Interesting. Here are two more pieces calling Bush to account for his alleged rationale for the war on Iraq.
One from Senator Robert Byrd.
And another from Representative Henry Waxman.
Neither are exactly impartial observers, but it’s good to see these questions being asked, regardless of the source.
I’m not usually one for online tests like “Which Smurf Are You?”, but I saw this one in laurex’s LJ and it seemed interesting.
browse’s Brain Usage Profile
Auditory : 37%
Visual : 62%
Left : 52%
Right : 47%
Why is it that Clinton lying about a blowjob was a national scandal, but Bush lying about the alleged motive for bombing a foreign country into the stone age seems to be largely accepted?
I’m not sure, but it must have something to do with the liberal media bias.
What a great start to the weekend! Had a nice breakfast at Original Pancake House, had a smidge of a nap, and then drove over to Santa Cruz and sailed for three hours. The wind was out of the east, and so the cliffs blocked the wind and kept things calm until we got 1/2 mile or 2/3rds of a mile off-shore. Then it really picked up nicely and we had some excitement.
Now I’m most likely sunburned, and I’m definitely tired, but I have a smile on my face. If I could shake this bit of a cold I have, everything would be perfect.
How’s your weekend so far?
After storming out of the office, I spent the first couple of days being furious. I got a couple of worried phone calls from my boss and my HR rep, but I ignored it all while I calmed down. What can I say; I tend to be slow to anger, but when I cross that line I stay good and angry for a while. After a day and a weekend, I called my boss and had lunch with him, and the next day called my HR rep and had lunch with her. Both were understanding, worried about me, eager to have me back, sympathetic with my frustrations, and in general very easy to talk to. I got great advice from both of them, but walking away from it, I still wasn’t certain whether I wanted to quit, or come back, or take an extended leave of absence, or what.
I’ve had some frustrations with work for a while now. I’ve been working in high tech for about 15 years, the majority of that time at this company. While I love my team, and appreciate my direct manager, there are still some things that can drive me nuts. I care about my work more than I should perhaps; I try very hard to do a good job and I can get particularly frustrated when the layers above me seem to make my job harder than it should be for no damn good reason. Lately I’ve thought more and more about chucking it all and driving the submarine at Disneyland. Or selling Frisbees at the beach. Or doing massage work. Or becoming a short-order cook. Or a scene shop carpenter. Or getting a piercing and becoming a coffee barista. In other words, maybe this was just the excuse I needed to make a major change in my life.
The other personality quirk that comes into play is that I hate hard decisions. I have a fear of making the wrong move, doing something I’ll regret, finding out I’ve zigged when I should have zagged. It’s easier and I’m happier when I can find a way of looking at a problem such that the answer becomes obvious. And so far, I wasn’t finding that kind of answer for this dilemma.
And then synchronicity happened.
At massage class one night, we were having one of those (for me) frustrating classes where we were doing what is euphemistically referred to as “energy work”. One of the students asked how to handle a situation where he experienced a strong upwelling of emotions while in the midst of performing body work on a client. In my head, I quickly jumped to what my answer to the question would be. “Look, emotions happen. They don’t always follow a rhyme or reason, they just happen. And trying to stifle them or rationalize them away can drive you nuts. The trick is to be self-aware enough that you can recognize an emotional response for being just that. And if you can recognize an emotional response, then you have a chance to decide how you want to handle that, whether that means indulging the emotional impulse, or channeling it into a more productive direction, or setting it aside and choosing to respond when emotions have cooled.”
And as soon as the phrases coalesced in my head, the wave of self-awareness washed through in its wake. Oh, so that’s what’s been going on! I got frustrated, then got furious, then did the work equivalent of throwing myself to the ground and kicking my heels against the floor. Perhaps I had some justification, but it was still a great big emotional hissyfit. In hindsight, this is so obvious it hurts. And perhaps it was blindingly obvious to everyone else from simply reading the original post. What can I say; I’m slow sometimes.
Once I had this kind of perspective on the situation, any questions about what to do next evaporated. No, this wasn’t worth quitting over. I adore my team, and I basically love my job, even if it can drive me crazy on occasion. If anything, I’m embarrassed I wasn’t able to find a way to handle this without throwing a hissyfit. Sigh. “I am but an egg.”
So, I’ll be heading back into the trenches on Monday, hopefully a little calmer and a little more balanced. And there’s the added benefit that equipment for my team seems to have materialized in my absence. *grin* Now I just have to figure out how to explain this to people when I return. I’m hoping I can spread the rumor that I was out of the office in a rehab clinic for sexual addiction.
After the events of my last LJ post, I sent a snail mail letter of complaint to the offending place of business.
