Category Archives: Random Access

Random Access, the op-ed.

Off With Their Heads?

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Fifth-grade teacher Rigoberto Ruelas committed suicide in Los Angeles in September.

The California teacher was found dead in a ravine after the Los Angeles Times released a database that ranked teachers by name. Mr. Ruelas, whom colleagues said was “so dedicated that he spent much of his personal time outside school working with students,” was listed as “less effective than average” based on how his students did on standardized tests.

Less effective than average.

My party-wall neighbor just had the plumber in. Earnie Alexander had to dig a tunnel under the house to repair a broken sewer pipe. I’m hoping that Earnie is more effective than average. Otherwise my feet are likely to get wet. And stinky.

Less effective than average.

Our friend Tom “Parle-vous” Parlett is a nuclear engineer who worked (note the past tense) for one of the few remaining Fortune 500 manufacturers of power plants. A few years ago, looking for a way to reduce payroll, his employer implemented forced ranking. The intense yearly evaluations identified Parle-vous as “less effective than average.” That bottom 10 percent set him up for a buyout which he took.

I don’t like forced ranking because it decimates morale. But the first half of the equation, the intense yearly evaluations to measure achievement, tells us whether or not we are doing out jobs. (Parle-vous is now the top performer in a different organization.)

We don’t have a big pot of money to offer [teachers] to sign off on performance contracts, Monroe County School Board Chair John Dick told Anne O’Bannon this morning on the Morning Mix. Means there will be no way to tell if we are doing our jobs in the Keys.

Less effective than average.

A Broward County history teacher wrote to the Miami Herald ombudsman about the suicide. “Ruelas will not be the only teacher casualty if … attacks [in the news media] continue,” that teacher wrote. “…You will see that the coverage has been overwhelmingly pro ‘reform,’ with teachers getting much criticism. There has been very little defense of teachers.”

Huh.

A teacher commits suicide because it suddenly became public that he maybe wasn’t as good at what he did as his press kit said he was.

Toyota advertises that, nationwide, 80% of all their cars sold in the last 12 years are still on the road (of course that means that about 19,000,000 cars have been abandoned, crushed, or sunk in lakes around Chicago). Nationwide, 7,000 students drop out every day and only about 70 percent of students graduate from high school with a regular high school diploma (of course that means 16,800,000 of today’s students will end up on the dole). Nationwide, Toyota’s recall troubles over gas pedals and other sudden acceleration glitches standing at at least 5.3 million vehicles across much of their product line (of course, that means 85 percent of recent Toyotas with probably won’t kill their passengers but 15 percent could).

Less effective than average.

Congress very nearly demanded Akio Toyoda commit hara-kiri.

Teachers demanded raises.

Black and Blue Friday

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My 25 year old dryer and 15 year old washer were still running when Sears ran its Black Friday ad last year. Brand new, low water use, high efficiency, front loading, stackable washer-dryer pair for $579.98. Regular retail (does anyone pay regular retail for appliances?) price on those particular models was $1,399.98. “At least four per store” the ad said.

Key West has a very small store and it is an hour away. I figured four pairs would be the most they ever had.

Hmmm. I wonder if it is four pairs or four appliances? I didn’t want to get up at 0:dark:30 and drive 55 miles for something I didn’t absolutely need right then.

Why should I have expected any different? I called the store and the appliance department manager treated me like an annoyance.

I want a nap.

After the short wait programmed into the auto-attendant phone system, “Darrell” answered. I asked if he had the advertised washer and dryer in stock.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m in the shipping department.”

I asked the expected question about why a call to the major appliance department would be shunted to the shipping department.

“Because I’m the appliance manager but all my people are on the floor with customers.” Ahh, Sears.

Oddly, I was a customer.

Darrell spent about 10 minutes refusing to help me and asking for my phone number so “someone could call me back.” I do not respond well to stonewalling so I spent my part of those 10 minutes demanding that he treat me like a customer and give me the info I wanted. I got nowhere but I did leave my number with him.

He also refused to let me speak to his supervisor; he then refused to let me speak to the store manager when I asked to be transferred.

“You know,” I said near the end of the conversation, “if you had simply looked up whether you had the product in stock instead of being a dickweed (actually I probably said ‘instead of jerking me around’), you would have had a happy customer in me and would have had time to take care of two or even three other customers.”

I called the store back to speak to the Sears store manager. I had to leave my number on voice mail. I’m still waiting for that call back.

I need a nap.

OTOH, a saleslady named Ann did call me 45 minutes later.

“We had four pairs in stock,” she said. “I know we sold two right after the store opened but I think there are still two left.

