Use it or loose it.

I believe that our Corporate Overlords regularly use the technique of "bait and switch" when it comes time to announce unpleasant things. I particularly recall a meeting where the Site Manager brought us in to talk about where The Company was going and where they stood compared to the rest of the industry. The picture looked pretty good. Then we lost our 401k matching funds.

Well, as I said, there has been an Auditor in the area. When I spoke with him he talked about getting our ideas, asked if there were any tools we needed to do our jobs better and was generally upbeat. Well, today my skepticism was validated when the announcement came down concerning major changes to how vacation time is managed.

Previously, you accrued PTO based on the number of hours you worked. I recall it was something on the order of 1.6 hours of PTO earned for 40 hours of work. These hours were stockpiled indefinitely.

Now, vacation hours will be awarded based on seniority and status. Be employed for 1 year, earn 80 hours of vacation time for the year. Be employed for 3 years, earn 96 hours. If your a part-time employee, whether you work 20 hours a week or 35 hours a week, you only get half as much.

For myself, there is good and bad, and neither to the extreme. My 6+ years of service earns me 120 hours of vacation time for the year. I looked at my past usage of PTO and it's ranged from the mid 80s to the mid 90s so I am, in a sense, getting more.

But, here's the trick; if that time isn't used by the end of the calendar year, it evaporates.

The Corporation provides this benefit plan to provide a healthy work-life balance. The Corporate Overlords expect each employee to take the full allotment of vacation provided each year.

This isn't "work-life balance" if I'm forced to spend it at the rate they define.

But wait. There's more.

The PTO time I have right now, 55 hours, must be used by April 1st or it will disappear as well. In the next month and a half I need to spend over a week of PTO or loose out.

Damn right, I'm going to spend it now. I'm going to look over my calendar and start spending it left and right. Perhaps I'll avoid the nasty queue and take each Monday off for the next six weeks. Maybe I'll take six Fridays off and have some nice long weekends for a change. Maybe I'll just take a whole week.

But what about some of my other coworkers who I know have accrued more PTO than I have. I know of at least three with over 100 hours. Are they going to get a chance to spend their time or are they going to get ripped off? Am I going to be cheated out of my time while Management tries to accommodate everyone?

And, of course, I see this as another symptom of problems at the Corporate level. Switching from an hourly-based PTO accumulation to one that has a set amount a year allows them to budget more efficiently. No nasty surprises when an employee who's never taken a vacation collects all of it at once. And, for every employee that doesn't spend all his vacation time by the end of the year, well it's like free money in the pockets of the Corporate Overlords.

So, another shoe has dropped.

Carrots and Sticks.

Yesterday, we received a message that an Auditor from the Corporate Overlords was in the office and we were not to be doing anything not project related. That is; no surfing the web, no reading books, stuff like that. Well, he was still around today. At one point my Team Lead came into my cube and said that when I was done with the call I was on I was to go into the training room for a meeting with the Auditor.

"Are you sure you want me to do that?" I asked.

The Auditor wanted to speak with one Analyst from each of the three teams and my Team Lead had chosen me because he knew I had opinions and wasn't afraid to voice them.

Interesting.

So, in this meeting I went over many of the things I had gone over last week with the Site Manager. I toned down some things but I didn't mince too many words.

There has been a drop in performance by the help desk as a whole. Much of it has to do with the huge influx on new analysts but a significant and surprising amount come from experienced analysts who aren't acting with due diligence. They are making more mistakes. Careless mistakes. Why?

Well, we have no incentive to do better or work harder. No bonuses. No pay raises. Why work harder if we aren't going to be rewarded for our work.

There is also no dis-incentive to working poorly. There really is no punishment that can be inflicted on us for poor performance. A stern talking to or a threat of being fired isn't going to do it because we have learned from experience that it take a spectacular fuck up to get fired. Just being piss-poor, lazy or mediocre isn't going to do it.

So, we have neither carrot or stick. No reason to work better. No fear of consequences for working poorly. Just a huge, apathetic center.

The Auditor took all this in over 45 minutes and three pages of notes. I even had some suggestions. The spin he put on it was that he was there to learn how things work so that what works for us can be taken to other sites and what works there might be brought here. It all sounded so promising but I've heard this song and dance before. The cynical voice says that he's her to see where the fat can be squeezed. The company stock is still in the toilet and while they have avoided being de-listed from NASDAQ, they are still under scrutiny and probable pressure from their shareholders.

I have no reason to believe anything good will come of this. In the final analysis, I expect more of the same. No carrots. No sticks.

One for the thumb.

The Steelers won the Super Bowl last night. I wasn't watching the game but the end of the game was clearly anounced in the community with car horns and gunfire.

Yep, people were out in their yards firing shots into the air. In Oakland, a car was overturned The windows were busted out and revelers were allowed to dance atop it for 20 minutes before the police came to put a stop to their fun. Denied that form of vandalism, the crowd moved on, tore down store awnings, smashed windows, flipped city trash cans and newspaper boxes, pulled down street signs and destroyed parking meters. Eventually they found another car to flip over. On the South Side, riot police had to control the mob with Plexiglas shields and batons.

It's a stupid, fucking football game, people! It's just a game! And all YOU did was watch it happen on television.

So, congratulations, yinz guys. My thumb's up for your making this burg truly the City of Champions.

Posted

I went on a short hike along the Harmony Trail near Wexford. The Rachel Carson Trail Conservancy is working on converting a 4 mile section of what was once the Harmony trolley line from New Castle to Pittsburgh. At one point, the person leading the hike pulled a bright yellow "Posted" sign from a power pole. We were shocked until she explained that they investigated the name and John Knapp of 190 Clay Road in Wexford does not exist. The name does not appear on the tax rolls. The street doesn't even exist in Wexford.

It is known that several land owners along the corridor are opposed to "their" throughway being used as a trail but it is the general consensus that these signs are an effort by a local hunter to keep people off "his" prime hunting ground. We saw a number of well-traveled deer trails and one hunter's tree stand.

It's actually fairly clever to put up "No Trespassing" signs along what they consider to be unused land. Most people would simply believe the signs and stay away. The RCT Conservancy has been carefully looking into who owns what along the corridor and has been negotiating with property owners. When these signs started appearing (and apparently those previously had a different false name) they looked into it and found them to be ficticious.

Failure to Communicate

New stupid policy today. We were handed an eight page packet of procedure that we have to post in our cubicles. Not just pinned so that we can reference them but each one pined up so that wer cas see them all at once. Now maybe, just maybe, if these were procedures that needed to be referenced often I could possibly imagine the utility of having them all visible and handy but all of them, not just some but all of them, are procedures that are rarely necessary. For at least half of them I have NEVER received a relevant call.

But seven of the eight were relevant to the Financial Services group, apparently still populated by people who feel that they are the MOST important part of The Bank and must be waited on hand and foot.

Hey, if The Bank thought you were THAT important, they wouldn't have liquidated your own private Help Desk and given the job to us.

Requiring that we all have these procedures posted in view in our cubicles is insulting to those of us who know what we are doing and will be ignored by those who already ignore the stacks of procedure related emails we already receive. And since I count myself among those who are insulted by treating us like children, I went into the Site Manager's office to say exactly this.

To his credit, he stood up to me this time. Usually, he just sort of takes my ranting and agrees with me. This time, he's got his feet to the fire. Each day, he's pulled into a meeting where the Financial Services people hold up every mistake by the Help Desk as a reason why the elimination of their own personal Help Desk should never happened. He's a political punching bag.

But when the other shoe dropped, I lost all sympathy.

It would seem that a long time ago, when his predecessor was still "in charge" and I was working my ass off over the summer, one of the trainees complained that I editorialized about one of the team leads . (You can guess who. I've mentioned him here often.) N***, the new Site Manager and someone who I had previously thought was forthright and honest, revealed to me that he learned of this and decided that "it was not his place" do let me know.

This is my fucking career, we're talking about here. If someone is making claims or accusations about my performance, it is management's responsibility to address the issue. By sitting on this, I was denied either the opportunity to defend myself from unfounded accusations (which I wouldn't do because they happen to be true) or amend my behavior. By keeping me in the dark, I can only continue on the way I have been. I can only be led to conclude that my not being involved in the current training cycle was part of the diciplinary action that was meted out in absentia. I was told that this wasn't the case but the secret was kept from me for the better part of a year. Why should I believe you?

I told him, "N***, I thought you were better than that."

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

It's nothing new. I have said for years that Management at the Help Desk has failed to address issues in a direct manner. They make broad policies and mandate that everyone follow them when, in fact, there are a handful of individuals that need remedial training or to be pulled into the office and told to shape up. I have told Site Managers, Team Leads and the Ops Manager this to their faces. Now, I am one of those people that needed to be pulled into the office and they didn't have the guts to address the issue head on.

Spineless, selfish bastards.

Fortunate

I left the house without my wallet this morning, only realizing I didn't have it when I entered work and didn't have my security swipe card.

The security database had my photograph so I was able to pass but, more importantly, not having my wallet meant that I didn't have any money for lunch.

I was able to survive by scavenging a handful of fortune cookies from a co-workers desk drawer.

New Directions.