Three days later I was surprised and delighted to get a response by e-mail. The response said, in part:
I have since conducted a meeting with all department heads at this dealership. I want you to know that I have identified the perpetrator of the act referenced in your letter and already have terminated him.
This behavior is absolutely not tolerated at our dealership. The ignorance demonstrated by this act is the very heart of so many problems in our society today.
On behalf of our company, I would like to personally apologize for this incident.
(snip)
Again, please accept my apology and rest assured that I have taken steps to ensure this never happens again.
I’m not only mollified, I’m actually pretty impressed by the response. This is a great example of how to take a customer service disaster and turn it into a positive.
Though, truth be told, I have twinges of guilt that I’ve done something that has caused someone to be fired. But then I think about the black tape again and suddenly I don’t feel very guilty.
Anyway, I thought I would share. If I’m going to harsh on a company in one post, the least I can do is dole some praise their direction when they make amends.
I just picked up my car from Sunnyvale Volkswagen where I was getting some service done. On the way home, I stopped at a gas station to fill the tank. As I walked around the car, I noticed a strip of black electrician’s tape on the rear windshield. When I removed the tape, I realized it was carefully placed to obscure the rainbow pride sticker on the inside of the rear windshield.
Unbelievable. For a minute, I thought I was back in Tennessee. Sigh.
Someone asked my recently how work was going, and I replied “I’m not sure. I may have quit.” You may have quit? How can you not know for sure? Good question.
The company where I work has reviews for all employees every year in early December. This last year, as the review date approached, my manager’s manager’s manager laid down a new rule; new hardware allocations to teams would be held back until that team had completed all of their reviews. Seemed vaguely reasonable, he has had trouble getting some managers to complete their reviews in a timely fashion in the past, so here’s a bit of a carrot-and-stick approach to motivate them. At the time I didn’t think much of it, since I’ve always been rather diligent about writing reviews. I had eleven reviews to write (a new high) and my own self-evaluation, but as expected, I got them completed well ahead of other managers in the department. No worries.
Having finished my own reviews, I started looking for this new hardware that was to be available. Imagine my frustration when I was told the rule was more complicated than I first thought; reviews for the entire department had to be completed before hardware would be disbursed. That was more than a little annoying. Why was my team being punished because some other manager couldn’t get his/her act together to write reviews? Grrr… Still, not worth raising hell over; how long could it possibly take them?
About four months later, my team still didn’t have new hardware. And the lack of hardware was beginning to become a serious issue. I had one engineer who was using a three-year-old portable to do compiles when working at home on evenings or weekends. This meant a compile that took about 15 minutes at work was taking more like two hours at home. Additionally, I knew of a team that had recently changed departments, only to be immediately equipped with new hardware. Because of the excellent job they had been doing? No, merely because they reported to a department that had completed reviews. This policy was becoming increasingly frustrating and galling. So, I started working on challenging this rule.
I started bringing this topic up with my manager at our one-on-ones. He agreed it was a foolish policy, and assured me that the numerous warnings and complaints were registered when it was first introduced.But the VP in question (hereafter know as The Frenchman) persisted. Not long after, I had a one-on-one with my manager’s manager, where I brought up the same issue. I heard much the same from him; everyone complained when The Frenchman first brought up the rule, everyone thinks it’s a stupid rule, but we’re stuck with it. While it was nice to know I wasn’t the only one being frustrated, it didn’t really help fix the situation.
You might wonder why I wasn’t more frustrated with my manager and his manager since they hadn’t finished their reviews yet. While I was mildly annoyed with them for being such slackers, I resisted badgering them for two reasons. First, I resented being used as a “stick” by The Frenchman to batter other managers into submission. This rule was one of the dumbest things I had every heard, the hallmark of a massively inept manager. The last thing I wanted to do was perpetuate the cycle by motivating his managers where he could not. The other big reason was that i knew both of the managers in question. They were good people who genuinely did care about reviews and wanted to get them done, but were swamped with other, more critical tasks. And if someone is too busy to complete an essential task, who is to blame? Their manager. The Frenchman. Sigh.
After another week of fuming and frustration, I stayed late one Friday evening and wrote a long e-mail to The Frenchman. It was a good e-mail, by my standards. I wasn’t sarcastic or smartass, and I didn’t bait him. I simply asked if he could help me understand the policy. From my vantage point, it was causing morale problems on my team and in the department, it was slowing down work, and it clearly wasn’t doing much to motivate the laggard managers. I even suggested a number of alternatives for motivating the guilty parties. For my time and effort, I got a single-line response from The Frenchman, “Talk to your manager and your manager’s manager.” I can’t tell you how frustrated this response made me. Getting blown off did not sit well.
