Please, don't fire me.

I received the following election-season message:

Dear Neighbor:

I voted to Repeal the Pay Raise and I returned every penny I earned as a result of this ill-advised raise.

We all make mistakes; voting for the pay raise was a regretable mistake. I'm honest enough to admit that.

I have worked hard for this district and, except for this one mistake, I believe I have effectively served the communities and the citizens that I represent.

I would be grateful to continue to server you and the citizens of our community in the same honorable manner I had served before this single mistake.

I extend my sincerest apology and I assure you that I will not make this mistake again.

Sincerely,
Paul Costa, District 35 Representative.

First, let's review what lead to this plea. On July 7, 2005, the Pennsylvania General Assembly passed pay increases for state lawmakers, judges, and top executive-branch officials. The raise increased legislators' base pay from 16% to 34% depending on position and making them the second higest paid state legislatiors in the nation. (In Costa's case, his base pay went from $69,647 to $81,050 anually) The vote took place at two in the morning without public review or commentary and Governor Rendell quickly signed the bill. In addition, they were able bypass the PA Constitution that forces legislators to wait until the end of the term before actually getting the raise by claiming "unvouchered expenses."

The government seemed shocked and somewhat indignant when the public took exception to this. It didn't take long, however, for them to see that Pennsylvanians were almost universally outraged and on November 16, 2005 the Governor signed unanimously passed bill repealing the pay raise.

So now, the primaries are coming up and my Representative is begging me for his political life. And he's not even doing a very good job of that.

The first obsfucation is in the first paragraph where he notes that he voted to repeal the pay raise without mentioning that he voted for it in the first place. He tries to dodge this by saying it was "ill-advised", blaming it on someone else. He says he "returned every penny" when, according to Article II, Section 8 of the Constution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, he wasn't actually entired to a single penny of said pay raise until the end of his current term . But, by using "unvouchered expenses" he was going to be pulling in nearly $1,000 a month for the 17 months remaining in his term.

In two separate paragraphs, he claims that this vote was his "single mistake" made in seven years of service. Really? One mistake in all that time? And after violating the state constitution we are to believe that you made this one mistake and wish to server "our community in the same honorable manner?"

Sorry, Paul. I'm not buying it. Look here at the bottom of the mailing: "Paid for by Paul Costa for State Representative, Treasurer: Kathleen Gallant Costa." His wife is the treasurer of his re-election committee. His brother, State Senator Jay Costa, also voted for the pay increase and was also taking unvouchered expenses.

Oh, yea. I am overhwlemed with confidence.

It's payback time.

Got an e-mail today from the Operations Manager that everyone at the Help Desk was going to have the City of Pittsburgh Emergency and Municipal Services tax taken out of their next paycheck.

If you recall, it was well over a year ago that I first alerted Corporate HR that since I started in 1999, the Occupation Tax (and now the EMST) had never been withheld from my paycheck. After a year of them not doing anything about it, I reminded them and then called the City Auditor to turn them in. They finally deducted the tax that they were legally obligated to have been witholding all this time.

Since it took this long for them to take any sort of action with the taxes for everyone else at the Help Desk I suspect that they wouldn't have done anything at all until the City auditors caught up with them. Of course, the e-mail doesn't address why this was never done before. It's worded as if the change from the Occupation Tax to the EMST was something that happened recently even though it went into effect January 1st, 2005.

A small piece of justice. I hope they had some sort of fine or threat of legal action.

Chicks.

At least one Peregrine chick has hatched at the Gulf Tower nest.

My Daddy Workz Here

They call themselves the Hand Washing Committee. A shadowy, secret society who put up informational signs in the restroom warning of the dire circumstances that shall befall us should we not strictly adhere to their commands. They demand that building maintence refill the soap dispensers so that "their rules can be followed". They attempt to have people fired for not washing their hands, citing non-existent health codes.

Their latest campaign involves a new sign on the exterior door to the men's restroom that says, "WASH YOUR HANDS, MY DADDY WORKS HERE", replicating the PennDOT signs that warn people to slow down through construction zones.

I find a certain irony in using the juvenile backward "S" font. Firstly, I have never know an actual juvenile who ever actually wrote the S backwards. Second, this so-called Hand Washing Committee is behaving in a childish way I though had been left behind in elementary school. Is crying to your boss and getting his boss to call my boss's, boss's boss to chide me for not washing my hands the sort of behavior one would expect from professionals? Don't you have something important to do like, say, YOUR JOB? If you're so obsessed about it that you try to get me fired, you really need to seek help.

REAL professional help.

Hello, psychic helpdesk.

I have been described as being "psychically null", entirely insensitive to the energies of the world. One night, with K**** in Mellon Park, she had an overwhelming sensation of a presence. I recall asking if it was a zombie, vampire werewolf or ghost feeling. She didn't much like the skepticism in my comment but she described it as a werewolf-sort of feeling and she wanted to leave. For me, the darkness one the one side of the park was no different from that on the other side.

On the other hand, I have experienced some unexplainable "reactions". I have been known to wake from a deep sleep a minute or two before the phone rings. I'll be at work, leaning back in my chair with my arms crossed and my eyes closed, and I will, for no reason, open my eyes and sit up. My usual reaction is that I'm going to try to get more comfortable (which is impossible) but then the phone rings.

I had a strange occurrence today. A user called and when I asked for her login id, she gave me an id that ended with a two. For some reason when I wrote it down on my scratch paper I wrote a one at the end instead. Immediately realizing that I had not written what she had said I asked her to repeat the number, scratched out the one and wrote a two.

But when I searched for the id in the user database, it didn't come up. OK, that's not a big deal. Sometimes new users aren't yet in the Help Desk database, so I searched the mainframe database. It wasn't there either. I asked her to repeat it to make sure I had it right and when she confirmed that I did have it correct I asked her name. I did a database search on her name and it returned a number different from what she had told me. Users often don't remember their login ids because they type theme every day and it becomes a mechanical motion on the keyboard, an almost Pavlovian response to the request to type in a login. Sometimes they forget.

Her actual login id was not what she had told me but was in fact what I had initially written.

Oooooooo. Spooky.

