I grew up (professionally) in the Dark Ages1 when employees set their own performance goals for the year and enshrined them in a “P.D.P.”
Liz Arden and I talked about that a little this morning. “I don’t make resolutions,” she said.
Neither do I. It struck me as odd since both of us are hardwired to achieve goals. We Floridians did make a few resolutions for next year, though:
Make sure the body you bury at sea doesn’t walk ashore.
Do not eat giant African snail mucus.
Do not wear an underwire bra to a federal detention center.
Learn CPR. And carry a sidearm.
A Tampa alligator snatched a Jack Russell terrier from its owner. The man shot at the gator which let go of the dog. The catatonic pet wasn’t breathing until the man revived it with CPR. Hope he had some extra pooper scooper bags. Resolved:teach Cardio Pet Resuscitation.
A Miami attorney was stopped from visiting her client because the underwire set off the metal detector. Guards wouldn’t let her in after she took it off because she was braless! Resolved:find a better class of jailers.
A Hialeah man convinced his followers to drink the juices of smuggled African snails as part of a religious “healing” ceremony. Several became ill, lost weight, and develop lumpy bellies. Resolved:find a new weight loss ceremony.
A couple who paid $8 for a box of bones at a yard sale found their Halloween decoration was a real dead guy. And a family buried a deceased relative at sea; the body resurfaced at a Fort Lauderdale beach. Broward Sheriff’s deputies are conferring with the Coast Guard to figure out what charges they can bring. Resolved:pass a new law about cutting the feet off relatives and selling them in garage sales.
“In business we fill out the form at the beginning of the period and file it,” Liz said. “Spend the year doing our jobs. At review time, we sit down, pull out the form, and look for all the ways what we really did met the stuff we wrote down.”
And that’s why resolutions don’t work.
288 years ago, more than 100 years after 102 English reprobates and separatists set foot in the New World, Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards prescribed reading his 70 resolutions at least once each and every week. I hope he was able to do so; it’s the right prescription for keeping them.
Happy New Year, everyone!
1 “Management by Objectives is a process of defining objectives within an organization so that management and employees agree to the objectives and understand what they are in the organization…
“The essence of MBO is participative goal setting, choosing course of actions and decision making. An important part of the MBO is the measurement and the comparison of the employees actual performance with the standards set.”
Teenage clutter is one of the common threads in the Zits comic strip.
I have raised two (now-thankfully-former) teenagers, so I relate to the clutter but I don’t remember my own teenaged years quite the same way.
See, back in the days that marked my own adolescence, when we walked three miles through the waist deep snow to school, uphill each way, we didn’t have that much stuff.
My parents spent their teen years in the Great Depression and it defined them — and me — in many ways. I have reused and repaired and recycled if I couldn’t reuse or repair far longer than Kermit the (green) Frog. I hate to throw anything away that might be somehow handy later. And I don’t buy materiel without due … consideration. As a kid, they (and later I) wanted for little. We eventually had a teevee. We had an end room full of books. We had a boat. We had a garden and two cars. We ate and dressed as well as anyone else I knew. I still wear khaki slacks and blue cotton button down oxford shirts, of course. I didn’t get a used dog until I was nearly 50; nothing but new dogs before that. And I gave away our only used cat.
But we didn’t have a lot of stuff.
Oh, sure, we had washing machine and a dryer in the kitchen because that’s where my mom wanted them. And two vacuum cleaners, one for upstairs and one for downstairs.
It surprised me to learn that the U.S. had a small boom in middle-class home ownership before World War II. The post-war boom apparently built on that, and on the pent-up demand from the Depression. The war stopped the fledgling consumerism and it took several years for the factories to gear back up, years that many returning G.I.s spent in college. Consumers started finding stuff to buy again in the 1950s. My folks bought an brand new 1950 Ford convertible. The television didn’t come until 1955. Got the “little boat,” a 21-foot cabin cruiser, in 1957.
But we didn’t have a lot of stuff.
