One of the more depressing things about living and working where I do is that it seems to be a concentrated set of examples for a phenomenon that I noticed back in Corona: A good number of young men and women in their twenties are being tragically under-utilized. Over half our department is overqualified for the position that we now hold — a couple absurdly so. College degrees and years of experience are being dedicated to jobs that could be handled by inexperienced high school grads with decent grades.

This isn’t a complaint so much as an observation.

It seems odd to make this observation at a time when our school system keeps seeming to get worse and worse and we seem to have fallen behind past generations. I don’t pretend to understand it myself, really. But it seems that out here in particular, a better education system (and a family structure more conducive to a good education, I’d wager) only serves to push down the wages of the educated.

There is a rather high concentration of phone centers in the area. Long-distance companies, satellite television, ISPs, and during the last election political polls are being done in this area. Why? Because they can find more educated people willing to work for a lot less money than they have to pay less educated people in the city. There is a surplus of well-spoken, personable individuals. And where there’s a surplus in supply there is no premium placed on it.

I find myself wondering what we can do to better utilize this talent, where it exists.

But what many of us seem to have in education, we lack in attitude. Some within the department feel this job is below them and function accordingly. I think a number of my peers (the ones that went to college) expected to land straight into the middle class. I think that the expectation is higher and so the disappointment is greater and so the performance is lesser. Curiously, there doesn’t seem to be the ambition of starting your own company as there might be. Curiouser still is that those out here that do want to start up their own business seem the least mentally equipped to do so.

Unfortunately, I come from the Ironic Generation, where irony reigns over all things, including self-interest. It seems that a lot of the smarter people just double-back on themselves, aware that the path to success is littered with failures and appreciating (and exagerrating) the odds and repercussions of failure. Though I can’t speak for others in this area, I was coming up through grade school when Ronald Reagan was president and a number of my teachers had a rather dour view of the man and presented Reagan’s America as one where you can’t succeed because the game was irreversably rigged in favor of the big corporations that fund the Big Gipper.

Maybe my experience was unique. Whatever the case, the cynicism and apathy isn’t particularly helpful. I find it particularly sad when I’m one of the more ambitious people of my generation.

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. I did end up getting the day off, though as expected I worked on Friday. I was one of only a handful here.

Clancy and I were invited to the family meal of a coworker of hers for the festivities. We weren’t sure it would work out as our host almost backtracked, saying that someone in the family objected to our presence. At that point I was just as willing to spend T-Day with the Cranston’s upstairs rather than be there because my team won an intrafamily dispute.

Ultimately we were invited and whoever it was that didn’t want us there didn’t give themselves away. Everyone was quite gracious and hospitable. The only awkwardness was really on our part during grace when they thanked the Lord for the Prophet. I can’t remember the wording, but they were definitely refering to Hinckley. But we were guests in their home and acted accordingly.

I don’t come from a particularly large family, so being there with 25 or so family members is quite chaotic in my experience. We sat at a kiddy table, but then again 2/3 of the tables were kiddy tables. The family has 39 grandchildren (not all of whom were there, obviously). We sat with a girl named Tiffany. When she told us that was her name, I couldn’t help but think to myself “Of course your name is Tiffany.” You might have to see her to know what I mean.

The kids were an interesting cross-section of middle-class America, really. You had Tiffany the former cheerleader, Lacy the studious one, and so on. They were all quite pleasant.

Afterwards we played board games. You know, Mormons know the best board games. It’s religious tradition (as I understand it, Abel or Beth can correct me here) to spend Tuesday nights actively engaged with the family (as opposed to simply watching television with). One popular thing to do is board games. I’m sure that Milton Bradley makes considerably more money per capita in Deseret than anywhere else. At the last retreat, I played some German city-building game with one of her coworkers’ husbands. Anyhow, the guy turned out to be a friend of my boss Willard and I now have a standing invitation to their boardgaming group (I haven’t taken them up on it because it’s up in Mocum, but it was a nice offer. Clancy and I ended up playing Midnight Train, a domino-based game that was easy to learn and quite a bit of fun.

I managed to win three of the five rounds, but did so poorly in the first round that I lost to Clancy, who didn’t win a single round herself.

The weekend deserves another post, but suffice it to say it was a good one.

I stayed a little late at work and talked some with Melvin the Prodigy. Melvin probably has the most brainpower of anyone at Falstaff. His work on Will’s Melvin’s App has been amazing. Since moving into QA, he’s written snap programs that have made our job easier. I may resent his getting all of the credit for a project that I initiated, but he’s earned a lot of the praise. It’s a little disconcerting to see someone so smart wasting away at Falstaff and in Mocum.

Smart though he may be, his judgment could use a little work.

I had heard that he had gotten kicked out of BYU. Simon ominously said the had officially been booted for insufficient church attendance, but there were other reasons that he would “Never be allowed to step foot on campus ever again.”

Melvin explained what happened. I’m not sure what surprised me more, that he was caught having sex with the Bishop’s daughter or that he has actually had sex. I guess I sort of knew that he wasn’t a virgin because he did date Paige before she got together with Simon and I don’t get the impression she left many men as still virgins. I guess I just discounted that because the thought is too grody for me to even think about. It’s more difficult to imagine this hyper-nerd managing to have his way with the daughter of a bishop than it is to believe that doing so would get you kicked out of a religious university.