Or not. I'm not sure if it's a form of dyslexia or if my brain is attempting to do some sort of pattern matching or random checksum calculation but I will sometime simply write a different number than what I intended to write. Usually it's the last digit of a login id and sometimes I'm even mumbling the correct number while writing the wrong one. So, it's entirely possible (in fact, it is much more likely) that my brain simply mis-fired and I just happened to hit the 1 in 10 chance of getting it right.

So, how do I respond before the phone rings? Am I not actually "psychically null" and tapping into the cosmic causality stream, reacting to the future before the event? Am I somehow super-sensitive to the electricity running through the lines, triggering a reaction in my subconscious mind before the electronics in the phone activate?

It's probably just a coincidence. I'm not waking up because the phone is about to ring. I'm waking up randomly and the phone just happens to ring. There are many other times that I have woken up and gone back to sleep without anything of note happening to keep me awake (such as the phone ringing). Those many instances are forgotten and the rare few that seem to be cause and effect are positively reinforced.

Mystery solved.

Empty temple and empty mind.

I drove to Wooster, Ohio today to participate in my first atlatl competition of the season. A short explanation, an atlatl is a stick with a hook on the end that is used to throw long arrow-like darts with tremendous power. Our Ice Age ancestors used them to hunt mammoths. The Aztecs used them to spear invading Conquistadors. The Inuit and Aboriginal Australians still use them today.

I did very well for not having thrown at all since the middle of last year. But when it came time in the afternoon to throw for the official World Atlatl Association score, I screwed up big time. When before I was hitting the target nearly every time (missing only once or twice in a set, very good for me) when it was time for the real deal I missed as many times as I hit. My only excuse was that it was the end of the day and my arm was tired. Had I thrown for the official score at 1pm instead of at 3pm I would have done better.

My second point. . .

In the latest Ohio Atlatl Association newsletter there was an review of "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles C. Mann. It started with an illustration:From right to left, top to bottom, Atlatlists from the city empire of Teotihucan pay a visit to Tikal of the Maya, January 14, 378 A.D., resulting in the empty temple syndrome. The former Mayan ruler, having "entered the water", was replaced by the son of the ruler of Teotihucan.

I haven't read this book yet but this explanation of the carving's meaning seems needlessly euphemistic. It's pretty clear to me that the ruler of Teotihucan sent an army to visit his neighbor. The temple is empty because all the priests have been killed and the deposed Mayan ruler was probably tied up and chucked in the river to "swim with the fishes." Perhaps archaeologists and historians don't like to make assumptions about why the temple is empty after the atlatl-armed warriors pay a visit but I think that gives a skewed view of history.

"Constant Battles: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage" by Steven LeBlanc addresses the tendency of historians to romanticise pre-historic people. They look at "modern" examples such as the Native Americans and think that they lived peacefully with both their human and animal neighbors. This gets perpetuated in the media. In point of fact, early peoples did all the same things that their European conquerors did. They moved into new territories, depleted the local resources and came into conflict with their neighbors over those now scarce resources. Our impression of the natives living in harmony with nature is skewed because when we got to know these people their populations had already been decimated by diseases that the explorers had inflicted upon them. When most of your population dies, it's much easier for the survivors to find enough to eat. Europeans experienced just this sort of thing with the prosperity of the Renaissance coming after the horrors of the Black Death.

Ancient people were just like us and historians should say there was war instead of trying to call it "empty temple syndrome" like it's some sort of great mystery.

My third and almost unrelated point. . .

Tonight on the Sci-Fi channel, they are presenting the Sci-Fi Original "Mammoth." I think the line from the commercials says it all:

"We have an alien-possessed mammoth on the loose and if we don't stop it the government is gonna' kill all of us."

This gem of a line is delivered by Vincent Ventresca (Remember the "Invisible Man" series?) to Tom Skarrett, whose response is to fold over in in laughter. Yea, Tom, I'd laugh this guy out of the room as well.

Who writes this crap? The Sci-Fi channel has become the 21st Century's B-movie studio turning down "Farscape" and "Firefly" so they could churn out drek like "Mansquito". And a mammoth? They've had just about every other big animal they could think of run amok so they had to resort to bringing back a mammoth. Ok, I can imagine a mammoth frozen in the Siberian tundra being melted and brought back to life. ("Iceman" did a good job thawing out a caveman. Heck, even "Encino Man" was amusing.) But a re-animated mammoth probably isn't going to behave much differently than a wild elephant. Nothing exciting there. I know! Let's have it possessed by an alien. It's B-movie gold!

I wish I had a mammoth target to hurl darts at.

Flying off into the sunset.

The Corporate Overlords have announced half million share stock buyback program. So, after announcing a $10 million dollar lost for 2005, they are going to spend $4 million to take shares out of the market.

Why?

Well, the simple answer is that taking stock off the market increases the value of the remaining shares. Most often, this is done for stocks that are considered undervalued. Considering that the stock value of the Corporation is the lowest it's been in years, the market clearly doesn't consider it undervalued. If it's not an undervalued price, buybacks can keep the price up for insiders planning on exercising options.

So, are the top execs trying to take the money and run? I've been snooping on some market watch discussion boards and there has been some fascinating discussions about a recent conference call with the Chief Executive Overlord. Did he really get a big bonus ($500,000) and a new airplane (2005 Hawker 800XP)? According to one article, the Corporate Overlords claim that they are leasing the plane but the FAA says differently. If they aren't running, they are clearly bleeding the company for whatever they can personally get regardless of what it does to the company itself and the employees.

If they were genuinely interested in the company (or their customers), they would be investing in the product, not trying to float the stock prices. Produce a good product or service and the stock price will take care of itself. Of course, that would take someone who isn't a money grubbing bastard.

Fools rush in. . .

When I entered the building after lunch there was an alarm sounding. Flashing lights, annoyingly loud tones, announcements by security, the whole nine yards. I went back outside and waited for the whole thing to blow over.

For the 15 minutes or so that I stood there I could see security guards rushing about. Two fire trucks arrived and fully equipped firemen scouted around and, for all that, scores if not hundreds of people returning from lunch continued to enter the building and head for the elevators.

What the fuck is wrong with you people? A fire alarm means you LEAVE the building so that you don't die. Didn't they teach you that in Kindergarden? What the hell are you thinking? Sure, 99 times out of 100 the alarms are false but you're going to look really silly when Osiris is weighing your heart against the weight of a feather to see if you are worthy of entrance into the afterlife and says:

"So, let me get this straight. . . The alarm was going off, firemen were running around and yet you continued into the building to die a fiery death why?"