Ann explained that they were giving customers a ticket that let them buy the appliances and that the sale rules said they could not do a telephone sale. Sort of no tickee no shirty, and you must be present to win. She put me on hold to check.

They did have two pairs left; Ann advised driving down right then. Key West is an hour from my little house but I loaded up and did just that.

The store sold one more pair while I was on the road. I got the last pair.

Ann tried twice to sell me a new pigtail and vent but I demurred. I wondered why anyone would buy either, since most retail appliances today are replacements.

“Our installers will not use an existing cord,” she said citing liability. “If yours is even a little bit frayed and your house burns, we would buy you a new house.”

Loading was interesting. The dryer was the first box out the door. The stock boy rocked his hand truck back steeply and laid the bottom front edge of on the tailgate. He rocked the hand truck up a little and we lifted it right onto the tailgate.

Oops.

The box was two-three inches taller than my truck cap. No problem. He popped it over on its side and we pushed it to the front of the bed. The second stock boy brought the washer; the two of them laid it down on its side and popped it in without issue.

So here’s the bottom line. Ann at Sears was very nice, very helpful and deserves the little bit of commission they paid her. I got the washer and dryer I wanted. My 25 year old dryer and 15 year old washer experienced some … issues over the winter so I put the new ones in service and moved the old ones elsewhere. And I didn’t have to take Harvest Gold. Or Plum.

This year was different.

My UPS has been talking back lately so I’m thinking it’s time. Electronics don’t last as long here as in gentler climes. Office Depot had an APC 1500 VA UPS on sale for half price. No shipping. Big batteried UPSes are expensive to ship. I set the alarm for 5:40. Ayem.

Pink and purple sunrise and me without a camera phone. It was not red enough to take warning but I did watch. Not a sight I recognized.

Got to Office Depot about 6:20 and was dumbfounded to see the parking lot full. As in seriously full. Had to drive past many cars to find a parking space.

I did (eventually and with the help of a personal shopper) find and buy the UPS I wanted. Long lines at the checkout, mostly because the cashiers were hard selling extended warranties. Everyone was helpful and very nice. No Android Tablets. None of my other gimmes.

I also looked at a Ryobi cordless tool bundle in the Home Depot flier and didn’t even bother going there. Ditto the wrapping paper at Walgreens.

I thought long and hard about the wrapping paper. Then I thought long and hard about the lines. Inertia and the fact that I don’t actually use wrapping paper, particularly here, won out. About the Ryobi, if this year is anything like last year, the store was sold out in 10-15 minutes. It is the new 19.2 volt model which matches nothing I have. Drill, light, circular saw, vacuum. I would use the drill and light but can’t see much use for the circular saw or vacuum.

Back to the UPS. The Office Depot parking lot was full but, after writing that, I realized that “full” in a small town is a whole lot different than “full” in Miami or New York. Here, there were three or four or even five peeps at each of the three or four open registers. I’m really really really glad I didn’t find anything I couldn’t live without at Brandsmart up in the United States.

Giving Thanks

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Thanksgiving is a patriotic holiday, sandwiched as it is between Veterans Day and the official beginning of the Christmas Shopping season

www.freeclipartnow.com/holidays/thanksgiving-day/turkeys/turkey-dinner.jpg.htmlI’ll come back to the sandwiches.

Everyone not living under a rock knows that Thanksgiving Day is America’s primary pagan festival, celebrated to show thanks, gratitude, and love to the gods for a bountiful harvest on a New England day that fields have been barren for weeks and are now mostly covered in snow. This holiday has moved away from its religious roots and is now a time to participate in the largest single slaughter of fowl in the universe.

Here in the States, we mark Thanksgiving Day on the fourth Thursday of November each year. Our Canadian neighbors celebrated it six weeks earlier, on the second Monday in October. The snow falls earlier in Canada.

Our collective memory of the holiday is sort of wrong. In American as Pumpkin Pie, Plimoth Plantation tells us that

Prior to the mid-1800s, Thanksgiving had nothing to do with the 1621 harvest celebration, Pilgrims or Native People. Thanksgiving started as a traditional New England holiday that celebrated family and community. It descended from Puritan days of fasting and festive rejoicing. The governor of each colony or state declared a day of thanksgiving each autumn, to give thanks for general blessings. As New Englanders moved west in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, they took their holiday with them. After the harvest, governors across the country proclaimed individual Thanksgivings, and families traveled back to their original homes for family reunions, church services and large meals.

I expect to have a “traditional” Thanksgiving meal this year, whether I cook it myownself or drive over to the Cracked Conch with Joe and Willie. We’ll have a small turkey with bread (not oyster, thank you very much) stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and gravy, cole slaw, candied yams, green bean casserole, and pumpkin pie for dessert.