Unsurprisingly, he hated BYU. He resented being there, having won a full-tuition-and-books scholarship to the elite Claiborne University, coincidentally located in my home city of Colosse. His parents, probably (and correctly) worried that their son was spiritually astray, would not help him take care of room and board because they felt he belonged at BYU. My middle brother’s ex-girlfriend was actually a Mormon who wanted to transfer out of BYU and in to the University of Delosa. It was quite the ordeal with her parents and they all but threatened to disown her (to hear her tell it, she struck me as being a bit on the melodramatic side).

Anyhow, Melvin wants to move to the southwestern metropolis of Los Altos. He also wants to live in Japan for a while (he speaks German and Japanese fluently). He wants to be a software engineer. He wants to be a hardware engineer. He wants to do everything. He is mentally capable of doing anything, but by wanting to do everything I fear he will end up doing nothing. Not among his many talents is the ability to balance his checkbook to the point that he can afford to move away.

So much about him, from his extraordinary intelligence to his Japan fetish to his complete lack of people skills reminds me of a lot of people that I know, none more than my former roommate Karl. Karl was in college at sixteen, out at nineteen and is finally back in. Karl is probably the smartest person that I know. They are temperamentally quite different. Karl’s problem is extraordinary arrogance while Melvin’s is an extremely apparent distinterest in anything that’s going on outside his busy head. But neither has come to terms with people around them and, more worryingly, neither of them ever seem to see the need, and having that in common I fear seals a common fate despite their differences.

Don’t get me wrong. I really like Karl. Best roommate I ever had up until Clancy. Always an interesting conversation was to be had. Sometimes I’m not sure why I was his friend, but I always was. And I’m really getting to like Melvin. I have absolutely no desire to ever spend time with him outside of work, but it’s hard not to like and admire someone capable of so much. And it’s hard in both cases to watch people capable of so much do so little.

This is a follow-up to my Plakids post and Barry’s thoughtful reply.

Somewhere in between instilling one’s values and handing a child a semi-automatic weapon is taking them on protests and rallies… but then again some might say that a July 4th rally is no better or worse than an anti-war rally (both being unquestionably correct to the person taking them to the rally)… but I view them in entirely different contexts.

It’s an interesting question, philosophically, where instilling one’s values begins and indoctrination or even brainwashing begins. Most Christians will raise their children as Christian, which some might liken to what I’m complaining about above, though I don’t find anything wrong with that as long as it has appropriate restraints. I have little patience for those that would turn out their own kids for being gay, getting pregnant, etc. On the other hand, if one believes the Bible to be the literal Truth of God and take Leviticus to view homosexuality as a sin, then it’s hard to take a squishy ‘tolerant’ view of gays.

Similarly, I don’t have a problem with taking kids to an Independence Day Parade. How different is that from an anti-war protest? Both are intuitively true to their boosters. After all, who’s “pro-war” or “Anti-America”? The answer is a lot of people, of course, and a lot of people who attend the former will view it as attempted indoctrination later in life (particularly when in college).

In some ways I think parents are somewhat duty-bound to pass on their values to the next generation. Their kids may accept or reject these values later on, but I have difficulty putting my arms around the notion that values should be determined from a blank slate from one generation to the next. Just the practical implications are horrifying. In some ways, I think, generations have been too liberal in rejecting the wisdom of their elders. It seems to me that the curse of the baby boomers has been a reluctance to acknowledge that their parents were right about some things. At war with growing up to become their parents and therefore in many cases choosing not to grow up at all.

I guess it’s somewhat the difference between passing on values and passing on worldviews. Values, such as justice, freedom, or morality, can be applied in a number of ways. Values imply questions while worldviews suppose answers. Maybe that opens up a slippery-slope back to complete moral relativism, but just as I think it’s important for children to acknowledge the wisdom of their elders, it seems to me to be important as well for them to build upon it with new ideas.

An Independence Day parade represents, to me, a celebration. Not the proclamation that America is perfect, but a day to celebrate where we are. Some years that seems harder to do than others, but it seems more important when we have a President with approval ratings in Hooverville and an opposition that’s faring little better. War protests, on the other hand, often seem less to me about building peace than going after war (and the elements that have driven us to war). The same goes for an anti-abortion protest, seeming less about celebrating life than screaming and shouting.

In both cases, I guess, the stakes are high. Thousands or tens of thousands dying in war or millions dying by abortion. But in some ways that makes it even more important to me to leave the children out of it. They will have time later to attack the weightier issues of the world. They will, hopefully or unfortunately, pick their own battles to fight. It just seems wrong to enlist them in someone else’s.

Clancy and I made a trip out to Gazelem to see a musical. Gazelem, veterans of Trumanverse may recall, is the capital city of both Deseret and the LDS church. It’s a shame to live so close to such an interesting city and yet only make our way out there once every couple of months.

Despite being a religious capital, or perhaps because of it, Gazelem is the least Mormon city in Deseret. One can only imagine the puzzlement that the founders of the city have that their religious hub has instead become a hub of other sorts. But it seems that those Deseretians that don’t want to leave the state end up migrating there. I have a particular fondness for the city. I actually prefer it to more well-known mountain western cities.

