Why They Get Away with It

We’ve all seen them or dealt with them: they cut in line, or they shoplift stuff & try to “return” it, or they scuttle our weekend plans, or they tell people who don’t agree with their politics that we hate America, hate our troops, doing their worst to project their own hate onto us (and then accuse us of being “mean” or “angry” when we fight back). Basically, those who do any of the million and one things that violate that most uncommon of all things, “common” courtesy. And they get away with it, almost all of the time.

Why? Because the rest of us let them.

On the way home from work today, I turned off the radio, pocketed the iPod, and gave this one a little thought. People act like @$$h013s for a reason, and that reason is because it works. But why does it work? Because, again, we let it work. But why do we let them get away with it? That’s a little more complex, and sometimes different situations have different answers....

• Maybe we’re feeling too unmotivated to do anything about it, or we don’t feel as strongly about the situation as the @$$h013 apparently does. A nice way of saying we’re too lazy to stand up for ourselves (sometimes, we won’t stand up for ourselves as readily as we would for someone else).


• Perhaps we’ve been conditioned, via strict parenting or parochial school or some other means, to meet the expectations of others. The @$$h013 knows (or senses) this, and make its expectations clear so the rest of us know to meet them.


• Sometimes, we’re just intimidated or shocked into inaction by the breathtaking effrontery of the @$$h013.

It’s not always enough to call the @$$h013 on its behavior; those who have been there know that brazening it out is often the best way to go. Oliver North is the perfect example — in my opinion, there’s someone who should have been tried for and convicted of treason (defined in the Constitution as “making war on the United States, or giving aid and comfort to its enemies”). He certainly gave aid & comfort to Iran, and at the time just about any American (in or out of government) would have defined Iran as an enemy. But he appeared before Congress, blamed them for all his wrongdoings, and walked away basically scot-free.

So if an @$$h013 jumps to the front of the line, and I (from a few places back) say something about it, the @$$h013 can simply ignore me. The only way I would be able to have any effect would be to walk up there and shove the @$$h013 out of line myself — becoming an @$$h013 myself, in a sense. But now I’m the bad guy, at least in the @$$h013’s eyes, because I escalated the situation into the physical realm. But the person who should have been next in line can confront the miscreant instead. That’s the person who has been directly wronged by the @$$h013’s behavior and thus can act from the high ground, so to speak.

Some Christians, and especially the neo-Pharisees that look so much like them, often natter about “taking a stand.” All too often, they end up being @$$h013s about whatever “stand” they take, forgetting the compassion without which there is nothing Christian about it (or them). But if we want a more polite society, we have to take a stand to enforce good manners, unfortunately. Mrs. Fetched, one day, saw someone park in a handicapped spot, hop out of his car, and walk toward the store. She yelled at him, “You must be mentally handicapped!” and he actually turned around and moved his car. We have often applauded cops writing tickets to people illegally parked in handicapped spots — I mean, Judas Priest, we could all use a little more exercise. One of my favorite TV news spots was one I saw while on vacation at Mom’s: the Tampa station covered a deputized wheelchair patrol, who were writing tickets to people parking in mall handicapped spots who didn’t need them. It was amusing to see the miscreants whining about how unfair it was, there were plenty of other spots, why did they have to get singled out, boo freeking hoo.

But that’s the modus operandi of the @$$h013 — nothing is their fault, they always have a good reason to believe their immediate need is more important than everyone else’s. In brief, they’ll try to project their @$$h013ry onto anyone who confronts them if we let them. I will close this with a great story that circulated in email a long time ago:

A man pushed his way to the front of a long line at an airport ticket counter, demanding that he get his boarding pass right away. “Sir,” the attendant told him, “you’ll have to wait in line with everyone else.”

“But this is important!” the line-cutter protested.

“I understand that,” the attendant replied, “but all these people have to be served, and their needs are important too. Please get in line and we’ll take care of you.”

The line-cutter flushed. “Do you know who I am!?” he barked.

The attendant picked up the pager microphone and told the entire airport, “Attention, please. We have a passenger here who does not know who he is! If anyone can identify him, please come to the XXX ticket counter.” That was enough to embarrass the @$$h013, who slunk to the back of the line, while the rest of the passengers clapped and cheered the attendant.