"I needed to check my e-mail before my lunch hour was over."

"OK. You're too STUPID to make it through your first life, we certainly aren't letting you into Paradise to be stupid for eternity. NEXT! Oh, hell, here's another one. . . "

I don't care how much they pay me or how important they think it is that I be in my cubicle answering phones, I am not going into a building when the fire alarm is going off.

The big letdown.

I didn't get the job with the Think Tank that was so eagerly anticipated. I'm not sure what feel. I shouldn't take it personally and it shouldn't be surprising if there are more qualified people out there applying for the same positions but they were hiring for six positions. So, out of two-score people they found half a dozen better than I.

So, is it me? Is it something so simple as someone being more qualified or is it something else? Do I seem too eager to leave my current position or am I not eager enough? Does the seven years I've spent with my current employer show loyalty and dedication or does it show a lack of initiative? Was it something I said? Something I didn't say? Was some ugly secret that even I didn't know about turn up in the background check? Did someone not like my beard?

The interview seemed to go well but did I miss something? Some telltale clue in an expression, posture or word that indicates that a decision has been made right there and then? Is there something I could have done? They never tell you why you didn't get the job so you have no real way of knowing if it was something you did or if it was completely out of your hands.

Self-doubt is an ugly, corrosive thing. Despair festers and builds and makes you to think you will never get ahead. It steals your dreams and leaves you with only ague hopes of getting something that is only marginally better than what you have now because the big steps are just too far. Beyond your reach.

In my mind, I know I'm better than that. But my heart keeps getting stabbed with disappointment.

Better late than never. Not.

The Corporate Overlords have finally gotten their act together to file the papers with the SEC needed back in October, restate their 3rd Quarter earnings and figure their 4th Quarter earnings for 2005. The answer? A net loss of $10 million for the year.

Now, they said that they were also going to do a "writedown of goodwill" to the tunes of $16 million. It took some study but I THINK it means that they aren't going to be posting as much income as initially expected because a bunch of that money is going into acquisitions. Goodwill is the difference between what they pay for the acquisition and what the acquisition is actually worth, trying to take into account things that don't have a solid value, such as patents, customer lists and trade names. A writedown means that you aren't going to be making as much money off of those things as you thought you would. The charming thing is that the aquisition that they are undervaluing is probably us.

Or something like that. It sounds like smoke an mirrors to me. Especially when, after screwing up with the SEC and NASDAQ for eight months and announcing $10 mil losses, the CEO says, "the Company continues to be well positioned with a strong balance sheet." Sorry, boss, but a $10 million dollar loss doesn't sound all that strong. And a $16 mil "writedown" says to me you're expecting more of the same.

Flash Dreams.

Dream 1: Two children are assembling a swing set, specifically the slide.

Dream 2: Yesterday, in realspace, I rode on the Ghost Town Trail in Indiana County. There was one place where there were some odd concentric semi-circular mounds beside what used to be the rail line. I couldn't quite tell what they were for, but in my dreamscape I saw a track junction and rail laid along these mounds as I rode by.

Dream 3: A red business-sized card has little mechanical feet, like those wind-up toys, and is walking along a asphalt sidewalk. There is some sort of writing on the card that I can't read. Two blue cards walk out of the grass to the right and advance menacingly on the red card.

Dream 4: I'm hiking on a trail that looks like one in south park and there's a side trail that I know will take me down to an intersection and then back to the parking area. Instead of taking that trail, I continue up further up to a different trail intersection that looks more like the Whitetail Trail near Uniontown.

What is disturbing about these dreams is not their content but that I was able to have them in-between calls sitting in my cube at the Help Desk. Normally, I don't go to sleep easily and it's not unusual for me to lay in bed for an hour before drifting off. But I have discovered that in the morning I can cross my arms, close my eyes and fall into a dream state yet still be alert enough that I can answer an incoming call before the second ring.

I think there are several things going on here. The first is simple sleep deprivation. Four or five hours of sleep is the norm for me during the week.

Second, is the lack of anything to get my brain actually working in the morning. Calls are mostly passwords and mail servers being down so it's easy to be done with a call and drop off without having to think much about it.

And thirdly, I think my mind might just be wired that way. When I'm not getting enough sleep, I've hallucinated. Usually it's when I'm trying to sleep or just waking up I'll be in the space where I'm awake enough to see my bed room but asleep enough to see the aliens or demons from my dreams superimposed. I haven't been having that happen to me recently but this may be something similar.

I read a recent article that people who have had near-death experiences also experienced REM Intrusion, the overlaying of rapid eye movement sleep and brain wave patters over waking consciousness. Well, my dreams aren't intruding into my wakefulness but the time between my being awake and dreaming is greatly reduced. In most people, going from being awake to REM sleep, where most dreaming happens, takes 90 minutes. I'm apparently , under the right conditions, able to be dreaming in only a few minutes.

A little more investigation into the issue have shows that some dreaming does take place during other stages of the sleep cycle (they call this "covert REM sleep"). So, I'm not experiencing REM Intrusion but dreaming between phone calls is still not normal.

Complex mathematics

User: ". . . It's still not taking my new password.
Geis: "New passwords must be six to eight characters long. . . "
User: "It is."
Geis: "It must contain both letters and numbers. . . "
User: "It does."
Geis: "It cannot contain common words. . . "
User: "It doesn't."
Geis: "And it must be something you haven't used before."
User: "I haven't. . . and it's still not working."
Geis: "How many characters ARE in your password."
User: "Seven letters and two numbers."
Geis: "That's nine. Passwords can have no more than EIGHT characters."
User: "Oh. . . " *click*

Avian Flu Resiliency Preparation

Recently there have been a number of instances where clients have questioned us about our plans and preparations for a possible outbreak of pandemic illness - specifically the Avian Flu.

That's how one of the many e-mails I get at work started out.

. . . The Bank has established a comprehensive, cross-functional scenario planning process, designed to identify exposures, business impact, existing control cap bilities, gaps and remediation recommendations based on major scenario types has been established. This process serves as the foundation of The Bank's "Scenario-Based Business Resiliency Planning" program and facilitates a more effective management prioritization process to invest and continue to enhance The Bank's business resiliency capabilities.