As the title suggests, Gazelem often strikes me as a city at war with itself. The alt-weekly is twice as alt as most alt-weeklies. The punks are punkier. There is even a movie built largely around this premise. I’m willing to bet that more than a few punks get a particular thrill out of the structured nature of the area. I mean, if you’re going to Rail Against The Man, there’s no bigger and more obvious Man to rebel against than the those here.

But in spite of this, there is a certain cleanliness that I find refreshing. Particularly for a factory town. Even not having a family, there’s something nice about the family-oriented nature of the place.

It’s like these two aspects of the city balance eachother out perfectly. You get the artistic daliances of liberalism without the decadence. You get the orderliness of conservatism without the its dominance.

As we looked for a place for Clancy to further her education, we actually looked briefly at a position at the University of Deseret in this fair city. We’ve since discounted it, but given my eagerness to move on to greener pasteurs, it says something that I was willing to reconsider for its capital city.

It’s not nearly as grimey as Acropolis or dusty as Los Altos.

Abel is singing the praises of the TV show Lost.

I feel like a freak whenever this show comes up in conversation. I saw the first half of the first season, and though I found it a bit addicting in an oh-gosh-what-happens-next sort of way, I couldn’t find much good to say about it other than that. I dunno… it seems kinda needlessly melodramatic at points - if there is any plot that doesn’t need melodrama to be worthwhile, it’s one about being stuck on an island with monsters and freaks. The commentary also pinpointed another problem I had… they kept saying that you know everything you need to know about a character in the first bit of their introduction (Shannon painting her nails, Boone trying and failing to help, etc). I like characters that need more explanation. Only Michael seemed particularly interesting to me. I liked Locke, too, but doesn’t everybody?

Yet everyone else I know (except Clancy, who holds it in even lower esteem) seems to absolutely love it.

If it comes about that they really start answering questions later on, I will probably watch it all on DVD, but I fear it’s going the meandering, destinationless route that X-Files went.

Not to rain on anyone’s parade. I think it’s totally awesome to be completely captured by a television show.

Out of curiosity, though, Ethan mentioned one character as being a lottery-winner. Which one was it?

Thanksgiving is roughly three days away at this point and I don’t know if I’m going to have to work on it.

In October, they changed our vacation time without exactly letting us know about it. Rather, we knew that it was going to change but it was supposed to be on Jan 1. Anyway, I set up to take some vacation at the end of the year, assuming that I had a certain amount of time off. My assumption may or may not have been erroneous, depending on whether the PTO time on my paycheck included Thanksgiving and Christmas or not.

In all honesty, it wouldn’t be the end of the world if I did have to work. Would be nice to know, though.

Bill Darden, the new CIO, arrived at Falstaff today. He seems like a real hands-on kind of guy, which could be good or not. He seemed simultaneously impressed and unimpressed with my little database application. I think he expected there to be more “there” there. I didn’t tell him that I had to really go out on a limb to go this far, but I probably should have. It was a little bit agitating to hear several people falling all over themselves to compliment Melvin’s App, though.

Darden seems like a pretty good guy, though I’ve been wrong on that impression before. He seems pretty bewildered by the way we do things. He wanted to change our prioritization process, which would be great. He said something to the effect that he could not believe that we have a system that we have and things actually get done.

Whenever someone new comes aboard or we show someone outside the department what we do, I get a renewed sense of how strange it is. It’s funny how conditioned I’ve become to it all. The fact that we really don’t know what we’re doing from one project to the next. The fact that you only learn how to do things by getting repeated FAILs whenever you do something wrong. I remember when I was first brought on… if only I’d had this blog at that point. A lot more entertaining than tots at protests. It is really quite exasperating, but it’s ten times more formal than it was when I got here. We’re close to having actual procedures and a welcome bureaucratic guard to look after policy.

“A welcome bureaucratic guard”… words I never thought I would utter…

Sometimes work is a constant search of things to listen to while you’re working. Simon has taken to the whole podcast craze. A while back he stumbled across TheChurchIsNOTTrue.com. It’s by two former members of The Brethren that have dedicated themselves to “exposing” The Church. In a testament to Simon’s intellectual honesty, he also listened to the pro-LDS Mormon Stories podcast. I actually listened to some of both as well and found it all interesting, though I’m obviously more ignorant of some of the backstory than is Simon, who was raised in The Church.

But one thing that caught my attention in the anti-LDS podcast was an episode with his daughter. He took issue with something his daughter was being taught in school about Deseret and LDS history and sent his daughter back to correct the error. I’m not going to get into what the disagreement was about, but it was a pretty minor affair. Even to the extent that he was right and the teacher wrong, it rubbed me the wrong way for him to drag his daughter in to it. He can say that the school is the one that dragged his daughter into it, and though he may be correct, it is unlikely that the lesson plan will change and if that’s his goal he should take it up with the school directly. Considering local culture, I would probably not even do that as it would likely change nothing except make my child’s life just a little more difficult as an outsider. Of course, it’s fears like that which would prevent me from raising a child in Deseret to begin with, so being that he is binded to the area I can appreciate his dilemma a little.

It reminded me a little bit of Michael Newdow, the atheist father who sued on behalf of his daughter (without the legal standing to do so) to get the pledge stripped from public schools. Honestly, I think the words “under god” ought not be in the pledge and to the extent they are, Newdow was probably technically correct. But point-of-fact he used his daughter to make a political point. It would be one thing if the daughter went home in tears and was already distraught, but that was not the case.