Cool Program – Journler

I stumbled across Journler in a MacDevCenter post today, and it took about 10 minutes to get me hooked — at last, I can write posts offline and send them directly to Blogger when I’m ready. I really need to send Phil a check.

I do have a couple of nits that I hope he’ll fix:

• import of an existing blog (with comments?)


• blockquote style


• Blogger titles; option to save as draft


• smart quotes

I have a feeling I’ll be spending a lot of time inside this application.

How much is enough?

A recent post from The Homeless Guy prompted me to think about this while I was in front of my blog for a change. He wrote, “I think I've finally learned to be content with whatever I have, or don't have. Thats a big step for me, as I think it would be for any homeless person.” HG, that’s a big step for anyone. In my book, you’re ahead of 99% of the population, homeless or no.

That kind of contentment is not only hard to gain, I can testify to how easily it can be lost —and not always by your own doing. Before FAR Manor, we lived in a double-wide about a half mile from here (the rental property I’ve mentioned from time to time). Sure, it wasn’t a huge place, but we added onto it and the total climate-controlled area was nearly 1800 square feet. Yes, it was cluttered. Yes, it was a little cramped in the kids’ rooms. But the arfing thing was totally paid off, it was secluded to an extent that most people east of the Mississippi can’t even fathom (1/4 mile to the nearest neighbor), and we were barely keeping up with the bills we had at the time. To say I was content there may have been a stretch — the chicken houses and the in-laws were constant irritations then as now — but I was content to live there. Mrs. Fetched would complain that we needed a bigger house, and I would point out (rightly so, IMO) that we didn’t need more house, we needed less stuff. The Boy and I put up a nice deck out back that I could get to from the bedroom; I would take my coffee out there in the morning, and sit out there on pleasant evenings and irritate the squirrels by imitating their territorial calls.

But I digress. It seems like most people have a broken “enough” switch — look at Bill Gates; he has more money than... probably any random million people or so, but it’s only recently that he’s been able to stop. The one thing I would have wanted to say to him if I ever met him: how much is enough? Even Mrs. Fetched would have a hard time spending $30 billion — I believe she could do it, but it would take her a lot of effort.

Maybe somebody was able to ask him that question, and he listened. I think most of us would be better off if we considered that question, and came up with our own answer.

Programmers. Argh (2.0)

Seagull: someone who makes a lot of noise, craps all over everything, then flies away.

It’s been a while since the last one of these, before I started Tales from FAR Manor in fact.

One of my recurring work projects is a four-volume set of software firmware documentation — one volume each for features, provisioning (i.e. installation and configuration), management, and troubleshooting. These are the “wonk” documents, as opposed to the consumer documents. I depend pretty heavily on the developers (i.e. programmers) to get me the information that I need to put into these documents, and their usual modus operandi is to wait until the last minute and drop a ton of changes on me.

On occasion, some of the things they want just, as Mrs. Fetched says, “get all over me.” In Programmers. Argh. 1.0, it was a request to add text to the manual, verbatim, that contained a howling grammatical error. This one is a bit more complicated, and started a couple of months ago with this request:

We *really* need section numbers in the documentation. I am asked *all the time* to explain how certain features work. I would like to just reference the correct guide and section number for the answer. With the way the document is structured, I have to go into the document and find a *string* to reference that can be searched on to find the information.

Now you have to remember that this is a programmer manager asking for section numbers. I haven’t used section numbers in customer documentation in nearly 20 years, and 98% of what I’ve done was for technically-oriented audiences. Not to mention that section numbers really wouldn’t solve his problem: the manual needs a better index, and he can use page numbers to refer them to the right place. I need to do a better job of indexing, I’ll be the first to admit, but the thing that bothers me is that they didn’t even think to include me in the discussion, or even forward any kind of post-mortem to me. I like getting comments about my work, so I can make it better (and if you, yes you, are wondering whether I want comments on my blog, the answer is yes).

Now it was my turn to make a mistake: I quickly wrote a response, saying pretty much what I just wrote, and Notes (once again) came up b0rk3n. I saved the reply in my Drafts folder and promptly forgot about it until it came up again.