The Site Manager responded to my e-mail of yesterday with the following reply:

That was the reason for my reply. If we the management staff are holding the analysts to a standard - then I believe that we should lead by example.

So to your point - the only standard difference is the management team is more accountable.

Geis, we are looking at a new day for the Help Desk and the bulletin board speaks of a direction we are looking to move toward. Some make faster transitions than others. We must be tolerant to a certain degree to allow for change, both in management and analysts. With the level of experience you offer, I welcome your advice and insight but at the same time look to you not to just provide criticism of processes but offer process improvements.

Point made - point taken - point accepted.

He then came over to my cube and asked if I had read his e-mail. I told him that I did and have heard lots of talk over years about the Help Desk "moving in new directions" and I have never seen any of it pan out. Always a lot of talk and never any real progress. And, as to suggestions for improvements rather than just complaints, I have made plenty of suggestions over the years and those haven't seem to gone anywhere either. In this specific case, talk to D***** and have him fix his profile. Then maybe I'll actually see that we are being held to the same standard.

Of course, by the end of the day the only change I had seen is that the profile no longer had EvilScientist but had been changed to D*****'s logon id plus Evil Scientist.

Oh, yea. We're moving in a new direction.

Evil Scientist.

This morning, C****, our Help Desk Programmer, sent out a message reminding people to change their profiles in the e-pop utility. Every time we log on to the IM-like utility, it assigns the system's computername as our name and we are supposed to change it to our actual names so people know who is who. C**** simply sent out a reminder.

Shortly thereafter, someone sent out a message that said:

From: ***********.Users
Please make certain that you are using your 1st name and last name only.
Not a ficticious name so that it is clear who we are communicating to, as well as, who we need to reach.

The person sending it out had neglected to update their own profile so it was in no way clear who was communicating. And, of course, D***** continued to use EvilScientist as his profile. with his message:

From: Evil Scientist.Users
* * * ATTENTION * * *
If you received this message, then you need to change your epop identity from the workstation id.........so please change it now.

I'm really kind of fed up with this, so I sent the following to the Help Desk Site Manager:

"It is extremely hypocritical to be harangued both collectively and individually about not updating our E-Pop profiles and not using fictitious names when the person sending the message has failed to update their profile and D****is allowed to continue to use Evil Scientist as an alias.

I have long believed that Team Leads and Analysts are held to different standards and this behavior only reinforces that opinion. The motivational platitudes on the bulletin board at the front of the room are useless or are, in point of fact, counterproductive if Managers make rules which they themselves do not follow and then continue not to follow even after multiple messages that they themselves send out to Analysts."

Property Rights.

My wife is involved with a loose social group of mostly IT professionals who get together on a monthly basis to have dinner at a nice restaurant. I've joined them a few times and last night's "meeting" was at Green Forest.

Green Forest on Rodi Road is a Brazillian style restaurant that is all-you-can-eat meat, served on a sword.Turkey wrapped in bacon. Skirt steak. Strip steak. Flank steak. Garlic steak. Sirloin steak. Some other sort of steak wrapped in bacon. Fillet mignon. Lamb. Sausage. The waiter will come around with skewer after skewer of different kinds of meat until you tell him to stop.

But even though I was in a meatatarian's heaven, things did not go so well. The conversion turned to bicycling and at one point I spoke about some of the problems caused by land owners opposed to rail-to-trail going past their property. They will lay down carpet tacks, string wire across the trail and in one instance hung a bicycle from a tree by a noose.

This sort of behavior was endorsed by one of the attendants, a lawyer and self-proclaimed conservative Republican. He tried to not advocate violence but the more he spoke, the more he showed his true colors. He categorized the trail users as "jerkoffs" and "tree-hugging liberal hippies" and said that he would engage in "recreational lawsuits" to harass and bankrupt individuals and trail councils who dared to run this trail across his property.

Except that it's not you're property. It belongs to the railroad. It
probably belonged to the railroad since before your grandparents were born and if they choose to sell it to the trail council for conversion into trail then it's their right to do so. Lawsuit after lawsuit has been ruled against neighboring landowners. Sure, you've been using that "abandoned" throughway for years but it was never yours and you knew that when you bought the property. There it is clearly marked out in the survey. Yours. Theirs.

As he was challenged on this, he became more and more angry, completely flouting the rule of law. It bounced back and forth with him supporting nonexistent rights and myself saying "but it's not YOUR property." I don't remember what he said then but it was insulting and I just said "I'm done here" and got up to leave.

"If you're riding after November, be sure to wear an orange vest."

"Thanks for the threat." I could not believe that a lawyer had just made such a statement advocating violence against me because I was exercising my right to ride on trail designed and built for my use. It's why we have the trail in the first place; to get us on to a safe throughway and away from jerks like you who think the own the road and run us bicyclists off of it.

"I'm just saying that riding a bike, you look just like a deer."

A bicyclist looks like a deer only to drunken, inbred rednecks who have no business being out in the woods with a rifle. And you've just advocated negligent homicide, you ignorant, arrogant bastard.

Motivation

Someone saw fit to post some print outs on our otherwise blank bulletin board.

"Five Tips to Reaching Your Success in 2006"

It included bullet points for Be clear, Be Realistic, Communicate, Facilitate, (and my personal favorite) Visualize Daily

Ugh. As if this sort of this motivational pablum is going to improve morale. What we really need is better and consistent training, fair management and, . . . oh yea. . . how about competitive pay.

I'm waiting for the repugnant prepackaged motivational signs to start appearing.

I'm visualizing a new job daily.

Oceana has Always has been at War with Eurasia.

My Sister-In-Law sent me the following link:

Loose Change 9-11

Now, I'm not a conspiracy theorist but it does present the events of 9/11 in a different light that makes you wonder if Dubbya really is trying to bring about the world portrayed in Orwell's "1984".

Discounting all the eyewitness accounts (because witnesses are notoriously unreliable), some debatable grainy video enlargements and looking only at the crash site at the Pentagon, the story of a jet liner crashing into the building doesn't hold up. How does a jet liner punch through three buildings? How does it target the building so precisely without skidding off the ground? Why didn't the intense power of the jetliner's engines not blow cars off the road as it supposedly passed 50 feet overhead? Why does the security cam footage from the convenience store across the street not show a jet liner? And the one that I could see with my own eyes on live broadcasts that day; Why is the hole not airplane shaped?

I used to disbelieve conspiracy theories because I was not confident that such a complex plot by the government could be kept secret. Surely, one of the hundreds of people involved would let something slip somewhere. But the more I think about it. . . we have an administration of zealots, crusaders and true believers. Lead by righteousness, they could probably keep a secret much better than a career bureaucrat. And since we now know that the government has been engaging in warrantless domestic wiretapping, they could certainly keep an eye on their own co-conspirators.

Orwell presented a dystopian world that was allowed to get that way because people believed the loss of their freedoms was necessary for their own defense. We eventually learn that the war that Big Brother is waging might not actually exist. That it is a fabrication by the government.

Oceania is at War with Eurasia. Oceana has Always has been at War with Eurasia.

The US is at War with el-Qaeda. The US has Always been at War with el-Qaeda.

Holiday Excitement

Working on a holiday when the bank and financial markets are closed is a mind-numingly boring experience. I had 6 calls by lunch and only one more in the afternoon. Given my typical call volume of around 50 a day it was good that I had a book to read.

A little investigation revealed that Team Lead D**** had neglected to send out the e-mail wherein he noted just who was supposed to be in today to everyone. The people who didn't get the e-mail came in and essentially made us well overstaffed with more than a dozen people logged in. I would say that it was six too many. All told, the Help Desk took a little over 100 calls when non-holiday Mondays pull in nearly 1200. Boredom compounded.

ke=mv^2

Someone chucked a Compaq Presario off the 10th Street Bridge onto the Eliza Furnace Trail. The memory I pulled from the wreckage probably survived but odds are that the 8 Gig drive did not. Terminal ballistics can be an odd thing, though. The case folded up and exploded. It's possible that most of the kinetic energy of impact went into destroying the case and thus protected the drive, much like modern cars fold up to protect to occupants. On the other hand, hard drives are fairly delicate so I may just have an 8 Gig paperweight.

Tax Evasion

On the 1st of February last year, I realized that The Corporate Overlords had never deducted my City of Pittsburgh Occupation Tax out of any of my paychecks for the 6 years I have been working for the Help Desk. I hadn't noticed previously because in 20 years of working within the City limits, my employers had always taken care of their tax obligations.

Well, over the course of two months, I sent out numerous e-mails to HR, the Payroll Manager, Employee Relations and others alerting them to this problem. I received no response. When I finally had a meeting with the then new Site Manager T*** in August, he assured me that he was going to leverage an answer for me. He was out the door a month or so later because he hadn't been qualified to do the job.