Oh, sure, I had a Rawlings glove but it lived in the “toy box” on the back porch. There was no plethora of cleats and Air Jordans and walking shoes and running shoes and everyday sneaks and splashing-around-getting-mucky sneaks and sandals and Crocs. I had a pair of Keds. In the closet.
We had two phones in the house. I never had one in my room.
The 80s brought us the boombox. I truly have never owned one although I did borrow my dad’s transistor radio to carry to school in fifth grade.
Motorola sold the first cellphone in 1984. I didn’t have one. Or a computer, or a smart phone, or a TV in my room
We didn’t have a lot of stuff mostly because there wasn’t nearly as much stuff to have.
Today is Labor Day. Tomorrow, September 7, would have been my parents’ 64th wedding anniversary. Friday, September 10, would have been my father’s 91st birthday. I always mix those two dates up and when I don’t, I think I do.
As it was, they had been married nearly 56 years when my mom died. It was my father’s second marriage, her first. His first wife, my mom’s college roommate, divorced him after Uncle Sam invited him to spend a few years away from her starting in 1941.
Milestones. FreeDictionary.com‘s first definition is “A stone marker set up on a roadside to indicate the distance in miles from a given point.” Number two is “an important event, as in a person’s career, the history of a nation, or the advancement of knowledge in a field; a turning point.”
The Birth of a Nation. Married 50 years. Everybody Must Get Stoned. “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Old enough to … vote. Labor Day.
When President Grover Cleveland called out the army and U.S. Marshals to end the 1894 Pullman Strike, 13 strikers died and 57 were wounded. Congress, fearing further conflict, made Labor Day a national holiday by rushing bill into law just six days after the end of the strike.
That milestone is now celebrated as a national day off work.
In Northfield, Vermont, the Labor Day Weekend Celebration is a three-day community event with live entertainment, local and international foods, games of luck and skill, displays and booths, and more, all in Depot Square. The Last Fling of Summer in Montgomery, Vermont, is a free day of arts and crafts vendors, yard sales, delicious food, and live music in the Montgomery Village Recreational Field. Thunder Road has the Bond Auto Labor Day Classic in which Barre’s Nick Sweet will defend his home turf in this ACT Late Model Tour points race.
The Key West Brewfest has more than 50 different kinds of beers and micro-brews plus food and reggae rhythms on tap at this Southernmost Hotel Collection and Key West Rotary Club event.
My folks had the usual issues getting past their milestones; spending more than 50 years in close proximity guarantees that. They also had what I’ve called the most important asset any relationship can have: conversation.
I have met few other people who talked to each other as much as Mary and Chan Harper. They loved road trips and had premium sound systems in their cars, the better to listen to operas. Didn’t turn the radios on much, though. Too busy talking. My dad liked to watch CNBC and putter on the computer. I don’t think he got as many of the news stories (unless CNBC kept repeating them) and I know he was slow on the computer. Too busy talking.
I never have any trouble remembering any other anniversaries. Maybe I’ve been too busy talking.
In the words of my favorite philosopher, Jimmy Buffett, “Some of its magic; some of its tragic, but Ive had a good life all the way.”
Google denied selling out network neutrality with Verizon earlier this month but the ballistic blogosphere bucked that.
You may recall that Google and Verizon unveiled a plan on August 9 that would prohibit wireline operators from discriminating on the open Internet but proposed a second, closed (mobile) Internet where they could do just that.
Turns out that BP’s Tony Hayward has assumed the helm of the joint GOOG-VZ P.R. department.
[Important Note: The following column appeared under this same title in the Burlington Free Press in March of 1997.]
“Hang on. I dropped the phone.”
Like the toilet, the telephone is the household appliance that must perform faithfully every time you need to make a call.
Once upon a time the telephone came one style (Durable Dial), one color (Bell Black). One monopoly served everyone. Local calls were unlimited, operators assisted, phone bills were reasonable, and the phones stood up to the occasional gambol on the kitchen floor.