Fast-forward to last week. Here come the comments, courtesy of the guy who pulled 1.0 on me, and guess what was at the top of the list? I started looking for the original request and found the response in Drafts. Cursing Notes and the IT department that forces us to use it, I updated the reply and sent it off. The bit-munchers were copying everything to my new boss, which only irked me more — not only do I suspect them of deliberately waiting to drop all their comments at the last minute so I’ll be the one late and officially holding up the release (giving them more time to fix their problems), they are trying to make me look bad to my boss. I sent him the general history of the project, including the stuff that has gone on before, and suggested he contact previous managers for confirmation.

He dug in, I dug in. You can’t out-flame a writer, and he probably knew that: all he had to do was stonewall until it was time for him to leave on two weeks vacation. But he may come back to find the company short one tech writer. One of my co-workers helped to diffuse the situation somewhat, arranging (and refereeing) a meeting between me and this guy’s manager (who kicked off this particular request). We compromised: I agreed to put chapter numbers and titles in the headers, especially since I’d planned to do it in the first place, and he agreed to start copying me on customer squawks that involved documentation. But I’m still pretty cheesed about the whole thing.

Time to find my resume and start emailing, I guess.

There's a sign...

... on the road ahead... and it says: “JOB BURNOUT - KEEP GOING.”

The question is: where do I turn off?

Half-right

A while back, I wrote that Ken Lay (and Jeff Skilling) would stay out of jail because Bush-league would write them pardons on his way out the door. As it turned out, I was half-right — Ken Lay will never spend a day in jail — but I got the reason wrong.

That’s really too bad, and I truly do feel bad for Mrs. Lay. I’d hoped that Ken Lay would live for a long time... behind bars, of course. Skilling may have been just as involved, but he was lesser known and he might slip by with a pardon, if Bush-league remembers to give him one.

But this pretty much ends the Tale of Enron. Skilling’s appeal and eventual sentencing (and possible pardon) really only rates an afterword or appendix.

Future boom regions

I'm no sociologist, but that’s never stopped me from pontificating.

In a world of change, one constant is that there is always a boom region — a place where people move en masse for whatever reason is in vogue at the moment. California comes to mind: the 1849 gold rush, the Dust Bowl migrations during the Great Depression, and the dot-boom of the late 1990s (that became the dot-bomb of 2001) are probably three of the better-known examples. Southerners moved to Detroit and other midwestern locales through the 1940s and 1950s to work in the auto factories, and midwesterners returned the favor during the Sun Belt migration of the 1970s and 1980s. And until last year, it seemed like everyone was moving to Florida — although now many Floridians no longer think the warm winters are compensation enough for a summer of hurricanes, and are moving to high ground (often around here).

Predicting where and when the next booms will happen is a guessing game, but I see trends pointing to two places in particular during the next 25 years:

Michigan (and the entire Great Lakes region)
One word: water. Many southwestern (and even southeastern) boom areas are straining to get enough water for drinking, irrigation, and industry. Eventually, they’ll need water more than warm weather — and what with global warming, Michigan’s winters are getting milder (I remember when snow cover all winter was normal, now it comes and goes). Naturally, the dry states will resist the trend, expecting the Great Lakes region to just give them water. In fact, their first attempt went down in flames some years ago. There will be a nasty political fight over water sooner or later, but many people will give up waiting and move their homes and businesses to a place where water supplies are reliable.

Europe
An excellent infrastructure coupled with a declining population makes Europe another likely destination, although there are some factors that may limit or kill the boom a-borning: lingering tribalism (the EU notwithstanding) and a little too much government for some peoples’ tastes are the two major ones. But with fewer Europeans, property values will begin declining and businesses (and governments) will start offering incentives for skilled foreigners to immigrate, and many people (especially liberal and moderate Americans, fed up with their own government) will take the plunge.

Of course, I could be totally wrong — things can change overnight and the next boom could be in Thailand or Namibia, for all I know. You, dear readers, might have your own ideas about future boom regions — leave a comment or a link if you’re inclined.

Argh! My eyes!

Yesterday, I came in from doing something or other, and walked down the hall toward my bedroom. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement as I passed M.A.E.’s room, and made the mistake of looking. There she was, in her underwear, putting something on. Good thing she was sideways to me, because she wears thong bottoms. Yeesh.

I went eyes forward as quickly as possible and continued down the hall, hearing her door slam behind me. I’m still trying to decide whether I should scrub my eyeballs with iodine or bleach.