I feel the same way (except much more strongly) about involving kids in political events. I grouse at parents that have a little three year-old girl holding a placard supporting a position that they could not possibly understand or an eight year old who may understand it somewhat but is not aware that there is another point of view that may be equally supportable. There’s a reason that they’re not allowed to vote, because they’re not old enough to understand the issues. The children of most Republican parents will become Republicans. The same goes for Democrats. Fearly on you eye current events with the perspective you are raised to. This is true even when parents don’t talk politics. It’s not even a bad thing as it is important for parents to pass on their values to children. But the leap from “You should help your fellow man” or “You should earn what you get through work” and representing your own opinion as your child’s is not a small one - even (and especially) when they’re perfectly willing and happy to do so because they love their mommy and daddy.

A long time ago we had an OSI QA tech named Teddy Forbes. Someday I will tell the entire story, but in short Teddy was unjustifiably arrogant, condescending, smug, and lazy. Much like Golden Boy was a few months ago, he was bumped up from programming to QA because he was getting no programming done and he had somehow convinced George Welton that he would be better in a position more befitting his skill level and experience. Rewarded for his laziness and arrogance, he dug in his heels further and decided that he wasn’t going to put forth any effort until he was promoted out of RLC altogether.

It was apparent for months that he was not getting any work done. He made no effort to hide it. He volunteered for additional projects, but when he wasn’t getting those he did nothing. Usually when you say that somebody gets nothing done it’s an exaggeration, but not so with Teddy. He honestly felt that his job was beneath him and he wasn’t going to do it until they either got him out of the department or he was given a big enough raise to justify his trouble.

His boss Carl Davis got a job elsewhere. Fellow QA associate (and Carl’s younger brother) Micky Davis was promoted out of the department and other QA tech Mindy was in line for a different promotion. The last straw was when QA was moved deeper into the RLC department that he wanted to get out of. So he issued an ultimatum: If you don’t give me a promotion right now, I’m out of here. Willard, who was his boss at this point, said that he would confer with the higher ups.

My bud Simon is a rather quiet person. Until he got a bunch of his friends jobs with the company, he rarely talked to anybody except me. He’s also really good at keeping his nose to the grindstone and out of company business. He’s the last person you would expect to speak up on personnel decisions. But he was so disgusted at the possibility of Teddy getting a promotion for doing nothing, that he sent Willard an email saying something to the effect of:

Teddy either has or will issue an ultimatum that he wants out of the department or he is leaving the country. You know as well as the rest of us that Teddy is openly non-productive, abrasive with his coworkers, and providing the company very little in return for what he’s being paid. Stan Axley, on the other hand, is the hardest working person in this company. He has been denied every opportunity here because he’s so important at what he does. He’s so important because he has learned the industry backwards and forwards both on and off the job and works his tail off.

If you give Teddy a promotion while Stan lanquishes in RLC, you will be sending the message loud and clear that the way to get held back in this company is to work hard and the way to get ahead is to do absolutely nothing and flaunt it.

Repordedly, Willard printed out the email and took it to the COO’s office.

An hour later, Teddy Forbes was unemployed.

So everything has changed again.

Some of you may remember Andre, who was plucked from our department after a couple of weeks for bigger and better things on dubious merit. Well, after a couple weeks in software support, he’s been promoted again. This time I am a bit pissed off because it’s a database software development spot. I have two years of database software development experience and a college degree. Mr. Personal Stature has… a brother in the software department and a temple recommend. The only bright side to this is had I gotten the job, it would have been heartbreaking to leave it.

Meanwhile, there was briefly a spot in Legal Standards & Compliance that was open. There original thought was to put this guy in software support in there because… well, no real reason given. He’s openly declared his intention to leave when he gets his degree. He has no experience in our field beyond customer support (which is vastly different from actually making the reports and contracts that he will be requesting and checking on as an LSC officer).

Meanwhile, there is an ANG tester named Carol Goddard that has been waiting for two years for there to be an opening. She knows her stuff and has dedicated herself to the company (her husband now also works for Falstaff). The thought had occured to management that Carol has the knowledge and background to be good. Somehow their thought went from “Carol Goddard, who has been in ANG programming and ANG QA for two years really wants the position” to “Hey! Let’s give it to Carrie, who has only been an ANG for eight months. She’d probably be great!” to “Boy, it would be a bad idea to pass over the capable person with more experience for the capable person with less, so let’s just go with the BYU student in software support to be safe.”

This, too, bites me in the butt two ways. First of all, the two remaining candidates for Software Quality Control are Carrie and myself. Now it’s all but certain to go to her. Not that she is undeserving, but I was allegedly passed up last time around due to seniority and this time I will be passed up (by someone with a two-year degree to my four, less professional experience, and less time served at Falstaff) based on personal preference. I don’t care that I’m not going to SQC - in fact, if Willard comes through on the compensation numbers I gave him earlier in the week, I would turn down the opportunity - but it’s often not what happens, but why it happens.

I may sound like I have a persecution complex here, but I assure you that I do not. It’s very rare that I complain about not getting a job, a promotion, or whatever. I am not unhappy where I am in the company. I have just been particularly tired of being the wrong guy with the wrong friends and the wrong faith at the wrong time.