Then, with a swipe of the judicial pen, “Ma Bell” split into AT&T and all the regional Baby Bells like New England Bell. Phone bills soared. We all had to buy cheap phones that bounce poorly. Trust in the phone company went down the toilet.
Heard at a Vermont IGA, “Their minutes last 53 seconds.”
[Historical Note: New England Bell spawned NYNEX which in turn merged with Bell Atlantic and spawned Verizon which sold out to Fairpoint which went bankrupt. See how that works?]
Thanks to the Vermont Telecommunications Agreement, NYNEX gave us measured service. In phone company parlance, measured service counts each instant of local phone use. Then they bill us. NYNEX sold measured service to Vermonters by saying it controls our local telephone costs.
Sure. The old way, we paid $19.63 every month.
Measured service means we can’t “pay any more that $26.67.” If you manage not to use their minimum daily allowance, you’ll pay only $19.52.
Here’s the scoop. NYNEX “gives” us a $6.95 worth of message units each month. Every message unit amounts to one minute on the phone. More or less. When you use more message units, NYNEX bills you. NYNEX charges you for each whole minute’s worth if you use even a single second. Even if you get a wrong number. If I use less than my allotment, does NYNEX give me a discount? No. They just make more profit.
Who counts those minutes? The electric company puts their meters where we can see them. When I pump gasoline into my car, the readout tells me how much in thousandths of gallons. I’ve always wondered why I need that kind of precision.
I installed a phone timer to record every outgoing call; the log shows whether the call is peak or off-peak. The local usage charge on my bill has never come within 10% of the total shown in the log. Since NYNEX apparently cannot count, I guess I do need the gas pump kind of precision in my phone bill. Wasn’t NYNEX forced to return a $15 million excess profit?
Maybe that’s why they needed an 8.2% rate increase [then].
Measured service is such a delicious oxymoron. It positions its purveyors perfectly in a world where decamping lovers practice “cruel kindness,” a computer crash can cause a “partial shutdown” in your life, and “call answering” leads to a heartfelt conversation with a computer voice.
Almost everyone has a phone story. Your state Public Service Board wants to hear yours. Speak up at public hearings; write to them in your state capitol. If one or two of us sing loud and long, it might sound like a song from Woodstock. If a hundred of us serenade them, they’ll think it’s a movement. And if they get letters by the mailbag, who knows, NYNEX might get some competition. With more than one dial tone provider looking for your business, Vermonters might get nicer phone bills.
There is another way. A NYNEX representative told me she has had measured service for a few years, and it doesn’t cost her any extra.
“How so?” I asked.
“I don’t make any calls.”
Back to Verizon and Google. The Internet will be open but not the mobile Internet.
The big players say it is to protect bandwidth.
Some of the talking heads agree and note it is to protect (phone company) revenue.
The Media and Democracy Coalition, for example, noted that this have-have not system “could further widen the digital divide, particularly for those that rely primarily or exclusively on wireless Internet access, as do many individuals in rural areas, and many low-income consumers. It may also create a barrier to entry by independent creators, entrepreneurs and startups.”
That’s true but there is a bigger issue.
Remember the NYNEX message units? Verizon does. You pay them every time you dial your cellular phone.
Bank of America will test a system that bills consumers for purchases they make with their mobile phones. The initial mobile payments test, beginning in New York City next month, includes BP gas stations, New York City taxis, Burger King and McDonald’s restaurants, Home Depot, and the Walgreen’s and CVS drug store chains.
Mobile payments. Phone company collectors with baseball bats.
Mobile payments are especially popular in Asia and Europe where consumer use smartphones to pay for goods and services. The billing uses SMS-based transactions, “direct mobile billing,” mobile web payments (WAP), or the fastest-growing contactless NFC (Near Field Communication). Most purchases are for digital goods (music and videos, ebooks, online games, and the like), bus fares or parking meters, and burgers.
Experts say the market for mobile payments will exceed $600 billion globally in less than three years. That’s almost as much as the AIG bailout.
And you think Google and Verizon aren’t slobbering to skim that?