Uncle John

Family Man posts a lot of great stories; today’s was about The Hay Field. It reminded me of a story about Uncle John, a colorful character who is the genesis of many family stories. Uncle John was the oldest of my dad’s brothers, has been a farmer all his life, and... shall we say, has a bit of a temper. I actually saw him go toe-to-toe with an uncooperative horse once, and the horse decided to cooperate.

But Family Man wrote about his experiences in a hay field, so the first story is one my dad told me about a hay field. He and Uncle John were getting ready to bale some hay — it was cut and dry and ready to go. So just as they started, it started to rain (and as Family Man said, that’s not good news). So Uncle John raised his face and his fist to the sky and started cussing the rain — and it stopped. He cussed it right back into the sky.

In his later years, he developed diabetes and lost circulation in his legs. They amputated one leg, and then the other some time later. So he’s laying in the hospital bed after the second amputation and a male nurse came in to get some information. He asked about name, address, date of birth, then said, “How tall are you?”

“I don’t know,” Uncle John replied. “The doctor didn’t tell me how much he cut off.” The nurse got so flustered he walked out. He gets around pretty well with prosthetics and a walker — he needs a little help getting on and off his tractor, but he’s fine once he’s in the seat.

His farm is 105 acres in southwest Michigan, in an area that’s turned into a bedroom community for several of the nearby cities, and the subdivisions have grown up all around him. He just keeps on doing his thing. Every once in a while, developers come by and ask him if he’s willing to sell his place; his response usually boils down to, “Get your @!&$##& #$!@!! the $&#@&! off my property!”

Old farmers can be among the most stubborn folks on God’s green earth.

Friday Night Cinema

You get paid on Friday... next Friday... and you don’t have time to drag yourself to the theater anyway.

Tonight’s selection is a horror flick... or it would be horrifying if you could only stop laughing at the soundtrack. Go watch it and see I’m right.

Soundtrack: Jonathan Coulton

Video/machinima: Mike “Spiff” Booth, a program manager at Adobe. If he manages FrameMaker, I understand why the thing has been languishing lately: he’s too busy making silly machinima to pay attention to his product. :-P j/k!!!

We have network

I have to hand it to Alltel — the new DSL box came in today, the most optimistic end of the 3–5 days the support guy said it would take. The CD had been shoved into the box at an odd angle and came out warped, but it wasn’t difficult to locate the disk that came with the old DSL box and use that instead.

With the DSL working again, I quickly realized that the Airport hub had taken a hit in the Ethernet port as well. I had just enough time to get to Office Max before they closed and grabbed a D-Link router. It didn’t take long to set it up and get it talking to the DSL box, and it has a built-in 4-port Ethernet hub so I took the Netgear hub out.

Daughter Dearest is ecstatic, and I’m pretty happy too because I can work at home tomorrow.

Work stuff

Some brief scenes of work lately....

I got moved to a different cube last week, after being told I wasn’t moving, which in turn came after I was told to get packing. This was the first time I’ve moved cubes where it wasn’t part of a group move: instead of grabbing boxes off a stack and told to pack up everything, a Facilities person did 90% of the job for me. He moved all the stuff that wasn’t on my desk (taking drawers or the entire piece of furniture), and all I had to do was clear the desk and set up my phones and computer at the new cube.

The new cube is an improvement, although it would have been hard to find a worse cube than the one I just left after several years: near a main traffic area, across from the training room (the trainer’s voice carries and he leaves the door open, not to mention the equipment noise), as far away from windows as possible. The new cube is near a window, and there’s a little chit-chat and equipment noise, but nothing my headphones can’t drown out.

One problem: the keyboard support was broken. I emailed the Facilities guy asking for a replacement, preferably with a mouse surface. So yesterday I came in to find a new platform on the floor and a Ryobi 18V drill in its case. When the assistant didn’t show up after an hour, I took drill in hand and did the five-minute transplant job myself. It’s a great stand; enough room to use it for lunch (after moving the keyboard).

Last night, I sat down and made a list of all the things I’d like to do given the time, or see happen in general. I might post it later, but none of the work-related items had anything to do with my current employment. Scary.

What The Boy hasn’t learned

That could actually be the subject of a voluminous blog in its own right, but for now we’ll limit it to one thing: he hasn’t learned that “magic” words only work on machinery.

