RETIREMENT? NYAH! HA! HA! HA! HA!

My friend in LA writes, "My job is making me crazy. My boss said he could fire me for forgetting to do stuff like leave the subject line blank in an email and if I can’t do it right, he has to do his own e-mail and then what does he need me for. Now, that’s a Friday statement that ruins your weekend. I have done it a couple of times - shit. I have worked there since 2003 and something like a blank subject line is grounds for termination?"
Sadly, the story she tells about her job situation sounds all too familiar in this economy. Employers are using the uncertainty as an excuse to abuse employees, even loyal, long-term employees. They're threatening them with the loss of their job over little nothings and asking them to relinquish pay and benefits at a time when they should be helping their fellow woman/man/person. My own pay went DOWN 5% this year because I had to absorb a hefty increase in the cost of health insurance. I received no bonus or cost of living pay increase. I cried the blues to my agent but she just shrugged her shoulders as if to say, "Not my problem – if you don't like it, look elsewhere." Then, if we were in the old-timey movies, the villain would have curled his moustache, snarled and laughed an evil villain laugh – NYAH! HA! HA! HA! HA! That's what your boss is doing.
At our age we should be thinking about retirement and taking it easy. Instead we're having to make life plans for survival. My friend went on to say, "I don’t think I can work like this any more. I have to figure out what I’m doing with my life – there are changes I should start thinking about making."
It's sad that we have to think like this at a time in our lives when we should be living the high life and playing with our grown-up toys, like cameras and guitars.

Using American

The term "American" seems to have become synonymous with "citizen of the United States of America ". I protest its use because the Americas are so much more than the United States. I protest it for semantic and geographic reasons not for patriotic reasons. I'm a citizen and patriot of the United States of America, but I'm an American by virtue of living on the North American continent.

It would be equally inaccurate for us to use the term Asian to mean someone from China and exclude all the other nations that make up that continent, or African exclusively for someone from Nigeria, or European exclusively for someone from Italy. They are all correct geographically in the larger sense, but the continents include so many other nations.

"I'm an Australian" is about the only accurate statement covering both nationality and the geographic continent where the person lives. The other accurate statement is, "I'm an Antarctican," and that is reserved mostly for penguins.

Courtesy of Wikipedia, here is a list of American countries, territories, and dependencies.

Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Aruba, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, Bolivia, Brazil, British Virgin Islands, Canada, Cayman Islands, Chile, Clipperton Island, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Falkland Islands (UK), French Guiana (France)[D], Greenland, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Isla Aves, Jamaica, Martinique, Mexico, Montserrat, Navassa Island, Netherlands Antilles, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Saint Barthelemy, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saint-Martin, San Andrés y Providencia, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos Islands, United States, United States Virgin Islands, Uruguay, Venezuela

There are 43 North American countries and territories, including both sovereign states and dependent territories. This list considers North America to be the continent and associated islands north of the Panama-Colombia border.

There are 13 countries and one dependency in South America based on the United Nations geoscheme for the Americas.

So, there are 56 areas that can lay claim to the statement, "I'm an American."

So what do I suggest? I've tossed around a few ideas for an abbreviation for United States citizen. I'm trying for something simple like Canadian, Italian, Chinese, French, German, etc. Someone from the United Kingdom may say, "I'm a Britain," or "I'm British." Maybe we can say "I'm a USAN," or "I'm USISH". Any ideas?

Elevator Buttons

The Return of the Flophouse

I live in Albany, NY, the state capitol. I found a studio apartment in a nice, secure building, for reasonable rent, and within walking distance to work. The building is condominiums and many of the tenants live in their apartments. One person who bought a condo as an investment rented their studio to a friend who was down and out. The friend immediately took in five or six "tenants" of questionable character. Eventually, the tenants association decided enough is enough and had the man and all his roommates evicted.
A friend in Los Angeles wrote me about a situation in the building where she lives. The property owner showed up at her door last night and brought a man who recently got out of jail (we will call him Joe) who rents out cots in his one bedroom apt in the building. Joe doesn't even live in the building and doesn't even have a key to his own apartment. The other tenants have no idea who rents the cots. The landlord, described by my friend as a belligerent man, confronted Joe in front of my friend's apartment and told him the tenants were complaining. The landlord said he wants the transients out immediately. Joe said he has to give his people 30-days notice. The description my friend sent of the landlord's reaction is not worthy of repetition. Put yourself in his shoes and use your imagination.
Renting floor space or cots to short-term tenants is equivalent to running a skid row hotel in a residential zone. In the 30s, they called them "flophouses". Joe's idea is similar – to provide a lot of beds in a small space for a lot of people. He is technically the "tenant", but doesn't live there and doesn't even have a key. He has a racket going. I wonder if he actually makes money.
In any event, my friend doesn't want this going on in her building. Who knows the mentality or the desperation of the people who need to rent a cot to have a place to sleep.
When I lived in Sarasota, I rode my bike to work and passed a park-like area with lots of trees and high grass. The homeless slept there at night. The grass shielded them from view so the police, who knew they were there, didn't bother them. If I rode by early in the morning, I saw the homeless folks starting to rise up out of the tall grass like human plants. There were flophouses in Sarasota but they filled up fast.
Sarasota is one of the wealthiest cities in the US, but because of their climate they have one of the highest homeless rates in the US. During the day, those who could afford it went to storage sheds to hang out with their few possessions. Not everyone could afford the cost of the flophouse or storage shed so they wandered aimlessly during the day and retired to the field at night.
In Albany, I see the storage-shed concept in practice. On one of the side streets I walk down, there is a row of garages in a single-story building. Two people run a perpetual, daily garage sale out of one of the units. I see a little old woman lift the door to another unit, pull out a battered lounge chair, and spend a good part of her day sitting there.
It's a sad sign of the times. There are rental signs everywhere and vacant buildings galore but many people have to find flophouse style accommodations because they are jobless and homeless.
The situation in my building was resolved, but I wonder where all those men moved after they were evicted. I hope the situation in my friend's building is resolved peacefully and without her having to be involved as a complainant or witness. Even more, I hope the situation in the United States improves so that flophouses are not necessary.