The second way this bites me is not a bad thing on the whole. It looks like my email a couple weeks ago had some impact. The opening in Software Support is likely going to go to Simon. That’s bad for me because it makes me all the more crucial where I am (another reason I’m not pre-emptively putting Software Quality Control on my resume). But it’s great for him because it will be a compensation increase and a better job for him. It could be good for me because it will clear up some funds within the department, making me slightly more likely to get the figure I asked for. If the job doesn’t go to Simon, it will likely to go Melvin. It’s also bad because it means that OSI QA will be even further behind and I will have less time to work on my side projects.

But giving Simon, who has four years experience on the phones, a better job is the one thing this company has done quite right. I’m really going to miss him, though. He’s by far my best friend in the department outside of Willard.

Speaking of Willard, I’m less than pleased with him as well at the moment. He has apparently really been talking Golden Boy up in an attempt to get him the heck out of our department. It’s good that he’s trying to get him out of the department, but he pushed Clem for the spot in LSC. That would be even more of a problem than we have now and has the added problem of cementing the false perception of Clem as an asset to the company and even though he didn’t get the LSC spot the asset thing makes his chances of succeeding Willard that much better. I’m extremely disappointed in Willard’s judgment on this matter. The only time I’ve been comparably disappointed is when he gave the little Napoleon the process coordinator duties in the first place. I was also hoping that Clem might be getting the axe as Willard has been talking about losing some of the department’s deadweight (more on this some other time), but that looks out of reach. Clem’s wife works in account management and his father is somebody important, so I can appreciate that Willard is in a bind. Even so, I’m quite disappointed.

A while back a couple of friends convinced me to upgrade from WinAmp 2.08 to WinAmp 2.64. They listed all the ways that it was superior and all the things 2.64 could do that 2.08 couldn’t. That’s all fine and good, I said, but will it tag my files quickly and correctly when it loads? They listed the superior traits again. I didn’t care. I just cared that 2.4 was pulling the wrong file tags (and belatedly at that). They told me that I could rewrite the tags to my files. And that I wouldn’t have the slow-load problem if I had a faster processor. It was a case study in Missing The Point.

Ethan is apparently giving Linux a test-drive. His first comment, one imagines as out of a bit of frustration, regards usability:

It’s the usability, stupid: This is where Windows wins hands-down. I installed Linux without any manuals (how’s that for gutsy?) and it took all weekend to get it right. I can slide in any version of Windows from 95 up and while it may take a relatively long time to install depending on the version and CD-ROM drive speed, it gets done in one pass and life goes on. Novell’s offering is not quite as user-friendly. And with a hefty 5-disc install package, it can get painful. Yet robust.

If you’re yawning, don’t worry, this post isn’t about Linux. It’s about usability and consumer demand.

Perhaps that most important lesson I learned in the business end of my IT degree was that the purpose of software - or any product - is that it will be used by somebody. If you want it to be used by a select few with money (in the case of luxury products) or a tech background (in the case of anything technical), that’s fine, though it will cost you in sales. If you want to make up for those sales, you’ve can’t just convince the customer to want what you have, you have to give them what they want.

As tough a run as Ethan might have had with the Linux install, it’s light-years ahead of where it used to be. There’s nothing wrong with that as it takes time for complex software to develop, but there was certainly something wrong with the attitudes of its boosters, who would respond to complaints by talking about trade-offs between quality and ease-of-use. If it didn’t have what you wanted it to have (an easy install, good graphical interface) then the solution was for you to not want it anymore. And yet they’d then complain about all the idiots still using Windows and Mac (pre-OSX, the point at which Mac became cool).

Lucky for all involved, Linux started picking up corporate sponsorship. They supplied three things: Money, credibility, and most important (in my mind) priorities. They understood what the computer geeks who used to drive Linux didn’t: most people will not readily switch from something convenient to something inconvenient, regardless of the upfront savings and the superior product. Convenience is money in the bank. If you save $200, but spend 72 hours trying to get the thing to work, unless you work for below minimum wage you are operating at a loss. The suits sent the nerds back to the drawing board, so to speak, and what happened was an extremely rapid development of a very solid interface. All they had to do was be convinced that it was important. Don’t get me wrong, they still have quite a ways to go, but I’m increasingly convinced that they’ll get there now that enough people seem convinced that “there” is a place worth going.

I ran into this myself when I was writing database applications for Wildcat. I frequently had the tendency to say that they wanted to insert the information wrong. Sometimes they did (from a relational database standpoint), but more often than not while my preference may have been more expedient, there was a premium on making it as much to their comfort as possible.

Microsoft has been pretty consistently bitten in the butt lately because they failed to listen to the consumer. While they worked on making bulkier and bulkier versions of their OS, they started losing ground on the browser marketshare when competitors started offering more security and convenience. Each version of Windows has a bulkier and less useful search function than its predecessor, and Yahoo and Google have created desktop search functions. I am not among those that expects Microsoft to take a real tumble any time soon, but they are still an object-lesson that the will-power of the industry leader is insufficient to get people to ignore what they don’t want. Microsoft attempted to prove that if they didn’t supply it, nobody needed it. What they ultimately proved was if Microsoft can’t change demand, no one can.