I came home from work yesterday, to exactly what I expected: no supper. Fine, whatever, I had some last photos to shoot for a work thing and had picked up two MOVs to fix a surge protector. While retrieving a tripod for the photos, Mrs. Fetched rolled in. I didn’t say anything, just went into the outbuilding and shot the photos.

I needed a Phillips screwdriver to get into the surge protector (one of those nice old Isobar models that have screws holding the case together — not something you want to throw away if you can salvage it), and didn’t have it in the outbuilding. I came back out to find Mrs. Fetched dumping gas into her Barge and the detached garage opened up.

“We need to make sure the windows in the garage don’t open,” she told me. “The Boy said he’s going to get his guitars and amps tomorrow, and he’s not getting them until he pays us for the phone bill.” Neither one of us said the obvious: he probably wanted to sell them to buy drugs. I forgot to mention: last weekend, he admitted his friend borrowed his phone and pretty much stayed on it constantly, running up $600 worth of airtime (putting the girlies to shame). Mrs. Fetched demanded his phone, he threw a tantrum and left, and Mrs. Fetched had his number suspended first thing Monday. So with that in mind, I went back into the outbuilding and finished what I was doing (the new order: I’m not suspending anything for anybody in this free-range insane asylum). Then I picked up a two-by-four laying around, measured out the right length, and fed it to the table saw.

Just in time: as I dropped the last board into place, I heard an unfamiliar car pull up. I quickly locked the garage, shut off the lights, and closed the last door just as The Boy stepped out.

“Is the garage unlocked?” he asked.

“No. Why?”

“I’m going to get my guitar and amp.”

“No you’re not. Not until you pay us the $600 for the phone.”

“F— that. Open the garage or I’ll bust a window.”

“Go right ahead if you want to get arrested,” I said. Mrs. Fetched came back outside, phone in hand, and heard the last exchange. “I’ll call the law!” she yelled, waving the phone.

The Boy walked right up to the door, perhaps he pushed it to see if it hadn’t latched, but decided not to call our (non-)bluff. “F— you! F— you!” he started screaming, walking back to the car (a wise move on his part... if he’d wanted a fight, in my frame of mind I’d have given him plenty more than he wanted).

“F— you right back,” I replied, with the appropriate gesture, as he got back in the car. “You think you’re going to just order us around and blow off your obligations to us, you’re wrong.” The girl at the wheel of this silver Grand Am (with an airbrushed “Kindra” plate on the front) waved at us a couple of times. Mrs. Fetched saw it as more provocation (anything she doesn’t understand is a provocation); I saw it as the futile gesture of someone trying to be helpful and wandering into the middle of something she didn’t want to be a part of.

He rolled down his window and screamed from the safety of the car, “You sell my stuff and I’ll sue you! I’ll sue you!”

“Nobody said anything about selling it,” Mrs. Fetched said with a minimum of heat. “You can have it as soon as we get the money for the phone bill.” He spat something about getting the money from his friend and they drove off. His last gesture was what old-timers would call a “V for Victory” sign — I’m not sure how kids interpret it.

Reruns of the Summer of Discontent are the last thing I need right now. Or maybe I need them as something to direct all my own anger toward. The less time I spend at FAR Manor for now, the better.

Weekend Wash-out

I should have known better than to think I was going to spend Saturday at the resort. My first hint should have been the phone starting to ring about 7:30 on Saturday morning — and I’ve let the in-laws know (several times, with various amounts of strength) that they should leave us alone until 9. I didn’t mind taking a turn at the chicken houses in the morning — Daughter Dearest had a headache and I would be enjoying the rest of the afternoon. Before we left, I threw some bread into the machine on the dough cycle, to take care of when we got back.

But as we were wrapping up, her dad came by and asked if I could help with putting an extension on the standpipe in his pond, to raise it up another foot or so. I really didn’t want to, but I’d told him some time back that I would help with that so I was pretty much stuck. Besides, I figured I could still light out right after we finished, and spend the rest of the afternoon and early evening taking a well-deserved mini-break. This pipe thing didn’t turn out so well: he had the extension bolted inside a much larger pipe; the pond water would flow up from underneath and out the extension, but the larger pipe stuck up a few more inches so debris wouldn’t have a chance to clog the outflow. Great idea on paper, but it added about 50 pounds to the weight. To make a long story short, the boat drifted backwards as I was trying to left the assembly into place and the whole thing ended up at the bottom of the pond. I was a lot more upset about it than he was; he said he’d get his grapple and try to pull it out later.