Today was my first paycheck of 2006 and sure enough, the City's Emergency & Municipal Services Tax was not deducted. I alerted the local HR Rep (officially titled the "Operations Manager") of this and, with the all too typical surprised look on her face, she said that she though she had told me that WE would be responsible for the taxes. I said, "No. You never said anything like that to me and I certainly haven't received any documentation to that effect." After that little conversation, I again sent out a series of e-mails in which I said:

As of 1 January 2005, what was previously known as the Occupation Privilege Tax had been changed under City Code Title II, Article VII, Chapter 252 to the Emergency & Municipal Services Tax. According to Article III, Section 301 of the Regulations, “All employers and self-employed individuals are required to collect the Emergency and Municipal Services Tax from all employees engaged in an occupation within the City of Pittsburgh.” Section 303 goes on to say “Any employer required to withhold the taxes in accordance with the City Code and with these Regulations shall be personally liable for payment of the tax in the event he fails, refuses or neglects to withhold or transmit the tax or any portion thereof, in addition to the interest and penalties.”

Perhaps quoting the law, chapter and verse, will get the Corporate Overlords to notice. I actually doubt it. That's why I went ahead and called the Audit Section of the City of Pittsburgh Department of Finance. The guy there was very pleased to take my anonymous report that an employer in the city had been shirking their tax obligation for the past seven years or so. "We love doing audits," he said.

In point of fact, even though the employer is legally responsible for withholding the tax from employee's paychecks, the employee is still responsible for the paying of the tax. My tax burden for the unpaid Occupation Tax of $10/year through 2004 and the Municipal Services Tax of $52/year from 2005 on is $152 total. The math for the assessment of penalties and interest is a bit tricky to understand but it can't be more than another $75 on top of the tax responsibility. Lets say $200 total. The pain of that is more than offset by the warm feeling I have from knowing that City auditors and lawyers will be descending upon my delinquent
employer.

I warned them.

Fully staffed.

I got an email that, among other things mentioned that "we finally have enough staff to cover our queues."

Back in December, I had it out with the Site Manager because they had gone through a cycle of hiring and training without involving me; the Help Desk Trainer. In spite of the assurances that I was indeed still the trainer, I have noticed at least two new faces out on the floor being trained. I wasn't introduced and I certainly have not been involved in their training.

Lies? Oversights? Ignorance? I don't know what's going on with management but I am now somewhat beyond caring. I was going to say something else, specifically pointing out that they are only proving me right when I said that no one listens to me. But, of course, they wouldn't listen to that either.

You can't say that.

Even though we are now fully staffed, we have apparently not been meeting our metrics for the month. This means that Team Lead D**** has been sending out this message every day:

To: O=HelpDesk.Users
From: EvilScientist.Users
Sent: 01/10/2006 9:09:07 AM
Subject:

*** EVERYONE ***

I understand that each of you want to resolve issues.... and that's a good thing. However, when we're in our SWAT hours, we really don't have the luxury of time....With that being said, I recommend a problem ticket for 2nd level support.

Our primary focus should be clearing the queue between the hours of 07:00 and 11:00...the only caveat is that you can't say that to the user....you need to find a creative yet effective method to do this.

Thank you for your compliance.

My first problem with this is the signature. The message utility we use defaults to the system's computername for the From: field and we are required to change it to include our login ids and names. Except that D**** has chosen to define his name as EvilScientist. Not only has he gotten away with something that the rest of us can't, when someone else sends out a message and has neglected to change the field, he calls them on it. Just another shining example of the double standard extant.

I particularly like the directive that we focus on clearing the queue, cutting calls as short as possible. Of course, that's without letting the users in on that.

I have never really paid attention to these sorts of things. If I can solve a problem, I'm going to take the time necessary to solve it. The occasional 20 minute call that I take is more than balanced by the number of calls that I can clear out in 45 seconds or so. In the end, MY average stats are in the green. If managers want me to cut calls that I could otherwise solve then they can come to my cube and hang up on the user themselves. I refuse to treat them like that.

Opening a ticket for issues that we can solve means that the ticket will go to a second level support and they will just send it back to us saying that we should do it ourselves. Of course, in the hour or so that it takes for them to do that the user is doing nothing. And sometimes they are calling back wondering why they haven't been taken care of. My logic is that it's better to take the time to solve the problem than to have the user calling back into the queue.

Thirdly, I like the "Thank you for your compliance" line. Obey.

Lego Rules!

Chris Doyls at has built the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster in Lego and it absolutely rules.

Out in the cold.

Since around Thanksgiving, I've been noticing new faces at the Help Desk. It started with half a dozen people sitting with other analysts. Since we had previously had visitors from Branch Support over to see how we did things, a sort of exchange program, I first thought these new people might have been from downstairs. Then I thought they might be visitors from the now dismantled Financial Services Help Desk. When I saw them sitting in front of computers attempting to take calls I finally figured that they were new analysts.

Since I've been the trainer for a number of years now I wondered why I not only wasn't involved in the training of these new analysts but also why no one had even seen fit to tell me anything about this or even introduce me.

Yesterday, I got tired of waiting and asked M***, the designated "backup up trainer". He told me he had been tasked with bringing them up to speed on passwords only in two days. At which point they were put on the phone and expected to be productive. Except, I knew from experience that it took more than two days of training to prepare one for taking calls. I knew that callers regularly just pick the first selection on the phone menu just to get a person and, surprise, surprise, the first selection happened to be passwords so that even those who were supposed to get only password calls would get every call imaginable. M*** spent his entire day going cube to cube trying to help these people who had been thrown to the wolves without proper training.

This morning I went in to talk to the Site Manager.

"So, N***. When was someone going to tell me that I wasn't the trainer any more."

E said that I was still the trainer and I launched into him. If I was the trainer, why wasn't I doing any training of this half a dozen new analysts. If I was the trainer, why wasn't I even talked to about this? If I was the trainer, why weren't any of these new people sat with me to actually learn something.

He thought someone had talked to me. I told him that M*** had said on several occasions " Shouldn't you be talking to Geis about this?" At one point the Education Coordinator said that he thought M*** should do it. "Oh no. That's not my job," he said. And so no one ever talked to me.

N*** said that the training was on Fridays and Saturday afternoon and evenings and I wasn't available. Untrue. When D**** had asked me at the beginning of the summer about the possibilities of training on Saturdays I said that it would depend on which Saturdays in case I had already made plans. That I should have a little more advance notice than I had been getting for new training (3 days). When D**** conveyed this information to the Site Manager and HR Manager he changed my "it depends" to a "no".

I also took the opportunity to tell the Site Manager what was going on with his company. The missed SEC filing, the 25% drop in stock value, the probably delisting from NASDAQ. He didn't know this.

He tried to convince me that it was just an oversight.

"I see this as a long evolving pattern of neglect. I started out getting two weeks notice as to when new hires were going to start. Then it was a week. Then it was less than that. Then it was three days. Then I wasn't even told at all. I started out keeping a seating chart up to date and the HR Manager copied that file from the shared network drive into the training manual. Then she wasn't copying the up to date file anymore. Then she created a brand new seating chart from scratch and when I told her that I'd been doing that all along she looked surprised and said she didn't realize that I was doing that. My job description doesn't say that I'm a trainer. My salary doesn't say that I'm a trainer. I'm not doing any actual training when there are new hires sitting out there right now. What the fuck am I doing here?"

Here's what I see happening. Earlier this year, the HR Rep asked me about doing this "two days then taking passwords" program and I said it wouldn't work. It wasn't enough time. They wouldn't have enough experience and the Help Desk would suffer for it. So, instead of listening to my years of experience she gave the job to M*** who she thought didn't know it was impossible. And you know what? It failed, just like I said it would. THAT'S why I wasn't talked to about this. She didn't want to hear me tell her that her scheme wouldn't work. And now that I've been proven right yet again, no one has the guts to talk to me about it. If we had done this my way, the way I've been doing it successfully for nearly four years now, they would be productive now. Instead, M***'s off the phones solving their problems.

"I have absolutely no confidence in this management or this company," I told the Site Manager. "This is completely unprofessional. It's short sighted. And it's failing. . . . My phone is ringing."

And I walked out.

"breathtaking inanity"

The ruling in the case of the Parents vs. the Dover, PA School Board over the inclusion on an Intelligent Design statement in science class has been handed down with a strong victory for science and truth.

"In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents."

"The breathtaking inanity of the BoardÂ’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial."

I particarly love the use of "breathtaking inanity".

His 139 page ruling made it abundantly clear that theirargumentss simply don't hold water. The ID proponentss brought in their big guns, their top scientist supporters and they had to resort to a redefinition of science broad enough to include the supernaturall to support their assertions.

"It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.

It is, of course, too soon to claim real victory. Those who wouldpropagatee the lie that is ID as science will not go away but at least now we have a sound legal precedence more recent than the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial on which to base our defense of truth and religious freedom.

From the Department of Redundancies Department

I got a call today on a notes issue and while looking in out ticket database for similar occurances, I came upon this gem of a ticket. (It has been edited only slightly)

16:12 USER IS WORKING IN NOTES AND WHEN SHE IS
      WORKING IN NOTES SHE WILL RECIEVE MESSAGE
      YOU HAVE EXCEEDED MAXIMUM AMOUNT OF
      MEMORY SEGMENTS, AND NOTES WILL FREEZE UP
      CAUSING USER TO RESTART APPLICATION.
16:13 - REF TO NOTES
08:21 ERROR MESSAGE IS NOT FROM NOTES; USER NEEDS
      TO HAVE LOCAL TECH LOOK AT OS FOR POSSIBLE
      ROOT CAUSE.
08:24 REFERRING TO DESKSIDE
09:27 REFER TO ########## FOR REVIEW
      HE IS WORKING ON THIS BECAUSE IT IS A NOTES
      ISSUE NOT AN OS ISSUE BUT A NOTES ISSUE
      REFER TO NOTES BECAUSE IT IS A NOTES ISSUE.

