us can’t even begin to parse, it’s couched in crackpot religious terms, often citing “prophesies” and other Jesus-sounding stuff as the reason why potential mass murder is, well, just around the corner.

That someone can easily dispatch a roomful or two of elementary school children, or college students, or theater-goers, or restaurant-goers with these same weapons is not seen by these people as something that needs fixing—at all. Yes, it’s sad that those particular people got murdered, but whether Americans have the God-given right to murder a large number of people quickly, and easily, if they feel the circumstances warrant it is something the tyranny fetishists will go to their graves, or your grave, or the local sheriff’s grave believing in.

The other tricky part of this is that (of course) the people most obsessed with defending themselves against government “tyranny” are the people who see “tyranny” in absolutely everything. The United Nations is coming for them; Barack Obama is a crazy Marxist; bicycle paths are a sign of the devil. The most unhinged people among us are the people who have volunteered themselves as the judges, juries, and executioners of any American government figures they’ve decided they don’t like—and those are the people that a large segment of our no-gun-regulations-ever crowd are catering to. Why? You could suppose the NRA, as obvious example, is merely acting as passthru for the manufacturer’s lobby, which makes a very sizable income off of crazy frightened people, or you could suppose them to be unironic believers in the tyranny theory of American proto-terrorists someday becoming American freedom fighters—but why does the we’d like to maybe someday be able to kill members of the government theory get so much mainstream love from supposedly mainstream sources?

It seems rather obvious that we could take all the arguments as to why one might need a 30-round clip because of potential tyranny and just flush that entire population from legitimate discussion. If tyranny does come to America, your little closet stockpile is not going to do a damn bit of good against the Air Force, and basing all our public safety decisions around your own little delusion that it might, someday, is not a very good reason for our continued enabling of frequent, convenient mass murder. So that seems a good first step: If you’re arguing that people need to be able to speedily murder other people because someday you and your little band of societal malcontents may want to murder the right people, the ones who really need murdering, all of the policymakers concerned with American public safety ought to write off your opinions on the matter from the outset. Then the rest of us can begin to have a discussion on guns in America that isn’t objectively, you know, insane.