Away From the Web

Difficult

We are up in the North Carolina mountains now where the temps are cool (around 72 or so) and the views all are of the million-dollar kind. But we have resisted installing broadband at our place here because (1) it wasn’t available until recently, and (2) we didn’t want to pay for it when we weren’t here.

But now the broadband provider has seasonal programs for those of us not bearing the -5 degree daily highs in winter and we are installing it tomorrow. Meanwhile I sit in the local Internet cafe typing this out. But tomorrow I can do it from the comfort of my own living room.  Makes the place complete.

Update

The cable guy came today and managed to leave us with less than what we had at the beginning of the day. No cable and no internet. After an hour or so on the phone we have the basic cable we began the day with but we do have Internet (yeah)!

We have managed to leave Florida just as they are suffering through afternoon deluges. Back when I was in undergraduate school in Tampa (this was some time ago) afternoon tropical downpours were everyday events. But as the climate slowly changes these afternoon thunderstorms have disappeared.  But now they are back, I’m happy to say. I’m sure it has something to do with our weather oscillations but I haven’t researched it at all yet.

The Rain

BY ROBERT CREELEY

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent-
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

Saturday–”The Folly of Fools is Deception”

Off

My first vacation since beginning my new job. Of course, I was off for 10 months before starting this job so I can’t say I haven’t had a few days off over the last year.

212 Degrees 

The president of the college where I work has launched an email campaign titled 212 Degrees. Nothing to introduce this campaign, no statement of purpose, no meeting in the auditorium to get it started. Rather, one day we have no emails titled 212 Degrees and the next day we did.  And on and on since then.

So, what is this thing?

Looking through Internet resources I find it to be one of these management motivation schemes created by a couple of entrepreneurs and sold to a bunch of corporate management types as a, you know, pre-packaged  program guaranteed to empower employees without having to really do anything. Here is an example of their copy:

 

One extra degree can make all the difference

At 211 degrees, water is hot. At 212 degrees, it boils.
And with boiling water, comes steam. And with steam, you can power a train.

One extra degree = Exponential results

Join hundreds of thousands of people around the world now being inspired by 212 to give more 
and, ultimately, enjoy more.

 

Well, this doesn’t seem so bad. All good things: try harder and get better results.

What Else?

There’s stuff to buy, naturally. Books and decals for a certain price

Books for $12.95, the video for $200, pullovers for $39, gear bags for $23.  Takes gear to get to 212 degrees. If you are not sure of where to go with this you can call Tina at this merchandising site    for “tips on creating a 212 culture.”

Gosh, is that all it takes — a couple of tips from a salesperson?  

The Upshot

Evidently our campus president attended one of these merchandising events and decided to change our culture by sending out emails.  They consist of a couple of personal words and then a quote or two. Anchoring the emails is this:

“We can do no great things — only small things with great love.”

Mother Theresa

So what is wrong with this? First of all, this isn’t how Mother Teresa spells her name. OK. anything else?  Searching legitimate Teresa sites the quote attributed to Mother Teresa can’t be found. I found that many of the quotes the president uses in her 212 degree emails can’t be found in the books of those quoted.

Conclusion

Succumbing to the promise of effortless culture climate change, our president thinks casual and careless emails can do what legions of experts usually cannot pull off — effectively changing the culture of an organization. Even worse, her message transmits precisely the opposite message she intended. She spends a couple of minutes trolling the internet for quotes that seem apt but actually are bogus. She passes them off as quotes from writers she knows. But she knows them not at all since she misattributes quotes from them. 

So she touts going the extra mile to make a difference (only one extra degree to get the water boiling) but takes the easiest path possible to distribute this message.

While I am only tangentially associated with this institution I find this effort wan  and terribly dishonest.  Didn’t expect that in an academic institution.

 

Proverbs 14:8

The wisdom of the prudent is to give thought to their ways, 
       but the folly of fools is deception.

 

Monday

No Rain

Rain all around the area but not here. Looking at the last 12 months of temps and I find 7 months above normal. Almost one degree above normal. Great that we get warmer and warmer.

 

What I’m Reading

 I’ve been reading Rick Atkinson’s series on WWII. The first is An Army at Dawn, describing in great detail (704 pages) the invasion of North Africa. Read this book and you will gain a real understanding of the complexity, chaos, and tragedy of war. We think of WWII as a noble effort supported by a uniformly positively public. A flawless and well-executed war.

Can’t be farther from the truth. Atkinson describes campaigns designed by planners unfamiliar with the units they were deploying using faulty intelligence. Over time the planners and soldiers learned from their mistakes but before they learned tens of thousands of troops died.  Atkinson’s analysis is clear-cut and fast-moving.

 The second book in the series is The Day of Battle, describing the invasion of Italy.  Once again, in fascinating detail (816 pages) Atkinson faithfully follows the Allies across the Mediterranean from Tunisia to Sicily and onto the continent. He is especially good at assessing the decisions made by generals and describing how their personalities affected their confidence or skepticism about battle campaigns. 

The Italian campaign’s outcome was never certain; in fact, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their military advisers engaged in heated debate about whether an invasion of the so-called soft underbelly of Europe was even a good idea. But once under way, the commitment to liberate Italy from the Nazis never wavered, despite the agonizingly high price. The battles at Salerno, Anzio, and Monte Cassino were particularly difficult and lethal, yet as the months passed, the Allied forces continued to drive the Germans up the Italian peninsula. Led by General Mark Clark, American officers and soldiers became increasingly determined and proficient. Atkinson tells us how they began the war untested and uncertain but emerged by the Spring of 1944 as battle-hardened and effective commanders.

