The Newberg, Oregon School Board has been in the news lately for instituting a district-wide ban on political symbols. Four of the board members have taken umbrage to Black Lives Matter and the rainbow colored flags that suggest support for gay rights.
But they didn’t stop there. A few months later in a surprise agenda item at a school board meeting, the four members moved to fire superintendent Joe Morelock for not doing enough to enforce the bans.
There are a number of pending legal issues having to do with the First Amendment which may have had something to do with the pace of Morelock’s enforcement, but that didn’t slow them down from giving him the heave-ho.
I would argue that such a ban isn’t realistically enforceable. Newberg School District has close to 5,000 students and the dress code police can’t be everywhere at once. Families will act out in subtle ways and likely make the board regret the decision.
This all stems from right wing republicanism of course. The problem is as far as gay rights are concerned, that ship has sailed. There isn’t any going back to the good old days of June Cleaver.
As far as Black Lives Matter goes, republicans just don’t get it.
...but, but, ALL Lives Matter.
Yes, of course they do. But at this moment in history we need to be reminded that Black Lives Matter because too many people of color have been shot at, harassed, pulled over and sent to prison for the crime of roaming around in a white neighborhood. Can we be big enough to support the concerns of our brothers and sisters?
As a former Catholic I often hesitate to be critical of the church for fear of offering opinions on matters of which I know nothing about. However… I do find it odd 60 years after Vatican II the church is still having a heated debate over the existence of the Latin Mass.
That was the biggest rub from the Vatican Council in 1965. Parishes could begin saying the mass in English and the faithful could relate better to what was being communicated.
More importantly though, it’s been 60 years! Don’t you think it might be time for a Vatican III? What else are they doing? C’mon guys, get with the program here. You’re losing members faster than you can shake a stick at them, do something constructive.
You know, I’m trying to love Normal Powell, but it’s kinda hard. Gary Trent Jr. was such a great shooting talent. I still don’t see the upside of this trade. Maybe I will over time, but right now I do not.
I’ve bought and sold a few things with the Nextdoor Neighbor app and it’s great to find out what some of the local issues are but perhaps the most entertaining thing I get from being a user comes from learning which neighbors are picking up their dog shit vs. not. Complete with pictures. You’re busted!
As a small part of my retirement plan I came up with the business idea of creating a bumper sticker that can hopefully catch fire and sell a million. So here it is, designed by yours truly, expressing the root cause for the problem with ‘Merica. Shoot me an e-mail @ billtoner.email@gmail.com and we can arrange for a $3 PayPal transfer.
I cruised past the 40 year mark last year in the high tech industry. It’s been a ride with ups and downs for sure. The recession of the early 1980s. The dot com boom of the 1990s. The recession of the early 2000s. Times have been good and times have been lean.
I had the good fortune of getting steered into role as a DevOps engineer for the twilight of my career. Good in the sense that it’s a job title that is in high demand. I haven’t felt this much job security in a long time.
For about 36 of those 40 years, corporations have had the upper hand in employment. All are at-will employers, but suffice it to say most corporations have a cattle mindset when it comes to headcount. Attrition hardly ever mattered much. Everyone is easily replaceable. Oh, you’re leaving? Best of luck to you.
There have been 2 exceptions to this. During the dot com boom I saw engineers leave for startups at shocking rates. Tektronix during the 1990s was a great place to work, but people were being woo’d away with signing bonuses and salary increases to the tune of about 5 a week. That was the first time I ever saw management and HR have to huddle up and try to figure out what to do about attrition. “We have to stop this.”
I remember thinking how great it was that employees finally had the upper hand. We get to decide what might be fun things to get involved with and they have to listen. The corporation has motivation to treat us well lest we might up and leave. They HAVE to be nice to us.
For years I toiled at Boeing as an Flight Controls Engineer, which you’d think would be in pretty high demand but actually not. The skillset wasn’t that transferable. Boeing was the definition of how corporations treat employees like cattle. By the very nature of the beast, any corporation that boasts 8 layers of management can’t help itself but make the poor souls at the bottom of the rung feel pretty inconsequential.
Okay now add to that environment an economic slowdown in aerospace complete with layoffs and the company really has the upper hand. If you want to complain about something, you have to talk with your feet. That’s your only option – get another gig. Even then they shrug off the loss like yesterday’s newspaper.