Mojo Jojo is working at Deskside support. Does the local tech sound a little upset that it ended up on his desk? I don't know about you, but I think it sounds like a Deskside issue. Sure, the Notes application is causing the problem but it's not going to be the Notes group that's going to solve the problem. It's going to be the Deskside person who's going to have to re-install the application.

In the end the Notes application WAS re-installed but the text in the ticket doesn't make clear whether that solved the issue.

Tanking

The Company is listed on the NASDAQ and periodically I look at a website at YahooFinance to see how things are going because we, down here in the trenches, seldom get word about corporate goings on.

It turns out there was a bit of a shakeup last month. The Company announced that it was going to delay filing a quarterly report to the SEC because of irregularities in its billing. They also weren't going to make a profit forecast. As a result, their stock price plummeted 25%. Then it was announced that they had missed a filing deadline with NASDAQ and risked being delisted because of it. Shortly thereafter, but for supposedly unrelated reasons, the CFO resigned.

H**** worked for a company that bought out a struggling company. They then brought the executives from that struggling company onboard in the new company where they could work their same magic and within a year, the once healthy company was screwed up and H**** got herself laid off.

I see the same thing happening here. My original employer made some really bad mistakes and we paid for it with the loss of bonuses, 401k matching and raises. When we were bought out by our new Corporate Overlords we were all told that this would turn things around. I was right to be skeptical because it looks like the house wasn't properly cleaned and the rot that did in my original employer has infected this one.

Hmmmm, and it took about a year.

Nice

A user called for an update on a ticket she opened two days ago but had yet to receive any response from Second Level Support. It turns out that I had been the one to open the ticket in the first place. I did my standard spiel for updating a ticket and sending "an electronic butt kicking" back up to support to remind them that the issue was still waiting out there unresolved.

After saying my good-byes, I could hear the user comment to a coworker before the handset reached the cradle:

"He is so nice"

Get stuffed.

A user I was on a call with this morning had numerous problems. In the first place, the ticket that had been opened for her PC was completely wrong. The analyst had completely mis-described the issue and so support was not taking care of it properly. So, I had to almost start from the begining with troubleshooting and re-describing the problem.

Next, she had a second computer that support had given her in the meantime that she couldn't access her e-mail on. I needed to get her to bring up her old PC so that we could copy her Noted ID file (where the password is stored) onto her network drive so that she could then copy it back onto her loaner PC to get into her mail there.

On top of that, she had a networking issue to deal with.

All this troubleshooting took time. My Team Lead eventually sent me an IM saying that I couldn't be on a call for 30 minutes.

The irony was that the user had just finished thaking me for taking the time to solve her problems and complimenting me that I was the only one at the help desk who seemed to know what was going on.

So, in response to my Team Lead's message, I was formulating a response saying that I was taking care of three problems. After the user's compliment I said that I had just gotten a message from my lead telling me to wrap things up because I was taking to long and I was about to tell him to "get stuffed."

"I heard that," came the IM from my Team Lead. I have a loud, penetrative voice and while he may have heard me from across the room it wouldn't surprise me if he were listening in on my call.

"We're going to need to talk about this," came the next message.

I doubt it. I am now 8 weeks late for my annual performance appraisal so clearly having meetings with the employees are not very high on their program. And even if we did have this "talk" I would only admit that saying "get stuffed" was a poor choice of words. I hold by my assertion that it is rude and poor customer service to end a call with a user just because management is concerned with the metrics. If I can solve the problem then I'm going to solve the problem because that's why the user is calling. Were I to open a ticket for the user's ID file issue it would sit up at the Function Desk for an hour or so before it was sent back to me with the statement that I was capable of doing this and should call the user back or, even worse, it would be sent off to second level support who might get to it in the afternoon sometime.

If my team lead wants me to cut calls short then he can come over to my cubicle and press the release button on the phone. I'm not going to do it.

And so I thought to take a look at the actual metrics for the day. I took 61 calls for the day. The person who took the next highest number of calls was at 55 calls. Most people were taking around 30 calls for the day. So, even though I'm spending 30 minutes on a call here or there, I am still outperforming EVERYONE at the helpdesk. That's even compared to B*** who works a 10 hour shift rather than the 8 hour shift that I work and only took 40 calls.

Blast from the Past

I've bought an 8-track player.

As retro as that sounds, it has a singular purpose. Twenty five years ago when I was in junior high school I was introduced to several pieces of music in music clas that became some of my favorites. One was "Romantic Warrior" by Chick Corea and Return to Forever. The other was Gustav Holst's "The Planets". I went to the Irwin Public Library and made a copy of that record onto an 8-track, the technology we had at the time.

Eventually, the player was replaced and I went back to the library to borrow the record again. Except someone had stolen the record. The library had gotten a replacement but it wasn't the same. There were differences that I just didn't like and I began searching for the versiopn that I had first heard.

Unfortunately, I hadn't written down who the conductor was or what orchestra he was conducting. Early on, my search was based on the album cover but since just about every printing of the album had a picture of Saturn on the cover, it wasn't very helpful. Reissues and Cds added to the difficulty. To find what I considered the difinitive performance of "The Planets", I had to listen to it. There are a few key points in "Jupiter" and "Mars" that stand out, subtle pauses and tempos that my brain has kept on file for reference. But how do you explain this to someone else so that they can help in your search?

Thus, I have finally found an 8-track player. I will copy my tape onto a casette to convert it to MP3 so that I can post it to the web or send it in an e-mail so that others can listen and perhaps recognise this particular version from 1980 or before. Once I get my brother-in-law to do the conversion (or give me the software) my first thing will be to send an e-mail to WQED-FM.

The risk is that the tape is 25 years old. It may break. It may not play at all. It hasn't been used in all that time so it hasn't gotten worn out but if it does fail then I fear that my quest will finally fail.

Wy wife thinks I am imagining things. That what I remember about the music has been tainted and changed by time and that the version that has been playing in my head for a quarter century doesn't actually exist. I, of course, do not agree. When I listen to a version I replay my memory alongside. Sometimes I cannot tell the difference between the two but then I reach that key point and the pause is too short or too long and it leaps out at me. Of course, one I get the copy I will know for sure. Then again, my wife will probably say I'm deluding myself.

The Doctor is In

My cubicle is my own little gulag. I am isolated and away from everyone else at the Helpdesk. Well, not completely isolated. We have a IM-like application that allows analysts to communicate with one another. Managers use it to remind us that there is a queue and we need to limit out talk times. Analysts will use it to alert the rest of the Helpdesk when there is a wide-spread issue so that others don't duplicate troubleshooting issues.

With the large influx of analysts recently, we suddenly have a lot of analysts who do not have all the accesses that they need. Specifically the application and access that allows us to change Lotus Notes passwords. So, the IM application is used by those analysts without the access to ask those with the access to change a password for them.

So, here I am behind my high wall getting requests from analysts out on the floor to change a password for them. But should I walk away from my desk to go to the rest room or to lunch, no one sees me go. And the requests keep coming in. Eventually, the analyst may ask someone else or come over to my desk looking for me only to find my cubicle empty. I'd come back from lunch to find a stack of password requests.

I figured I would put up some sort of sign so that people knew if I was in or not. I had a little bendy figure, some scissors and some tape and so I made a sign to stand on the top of my cube wall so that people will know.

Being a Meatatarian.

Last night, I went on a night hike in North Park with Venture Outdoors. That went well enough but at the beginning, a few of the women there were discussing having had a vegetarian Thanksgiving last week. Again, well enough, but one of them made a statement (that I don't remember exactly) that was looking for the opposite of a vegetarian Thanksgiving.

"That would be my Thanksgiving," I said. "Turkey, turkey and some stuffing. I'm a meatatarian."

She proceeded to tell me that I was wrong to eat meat. One of her primary statements was that my intestines were too long to eat meat. I countered that my stomach was too small to subsist on only plants.

"You have the right to believe what you want, no matter how wrong you are."

I had never actually hear that phrase used before except as satire or on bumper stickers. She wasn't willing to go any further, having made her declaration that she was right and I was wrong no matter how much evidence was offered.

So, it has me thinking about vegetarianism, being an omnivore and how to defend oneself from those who think meat is evil and humans shouldn't eat meat.

* Our nearest relatives, the chimpanzees, hunt other animals and eat them. We share a common ancestor some 5 to 8 million years ago. Anatomical comparisons show that this common ancestor probably didn't have eating habits much different from modern chimpanzees.

* Vegans argue that mountain gorillas are vegetarians. They are not as closely related to humans as the chimpanzee so that comparison only slightly less valid on that basis but, in point of fact, it is completely wrong because the gorilla isn't a herbivore. It is an omnivore. Granted, the bulk of the meat they eat is from termites and other insects but it is still meat. The huge canine teeth and incisors for ripping and tearing flesh shows that they have not completely evolved away from their more predatory ancestors.