Back in Colosse there is a somewhat prominant megachurch pastor and TV evangelist named Ross Garrett. His attendance was usually in the five digits and he is big enough that he has the President’s ear on matters of social policy. Though I never went to any of his services, I am told he is phenomenal and the one sermon of his I’ve heard backs that up.

The family I worked for at Wildcat was full of fundamentalist Christians. Politically, my boss Cal was pure Pat Buchanan and his son-in-law Red was more George W. Bush. During the run-up to the War in Iraq, there was a difference of opinion and a sort of rivalry broke out as they each tried to convince the rest of the gang that their cause was more just in the eyes of the Lord. Being the one with the CD burner, I was caught in the middle of this struggle.

Red gave me one of Pastor Ross’s sermons that directly addressed the coming war. Garrett declared our President a Man of the L0rd that we should follow as a good shepherd, Saddam was satan incarnate, the French are a joke, Clinton was to blame for 9/11, and those that opposed the war were analogous to the Germans that looked the other way while Jews burned. But Garrett has a way of making even the ridiculous sound sublime. It makes for interesting listening, whatever one’s opinion of the above individuals and the war might be. It was sufficiently interesting to me that I kept a copy of it until it got stolen with the rest of my CDs. It wouldn’t surprise me too much if the thief heard the sermon and begame one of Mr. Garrett’s congregation. The man is that charismatic.

But back to my copy of the CD. It was an illegal one. You see, Pastor Ross charged $3.99 for every copy of his sermons. I found this to be ethically quite interesting. First, there I was making illegal copies for some rather moralistic individuals. Second, I was making illegal copies of a sermon. Isn’t the point of a sermon to be heard? If Ross Garrett is spreading the Gospel of our Lord, shouldn’t priority A-1 be for as many people to hear it as possible? I understand that the church has to raise money and pay bills, but neverminding the extravegant mohogany doors and all that jazz, isn’t the primary goal of a church to spread the Word? Isn’t the money-raising supposed to be a means towards that end? Making copies of sermons not only doesn’t cost the church any money in absolute terms (there are opportunity costs, but see above), but it provides free advertising both for the church and the Word it professes to be in the business of spreading.

I suppose “business” is the operative word.

In the past week, we’ve gotten emails at work asking us to stop:

• Calling 911 if there isn’t an emergency. The Mocum PD is getting tired of these pranks.
• Turning each other’s nameplaques upside down.
• Sending out emails from others computers offering free candy to anyone that stops by their desk.
• Drawing “adult” pictures in the guest-book.
• Poking holes in the drinking cups downstairs.
• Tossing full cups of coke into the trashcans.

I’m not sure whether it’s agitating to be working with a bunch of adult children or refreshing to have a laid back office atmosphere.

Last Friday, I faked a doctor’s appointment at the request of a coworker that apparently didn’t want our boss Willard to know that he had a job interview. Explanation here.

Let’s just say that completely and totally backfired.

The department is undergoing some restructuring, so everyone was on the lookout for unusual things. Simon, who was also in on it, was absent. Melvin, for whom I was dressing up, wore a jacket for most of the day and was pretty inconspicuous. So there I am with slacks, a tie, and suspenders. Since last time I said that I was dressing up to see the dentist, this time I decided I would be even less credible and say that I was going to see an anesthesiologist. Why would someone make an appointment with an anesthesiologist? For the same reason they’d dress up to go see the dentist.

I get there and Franky asks if I have a dentists appointment and I tell him about the anesthesiologist. That immediately garners Willard’s attention. Willard, who has always been more than tolerant of people looking for better work, pulls me in to a conference room.

“So what kind of pay increase would it take to get you to forego appointments with the dentist or anesthesiologist? Willard has just been given the authority to allocate budgets and is actually in a position to give me a raise, so this isn’t a hypothetical question anymore. Except that I didn’t actually have a job interview and now I was going to have to explain it to him. It’s not easy to put a positive spin on pretending to have a job interview when you don’t, because it sounds like you’re trying to run some sort of scam. And I can’t even tell him what’s going on because I’m doing this to cover for someone else.

I told him that I would need to explain something to him and that I would after work. He left work immediately after 5 so I didn’t get the chance to. So tomorrow I have to figure out what exactly to say and how to say it.

Just as Dante Hicks wasn’t supposed to be there that day, I wasn’t even supposed to be dressed up that day. Friday is the one day of the week when I want to dress down. Mumble-grumble.

I try to keep talk of Falstaff’s structure to a minimum, but to understand a few things underway I have to give a very brief rundown. Below is a chart of what the division looked like when I first got here. George Welton was in charge and he was the one that actually hired me. A guy by the name of Tobias Long was in charge of ANG and Willard was in charge of OSI, where I am. ANG and OSI are, as mentioned before, two groups that do the same thing using different software. OSI is the newer software and ANG is being phased out.

About the time I was shifted from being an OSI Programmer to an OSI Quality Assurance Associate, there was a major upheaval. George Welton was essentiall demoted to be the head of ANG. Tobias Long, who was the employee of the month at the time, was displaced. They tried putting him in QA, but that was correctly percieved as a step down, so he was moved in to Legal Standards and Compliance, where he is now. Carl Davis left the company and was briefly replaced by Hilton Wilde before the QA department was abolished and control was shifted to the leaders of each service. In the Interim, a guy named Gregg Elmond was named the head of LSC and shortly thereafter replaced Welton as the CIO, becoming his former boss’s boss.