Now, I can appreciate that a large financial institution should have a business resiliancy plan for dealing with emergencies. Hell, I even worked on the Help Desk's plan after 9/11 when I became the floor warden (a plan that seems to have been forgotten in the years since). But, in all honesty, compared to Avian flu, I suspect my finances are at a greater risk from mis-statements of earnings and fraud perpetrated by overpaid executives than by a disease that has thus far only affected people who live with their chickens.

This fear-mongering is propagated by the sensationalistic news media and, much like drug company advertising drives people to demand treatment for non-diseases like "restless leg syndrome", the Avian flu panic is driving our financial institution to waste cycles on on this nonsense rather than doing what people really want it to do; manage their money.

Not to completely discount the risk of a influenza pandemic but should such a thing happen, the ability of my bank to provide good customer service for my financial services questions is going to be the least of my concerns.

On the other hand, one could conceive of a scenario wherein the banks are unable to to staff properly. The poor customer service causes people to fear that they won't be able to access their money leading to a run on the banks, a financial collapse of the American economy, chaos and anarchy.

I should write a made-for-TV movie script.

Dreaming in the Neighborhood.

Last night's dreams were not unlike many of my dreams. A major portion of it involved my defending against an alien invasion. (Large, tentacled monsters like those in "Half Life".) The space fighter I was climbing into was suspiciously like a WWII Spitfire. Then, like dreams are wont to do, it changed gears and I was entering a house that looked like that of my Great-Grandmother in Homestead. I was part of a tour, and once inside the scene changed again to that of the offices of WQED. Specifically, it was the set of Mister Rogers Neighborhood.

I grew up watching Mister Rogers on the television. Twenty years later while my daughter was growing up watching him on the TV, I met him a few times when I was a delivery driver for Kinkos. Metting him was little more than greetings in the hallway but from seeing him sitting on a couch reading or working behind the scenes to produce his show, one could easily see this was the same person. The Mister Rogers who sang "It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood" while he changed from loafers to tennis shoes was not a persona he put on with his sweater or an act, it was exactly who he was. What you saw on television was the way he was in person and the way he was when he spoke before Congress. When the camera panned over the model of the neighborhood and he came through the door one had the impression that he had walked there because he had actually walked to work that morning. I saw him regularly walking through Oakland on his way to or from the studio.

And in my dreamscape, it wasn't incongruous for my Great-Grandmother's house to seamlessly transform into Mister Rogers' house. In a sense, he was like a part of the family. He was the kind of relative every child deserves to have instead of the asshat uncle we actually got.

In my dream, I turned the corner to the darkened Neighborhood of Make-Believe set. The castle of King Friday XIII. The tree of X the Owl and Henrietta Pussycat. It was exactly as it was on television, except that it was empty. Lifeless. Fred Rogers died of stomach cancer in 2003. In my dream, I cried alone in that darkened soundstage, tears unselfconsciously pouring down my face. Even now as I write this, I feel the sadness for the world having lost such an irrefutably good person.

Good-bye, Fred Rogers. We still miss you.

On the rim.

My bike was in the shop last week for some repairs. The gears had worn out, the crank, freewheel and chain were being replaced. This work was done at the new Iron City Bikes in Oakland, by the way. The technician pointed out a problem with my brakes. The pads were still ok but when I squeezed down on the lever, I used up almost all the slack in the cable of the side-pull brakes. I knew I had to do something about that but I didn't actually notice it until I was riding this weekend and the back brakes weren't working.

Only when I was at the hardware store buying some washers to take up some of that slack did I realize why this problem was happening in the first place. Last year, one of my rims broke and when the techs at TRM replaced my rims they did so with slightly narrower ones. Most of my riding is on trails and road so having slightly narrower rims and tires on my hybrid isn't a big deal but my brakes were designed for rims of a certain width and changing the one means I now have to adjust the other.

I should have insisted on rims of the same width but the rim was broken and they didn't have the identical size in stock so I had little choice but to get what they had. Thankfully, adjusting the brakes to work with the new rim width was a simple matter of adding some 1/4 inch washers.

Taking credit where credit isn't due.

We'd been really busy all day, starting with a server outage that lasted most of the morning. This afternoon, there was a little bit of a queue in the phone system, after which Team Lead D**** sent the following message:

not to worry everyone.............I cleared the queue for you.....you're welcome

Hmmmm, I looked at the number of calls I had taken so far for the day; 72, and compared it to the number of calls he had taken; 0. According to the ticket generation system, he had not generated any tickets at all. Not one. Yet he felt comfortable in announcing to the entire Help Desk that HE had cleared the queue.

I've also noticed a new addition to his repertoire. When the queue climbs a little bit and he thinks that too many people are not available or taking calls, he says "You're killing me." Sorry, but I don't think it quite reaches the level of life threatening.

And by the end of the day, my call total was 88. Not a record (I have cleared over 100 calls on two occasions) but one of the highest. Working that hard for what I'm making, now that's killing me.

Step three

I had my interview with the Think Tank today and I think it went well. Several times I heard one of the interviewers (by video conference at the Home Office) say "That's what I wanted to hear." They also said that they only hand out the form for the background check to people they are serious about. Then they handed me said form.

The Think Tank is in the process of moving to new offices so they won't be getting back to me probably until the begining of May but I have a really good feeling about this. There's a part of me saying, "I so have this job," but it could still go the other way.

*deep breath*

Second Step

I just returned from being out of town to find a message on my answering machine from the Think Tank, left on Thursday, asking me to come back for a face-to-face interview. In less than 24 hours they had decided they wanted to hear more.

Hoody Freakin' Hoo!

OK, now before I get too excited, this is just an interview. I don't have the job yet.

One small step

I had a phone interview today for a "Remote Support Specialist" (sp. Help Desk) position. It was all very preliminary but, hey, it's a start. A public policy think tank is expanding their Pittsburgh office and consolidating all their remote support in one location. The first good thing is that I got a call at all. The second is that they have gotten "dozens" of responses but are hiring half a dozen so the odds are in my favor, better even than my chances at my last interview where they started with over 400 applications and narrowed it down to three or four.

When I was in school working on my Information Science and Political Science degrees, I sort of hoped that one day I could get a job working for The Tank. I didn't think it was likely because I hadn't started in Poli Sci but now it looks like I might have my chance having taken the I.T. route.