Atkinson skewers the idealistic view of war that Nemerov mocks in the poem below.

The War In The Air by Howard Nemerov

For a saving grace, we didn’t see our dead,
Who rarely bothered coming home to die
But simply stayed away out there
In the clean war, the war in the air.

Seldom the ghosts come back bearing their tales
Of hitting the earth, the incompressible sea,
But stayed up there in the relative wind,
Shades fading in the mind,

Who had no graves but only epitaphs
Where never so many spoke for never so few:
Per ardua, said the partisans of Mars,
Per aspera, to the stars.

That was the good war, the war we won
As if there was no death, for goodness’s sake.
With the help of the losers we left out there
In the air, in the empty air.

                 ——–from The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov.

 

 

Weekend Over

Weekends, Concept Of

I have to say that while I was just plain retired I began to lose the concept of weekends. Of course, some cultures never really had it. I recently saw this on the Online Bangalore website:

Although not new, the concept of weekend as perceived and practised in Western countries started acquiring popularity and practical force only recently in Bangalore. Weekend here means the whole of Saturday and Sunday for some or half of Saturday and Sunday for some others, but it does clearly mean Sunday for almost everyone. 

I was losing even the concept of Sunday. But now that I have returned to a more regular schedule I once again feel the limits of weekends. I have mixed feelings, I guess, about that. But I like at least the rhythm of work and like that I do it less than full-time.

More later.

Back Again, Again

Gone But Have Returned

Well, I’ve been away for some time but now I’m back. I’ve been working 32 hours each week at my part-time job but it is feeling a little full-timeish recently. For instance, yesterday I worked 13 hours to solve a scheduling problem.  I was scheduled to supervise GED testing in the morning but had inadvertently also been scheduled to work with new immigrants (from Burma, Colombia, Vietnam, Haiti, Ukraine, Puerto Rico, Iraq, Syria, and other places) in the evening. No one else qualified to work with the new immigrants was available so I volunteered to work late. This is part-time????

A Job Commonplace

 My original intent in this little job was to offer a service to underserved populations, get back into the work-world a bit, and encounter a slice of life otherwise invisible to those of us living in middle-class suburbs.

Certainly I’ve seen quite a slice of life not experienced before. Every day I talk to immigrants and Americans at the bottom end of the education ladder. In the past I’ve worked and studied with educational elites. If they are the sun of the academic world then I’m now working in the shadows — with dropouts, screw-ups, the vastly underemployed, and, of course, immigrants just taking their first steps in a new world of unfamiliar customs, a strange language, and without the support of nearby family.

 They come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes they are attractive and young like this mother and daughter used by Catholic Charities to raise money. But more often they are people who have lived hard lives full of physical labor yielding little in the way of wealth. 

 

But they want to adopt American values and culture, they want to embrace the entrepreneurial spirit of America, they want to be part of America and everything positive it stands for.  

I don’t recognize in these people the political attacks made by politicians and cable news talking heads. They want to work hard for success, they want to speak English so they can join the American economic mainstream, they want their children to grow up as Americans. Their attitudes are a tonic to feeling bad about American prospects.

The Impact of Underemployment

If only that was all there was to this job.  As a part-time job with no benefits it does not attract workers in the middle of building a life-long career. Rather, it attracts intelligent people who are in between jobs or have reached a dead end of some kind in their work or people like me — occasional workers with no career aspirations. Underemployment – the employment of workers with high skill levels in low-wage jobs that do not require such abilities –  tends to lead to workers feeling undervalued and often bored.  A bad combination. In the case of the college where I work now these feelings led one worker to needle another worker to the point she complained about a hostile work environment.  The man doing the needling thought I had some part in her complaint (I didn’t, actually) and now he glares hostilely at me most days as well as not talking to me.

I can live with this I suppose but the atmosphere is ridiculously tense and leads me to wonder why we all just can’t get along, to reference another person at odds with his work environment.

Maybe I’ll just go back to being retired.

This poem by Bob Hicok has reflects what seems to be the attitude of several people I work with now.

After working sixty hours again for what reason

The best job I had was moving a stone
from one side of the road to the other.
This required a permit which required
a bribe. The bribe took all my salary.
Yet because I hadn’t finished the job
I had no salary, and to pay the bribe
I took a job moving the stone
the other way. Because the official
wanted his bribe, he gave me a permit
for the second job. When I pointed out
that the work would be best completed
if I did nothing, he complimented
my brain and wrote a letter
to my employer suggesting promotion
on stationery bearing the wings
of a raptor spread in flight
over a mountain smaller than the bird.
My boss, fearing my intelligence,
paid me to sleep on the sofa
and take lunch with the official
who required a bribe to keep anything
from being done. When I told my parents,
they wrote my brother to come home
from university to be slapped
on the back of the head. Dutifully,
he arrived and bowed to receive
his instruction, at which point
sense entered his body and he asked
what I could do by way of a job.
I pointed out there were stones
everywhere trying not to move,
all it took was a little gumption
to be the man who didn’t move them.
It was harder to explain the intricacies
of not obtaining a permit to not
do this. Just yesterday he got up
at dawn and shaved, as if the lack
of hair on his face has anything
to do with the appearance of food
on an empty table.

        ————— from Insomnia Diary, by Bob Hicok