* Humans have lost the large canines that the apes still retain, and both families have lost the claws that the carnivores still retain, but we still have binocular vision, which is the mark of a predator. All the herbivores, those things that are exclusively vegetarian, have their eyes on the sides of their heads because they are "prey" and need that wide field of vision to protect them from predators. Humans may not be the best predators, but we are still designed to hunt.

* At about 2.3 to 1.5 million years ago, the first "true" humans appeared. This coincided with an increased consumption of meat. In fact it is likely that the huge amounts of energy that can be derived from meat proteins actually lead to the development of the large human brain. Archeological and anatomical evidence shows that some human ate meat as up to 40% of their diet.

* Between 1.7 million years and 230,000 years ago, the human diet consisted of even more meat, with teeth wear micrographs of Homo erectus being comparable to that of the hyena.

* This much more meat-using diet allowed humans to move into new environments where proteins are more difficult to find in plantstuffs. During the ice age in Europe (25,000 to 15,000 years ago), the Cro-Magnons, fully modern humans, survived on a diet of nearly 50% meat.

* After the Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago, agriculture began to take over from hunting/gathering. By about 7,000 years ago, the human diet had shifted to about 10% meat. As meat consumption declined in paleolithic times, tooth decay, malnutrition, and rates of infectious disease increased. This has more to do with the types of vegetables (mostly starches) that were replacing meat in the diet than with a decline in meat consumption. But also, agriculture is hard, backbreaking work whereas the hunting/gathering lifestyle, while it can also be difficult, is not as oppressively and continuously stressful

So, this is where we come from. Millions of years of evolution that not only has always involved the consumption of meat but was actually accelerated by it.

* Vegans argue that human intestines are too long to digest meat. That the meat rots before it is digested. It is true to say that human intestines are too long to EFFECIENTLY digest meat when compared to carnivores like cats but conversely the stomach is too small to effectively digest an exclusively plant diet. What allowed humans to eat an up to 50% meat diet was the control of fire and cooking. Cooking the meat helps to break it down so that our so-called overly long intestines can handle it. We still have long intestines because we are designed by evolution to eat MOSTLY plants.

Now, saying I am a meatatarian is not saying I'm a carnivore. I invented that term because it sounded like the opposite of vegetarian. I eat a lot of meat because I happen to like meat and don't like vegetables and fruits. The proportions in my diet are a matter of taste. But the fact that I continue to be quite healthy and active shows that my diet is not so bad as the vegans claim I should be.

This is not to say that people shouldn't be vegetarian. The big brains that we have (thanks to meat eating) have also allowed us to develop alternatives to eating meat. We can get our dietary requirements elsewhere. But that comes with risks. There are some vitamins and minerals that are best found in meat. Sure, they are found in some vegetables but we simply couldn't eat enough of those in a day to fulfil our requirements. Multi-vitamin supplements must be taken to take care of that.

But don't go telling me I am wrong to eat meat. I am designed by millions of years of evolution to eat meat.

ID10T Quote of the Day

Geis: . . . . that error means that you're going to have to reboot your machine by doing a ctrl-alt-delete and selecting Shutdown and Restart.

User: So, how do I do that?

Geis: By doing a ctrl-alt-delete and selecting Shutdown and Restart.

Black Friday

H**** got up at 4:00 this morning to go shopping. At 6:00 am, WDUQ news reported that mall parking lots were already at 60% capacity and Bust Buy was at 80% capacity. It's a madouse. A MADHOUSE! I am actually glad that I had to work today. It will keep me from being dragged into the after-Thanksgiving shopping insanity.

In other news, it was pointed out to me by a coworker that The Corporate Overlords have designated the day after Thanksgiving as an official holiday. Before we were bought by our new Corporate Masters, the day after Thanksgiving was just another work day. There was an e-mail sent out at the begining of the month noting what days are official holidays but nothing to make sure we filled out our time sheets properly this week. Given how things have been screwed up, there is also some suspicion that they will not pay for the day after Thinksgiving. We'll just have to see.

There is No God.

I had heard that Penn Jillette was going to have an entry on NPR's "This I Believe" series and really wanted to hear it. I missed it but found it was posted on their website.

Penn Jillette is my new hero.

He starts out with the bold statement, "I believe there is no god." He goes from there and eventually hits on some of the same things that I believe but with a simplicity and clarity that I never bothered to sit down and compose.

"Believing there is no God means the suffering I've seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn't caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn't bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future."

These aren't new ideas, of course. J. Michael Straczynski (one of my other heroes) had his Ranger character Marcus say very much the same thing in "Babylon 5" many years ago:

"You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe."

I've been paraphrasing those sentiments since then, remarking that I much prefer living in an uncaring universe. Because if the universe does care, then all the hate and evil and seemingly random misery inflicted on us are being done by someone TO us for a reason.

I was raised something of a Lutheran. My family went to church on all the important holidays and occasionally went on other Sundays. I went through and passed the Catechism classes. I went through the motions of belief. But I don't think I ever actually believed in God enough to consider myself to have "lost faith." The Catechism class was little more the memorization of some psalms and the books of the bible. Important questions of faith were never addressed and my specific questions were never answered. And certainly there was nothing about what Martin Luther was really talking about.

So, when I went off to college, I merely left the trappings of belief behind. I didn't even consider myself an agnostic or an atheist. I would say that I hovered somewhere in between but I never really thought in terms of the possibility or the need for a god. God simply didn't exist and trying to define how much he didn't exist with terms like atheist or agnostic didn't seem necessary.

I can't say I've been in a conversation for a long time in which I've had to proclaim my theological beliefs but now I have the right words: I believe there is no god.

Inflammatory Fashion

I was at the Pennsylvania Gun Collectors Association gun show at the Monroeville ExpoMart this morning. My intention was to buy a watchband compass for about $3.50. One of the dealers was selling t-shirts, one of which was the standard military green with the word "Infidel", largely writ in both English and Arabic.

How stupid can you be? For one, it's like wearing a shirt that says "I'm a bigot" and walking around. Of course, since people of Middle-Eastern descent are currently hiding as best they can because of racist bastards, it's not taking much of a risk like wearing a Klan shirt into a black neighborhood would be.

I was tempted to walk up to the dealers modeling the shirts and say "So, what you're saying is that you are unfaithful to God."

That's what it means. "Unfaithful to God". But since the Muslims used it so extensively to refer to the marauding Crusaders, you think it's their word for anyone other than themselves. Other than Muslims.

But when the Muslims were in control of Jerusalem from 638 to 1099, they didn't refer to the Christians and Jews under their administration as infidels. They were most assuredly faithful to God. The same god. But the Crusaders behaved in a deplorable fashion. After looting and pillaging their way across Europe, the first thing the did after crossing the Bosporus was to have the ruler of Edessa overthrown and assassinated. Edessa was a Christian city. When they broke through the defenses of Antioch after an 8 month siege, the killed nearly everyone. Men, women, children. These are not the actions of one who is "faithful to God".

So, for the Crusaders, the Muslims used the word "infidel." It was wholly apt and well deserved. And they did not engage in reprisals against the Christians of Jerusalem. That came later at the hands of the Crusaders themselves when they "liberated" the city on July 15th, 1099 and proceeded to kill everyone they could find. Muslim, Jew and Eastern Orthadox Christian. "Indeed, if you had been there," wrote Fulcher of Chartres, "you would have seen our feet coloured to our ankles with the blood of the slain. But what more shall I relate? None of them were left alive; neither women nor children were spared."

I recall just after 9/11, George W. made a speech and used the word "Christendom", invoking the language of the Crusades. Thankfully, someone smart in the administration told him this was a bad idea and that language was only used for about a week. But it frightened me the same way that this t-shirt does. You'd think in a thousand years we'd have learned something.

Six

The trap was spring this morning and inside. . . our little mousy ninja.

Mousy Ninja

For the past few days we have been checking the mouse trap in the morning only to find it un-sprung but also minus the moldy cheese set as bait. Now, admittedly I haven't been pushing the cheese all the way to the back of the trap because it is so sensitive that the weight of the bait itself is enough to set off the trap.

But our mouse has been able to get into the trap and make off with his treasure without getting trapped.

Clever rodent.

Children

We've had Financial Services people lurking around the Help Desk for the past several days. They are ostensively "observers" but their presence has created policies that require that for every time we open a ticket for a Financial Services user we have to inform our Function Desk. Essentially asking permission to open a ticket.

"Oh, teacher. Did I do this right?"

"Why yes, Timmy, you have done this correctly. You get a gold star."

Today, D***** the HR Rep (it says Operations Manager on her sig file) was hovering by my cubicle while I was on a call. She had some red plastic cups in her hand and I had a sinking feeling. Not wanting her to loom over me while I was trying to work I put the call on hold for a moment to hear the explanation I already knew. Yes, the cup was to put on top of the wall of my cube so the guy from the Financial Services group would know that I was on such a call and required assistance.

As if I'm too stupid to get up and ask for help. Or that the user is so important that they won't accept an "Hold on just a minute while I look into this" request.