So it was time for Mrs. Fetched to deliver the coup de grace. She handed me a faucet repair kit and told me I had to fix the kitchen faucet at the rental place. $#¡+!!! Like these people are freeking paying rent anyway, more than once a whenever it won’t impact their cigarette budget. I wrote off the day and went to fix the sink.

“Oh, you can go tomorrow after church,” she reassured me. “Hey, we’ll all go after church.” Riiiiiiiiight. Like it wasn’t going to rain. I went ahead and took the photos for work that I’d figured to take Sunday, and then we all went bowling (which was actually an excuse for Daughter Dearest to meet up with a kid that she’d talked to online). The bowling outing went OK, although we would have been better off quitting after two games. The kid’s Dad, it turns out, knows a lot of the same local folks Mrs. Fetched does; we ended up yakking all evening nearly to midnight. While we were out, the rain started rolling in and lightning nailed the DSL box that I thought I’d unplugged.

Sunday morning dawned as expected: threatening. The sky pretty much opened up on us on the way to church; my little Civic hydroplaned a couple of times but I kept the car straight and the speed down, getting there without incident. It pretty much rained hard all through the service, when it wasn’t pouring even harder. We had no idea how hard until we started heading home.

Less than a mile from home, the SUV in front of us stopped and turned around. Once he cleared his bulky self out of the way, we saw why: a tree down across the road. Two ways to go around, and the shorter way involves a dirt road for a stretch. I turned around and headed back, flashing my lights at oncoming cars to warn them of impending unhappiness ahead.

All the creeks were flooding over; one usually scenic pasture on a sheep farm was especially wetter than normal. Crossing a large creek, it looked scary even though the water was still well below the road... and this is what the crossing looked like several hours later. The next creek was even scarier at that time; it was over the road a couple of inches. In one of the less intelligent moves I’ve made since moving up here in the first place, I put it in low gear and crossed it (without incident). There was another tree down just before the driveway, but the sheriff’s office had some prisoners clearing it and they finished shortly enough.

“Resort delayed is resort denied,” I told Mrs. Fetched.
“Hm. Well, you can go next weekend.”
Like I believe she meant it. July 4 weekend? The place will be packed even if I was allowed away from FAR Manor. Even now, it doesn’t do to dwell on it much... anger doesn’t solve anything for me.

Rain gauges were full, so we got at least six inches of rain in the space of a few hours — after six weeks of nearly no rain at all. Making up a rain deficit is one thing, making it up all at once is another.

But the nightmare was only beginning. Whatever wind there was in the storm blew copious amounts of rain into two of the chicken houses... unless it just went under the foundation and came up from below. Oh, and we had to shovel our driveway out of the road. Already in “I just don’t care anymore” mode, I basically shut off my brain and did whatever I was told until it was time to leave.

I might feel differently about things if I felt like I was getting support through the week — things like supper waiting when I got home from work (which pretty much makes everything else possible around here), things either clean or nobody griping about them not being clean, or if I thought anyone had any respect for projects that I would like to work on from time to time. But the way things are, everyone seems to think that I’m obligated to them from 7a.m. Saturday morning to 11p.m. Sunday night. There’s not going to be a repeat. One way or the other.

The Lord Provideth

Mrs. Fetched told me yesterday (Thursday) that she was thinking about taking the kids up to a resort where we have a membership, about an hour from FAR Manor. Naturally, I wouldn’t be able to go along, since I would be working. So I opined that I might go on Saturday. Telegraphing weekend plans to Mrs. Fetched can be a mistake some times; she has a habit of torpedoing them.

So we were wrapping up VBS this evening, and she caught me and told me what I least wanted to hear: it was our turn to clean the church, and we would have to do that before I could go anywhere tomorrow.

But The Lord Provideth: some of the other people were taking down decorations and starting to clean, so not only was it happening tonight, we were going to have a lot of help! A couple of the young teenage females even took over vacuuming the sanctuary, which is usually what I do when we clean. Naturally, I had to go over a couple of the spots they missed, and they didn't know I usually run the vacuum over the pews (which are upholstered)... but they caught on fast.

Looks like I’ll get a little poolside break tomorrow after all... unless something else blows up.

Agreement

This afternoon, as I was pounding on work stuff & Mrs. Fetched was doing the same with her own, she told me: “I can’t wait for this week to be over with.”