Even with nearly two decades of dreaming of just such an opportunity, I'm trying not to get my hopes too high. If I spend too much on expectations, the crash will be even harder should success elude me.

Lego Dominatrix

Got the new Lego catalog today and they have a new Batman series. Batmobile, Batwing, Joker, Two-Face, batarangs and even henchmen.

Catwoman has a Lego whip.

Patently Silly

Found a link for a website called Patently Silly that features submissions to the U.S. Patent Office that are, well, stupid.

Though not featured on the website, one of my favorite patents is Chet Fleming's Device for perfusing an animal head.

This invention relates to a device, referred to herein as a 'cabinet,' which will provide physical and biochemical support for an animal's head which has been 'discorporated' or 'discorped' (i.e., severed from its body). This device can be used to supply a discorped head with oxygenated blood and nutrients, by means of tubes connected to arteries which pass through the neck. After circulating through the head, the deoxygenated blood returns to the cabinet by means of cannulae which are connected to veins that emerge from the neck. A series of processing components will remove carbon dioxide and replenish the oxygen level in the blood, and return the replenished blood to the discorped head via cannulae attached to arteries. If desired, waste products and other metabolites may be removed from the blood, and nutrients, therapeutic drugs, experimental drugs, and other substances may be added to the blood.

The cabinet will provide physical support for the head, by means of a collar around the neck, pins or other devices attached to one or more vertebrae, or similar mechanical means. If desired, the spine may be left attached to the discorped head.

The support provided to the discorped head will prolong various natural metabolic activities in the head after it has been severed from the body. This will allow various types of analyses to be performed on the head (including pharmaceutical, toxicological, hormonal, and neurological analysis) without being affected by various metabolites generated by digestive and other internal organs when such analyses are performed on intact animals.

The severed head preferably should retain all of the sensory organs, and the vocal cords if desired. Depending on the surgical procedures used to sever the head from the body and the type of blood processing and drugs used during and after the operation, the discorped head might experience a period of consciousness after it has been severed from the body.

The best part is that the patent consistantly says "animal" but the illustrations are of a human head.

Productivity

Today was one of the days I specified for spending some of the PTO I had accumulated before I loose it at the end of the month. I spend half of a day at work and the other half running errands.

For the half day I spent at work, when I had left I had taken a dozen calls, changing passwords, configuring VPN, changing printer settings and the like. In short, at the end of my time I had actually accomplished very little.

For my afternoon I went to a bike shop, had my bike tuned up and had some parts ordered to replace worn ones in anticipation of the summer biking season. Stopped at home to have a quick snack. Checked my porch to find that I had received the game camera I intend to use to catch the squicky vandal greasing my door handle at the Eliza Furnace Trail parking lot. I got a haircut. Got the oil changed in my car. Stopped by a Panera and had a another snack while I checked my e-mail using their wireless connection because I'm having problems with my network connection at home. I went to BestBuy and bought a new cable modem to solve said connectivity problems. And I bought some C-cell batteries and a charger to drive the game camera.

I wasn't quite home at my regular time but, as you can see, my time not working was much more productive than the time I spent at the Help Desk. Work is something I do to make money so I can be much more productive away from work.

Spring is in the air.

I hadn't been paying attention to the Gulf Tower Falcon Cam this weekend but watching this morning, the first day of Spring, I was able to see the female up off the nest enough to see at least two eggs.

[sound of crickets chirping]

Normally, even in my 48 square foot gulag, I can hear the activity on the rest of the floor. Phones ringing, people talking, signs of life. This afternoon, it seemed very quiet out on the floor while I was taking call after call. I stood up to look over the partition and it was like a ghost town. Most of the cubes were empty.

This is a direct result of the decision to cut hours after finally getting up to proper staffing levels. For the day I took 40% more calls than the next most productive person on the floor.

I hear that the Site Manager argued long and hard to keep staffing levels up to where they should be but he was inevitably overruled by the Corporate Overlord's Bean Counters. So, all the work I did over the summer training a score of new people is being eroded by the bottom line.

The birds are back in town

On NPR earlier this week, there was an news item about the return of Pale Male, the Red Tail hawk with a posh Manhattan address. This got me looking for our own high-rise birds of prey.

At the Gulf Tower.

And at the Cathedral of Learning.

Welcome home.

Take a bite out of crime

"How can I help. . . oh, it's you."

It doesn't sound like a flattering greeting but this is the response I got from the officer at the Squirrel Hill station when I walked in to report that my car had yet again been vandalized at the lot at the end of the Eliza Furnace Trail. This time, like another commuter a week and a half ago, it was toothpaste instead of the previous grease.

So, I guess vandal season has opened early this year. Last year the first attack was in April or May. I didn't pay attention because I thought it was a one-off. Then they came with a much greater regularity: June 3rd, July 8th, July 27th and August 18th.

Last year, I had made much noise about getting a game camera to capture the vandal in the act but nothing came of it. The attacks ended and I spent my money on other things. I've had enough and am going to get a camera. This week. A little bit of camouflage and a steel cable to keep it from being stolen should it be discovered and I have a plan.

Minty justice.

Information Science 101

Had a call today from a Financial Services group member saying that a W****** report hadn't loaded with data for a certain date and to have the report reloaded. I looked up W**** in the Help Desk Reference Manual and could find no documentation. I looked up in the Financial Services Procedures Manual and found only a few references but nothing that had procedures for loading reports. I did a keyword search in the database of previously opened tickets and saw some tickets so I opened a ticket just like those.

My Team Lead was doing a Service Observe at the time, that is, he was listening in on the call. Afterwards he informed me that the user actually needed to place a C*** Platter Request and that she needed to call the Data Delivery group directly.

This is a failing of Notes because when you do a search for documents in Notes databases, it doesn't search the entire document for the keywords. It searched only the designated keywords. This would be analogous to a web search like Google only searching META tags instead of indexing the entire webpage.

More than that, this is a failing of document writers because, knowing how Notes works, they neglected to create keyword lists that actually reflected the keywords of the document. If an application or procedure has synonyms that users might use, then those other terms must be included in the keyword list or a search will never turn up those documents. If you can't search a database, the documents in that database are worthless.