The Correlation of BLAH to ZZZZ

Technical meetings are always a thrill for us non-technical people. The techies get their chance to spout their wisdom about subjects that just sound like "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah..." to us. They speak in acronyms like everyone in the world knows what they stand for. Invariably, their voices take on a deep, droning tone. My eyes begin to close and my breath slows.
Today at such a meeting, I drew a chart correlating the Blah Blah to the ZZZZZ factor.

You Know

Heard on the train today - a conversation between two young (20-ish) people -
Person 1 - "Like, I could like make this like happen, you know."
Person 2 - "Like, for sure, like you really could like do it."
Like it or not, this is youth speak, but it isn't a new phenomenon. I attended a party in the late 60s hosted by my friends Leigh Lassen and Terry Logan, two soap opera stars in New York City. Leigh is a beautiful redhead who could trace her lineage to Russian royalty. One of the guests at the party was a Russian princess who was then in her 80s. Her family was forced to flee Russia during the revolution in 1917. They emigrated to the U.S. where their children received an excellent education. The princess and I had a conversation about language and she lamented the state of English usage in the U.S. It seems she was an avid listener of radio talk shows. She cited the comments made by several people who called these shows to offer their opinions on different subjects and followed their comments with "YOU KNOW."
"No, I DON'T know," she said. "I want them to explain their stand on the issues clearly."
I wonder how she would feel trying to translate some of today's slang and jargon. We have many different dialects in this country, sometimes several in one region or city. The phrase "YOU KNOW" is still widely used as evidenced by the conversation between the 20-somethings on the train today. Thanks to the princess, every time I hear the phrase I think, sometimes out loud, "No, I don't know. Please explain."
Sometimes it makes for an interesting conversation - other times it ends it.

Work is Just Work

I observe people as they come to work. Most of us are just here for the paycheck. Direct employees hang in for their excellent pensions and benefits. But for some people, this is their LIFE. They come to work all fired up and dead serious. They have an inflated view of their importance and they play office politics in earnest. It's amusing in a way, watching their gait as they walk through the hallway, like they're headed for a meeting with the president. Then in meetings, these "company people" are super-intense and sometimes verbally abusive to people who they feel are their underlings.
I was sitting here calmly at my desk early this morning and I could hear two people coming down the hall involved in an animated work discussion. One of them was talking like the subject was nuclear disarmament when, in fact, it was about someone doing their paperwork.
I may have been intense at some point in my career. I remember talking about a "sense of urgency" regarding projects and feeling that everyone involved should have it. I took my work home with me too, thinking that I was doing work of value and lasting importance. Thank goodness I transcended that phase.
I'm not saying that work isn't good and I believe that we should always do our best in whatever we undertake. What I believe, however, is that our jobs are a very small part of who we are. To give work your "all" is to diminish the really important parts of your life - love, family, and friends.

To Save or to Throw

A friend gave me her business card recently and said, "Send me an e-mail sometime." I went to my office and sent one off immediately before I lost the card in a pile of ever accumulating papers. I do throw some things out eventually but not until the fire marshal threatens to have me and my piles of paper hauled away.
Several years ago, I learned the principle of expected use. What that means is you look at an item and determine how likely it is that you will ever use it. It may be an actual physical item or something like an e-mail. Since I put this principle into practice, I am much better at sorting through e-mail.
I used to try to save everything on the possibility that I would use it for something someday. After moving all my "stuff" around several times and not finding any practical use for much of it, I decided to sell, give away, or throw away much of it. As I sorted through my papers from grade school through college that my Mother saved for me for posterity, I became less and less nostalgic and more and more practical. Then I started tossing all of it. Then I started tossing out the papers that I saved for my children thinking, "I'm saving them from having to do the same thing I'm doing." It was liberating to simplify my life and my next move. One hundred boxes of "stuff" became twenty, my treasures became someone else's junk, my load was lightened.
Of course as soon as I settled into my new home, I started accumulating new "stuff". It's time to purge again.

Back On Track

OK. I started this bloggy thing in 2006 and forgot about it completely. It's now part of the Google Empire (what isn't? Oh yeah, Microsoft!). It took me a while to find the way to get my old blog back but they had a fix for that, or as the ads say, "There's an app for that!"
I'm going to try to be a dutiful blogger now.

little thoughts 20060415

I am finally joining the blogger's world.
What inspired me?
The young lady Alex in Doonesbury has been blogging for several years.
Young folks embraced e-technology and mastered it while many of us older folks treated it as some sort of fad.
Change is a four-letter word to many people!
Eolake Stobblehouse is blogging while on vacation in Copenhagen. His thoughts and images from a beautiful country also inspired me.
My good friend Rob Sprankle, www.artoftraffic.com, has been blogging since before "blog" was a word. He is always an inspiration in some way.
I claim to be a writer and I know it is therapeutic for me, yet I haven't bothered to put my thoughts out to the world.
Yes, the Internet is the world. It reaches everywhere that human beings travel and live.
So here are a few of my first "little thoughts" and here's to many more.
Bless the bloggers.