That basic menu has remained unchanged for a couple hundred years but that’s all the older our menu is. The three-day pig-out of 1621 at Plymouth (the “First Thanksgiving”) may have had ducks or geese, but yes they had no potatoes, and bananas were equally scarce. No apples. And no pumpkin pie. Likely no turkeys who were wily even then.

I don’t care. I shall have pah.

Geeks are hoping that upcoming Android release 4.7 will be “Pumpkin Pie” and will also be ready by Thursday.

I AM™ a lucky boy lucky. My island house value is down so my future property taxes may be lower. My family is scattered across a couple thousand miles but we are all speaking to each other and happily anticipating a blessed event. The brakes work in my truck and that cost less than I expected. I have walls full of my mom’s art, and mine, and a host of other artists I like from Corliss Blakely and Clyde Butcher to Natalie LaRocque-Bouchard and Thomas Sully. Next week, I shall have white meat turkey sandwiches slathered with mayonnaise on good crunchy sourdough bread for lunch every day of the week. Most important, I have been blessed by a perfect time here in my little house.

I’m disappointed, though. People decorate for Halloween and for Armistice or Remembrance Day and for Christmas. Very few put big inflatable turkeys in their yards for this week.

I wonder why?


www.wilsoninfo.com/thanksgiving.shtml

Cleanroom

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Teenage clutter is one of the common threads in the Zits comic strip.

http://www.chron.com/apps/comics/showComick.mpl?date=20101114&name=Zits
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.

In Zits, mom Connie Duncan needs a metal detector to find her car keys in son Jeremy’s room. Maybe the Duncans “gotta move, gotta get a bigger house. Why? No room for [their] stuff anymore.”

I didn’t need to move until much later in life. Back then, I didn’t store my clothes on the floor.





Getting It Up Early

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I have a houseful of visitors here in the Keys. I don’t understand that. In our more than 30 years in Vermont, we can count our out-of-state visitors on our fingers. Here in Paradise, visitors are numbered like grains of sand. Anyway, our friend Missy noticed that I was “up bloody early” today (Biff was still snoring then).

“No,” I told Missy. “It is the clock that has changed. I’m up at the exact same [solar] time I get up every morning.”

Thanks to the visitors, I was actually late-ish getting to bed last night and therefore late-ish getting to sleep. Late-ish is defined as early-ish by Daylight Savings standards but later in terms of the hour at which I planned to arise. The alarm makes sure I rise correctly no matter how long the temptations of the night before seduce me.

Farmers have lived according to the sun for as long as there has been fixed base agriculture. Although my great-grandfather was a dairy farmer — I grew up on the last few acres of his farm, then made a home on the last few acres of a former Vermont dairy farm — I do not farm. I prefer sleeping in and generally like to roll out of bed about 30 seconds before I have to go to work. It also means I can see the sunset, the moonrise, and the clocks strike midnight.

Clock setting is arbitrary, all because somebody in “the dawn of time” jammed a stick in the ground and decided that getting his farm workers up at 4 ayem was a good idea. Some of us don’t agree. Russia’s 11 time zones are all an hour ahead of the corresponding standard time zones and double that during DST.

Ben Franklin wrote satirically that Parisians should go green and save candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight. He didn’t seriously propose Savings Time, though, no matter what you read on the Internoodle. That honor falls to George Hudson, an amateur New Zealand entomologist who wanted to collect insects in after-work daylight.

I don’t understand why we don’t just choose a time we like permanently.

Arizona, Guam, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the Virgin Islands, most Indiana on Eastern Time, don’t switch their clocks. Arizona remains on Mountain Standard Time year round. They, along with India, China, and Japan are the major industrialized states that are constant UTC+something 12 months out of 12, while the rest of us spend seven months of the year with “extra” daylight and nearly five months without.

Not even all of Arizona is exempt. The Navajo Nation does observe. The Navaho have the largest land area of any Native American jurisdiction within the United States with 26,000 square miles that covers all of northeastern Arizona, the southeastern portion of Utah, and northwestern New Mexico.

Changing the clocks irritates me but I’m not rabid about sticking on solar time except I have a regular morning phone call with one of the non-mainstream states.

A friend who lives there “finds it irritating that we have to rearrange our meetings every time all y’all flip to another time, and irritating that I have to think “Is it two or three hours different when I call my dad? Is it one hour or the same when I call my daughter or mother?”

Exactly.

My choice is to synch my own schedule rather than force the others on that call to rearrange theirs.

It just seems bloody early to start the morning to Sally. And to me.

For the record, my European web host thought this post went up at 13:00.