Last week, everything changed again. Gregg Elmond was put back in charge of LSC and Reports and Legal Contracts (RLC, the name of the department which houses both the OSI and ANG subdepartments) was put solely in the hands of Willard Lake, my current boss and one of the heroes of this blog. Willard, who was merely a “Team Leader” when I got here, is now a full-blown Director. He now has the power and responsibility of Human Resource Management (he can now fire someone without needing it approved) and budget allocation. The latter part is going to be important in posts to come. George Welton has been shifted into LSC as a liaison between LSC and RLC. Elmond has been replaced by someone from the outside.

For review and further reference:
 
CIO - Cheif Information Officer. What a CIO is ordinarily in charge of is actually the job of our CTO. The CIO at Falstaff is in charge of making sure that the reports, legal contracts, and other documents that we do are put out in a timely and accurate manner.
 
Legal Standards & Compliance (LSC) - They’d call it “Legal” if they could, but they can’t because it’s not staffed by lawyers. Our customers believe that our legal contracts are looked over by actual lawyers, but not so. Not even paralegals, actually. Our financial reports are not looked at by accountants, either. If LSC personnel have a question, we do have a couple lawyers and an accountant on staff, though. Everything we do goes through LSC.
 
Reports & Legal Contracts (RLC) - This is the department that I work in and that Willard is in charge of. It’s a bit complicated, but we use a proprietary computer language (two, actually, one for each of the departments below) and established languages (SQL, XML, HTML) to create financial reports and legal contracts. Falstaff provides an array of services for small businesses to alleviate Human Resource needs (or software department writes in-house software, for instance), but we are the constant revenue-generator that keeps everyone else going. Through us, they can draft legal contracts without need of a lawyer. They can issue financial statements without having to hire a CPA.
 
Object-Standard Interface (OSI) - This is my department, or subdepartment technically. With OSI, companies can import and export documents in common document formats such as Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat. It has an object-oriented, graphical interface.
 
AlphaNumeric Gamma (ANG) - Gamma was the name of the original project, AlphaNumeric differentiates it from out object-interface. ANG is a DOS-based program without such ostensibly necessary things as Print Preview. The documents are harder to make, look crappier, and are much more difficult to produce for the end-user.
   
Quality Assurance (QA) and CopyCheckers (CC) - CopyCheckers have one of the worst office jobs in any company anywhere. They basically make sure that what we have matches the model that we were given. Turnover is high, morale is low. I’m currently in OSI Quality Assurance. QA technically doesn’t exist anymore as an identifier because the positions are now considered senior programmer rather than quality assurance, but the function is the same. Unlike the CopyCheckers, QA are divided between ANG and OSI.
 
Software Quality Control (SQC) - This is generally the exit point out of RLC. Instead of testing reports and documentation, you’re actually testing software. You get more money, but more than that you get out of RLC and therefore gain more respect. The SQC folks, however, don’t seem to have a significantly higher opinion of themselves than RLC folk do. I was a candidate for an SQC opening in early 2005.
 
Software Support Group (SSG) - It used to be that SSG never hired from RLC, but they’ve started. Software Support is glorified phone support, but they make a lot better money than the guy at the other end when you call the phone company to complain about your bill. It seems to me like it would be a good breading ground for account managers, but that rarely seems to happen.
 
Account Managers (AccMan) - While Software Support handles calls for low-volume clients, once you are spending a certain amount of money with us you get an account manager. Well you share one with anyone from 12 to 70 other companies, but you still get better service. Account Managers are our natural nemesis as they obtain glory by making promises on our behalf. They are the most well-paid people at the company outside of the executive council and particularly good sales managers.

Cheif Executive Officer (CEO) - Owns the company. Talks a lot.

Cheif Operations Officer (COO) - Runs the company.

“Anymore. It’s a contraction of sorts from ‘any’ and ‘more’. It means once, but no longer.”

“I asked of its intent, not its meaning.”

“It means that I never wish to see you again.”

“There’s that word again. ‘mean’.”

“Sorry. I am intent on never seeing you again.”

“I see. It has more meanings you know.”

“What does?”

“Anymore does. Have you ever heard the joke: I don’t drink anymore… but I don’t drink any less, either. It can mean an amount of matter or transition of matter not exceeding the previous amount or amount in transition.”

“Let me try this again. I mean that I don’t want to see you ‘anymore’ the same way that you told me that you don’t love me ‘anymore. ‘ Is that more clear? Do you follow, now?”

“Define ‘follow.’”

-{Explanation here}-

A few weeks back I had a job interview with Deseret Power. I haven’t heard back, so unfortunately it seems that I did not get the job. You may recall that I wore a dress shirt and tie that day. When asked why, I told everyone that I had a dentists apointment. It was such a blaringly obvious lie that I didn’t even need to nudge or wink.

Earlier this week Melvin the Prodigy was wearing a dress shirt and tie. He does that sort of thing from time-to-time because he’s weird, so I didn’t really think anything of it. I asked him, someone jokingly, if he had a dentist’s appointment.

“Doctor’s appointment, actually,” he replied. “But it got postponed.”