I said, “I’ve felt that way since Tuesday.”

Grasping the nettle

Two projects blew up on me at work this week. That wouldn’t usually be a major problem — happens all the time — except that I got volunteered to run the games for Vacation Bible School at church this week. Then someone got the brilliant idea to start VBS at 6:30 instead of 7:00, which gave me no time to run home and get prepared... but now it’s out of my hands; I had to pass off the games to my (quite capable) assistant.

A while back, I mentioned wanting to move a desk into the bedroom, and expecting Mrs. Fetched to deprecate it as she usually does any idea of mine. But now it’s too hot to work on the porch (summers have attitude in the south, and the first day of summer had it in spades here), and everyone else was at VBS, so I just went ahead and did it. Then I ate some leftovers and got to work.

The family came in a bit after 9:00. Mrs. Fetched walked in, saw my setup, and said, “Good thing you cleaned that area up. That looks good there.” I was stunned but did a decent job of not showing it.

Just goes to show... Mrs. Fetched is completely predictable if you run an idea by her. But if you just do it, she’s completely random.

That didn’t last long...

Daughter Dearest has already bailed from her first job, after just over a week. Some b***h of a customer got snippy with her, which upset her, and her boss decided DD couldn’t handle the stress. She still has the second job with our friends from church, who have an e-learning business, so she’s not completely back to nesting in her room with the laptop. She (and Mrs. Fetched) met with her erstwhile boss today, who hasn’t changed her mind but will be willing to re-hire her once she has more waitressing experience.

So I think she’s going to apply at Fire Mountain. With any luck, we’ll be able to talk them into putting her on the same shift as M.A.E. so we only have to do one drop-off and pick-up.

I know the answer, but I can’t say...

Well, I can’t say it on a public mailing list using my real name, anyway. But it’s too funny not to share.

The following conversation took place on a mailing list I subscribe to. The text in red is from a documentation manager who works for a competitor; text in blue is someone who is trying to be helpful.

Anyone with experience converting from AuthorIT to FrameMaker 7.2?

Did you have any significant problems? What sort of prep work did you do before converting?

Why are you interested in converting from AuthorIT to FrameMaker? I ask because I have just been working in a place where AuthorIT is being considered as a replacement for FrameMaker - is AuthorIT not delivering the goods?

My company uses FrameMaker and may go to XmetaL eventually. We acquired a company that outsourced the doc to a turn-key vendor that does not even store files on our corporate server, let alone use our standard templates, our file management system, and so on. This creates all sorts of problems, including putting our intellectual property at risk, severely limiting our control of resourcing projects, and so on.

At this point, I should mention that I have a pretty good idea of which company it is that got acquired: one I used to work for about ten years ago, in fact — although the outsourcing bit must have happened recently. And so the thread continues:

Thanks! That sort of outsourcing takes a lot of courage, or faith in your supplier, or stupidity!

You can probably guess what my vote would be. I was happy for the employees of this particular ex-corporation to see them get acquired; that’s a place in dire need of a culture enema. In fact, once the enema has been administered, I would consider working for them again.

I thought about jumping in on a thread on one of the other mailing lists that the competitor posted to, where my email address isn’t tied to the company I work for, but I don’t have anything to say that they probably aren’t aware of already — there isn’t a trivially easy migration path. You have to do what engineers call a “double-pump,” convert to an intermediate format that both programs understand, then convert that to your target format. If they are using structured FrameMaker, they could create AuthorIT templates to export XML in a format that their FrameMaker setup could use directly. Otherwise, they should export to Word format, using the same style names as their FrameMaker templates, and expect some cleanup work.

A question that will be harder to answer, but the manager is going to have to ask soon, is “Do we clear the decks of any ongoing work and do this conversion all at once, or convert each document as it’s needed?” There are advantages and trade-offs either way. Doing it all at once means you might miss some deadlines (which tend to slip on their own anyway), and you may end up converting documents that you won’t need later on, but you also don’t need to keep a rather expensive AuthorIT database around. Doing it piecemeal is probably easier, but you have to keep the old rig around (unless you just export everything to the intermediate format and do the second conversion later) and the goal line is hard to see (how do you know when you’re done?).