One of the first courses I took in college for Information Science was about keyword searches of abstracts. How do you formulate searches so that you get the data you are looking for. How do you construct an abstract so that searches can find the document. In this case, the keyword was W******. Doing a search for this returned no results because the documents that had this information did not have W****** in the keywords to be searched. Both W****** and C*** were in the document and clearly they had to do with one another so the only reason why it couldn't be searched on was because of the person who created the keyword list.

Come on, people. This is basic stuff here. I did this 20 years ago.

Told you so.

On the way into work this morning, NPR made mention of some of the latest legislation that again had provisions for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Sitting down in front of my PC to read some news, the BBC website had an article on an oil spill from the onshore pipeline at Prudhoe Bay. Over a quarter of a million gallons, the largest spill ever recorded on the North Slope. This spill happened 2 weeks ago but is only now being reported.

Reap what you sow

The huge amount of hiring and training that happened over the summer and fall was not only a desperate attempt to bring our staffing levels up to address the increase from the new Financial Services clients, but also playing catch-up for having been understaffed for years. Finally, we were told, we were up to the proper staffing levels for our call volumes. Huzzah!

Except that this week they started cutting the hours of our part time staff. It would seem that they discovered that having a full staff spends too much money. Oh, and there are simply too many people sitting idle waiting for calls.

Today, there was the pop-up message that we had a queue and that people should stay available because "we are short-staffed."

And who's fault is that? We can be fully staffed and when something goes wrong there will be a queue because hundreds of people are affected and they are all calling the help desk. If you want to be prepared to handle those problem times then you are going to have to accept that there are going to be times when people are doing nothing because nothing happens to be broken. Management is going to have to decide whether we are going to be fully staffed and have people idle or be understaffed and have queue problems.

Vandalism with some teeth

The squicky vandal who last year was putting grease under car door handles at the Eliza Furnace Trail parking lot has apparently returned for a new season. An e-mail from a fellow bicycle commuter tells me that his car was hit on Friday (3 March) but this time, instead of the grease it was toothpaste under the door handle. I happened not to be parking that day as I took the day off to pick up my daughter for spring break or else I probably would have been hit as well.

Well, at least toothpaste is water soluble.

Out in the cold.

The other handwashing shoe has dropped, so to speak. I was called into a meeting and was formally asked if I would wash my hands. The statement was made in such a way that, if I refused, I would be fired on the spot.

The Site Manager brought up that Pennsylvania is an "at-will" employment state and I can be let go at any time for any reason. So, they can use a nonexistent law to punish me and hold up another convenient law to let me know that there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.

This isn't about handwashing. I am not some back-to-nature, anti-fluoridation, neo-Luddite barbarian choosing to be filthy to make some sort of societal statement. I simply don't always stop by the sink on my way out of the rest room. A lot of people do it. I've seen them. But I've done nothing illegal and apparently all those other people haven't been called on the carpet. So, it's not about cleanliness or hygiene. It's politics. It's The Bank flexing it's contractual muscles against its Help Desk minions. The other Bank employees on the floor have regularly made it clear that we are not a part of the team. We are outsiders who, 7 years ago, usurped the status quo by replacing the previous Bank-run Help Desk.

And I am a convenient target. Someone made a stink when I came onto the floor in my biking gear forcing be to change in the bathroom on another floor. This handwashing accusation based on a lie about health codes is just another strike. Next time, it won't matter what the accusation is. It won't matter whether there is any truth to the matter or even if it's relevant at all, I know that my employers will do absolutely nothing to defend me. I will be sacrificed.

On the ironic side, I've read a new article that The Corporation isn't doing so well, either. They have missed another SEC filing deadline. They've gotten one more extension from NASDAQ to the end of the month or risk being delisted. Also, the CEO is in a bit of a tussle as his estranged wife is initiating a lawsuit charging him and his family with mismanagement, self-dealing and abusive use of corporate assets (including tens of thousands of dollars in reimbursements for strip club visits). In another suit, she charged her phone provider with allowing her husband access to her phone records. She also threw in charges that he beat her and forced her to engage in deviant sexual acts.

So, here I am having my career threatened for not washing my hands while the Corporate Overlord himself is raping both the company and his wife. And while he has the best lawyers his half-million dollar a year salary can buy, I have no recourse whatsoever. I haven't gotten a raise in four years so that the Corporate Overlord can spend the cash on hookers.

Welcome to the American Dream.

Mutants and Masterminds session #4

After the battle with the Red Hulk, Justice and Cosmic Kid fled the scene leaving Brian Czitrovszky to deal with the police. They wanted to take him downtown for questioning but Luther Lexington showed up and vouched for him. Oddly, though, that defense was not followed up on in any way.

Brian caught a bus home to work on repair his van. While doing that, Cosmic Kid and Nexus (a new player character, essentially a humanoid black hole) showed up tracking an energy signature. They are immediately fired upon by the lab's defenses. Cosmic Kid can withstand the paralyzing rays long enough to call the lab on his cell phone and ask to have the shooting stop.

They come in and ask Brian about the Unbihexium. Still working on the van, Brian says, "Sure, it's the box on the table over there. Knock yourself out." Whereupon, Cosmic Kid nearly does just that when he opens the box and is bathed in the Kryptonite, err, Unbihexium rays. (He looses 1 point from each of his stats.) Nexus closes the box and makes an exclamation about Brian's letting something so dangerous lying about.

"Poppycock!" Brian says and takes the crystalline ore out of the box to show that it has no effect on him. Cosmic Kid, however, takes more damage (2 more points) while Brian is fascinated by the effect it has on his alien physiology.

Deadpool teleports in with Flashdancer (another PC) and a cop from the Star Squad (yet another PC that hasn't chosen a superhero name yet). It was from the cop that Brian learns that Deadpool had stolen the Unbihexium sample. Brian was done with it and so had no problem with allowing the cops to take it back (with the hope the they would also arrest Deadpool and get him out of his hair.) Shortly after the fast ones left, half a dozen robots of the type that first attached Brian's lab show up.

Deadpool and Nexus fight them while Brian attempts to remote-hack. He is able to regularly break through the firewall but usually is only able to stun one of them to keep it out of the fight. Eventually, he's able to crack one wide open and he orders it to do a complete shutdown. Cosmic Kid and Flashdancer return and give fight. Flashdancer is a speedster (ala The Flash) and does the cliched "wrap the opponent in cable" trick. Brian connects the end of the cable to the power supply on his particle accelerator and fries the thing. Eventually, the rest are defeated and the game session ends.