Remember the former Soviet republic of Moldova? About the same time in 1997 that I reported the NYNEX fleecing of Vermonters, that tiny country gave us the Moldovan horse, a Trojan horse that hijacked customers’ modems and dialed up Eastern Europe, at tens or hundreds or even a thousand dollars per minute. Victims ended up with phone bills that cost more than their cars.
AT&T’s Fraud Control Group got involved. The FTC investigated intensively. And while that was going on the phone company mafia kept collecting on those thousand-dollar phone bills.
Are these the peeps you want in charge of your Visa bill?
Google says their mobile Internet plan is “compromising not selling out.”
Uh huh. And NYNEX said the check was in the mail and they won’t … well, you know the rest.
Breaking News: Verizon Wireless will pay about $90 million to 15 million cellphone customers who were wrongly charged in one of the largest-ever refunds by a telecommunications company.
[Important Note: The following column appeared under this same title in the Burlington Free Press in March of 1997.]
“Hang on. I dropped the phone.”
Like the toilet, the telephone is the household appliance that must perform faithfully every time you need to make a call.
Once upon a time the telephone came one style (Durable Dial), one color (Bell Black). One monopoly served everyone. Local calls were unlimited, operators assisted, phone bills were reasonable, and the phones stood up to the occasional gambol on the kitchen floor.
Then, with a swipe of the judicial pen, “Ma Bell” split into AT&T and all the regional Baby Bells like New England Bell. Phone bills soared. We all had to buy cheap phones that bounce poorly. Trust in the phone company went down the toilet.
Heard at a Vermont IGA, “Their minutes last 53 seconds.”
[Historical Note: New England Bell spawned NYNEX which in turn merged with Bell Atlantic and spawned Verizon which sold out to Fairpoint which went bankrupt. See how that works?]
Thanks to the Vermont Telecommunications Agreement, NYNEX gave us measured service. In phone company parlance, measured service counts each instant of local phone use. Then they bill us. NYNEX sold measured service to Vermonters by saying it controls our local telephone costs.
Sure. The old way, we paid $19.63 every month.
Measured service means we can’t “pay any more that $26.67.” If you manage not to use their minimum daily allowance, you’ll pay only $19.52.
Here’s the scoop. NYNEX “gives” us a $6.95 worth of message units each month. Every message unit amounts to one minute on the phone. More or less. When you use more message units, NYNEX bills you. NYNEX charges you for each whole minute’s worth if you use even a single second. Even if you get a wrong number. If I use less than my allotment, does NYNEX give me a discount? No. They just make more profit.
Who counts those minutes? The electric company puts their meters where we can see them. When I pump gasoline into my car, the readout tells me how much in thousandths of gallons. I’ve always wondered why I need that kind of precision.
I installed a phone timer to record every outgoing call; the log shows whether the call is peak or off-peak. The local usage charge on my bill has never come within 10% of the total shown in the log. Since NYNEX apparently cannot count, I guess I do need the gas pump kind of precision in my phone bill. Wasn’t NYNEX forced to return a $15 million excess profit?
Maybe that’s why they needed an 8.2% rate increase [then].
Measured service is such a delicious oxymoron. It positions its purveyors perfectly in a world where decamping lovers practice “cruel kindness,” a computer crash can cause a “partial shutdown” in your life, and “call answering” leads to a heartfelt conversation with a computer voice.
Almost everyone has a phone story. Your state Public Service Board wants to hear yours. Speak up at public hearings; write to them in your state capitol. If one or two of us sing loud and long, it might sound like a song from Woodstock. If a hundred of us serenade them, they’ll think it’s a movement. And if they get letters by the mailbag, who knows, NYNEX might get some competition. With more than one dial tone provider looking for your business, Vermonters might get nicer phone bills.
There is another way. A NYNEX representative told me she has had measured service for a few years, and it doesn’t cost her any extra.
“How so?” I asked.
“I don’t make any calls.”
Breaking News: Verizon Wireless will pay about $90 million to 15 million cellphone customers who were wrongly charged in one of the largest-ever refunds by a telecommunications company.