We have issues called "911 Issues". These are things that are of extreme production importance such as "The Bank cannot communicate with the Federal Reserve." Billions of dollars things. We've been told that these procedures with Financial Services users "are just as critical as our 911 issues."

Hell, When we have a major system error and all of the branches loose connectivity it is not bad enough to warrant a 911 Issue. You can't tell me that these Financial Services users are that important. If they were, The Bank would not have "displaced" their specialist Help Desk. This is really quite absurd.

So, today was also the day the they turned out the lights over at the Financial Services Help Desk. Of course, they only sent an e-mail to us telling us about this change mid-way through the day when it was already pretty obvious what was going on. At one point I did receive a call that required assistance. Since the other Help Desk was gone, we had no way to track progress on the calls they had opened from within our databases.

Up went the cup.

After a while after having received no response I got up and sought one out. The Function Desk had access to the old database so I got a print out of what was going on and started generating a ticket to begin tracking the issue from our side. I was pretty much done with it when the Financial Services guy finally came over to help me out.

So much for "just as critical as our 911 issues."

Four and (probably) Five

H**** called me at work to say we had snagged another mouse. She was complaining that it wouldn't come out of the trap. I told her to just shake it harder and the little rodent will eventually fall out.

The other day one of the traps had been triggered but she hadn't checked to see if it was occupied. When she opened it to release the captive, she turned her head and thus didn't see if a mouse actually exited the trap. These little things are so light it's very difficult to recognize that the trap is actually occupied without looking.

Non-Issue and Stupid Procedures

It turned out that my application problems of yesterday did not cause the a recurrence of the widespread outage my system caused on Friday. Good. I needed to reinstall the application. But, again, it's a poor design when a single workstation can hang up the entire system.

In other news, yesterday we had a number of people from the Financial Services group here to look over our shoulders. It gave me an itchy feeling of impending doom. Today, word comes down that we cannot open any tickets for any issue concerning the financial services group without first conferring with the Function Desk to make sure we are doing it right.

What idiocy is this? I understand that there are some people who make crappy tickets (some of them are Team Leads) but in those cases they need to be talked to. By requiring all of us to ask permission to open a ticket, we are treated like ignorant children. This is a common problem here. Management has always attempted to resolve things with this "shotgun" approach instead of addressing the individuals who aren't doing their jobs.

This is not the way that professionals are treated.

McSeasons Greetings

McDonalds has their Christmas decorations up and we're still more than a week away from Thanksgiving. The larger-than-life figures are going into the creche on the plaza at USX. The tree continues to be decorated on the steps of the City-County Building. The holiday ads have really started in earnest on TV. Already, I am sick of Christmas and it's only just started.

Remember when the Thanksgiving Day parade was the start of the season?

Ugh.

The Keypress of Doom

Last Thursday I had to change my passwords at work. I have 22 passwords on different systems that I have to try to keep synched up so that I can use them for a month and then change them all again. One system for the Financial Services group gave me problems. The application I use threw a runtime error and I ended up having to end task. It was near the end of the day so and it wasn't a system I used often so I didn't think much of it.

On Friday, I tried again to change my password for that system and had some different errors after apparently successfully changing my password. Apparently everyone else was having problems with the system, there was a high severity ticket on the issue so I figured that my problems of the day before were part of that.

Today I found out that I was, in fact, the cause of the problems on Friday. Apparently, the problem with my system left me logged into an administrator table that locked up the whole system. Crappy design that it didn't time me out after X-minutes of inactivity but it wasn't intentional. My app had runtime errors.

Well, at the end of today, I again went into the system to change a
password for someone else and again threw runtime errors. The application ended up hanging completely. Not wanting to end task for fear that it would cause a recurrence of the problems on Friday, I left it alone and opened a ticket.

Oops.

Two Minute Warning

Normally, training is done in about three weeks. The first week is split between classroom work and new analysts listening in on calls. The second week has the new analysts listening and transitioning to sitting in front of the pc and navigating the screens while an established analyst takes the call. The third week is the new analyst taking calls while the established analysts "ride shotgun" and can step in to help. When the 4th week rolls around, the new analyst is put at their own desk and is on their own.

We are now two weeks into this latest batch and they have been told they go on to their regular schedules tomorrow. Some of them have been taking calls with supervision but they simply aren't ready. You can see it in their eyes.

But the Corporate Overlords don't care. Feed them to the wolves. Get to work.

How the Grinch Stole Thanksgiving

I'm flipping through channels and "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" is on. It's the middle of November, guys! It's not even Thanksgiving yet! I mean, really! Can't you wait until December? Do you need that much of a jump on the so-called holiday season?

Two. Three.

Last night, I go back late from gaming and found another mouse trap tripped. I didn't want to leave the mouse in the trap all night so I went way back in my yard and let him go.

This morning when I got up after H**** had left, I saw that one of the traps was missing so clearly we had captured a third mouse overnight and H**** had taken it to release.

A few years back we had an "infestation" of about half a dozen mice. One of them had even crawled into my PC and attempted to build a nest there. I've got nothing particular against them, they're just doing their mousy thing, looking for a warmer home to spend the winter. We don't leave food out that they can get to but there are crumbs and such enough to have them come looking for better environs.

Sorry, guys. You're not welcome so out you go.

Mutants & Masterminds: Session 2

Mad Scientist Brian Czitrovszky is returning to his lab when he is suddenly attacked by a humanoid robot saying "Meta-human identified. Initiate Capture." Brian attempts to use his machine interface power to hack the robot's computer brain but is unsuccessful. He pulls a blaster pistol and shoots the robot a few times so that he can get inside. The robot attempts to beat down the door so Brian interfaces with his own van, directing it to run the robot down.

While the van is repeatedly running the robot over, Brian uses the X-ray feature of his goggles to look through the lab wall and sees the Confetti Ninja spectating from a nearby rooftop. Eventually, the van is beat up enough that it stops working and robot again goes for the door. After coming through, Brian shoots the robot repeatedly until it finally goes down.

Meanwhile, the Confetti Ninja is outside dodging the lab's paralyze-ray defense systems (which had no effect on the robot). Brian directs the system to stop shooting so he can find out what the Ninja really wants.

The Confetti Ninja, with swords drawn, attempts to intimidate Brian, demanding to know what he had sold to Mr Johnson. Brian points his blaster at him and tells him to put the swords away. The Ninja counters that the "Yellow Boxes" tell him that he needs to be intimidating. They dance around some of this. The ninja does some teleporting. He puts the swords away but draws a gun. More verbal dancing. Eventually the "Yellow Boxes" tell the Confetti Ninja that he should shoot Brian in the knees. Brian gives up, puts down the gun and gives half of the information asked for. With some more verbal dancing, the Confetti Ninja goes away.

Analysis.

I should have shot him. Here I am trying to be a Mad Scientist but I haven't quite gotten down the madness part. I think too much and tend to invest in my characters so I am a little prone to inaction or delay. No. I'm mad! I need to act on impulse. Hacking the van and using it to run over the robot caught the GM (and Deadpool) off guard. I need more of those type of things. I need to describe my lab so it has things like Tesla coils, electromagnets and chain hoists. Things that can be employed at a moments notice in ways unexpected. I also need to start designing and building something specific. A device that nullifies powers would be good. According to Wikipedia, Deadpool's teleport is a device. I could build an EMP gun to disable his device.

And, most importantly, I need to embrace the madness and be unafraid to take risks and even die. The game system has "Hero Points" that can be used to ensure heroic success or avoid death. I just need to remember that and go for it.

Mouse Trap

Last night, H**** noticed signs and announced that she thought we had mice. I didn't think it was a big deal, such things happen, so I simply got out the traps and set them up.

We use the "humane" traps that capture the mice for release later so, when I got up this morning I saw that one of the traps had been tripped. I looked inside to see a little deer mouse looking up at me. (They're kind of cute.)

H**** took the trap with her and dropped the little rodent off near a cemetary on her way somewhere (far away so they don't come back into our house, at least).

Bungee Boss

Less then four months ago, T*** started as our new Site Manager. In doing so, they screwed over N***, who thankfully wasn't just let go. Instead, they made N*** the coordinator for the Help Desk picking up all the work from the Financial Services Helpdesk getting "displaced".

Good thing, because T*** left today and they needed someone to take over as Site Manager again.

On further investigation, I learned that T*** simply wasn't qualified for the job. He was a "paper manager" apparently without any practical or technical experience and he was simply overwhelmed. He never delivered on any of the promises he made, wouldn't interact with any of the staff and spent most of his time hiding in his office sending out e-messages to the floor telling us to buckle down when there was a queue.

He was given the option and chose to fall on his sword.

Four months.


So now that N*** has been put back into the position as Site Manager it also looks like they won't be wasting their time looking for another "bungee" replacement. Of course, now the Corporate Overlords are going to have to face the music. They had filled the position with someone making over $80,000 a year. When they "allowed" N*** to come back, he was making something on the order of what I was making, less than half of what the Site Manager's salary was. Now, if they want to keep him, they will have to compensate him fairly.

When G***** and T*** were leaving, management panicked and counter-offered to keep them. I have to wonder how they can justify not having given the rest of us raises for three years when they were paying the guy before "Bungee Boss" upwards of $130,000 a year and counter-offered a couple of function desk people.