Brian's goal for the fight (aside from staying alive) was to capture one of the robots. The robot's mission was clearly to either kill or capture meta-humans. Once that task was complete it would return from whence it came. The robot's memory has that information and with that, Brian will be able to track down who keeps sending these guys to wreck the lab. Another thing to deduce is how these robots are identifying metahumans. Are they programmed with individual information ("Capture Brian Czitrovszky!") or is there some sort of sensor that allows then to detect metahumans? Lastly, with the robot intact it should be able to be reprogrammed and set it to the task of defending the lab from other attacks.

Spelling Geneyus.

I was driving up Rt.66 on my way to pick up my daughter from Bradford for spring break. In Marienville there is a restaurant:I haven't been able to figure out why it's misspelled. It's not just a mistake on the sign. There is a smaller sign next to it and their website at http://www.route66dinor.com has it the same way. But on the menu, they do say that this is a diner, so it's not that they don't know how to spell the word. Perhaps it's some sort of tradition lost in the mists of time.

And right across the street:apparently, the Golden Arches is diversifying to prepare for all it's super-sized clients.

Cleanliness is next to harassment

I stand accused of not washing my hands. It seems that some Bank employee witnessed me leaving the restroom without my having washed my hands. He complained up the chain of command and it came back down from my manager's manager's manager that I was violating some sort of health code. I looked it up; there is no such code. I called the City, County and State health departments and they confirmed that the handwashing codes only apply to food service.

The last time I checked, Information Technology has nothing to do with food.

Yet, because a client complained I have received an official verbal reprimand for violating a law that doesn't exist.

I have asked if there is some sort of policy within the Bank or The Corporation that applies. I doubt it.

And this isn't the first time this has happened. I looked in my records and this happened December 1st of 2003. At the time, the Site Manager just said, "This has been reported", I told him it was bullshit and that was the end of it. This time I don't think things are going to go so well because this was made official with the Operations Manager and my Team Lead all in attendance and the statement being read off the e-mail.

They didn't even ask if it was true.

The Perfect Donut

Dunkin' Donuts now has Boston creme filled Munchkins! How cool is that?!

Curse you, Red Baron!

I've been playing "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City." In the "Bombs Away" scenario, Cuban drug runners are on the dock and I have a three RC biplanes with bombs strapped to the bottom that I need to fly across the bay and drop on the boats. Since I was playing with mouse and keyboard instead of the game controller I was having a great deal of problem controlling the aircraft. It would rise and fall like a roller coaster, eventually crashing into the water.

Reload the game and restart the mission.

With practice I could get it to fly nearly straight and level but any attempt to turn would cause it to slip back into the climb-stall-dive-splash cycle.

Reload the game and restart the mission.

Finally, I was able to get a plane to crash into one of the boats and blow it up. The cheat book suggested that the explosion of one boat should be enough to detonate the other two but they survived. The Cubans jumped in the remaining boats and took off. I could barely manage hitting one boat as a stationary target, let alone chasing down two different moving targets.

Reload the game and restart the mission.

At one point, I crashed the plane into the dock where the Cubans were standing around. They didn't seem to notice. I ran the plane into one of them. He fell down then stood back up as if nothing happened. I kept hitting him until he didn't get up again. So, I drove the plane around the dock, essentially chopping their shins up with the plane's propeller until they bled to death. Then, I drove the plane off the dock into a boat and blew it up. Since the crews were all dead, the other boats just sat on the dock waiting for me to fly another plane across the bay to make a rough landing in the parking lot and then drive onto the next boat.

Somehow, I don't think this is what the programmers had in mind.

Are you deaf?

Geis: ". . . It sound like you've either lost your connection to your L: drive or your Notes ID file has gone missing. Open notes and you should get a prompt that says 'Choose file to be used as ID.' Does it say that?"

User: "No, it doesn't. It says OK and Cancel and at the top it says 'Choose file to be used as ID."

Geis: "Which is what I just said. Now, click on the drop down next to where it says "Look in" and you should see a list of drives. Do you see the L: drive listed there? It will have your login ID."

User: "No, its' not there."

Geis: "What is there?"

User: "A: Floppy Drive. C: WinXP. D: CD. and my login with an L in parenthesis."

Geis: ". . . "

Change of plans.

When I first interviewed for the Help Desk, I had a question about holidays. Since The Corporation had certain official holidays (Christmas, New Years, Thanksgiving, etc) and The Bank had several more holidays (Flag Day, Columbus Day, Presidents Day, etc), how was that going to be handled? As bank holidays, would we get them like the other holidays? Would we not work and therefore not be paid? Even though the Bank was closed, would we be required to work? What? The HR Rep didn't have an answer so she threw money at me. That's right, she just offered me a slightly higher salary, I believe because she feared that without an answer I wouldn't take the job and they were desperate for warm bodies.

Well, in the past six years they still haven't figured it out. Each bank holiday seems to have some new twist. Sometimes it's been the full timers working 4 hour shifts to provide coverage. Sometimes it was one holiday on and the next off. Then it was voluntary.

President's Day is coming up and I was told months ago that I would not be working. I would, however, have to work the next two "bank" holidays. It was great to know this in advance so that I could make plans.

Except that today, Thursday, there was a meeting of some sort and the plans changed again. I *will* have to work on Monday. And not a full shift but a six hour shift. 10-4.

H**** had taken the day off so that we could spend it together. Sort of a late Valentines.

Thanks a lot, pinheads. These days are on the calendar far in advance. You have the data on just what the staffing requirements are. You've been doing this for almost seven frelling years and you still manage to screw it up each time.

Mutants & Masterminds session #3

Brian had finished his baffling conversation with the Confetti Ninja
and began working on dismantling and investigating the robot that he had run over repeatedly with his van. His goal was to determine perhaps who had sent this robot. That information was not found but he did find a power core of unknown content. The other task Brian set to was to take the best images from my security cameras of the Confetti Ninja, map them to a CGI model, place that model in front of a 7-11 image and post it to the Internet to some super-person discussion group. "Have you seen this ninja?" He took it out of context because he wanted a good image that separated it from the lab a little bit.