Such are the decisions a manager has to make. I suppose if I were the one making the decision, I would export everything to the intermediate format, and archive anything not being actively maintained. Then I could decommission the AuthorIT rig and “insource” some writers to import the active projects and get to work.

The frustration of forgetting

The usual pre-visitor cleaning frenzy is well under way at FAR Manor. Let me be frank here: I usually don’t bother doing any cleaning until Mrs. Fetched gets into a lather about it, because it’s a losing battle. The 80/20 rule applies here: 80% of the clutter is caused by 20% of the people (one, and that’s Mrs. Fetched). She’ll come in and drop whatever she’s carrying — groceries, mail, tools, church stuff — on the most convenient horizontal surface because she’s too tired or too busy to deal with it right away. Naturally, she denies it. (I suppose I would too.)

The real problem arises when I try to do (or suggest) something that might be something approaching a solution. Any time I’ve done anything, she immediately shoots it down with no consideration of discussion. Fool that I am, I keep forgetting this and need a reminder from time to time.

So during the cleanup, a couple of dusty paper trays (in/out boxes) turned up. Hey, I thought, we both end up with magazines and miscellaneous bits of paper strewn around the house — why not put these to use as a way to collect those things we haven’t dealt with yet? Since there was plenty of “test data” on the kitchen table and the built-in desk next to it, I laid the trays side-by-side on the desk and started sorting stuff into them. I guess The Boy gets his ability to construct elaborate fantasy worlds from me — I had the idea all laid out in my mind. Anything we weren’t ready to sort through would go in our inboxes; we could put stuff in each others’ boxes as long as we didn’t care what happened to it next. No more clutter all over the place, right?

WRONG.

Mrs. Fetched took one look at it and immediately said, “That can’t go there. I’m putting the bread box there.” No curiosity about what I had in mind, no consideration given to the idea — and when I tried to explain, it immediately became open hostility. It was my idea, it was a solution, therefore it had to die and quickly. I tipped the contents of her box onto the desk, picked up the few things of mine and dropped them in the bedroom, then took the trays to the outbuilding where they might see some use.

Mrs. Fetched isn’t very big on solutions, she much prefers to complain about the problems instead. This has been demonstrated over and over again, and it just doesn’t seem to stick in my mind no matter how often it’s been hammered in (probably because I can’t even imagine such illogical thinking). She would rather complain about mice in the house than let the cats in, for example. I suppose it would be OK if my entire home life consisted of following her around and cleaning up after her, but that’s too high a price to pay. In the last couple of years, I have begun to understand why some men will go from work to a bar for several hours — there’s no supper (but lots of complaints) waiting at home, why would anyone rush to go home to that?

I then considered setting up a small desk in our bedroom where I can keep my things organized, but I know exactly how that would play out. First, there would be resistance to bringing a desk in — it would make it harder to reach the blinds, it would block the window, it would block the vent, it doesn’t look right, etc. etc. etc. Even if by some miracle I brought the desk in without her disapproval, it would rapidly become useless to me. She has no concept of “my” space: it’s her house, her kitchen, her furniture... I just pay for everything.

Proof: In the house we lived in before, she suggested I take over a room that had been added on and was connected to the rest of the house through an opening where the dining room window used to be and a door that opened on the porch. I had the place all set up the way I wanted it... and then anything she didn’t want to deal with, she started throwing in that room. I’d clean it up and she would throw more stuff in. Before too long, I was having a hard time keeping enough floor space clear to walk from one end to the other. After a while, I gave up — then she complained how messy it looked. I told her to stop throwing her crap in there and she escalated hostilities. I’ve never been one for confrontation, unless pushed to the wall, and that works against me (but some years back, every time she complained about clutter, I would automatically respond “Stop buying more crap at Wal-Mart all the time then,” until she actually stopped). At FAR Manor, the reason my outbuilding hasn’t been treated likewise is because it’s not part of the house — it’s more convenient for her to drop things on a table than walk 30 yards (round-trip).

So I guess I’ll have to start spending more time out there. I have enough air conditioning, but need better heat in the winter. I also need to get Ethernet or wireless run out there somehow (wireless might be easier if I can get a signal through the sheet-metal siding), and get a small refrigerator where I can keep some beer, then I’ll be home free. Daughter Dearest said about this plan, “and we’ll never see you again.” Well, maybe, at least until Mrs. Fetched is ready to do more about problems than complain.