Oh, yeah. They DON'T justify it. It's supposed to be a secret that the two were counter-offered. We're not supposed to know how much management is being paid (even though they posted it on Monster.com) and we're not supposed to know that the people getting hired now are making more than the people hired just 6 months ago (also posted on Monster).

Quote of the Day

I was changing a password for a user. . . .

Geis: "You'll have to enter a new password"

User: "Can I use the same one I used yesterday"

Geis: "No. That's whay it's called a NEW password"

This is a great day for education.

Kansas Board of Education Chairman Steve Abrams said, "This is a great day for education" when the board passed the requirement that Science teachers be required to instruct their students that evolutionary theory is not proven, and will have to add that life is in fact so complex, it could not have arisen without the involvement of some external agent, or higher power. They must include statements to the effect that the fossil record is inconsistent with evolutionary theory; that there is a lack of physical evidence to explain our genetic code, and that evolutionary explanations are "not based on direct observations and often reflect inferences from circumstantial evidence"

Really. What the fuck is wrong with these people?

This creationism garbage is not science and has no place in science education. These people have deluded themselves into the narrow minded and dogmatic belief that the Bible is the absolute and pure word of god and must be taken literally. Hell, even the Pope has warned about such an interpretation. Sure, it took the Catholic Church 500 years to admit it was wrong for them to convict Galileo for saying the Earth went around the Sun, but they had actually given up on the geocentric universe idea a long, long time ago.

What is wrong with the fundamentalists in this country? Do they want to create a nation of morons without critical thinking? A land of sheep who do not question or inquire or offer any challenge to the directives of their rulers? I guess they do. Idiots are easy to rule over. They don't question authority. They don't know better.

I read this news on the BBC website. The rest of the world is completely baffled by this behavior. It is akin to the religious fundamentalism that is producing terrorists in the Middle East.

Here in Pennsylvania, a small victory on that front. The entire Dover school board, who have since 2004 required that a creationist statement be read in biology classes, have been voted out of office. They are currently being sued for violating the constitutional separation of church and state and it seems likely that they will loose that case and the new board is unlikely to appeal. On the other hand, new board member Judy McIlvaine said "We are all for it (intelligent design) being discussed, but we do not want to see it in biology class."

Intelligent design is a sham. It certainly isn't science so, yes, it has no place in science class. But it's trying so hart to conceal its creationist foundation that it isn't even good theology anymore and as such has no place in a decent sociology, philosophy or any other -ogy class you could think of. I could see it in a class on the study of propaganda, but then it would be discussing the form and not the substance.

Tacks

I got an e-mail from a contact at the city concerning another act of vandalism along the Eliza Furnace Trail. This gentleman has three flat bike tires in a week as a result of carpet tacks. The tacks were apparently along the trail and not associated with the lot so they are probably unrelated to our greasy vandal but with his having been greased before, he has decided to park somewhere else.

I haven't had any problems since August 18th but now that I have been able to save up a few bucks I am again thinking about getting a camera. I haven't been able to get my laptop/webcam to work properly due to software limitations and I don't want to mount a Sport Cam outside on a fence where it could be seen and taken. The problem is with putting such a camera inside. Would the IR trigger be able to detect someone through the window glass? Probably not.

Dunham's Sports has such cameras in their display case. I wonder if they would let me test one in their parking lot to see if it would work.

It wouldn't hurt to ask.

Selling out.

H**** is in San Diego this week at some sort of company-sponsored Microsoft conference. So, she calls me on Wednesday and out of the blue says, "I think you really should upgrade to WinXP."

My desktop machine at home has a 2 gig processor, 512 meg of ram, an 80 gig drive and is running Windows 98 Second Edition. Outdated? Perhaps. Obsolete? Certainly not. It runs all the software I need it to run, why should I upgrade?

H**** said she attended a demo of Symantec's latest anti-virus software which includes all sorts of neat features including anti-spyware software.

Ahhhh. Now I see why she wants me to upgrade. The latest Symantec product won't run on Win98. But, in all honesty, I don't need it.

First off, no hacker in his right mind, no matter how evil, is writing viruses to exploit weakness in Windows 98. Every hole in the system has been pretty much found and plugged by now so I don't need the latest and greatest AV software to protect my machine. I use Firefox and it does an excellent job of keeping spyware off of my machine. Scans with the software I have now turn up one piece of minor spyware only once every few months as opposed to the half a dozen I could pick up in a day of surfing with IE. I don't need a Symantec annual subscription. AVG works well.

On top of that, I have issues with Microsoft's requirement that I be connected to the Internet to update XP. Their EULAs give them permission to look at my system and install software, even from third parties, without asking my permission or even informing me about it. And in short order they are going to even further restrict the license so that they could use the online update process to make my operating system cease to function if I do not upgrade to the next OS.

I don't need WinXP. I don't need its features, capabilities or vulnerabilities and I certainly don't need to sell my soul to Bill Gates for it. So, why should I spend hundreds of dollars for something I don't need? I'm no neo-Luddite but I don't see the reason to jump on the latest technology bandwagon when the technology I have now, only seven years old, suits my purposes.

More vacancies.

I just started training a new back of analysts, the fourth batch in a row.

But I hear some other recent news. D**, one of the people I trained earlier this year, has given his two week notice. Now, when he was hired, they offered him $10.50 an hour. Later, while looking for postings on Monster.com, he saw a listing for Help Desk in Pittsburgh. When he looked up the details, it was for new employees at our help desk.

The kicker was that the offer for them was $12.00 a hour.

I know this sort of thing goes on all the time. I know that I am making more than some of the (few) employees who have worked there longer than I have, but to see that listed in black-and-white on the website is even more insulting.

Word quickly spread throughout the Help Desk and those that started at the same time for the $10,50 an hour rate went and talked to the HR Rep and the Site Manager. The response was that they would "look into it" which, from experience, means that they will send their question up to the Corporate Overlords and then forget about it. The only substantive thing to come about is that the listing at Monster.com for the next batch of hires did not have an actual pay rate listed.

I asked D** to see what other sort of opportunities are available where he's gone. The benefits sound top rate and the owner sounds like he cares about his people. I could do for some improvement in that category.

I also learned that M*** gave his two week notice. Now M*** was one of those employees that you wished would leave. He didn't produce quality work and was an irritant to all those around him, speaking constantly about sports endlessly (Hockey and Baseball) and getting into every conversation whether he knew anything about the topic or not. I was very glad to be sitting on the other side of the room.

When he tendered his two week notice they told him not to bother filling out the time. Someone else has cleared out his desk for him.

And so, it begins

Today is Halloween and construction has begun on the big nativity scene that goes up each year on the plaza at USX. It does not bother me in and of itself, it is what it portents because in short order the holiday decorations will go up in the stores. The lights and advertisements will line the streets. The billboards will proclaim the coming season. The carols will play in lobbies and elevators. There will be no escape.

As a non-Christian, I understand better than most Christians the importance of the religious freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution. The pilgrims came to the New World looking for religious freedoms. Their descendants, faithful Christians all, fought a revolution and enshrined in the Constitution the right of people to worship the way they chose. But the modern Christians have forgotten this. They know themselves to be the majority and believe that it conveys on them the moral duty to guide the nation the way they think it should be guided. They are, after all, the majority.

But the Constitution is not there to protect the rights of the majority. It is to protect the individuals from the tyranny of the majority. The First Amendment freedom of religion is there to allow people to believe and worship as they wish. Or to not believe and not worship if they choose.

Of course, as a non-believer (or "infidel"), I must tolerate other's expression of faith or else I become as hypocritical as they are.

Doesn't the Bible say something about not worshiping idols, and yet I see people standing in adoration of larger-than-life ceramic replicas, literally praying to them. People pray directly to Mary, Saints and angels for divine intervention, forgetting their own First Commandment.

And didn't Jesus say a thing or two about charity and helping ones fellow man? How much money has been dropped into this exaltation? This huge advertisement which will stand for three months. Surely the tens of thousands of dollars could have been put towards the betterment of society. It's built like a house. With the same money and a slight re-design it could actually be a house to protect the homeless that wander the streets of Pittsburgh from the coming harsh winter.

And every day I'll walk by. There will be no escaping the music blaring on expensive stereo speakers.

The Grinch complained about the noise generated by the Whos down in Whoville. He became bitter because of the incessant joyful noise and I can understand his pain all the more because I have come to believe that the Whos singing in front of their creche don't really understand what it is they're actually singing about. They talk about "the meaning of the season" but then never take the steps that the guy they're worshiping told them they should take. The carols are empty self-agrandizement driven by a mob mentality.

It's that hypocrisy that will grate on my nerves day after day for the next few months.

Mutants & Masterminds: Session 1

H**** has convinced me to join in a Mutants & Masterminds superhero game that she's involved in. It wasn't a hard sell. It's been a long time since I've been in a role-playing game of any significance and I've been missing it. So, I've created a Mad Scientist.