During the course of this, a limo pulled up to the gate. The passenger spoke with Aimee (the lab's computer) introducing himself as Luther Lexington.

Now, here I have to digress a little. One of the other players characters is called Cosmic Kid. (Brian hasn't met him yet). Cosmic Kid is just like Superman but without the super strength (he couldn't afford the points). He also comes with all of Superman's back story and baggage, all not-so-subtly changed to avoid copyright infringement. One of his buddies growing up in Tinyville was Luther Lexington. Ugh.

Anyway. I asked the GM what I knew of this Luther Lexington and all he said was that he was the son of corporate magnate Leonidas Lexington. The name Leonidas seemed familiar but I couldn't place it. It was late and Brian was working on the robot so Aimee passed on the message that Luther should make an appointment for a time during what would be considered business hours. Luther made a stink that he had an offer that would expire when he left. Aimee told him to have a good evening.

I could tell that the GM was stumped. He seems fairly used to laying out very clear plotlines and having his players follow them. My insistence on playing the character and ignoring the path he set out for me confused him. He pulled a bunch of pages out of his plot document and moved on to dealing with the other players.

During that, I listened in on what they were doing. There had been some sort of break in and fight at Lexington Corporation and they had obtained a data disk of some sort. They went to Freedom Hall (superhero central) to see if they could get the information off of it. They screwed it up but before the disk destroyed itself they got a screen that said "Project Θερμοπύλαι". I don't know Greek but as they worked their way through I heard them saying "Thermo-something."

I started laughing. Laughing hard. It was Project Thermopylae. The Battle of Thermopylae was the famous battle in 480 BC where 300 Spartans, lead by King Leonidas, held off an army of a million Persians. The Gates of Fire. So, it shouldn't be surprising that Leonidas Lexington is working on a Project Thermopylae.(I couldn't place the name because the GM pronounced it with a short-i sound in the middle and, since I didn't know proper Greek pronunciation, I had always pronounced it with a long-i.)

What bothered me about this was that the GM kept dropping hints until they figured it out. If he wanted them to know, why did he make it such a puzzle? Wouldn't it have made more sense to keep them in the dark, challenge them to figure it out for themselves or have them go to Brian to find out?

Back to Brian. Still overnight, The Confetti Ninja teleported into the lab again whereupon the defense systems immediately started shooting at him. He bounced around, asking Brian to "quit it."

"Why."

The GM seemed a little taken aback by the question and had the Ninja
respond "Because you're the nearest thing to a friend I have in the world."

"Really. That's ironic because you are the nearest thing to an arch-enemy I have in the world."

Brian let him dance a little while longer before stopping the shooting The Ninja presented him with a dark rock with green crystals in it. He was told it was unbihexium. As a player, I knew immediately that this was really a stand-in for kryptonite. I also guessed that it was this unbihexium that was in the robot's power core and that it probably had to do with Luther Lexington's visit and Project Thermopylae. The Ninja also threw down a pressure suit and said that Brian should put it on in the morning.

Brian ignored him.

When morning came, the Ninja teleported in again and was immediately fired upon. After jumping around a bit, he grabbed Brian and the suit and teleported to the downtown area. (I knew he wouldn't teleport into the vacuum of space without his having the suit on). There was a fight going on. A red Hulk-like being had thrown a truck through a restaurant windows and the other player characters were fighting him. Using player knowledge that Cosmic Kid was being mentally affected, I had Brian put on the suit, believing that perhaps the Red Hulk was emitting some sort of confusing gas that the suit would protect against. After that, what is a Super-Genius going to do against a rampaging monster? I asked the GM what might be available such as power lines, convenient vehicles and so on that could be used. He gave me nothing. Brian had to resort to pulling his blaster and shooting.Brian noticed a green crystalline spike in the Red Hulk's back. The assumption was that this was unnatural and it was this crystal that was driving the action either through pain or through remote control. In either case, when the Red Hulk was stunned and Cosmic Kid was compelled by the GM to go for the crystal, I thought it was a bad thing. The GM granted Judgement (the other player character, a teleporting energy caster) a Hero Point and said that he goes for the crystal. The GM awarded me a Hero Point saying that I shoot the crystal.

Harrumph. The awarding of Hero Points is compensation for the GM taking control of your character and forcing you to do something your character wouldn't normally do so that he can advance the plot in the direction he wants it to go. I really dislike this. Especially since the previous monkey wrenches I have thrown into the plot, not meeting with Luther Lexington for example, have been met with confusion on the GM's part. Judgement was going to try to stop Cosmic Kid from grabbing the crystal. I also though it was a bad idea and was going to shoot Cosmic Kid. What the GM makes happen is that Cosmic Kid and Judgement both touch the crystal and I shoot the crystal. Suddenly, we are teleported above Europa in orbit around Jupiter.

The crystal races off to the surface. Judgement can't teleport back to Earth (another plot device). Cosmic Kid flies us down to the surface. Noone can talk to one another in the vacuum so the two of them begin using their Freedom League secret-decoder PDAs. Brian hacks them so he can listen in. The crystal has grown into a Fortress of Solitude (tm). Cosmic Kid flies the group off to that. They are attacked by Omega Drones.

Omega Drones are robot minions of a supervillan called Omega. Really
powerful stuff. Anyway, at the Fortress there is air so Brian can take off his helmet. Introductions all around. Cosmic Kid gets the "This is Your Life" message from Marlon Brando. Brian and Judgement are encased in ice while Cosmic Kid races back to Earth. When Brian and Judgement are released, Omega is there. Judgement teleports Brian and himself back to Earth where it is only a few moments after they left. Brian finished the fight by blasting the Red Hulk.

Plot Hole #1: Why didn't the Red Hulk teleport with the rest of the group grabbing the crystal? He had the crystal imbedded in his back. Plot Hole #2: Why couldn't Judgement teleport and then was suddenly able to teleport? Plot Hole #3: How did Deadpool (I'll start using that name because Brian finally learned it) know that Brian was going on an interplanetary trip?

I really dislike Deadpool. I believe that the GM would really rather be playing Deadpool as a character and grants him super powers so that he can always win. Those super powers include secret information about where the plot is going and the ability to ignore the need to roll dice to judge the success or failure of any action so as to advance said linear plot. In fanfic this kind of character is referred to as a Mary Sue.

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.