About a week after that, I got invited to my first-ever one-on-one with my HR rep. Coincidence? As she and I chatted about how things were going in the department, I brought this issue up. She quickly agreed with me that it was a stupid policy, was causing a lot of people grief unfairly, and that she had been part of the group who had tried to discourage the rule back in December. She promised to bring it up with The frenchman again, but at this stage I wasn’t terribly optimistic.
One weeks later, and still nothing had changed. Let’s see, I had talked with my manager, my manager’s manager, The Frenchman himself (and was blown off) and with my HR rep. Okay, the next stage would be to talk to The Frenchman’s boss. Again, I stayed late on a Friday evening and carefully crafted an email to the senior VP. Again, I was very cautious to phrase the email so that it was not accusatory, not confrontational, but simply asked for help understanding the rule, since I was seeing lots of negative effects from it, and no good effects. I was pleasantly surprised to get a response in short order. While he understood and supported the general goal of the rule (reviews are important after all, and anything we can do to get them done is a good thing), he appreciated my observations about the negative effects of the rule on morale and productivity. He offered to speak with The Frenchman about finding a middle-ground. All things considered, I was very happy with this response. Finally, someone who might be able to make some headway.
About a week later, all of the managers in the department got an email from The Frenchman. He was revising the rule about reviews and hardware to be less draconian. Now, each team simply had to have their own reviews completed in order to receive hardware. For those groups that had met that goal, please contact him ASAP with their “wish list”, Yay, progress! So, I replied with great haste, explaining that I had finished all reviews and my own self evaluation several months ago and listing the hardware I needed (a fairly modest list, all things considered). Almost immediately, I got a response from The Frenchman. My team still would not be receiving hardware, because all reviews for the team had to be completed, including my own review (which my manager had not done yet).
I snapped. I walked down to my manager’s office, found he wasn’t there, left my badge in his chair and walked out of the building. That was nine days ago.
More later.
I found out I don’t even know how to tie my own shoelaces. I’ve been tying my own for quite some time now, but apparently I’ve been doing it all wrong all this time. Who knew?
I was lacing up one morning in preparation for work when this girl sweetly observed “Do you know that you’re tying your shoes wrong?” What? How could I be tying my shoes wrong? It’s not like it’s terribly complex.
“When you double knot your laces, you cross over right over left. The way you make your bow, if you double knot your laces that direction, the bows end up laying in a line pointing front and back, parallel to your shoe. If you crossed over the other direction, your bows your lay left and right, like that should.”
Wha? They do not! I should what? Like this? But, but, but, that just feels wrong.
Of course, being vaguely obsessive-compulsive, now I can’t help but think about this every time I tie my shoes. I’m trying to use it as a moment of zen mindfulness, but it’s closer to the effect achieved when asking a tennis player whether the inhale before or after they serve the ball. Not to mention that tying my knots the opposite direction feels about as natural and graceful as masturbating with the other hand.
I’m taking a professional-level massage class. Three days a week, 3.5 hours per day, for three months. 125 hours towards a license or certification, if I want to go that far. Say goodbye to free time. But I’ll enjoy it, I really will. I took two massage classes through a local community college about four years ago and I really got a lot out of it. My daily work in the computer industry is very left brain, linear, analytic, and utter passive physically. Body work, by contrast, is much more right brain, intuitive, sensing, and relatively physically active. I have really enjoyed the balance this has brought to my life in the past and I’m looking forward to regaining that.
But…
Two of the teachers that I’ve dealt with the most are far too… “new-agey” for my tastes. One has been talking about cleansing auras and how “gravity doesn’t just pull towards the earth, you know; gravity also pulls you up, lifts you to the sky”. Huh. I must have missed that day in 8th grade science class. After 20 years of body work and 10+ of teaching, she says she’s just now getting into anatomy. The other teacher is very big into talking about sacred space, and the “energy we’re building in this room”.
I dunno. I don’t want to sound like some republican. But I’m a realist, technical by training and vocation. I trust observable phenomena, I like measurable results, I like documented and verifiable assertions. My previous massage training was very solidly grounded, heavy on anatomy and kinesthetics, very no-nonsense. Which is to say, very unlike the classes I’m in right now. This side of the class is fairly challenging in that regard.
There’s another teacher who is a former engineer with PacBell. I’m hoping to corner him after class and ask how he handles that side of the profession. But I’m vaguely worried he’s going to say something like “I can tell by your aura that you’re really bothered by this. Have you considered talking to your guardian angel about this?”
While I’m on the topic, this class includes a requirement that I perform 16 massages outside of class. I’m not too comfortable asking people at work, and as sad as this might sound, I’m not too sure I know 16 people outside of work. Interested in a massage by an enthusiastic and partially trained amateur? Drop me a mail.