So I figured that he had an interview that had been postponed. Then he said that he sometimes just likes to dress up, so I figured that he might have had a doctor’s appointment that had been postponed and chosen to dress up for the heck of it. Then he asked how my dentist appointment had gone a couple weeks earlier, making me wonder if he was a candidate for the same position (I never told him what the job offer was, but Simon knew and Simon and Mel are former roommates and friends) and they were still interviewing.

I don’t think much of it until Melvin comes around, talking about needing an “excuse.” Excuse for what I did not explicitly hear, thanks to my earphones, but when I heard that word I took my headphones and joined in the conversation. He asked if we wanted to all three dress up tomorrow and have “doctor appointments” tomorrow. I initially declined because Fridays I like to dress more casually, but he seemed to really want it to happen tomorrow so I signed on.

Which tells me that he probably has an interview. I think. Maybe with Deseret Power, maybe not. I don’t know and it’s really strange to be helping someone that maybe or maybe not be covering for something for a boss that is very encouraging of his people finding better work (preferably within the company, but also outside of it).

If there is a job - even the Deseret Power job - I wish him the best of luck. His talents are probably more wasted here than mine are. But then again he pointedly did not apply for the software testing position that opened up because he plans to move down to Arizona as soon as he can.

So I have no idea what’s going on, except that now I’m in on it.

Clancy: Do you need the sink to brush?

Me: Yeah… wait, no. I need to floss first.

Clancy: You floss first?

Me: Yeah. It hurts too much if I do otherwise.

Clancy: Failing to floss shouldn’t make brushing hurt.

Me: Well brushing always hurts. It just hurts more if I haven’t flossed.

Clancy: I think you need to go see a dentist.

Me: It’s always been this way, though. Whenever I get mint-flavored toothpaste anyway.

Clancy: Well then maybe we should stop getting mint-flavored toothpaste.

Me: No. It’s good for me.

Clancy: Because it makes you hurt?

Me: Because it makes me floss.

Clancy: Oh.

Andre is like Golden Boy in many ways and yet doesn’t annoy me but a fraction of how much Golden Boy does. Andre shares Clem’s right-wing politics and strong religious backbone. Returned missionary. Married Young. Got the job in part due to family connections (his brother is a crucial software developer, Clem’s dad is a church leader). Exudes a certain confidence that Clem does, despite a lack of justification, performance-wise. Also like Clem, it became pretty apparent pretty early that he was going places. Unlike Clem, however, Andre has a solid work ethic and is constantly trying to improve. And Clem strikes me as smarmy, while Andre is just overly serious.

A couple weeks ago, I happened to overhear a disagreement between my boss Willard and his sister-department counterpart George about other managers poaching from our deparment(s). It came out that someone was being shifted elsewhere. Willard thought this was good because the experience garnered in Reports & Legal Contracts would be valuable elsewhere. George saw it as bad because if someone doesn’t work in RLC, they lose ground on the training devoted to them. But what I remember most from the conversation was tha this particular person was getting a better position not necessarily because of their experience, but because of their “personal stature.”

Personal stature? I figured at that point that it was either Clem the Good Mormon Family Man or Andre the Good Mormon Family Man. Since Clem didn’t seem to have a clue what was going on, I correctly determined that it was Andre.

Personal stature? What the heck kind of criteria is that?

The job in particular is a phone-based support position in Troubleshooting. As it happens, I have no particular desire to be moved there despite the increase in pay. What I don’t think that Todd Cummings, the head of Troubleshooting, realized was that it used to be that Troubleshooting would never, ever hire someone from RLC. The old manager was emphatic about it. It was his view that RLC was incompetent as evidenced by the fact that problems occur with our reports and contracts with regularity - neverminding that we pass through an average of 300 a week, it’s the five that are wrong that get everyone’s attention. So he passed over Simon and Paige (when she worked here) in favor of someone with half the experience from the outside. Always from the outside.

We’ve always had a great relationship with Todd, a former account manager. He even bought our department pizza once to express his appreciation. So it wasn’t that much a surprise that he broke with his predecessor’s decisions, though it was disappointing that he took Andre without even finding out who else might have more experience. But I cut Todd some slack because I believe this is his first managerial position. I started poking into it and found out that Andre found out about the opening and pre-emptively asked for the position, so it was effectively filled before a casting call was necessary.

But while I understood how it happened, in the unravelling of events it occured to me that Todd might not even know of the bad blood we had with his predecessor. He might also not know what a wealth of experience exists in our department for future hires. I decided to go out on a limb and email Willard, letting him know that there was some resentment towards the decision and that it would be good to let Todd know that we might have some people to fill future openings.

Willard took my email and had a talk with the rest of the department heads. Willard went a step further and asked that any other department that has openings notify him and give RLC personnel preferential hiring when the qualifications are in the same ballpark. Much to my surprise (and George’s dismay), the new policy is that we must be notified of all openings outside our department. We are officially the farm system, which is actually an improvement over what we were. On the whole I believe it will be a good thing. Without advancement opportunities, we’re going to lose the best people to job offers elsewhere and only the worst (because they can’t find other work) will stick around. If you’re going to hire overqualified people (as Falstaff does), you need to make it a concern to give them a chance to utilize their skills or they will do so elsewhere.

It was quite gratifying to know that my email made a difference. We’ll see how long it lasts, though.