Character: Brian Czitrovszky

Brian is a Mad Scientist in the mold of Christopher Lloyd's character in "Back to the Future" or Brent Spiner's character in "Independence Day". He's a super-genius with half a dozen doctorates. He wears these goggles all the time (even when sleeping or showering) that give him infrared, low light, x-ray and other specialty visions. He's got a force field belt with an extradimensional pocket built into it so that he can carry lots of tools and equipment. He has one super power in that he can mentally connect with computer, electronic and mechanical machines. He has that power at a fairly low level (level 3 with a range of 1000 feet) but I thought it would be useful. Brian has a lab in a former railroad roundhouse. Lots of equipment lying about. Weird things. Empty pizza boxes, cheetoes wrappers and Red Bull cans lying about. Don't look in the refrigerator.

I've been careful not to give him a superhero name. He doesn't have a secret identity. His computer (named Aimee) refers to him as Doctor. Most know him as Dr. Czitrovszky. His online name is Doctor Woot.

Scenario:

Brian is involved in some slightly less than above board activities. He is building low-level power enhancers and selling them to a minor-cape out of costume named Firebrand. Firebrand shows up at the Lab and pays in cash. He also warns of a villain out and about in the city named Scourge that is trying to kill people off. Oh, and there are political things in the works over the regulation or restriction of those with super powers.

Brian has another customer named "Mr. Johnson". He lives in a upscale end of town and deliveries of the devices are made to him. (He gets charged extra). In making a delivery I arrive to find his house on fire. Looking not at the house but at the surrounding area, I see a red-and-black clad, Ninja-esque guy on a rooftop watching things. When he notices me noticing him, he disappears in a puff of streamers. I take to calling him the Confetti Ninja. I later find out by listening to the Police frequencies that someone was found inside the home, burned beyond recognition but having been cut up.

Analysis.

I'm not familiar enough with the Marvel Comics universe to recognize a minor characters like Firebrand or Scourge, but that's where the GM got him. The political things are clearly based on the "Mutant Registration" storyline from X-Men. And the Confetti Ninja is Deadpool. Again, I don't know much about Deadpool but he is apparently a somewhat psychopathic mercenary with super-regeneration, the ability to teleport and who knows himself to be inside a comic book. I also have learned that Deadpool is the GM's favorite character and, based on past experience with GMs who really want to play one of the NPC's they happen to run, this version of Deadpool will be invincible. No matter what anyone does, the GMs pet NPC will be able to get away to move the plot where he wants it to go.

Not much exciting overall but it will be a few game sessions before he manipulates things to bring us all together to form a team.

Look, a bunny!

D****, our HR Contact, was at a meeting with the Corporate Overlords yesterday. On returning today, we didn't get exciting news about the restoration of salary increases, 401k matching, bonuses or any of the other valuable information one might expect from a meeting with the Lord High Muckedy-mucks.

We got. . . mousepads.

And it's not even a good mousepad. Sure, it have the corporate logo emblazoned in bright colors but those of us with optical mice have discovered that the surface it too reflective to work properly. The pointer bounces around, seemingly at random.

It strikes me as a piece of misdirection. Like a magician trying to point you in one direction while the real trick is going on somewhere else.

I am now a week past due for my performance appraisal. I haven't had any resolution on my occupation tax issue (9 months waiting). People who I started training nearly two months ago still haven't received their paychecks. The people who started nearly three weeks ago are due get their first paychecks the day after tomorrow. I wonder if they will get paid. They still haven't gotten most of the accounts they need to login nor have they all gotten access cards to enter the building. They still need to be escorted in by building security.

It's all smoke and mirrors.

Recaptured

I though both T*** and G***** were leaving but apparently at the last minute, literally, The Corporate Overlords made a counter-offer. Under normal circumstances they probably would not have accepted but the company to where they were going looks like they will be contracting with The Company for their Help Desk. They would be leaving here only to be bought up again by the same employer at a later date, having lost seniority and accumlated PTO.

Missing Serenity

I went to see "Serenity" today. In point of fact, I saw it a week ago but I was able to convince H**** to see it with me this time. And rather than going into a lengthy review (I liked it a lot), I want to comment on the differences between the two.

The movie I saw last week was not the same movie. There were three scenes that were cut. Not long scenes or terribly important scenes, but they were distinctly gone.

****** SPOILERS BELOW *******

When the crew is in the mule preparing to head off to the robbery and Simon says that it's OK to run and leave the others to die, River says, "I'm the brains of the operation."

Cut.

When Mal receives the wave from Anara he is shirtless with pants but she can only see him from the waist up. She says "I hope you're wearing pants." Mal replies to the effect that he is the way he came into the world (implying that he is not, in fact, wearing any pants.

Cut.

In the final fight scene between Mal and the Operative, the camera lingers close up so that you aren't sure who has been stabbed. For a moment, it cuts back to show the sword through Mal's side.

Cut.

What is Destinta doing? Is Destinta getting a different version of the film or are they cutting it themselves? Whay would a theater show a version different from other theaters and, if they were editing it for some sort of content, why would those three scenes be cut?

I feel as if I've been robbed or deceived.

Tumbling tumbleweeds.

Today was T***'s last day. V*** also appears to be gone. N*** will be changing to part time next week and while G**** has anounced that he's leaving next week, he's hoping that perhaps The Corporate Overlords will make him a counter offer because his leaving (in addition to T***'s) will be cutting the Function Desk staff by half.

And here I was foolishly worrying that the new hires wouldn't have desks to sit at. Indeed, things are starting to look fairly empty at the Help Desk. Of course, their leaving and the increasing call volume due to the Finantial Services Help Desk downsizing make it all the more difficult for those of us that remain.

Annual delay.

Today is the sixth anniversary of working for The Bank. Not something I am particularly pleased with but it is the day that I was due to have my annual performance appraisal. It's not unusual for it to be late and this year was no exception. My Team Lead said that they couldn't have it today but they definitely wanted to have it by the end of the week.

Not that it matters. No pay raises. No bonuses. Just another year of superior performance by myself with no hope of fair compensation.

Welcome to The Suck.

Columbus Day.

The typical plan for bank holidays is, because the branches are closed, we are at half staff or less. Half of the staff works this holiday and then will have off the next minor bank holiday (Veteran's Day). Major bank holidays, like Thanksgiving, find everyone off except the handful of volunteers willing to get a little bit of extra time in addition to holiday pay. I may be one of them because I won't be able to get the Friday after Thanksgiving off and, since I won't be able to visit with family in Maryland because of that, I might as well get some extra pay by working that Thursday.

But, back to Columbus Day.

Even though we are at half staff and the branches are closed, the markets are still open. Which means brokers and financial service consultants. But the Help Desk that supports them are due to get the axe. They are working a bare minimum levels and most of their duties have been transferred to us. Which means a high volume of calls and almost noone at the Help Desk to take them.

The Powers That Be did not take that into account when staffing the Help Desk.

Wait times were 30 minutes long at times. I took 150 calls, one right after the other. All day.

The result is on Veteran's Day, a day I might have expected to have off, we'll have to be nearer to full staff. Well, I need the money.

Rats

Three of the four new hires showed up today. Not an good start. Many of the recent hires are coming in with a lot more experience than the Tech School recent grads that HR has been hiring of late. On one hand, it shows a market that has skilled people taking a cut in pay to find a job. On the other, these people will be jumping ship at the first opportunity.

And another analyst has done just that today. We ar hemorraging employees at an astonishing rate. And I have been training their replacements on an almost continuous basis for months.

I'm due for my annual performance appraisal next week. I'm not expecting good news. Sure, my performance has been excellent, but I suspect questions of pay raises, bonuses and the like will continue to be met with platitudes. "We're looking into it," seems to be the catch phrase.

Two for the road.

On Friday, I noticed that J**, one of the newest analysts, came in early and was sitting with B***. So, when the others showed up and I was looking to place them with established analysts to listen in on calls, I was surprised to see the new guy gone. Another of the new analysts didn't show today.

Another analyst told me that J** had been called into the office and, shortly thereafter, grabbed his backpack and was escorted off the floor.

The only thing that I can imagine a new analyst doing to generate that sort of reaction would be failing the drug test. I asked what was going on and D**** didn't tell me anything except to say neither of the two would likely be coming back.

So, out of the seven analysts hired three weeks ago, only three remain. That's an extremely high drop out rate. Four more are going to be starting tomorrow.

But, on top of that, two of our function desk people have found jobs. Both at a company that has hired people away from our helpdesk before. A place that has gotten a lot of praise from those who have gone before.

Oh, and N***, the analyst who used to sit next to me before I moved to the full cube and someone who I had trained, has gotten another job. He'll still be working part-time for the Helpdesk here but at his new place he's got full-time salary and benefits.

I need to send out more resumes.

The Whack-A-Mole Keyboard

I cannot type. No, that's not quite true. I typically type using the "5 finger" method, a step above "hunt-and-peck". I can even get up to 40 words per minute. But it's not 100% accurate. When I'm having a particularly difficult time typing, I will say that I need the "whack-a-mole" keyboard with big keys that I can smack with a hammer. "K!" *bam* "E!" *bam* "Y!" *bam*

Reading on BoingBoing.net I see that someone has, in fact, invented just that: The Sledgehammer Keyboard.


It needs TWO hammers!