Enter the 2010s and the Amazon Cloud. That was the beginning of another turning point that put supply and demand back in favor of the little guy. Suddenly cloud certification became a big ticket to a higher paying job and if you were good you could even be a little choosy about which opportunities to get involved with. The bonus money started to look really healthy. If you’re fortunate enough to work for a profitable company, the incentives are nothing to sneeze at.
At the start of the 2020s, even with the pandemic, DevOps engineers have had the upper hand for a while. I’ve seen a raft of departures lately from people who worked at companies with rock solid careers in place. They are getting enticed away with offers for higher compensation and better work. Management is starting to get nervous again. If this keeps up another round of HR meetings will take place to try and figure out how to stop the bleeding.
In some cases, nothing less than a management epiphany will reverse their fortunes. Case in point is jobs that included on-call. On-call comes with the dreaded requirement of being chained to your house for a week or more at a time. For those of us who do it, it blows. One thing that would make the requirement a little more palatable is if companies would compensate for it — and I mean really compensate for it, not a token $50 a day for the inconvenience of having to be at the ready 24/7. I proposed this to a mid level manager at a previous employer and he wasn’t having any of it. “I want people who love what they are doing and passionate about it.” Translation: Willing to work for free. To be fair, some companies have figured this out and have gotten creative about ways to compensate or otherwise comp the time for the inconvenience it causes. But not everyone gets it yet, and those that don’t will suffer higher attrition, at least in this market. Next year could be a whole different ball game.
It’s Econ 101, really. Supply and Demand. It would have been nicer if more than 4 years out of those 40 had been tilted towards the little guy, but as they say, “first world problem.”
Stuff happens as they say. Especially with the increased frequency of severe weather storms that seem to be coming our way, even in the cozy confines of Portland, OR. It could very well be due to global warming. I’m not a climate scientist so I don’t know for sure, but one can’t deny the increased frequency of severe weather hitting the country, hot and cold.
Last Labor Day the western half of Oregon was on fire. People in cities with tens of thousands of people were evacuating. For a brief moment I packed a suitcase and started taking videos of my belongings incase of an eventual insurance claim. Just after Valentines Day a polar vortex caused a snow and ice storm that took down trees everywhere because of the dense ice accumulation.
When severe weather hits Portland, the city all but shuts down. The buses don’t run, the power is off, the grocery stores don’t have food, anything you had planned to do has been canceled and it’s probably just as well because you can’t drive safely anywhere on sheets of ice. If it were just dry snow, people could adapt. 4WD is no match for a 4″ layer of wet ice on the road. To make matters worse, it’ll get up to 36 degrees the next day, rain like crazy and melt some of the ice, only to be frozen again overnight as a layer thicker than the day before.
SE Portland Ice Rink / Parking Lot
All of this inspired me to share my strategy for dealing with another unforeseen consequence of Global Warming: more time chatting with Comcast Support. Notice I didn’t say “on the phone” with Comcast Support. That’s because you can never in your wildest dreams talk to a human being with Comcast Support.
The internet has afforded many of us the opportunity to work from home. I have personally worked from my home office since 2012. It’s been great – except when there’s no power. It’s pretty hard to contribute in a meaningful way when your internet access is cut off. With celular service now, it’s actually possible to get some work done even if the power is off by setting up a hot-spot on the cell phone. But it’s less than ideal. The real challenge is how to figure out how to get ahold of those pesky Comcast Technicians to come out to the house and fix the unique problem I have – a tree branch took down my cable line and cut off both TV and Internet.
Comcast has all sorts of automation informing me of how they are dealing with the outages. I can check my area and see if service is restored. That’s great, but that doesn’t help get my line hooked back up, which is 20 feet up a power pole in close proximity to the power company’s 220v feeder lines. I ain’t climbing up there. Meanwhile I keep getting texts from Comcast saying “We fixed it! We fixed it! Check your service.” I did check my service and I can still see the coax cable coiled up in my driveway. Sorry dudes, it ain’t fixed for me yet.
Cable line not happy
So 3 days of no work due to no power in the house. That finally gets restored so now it’s time to attack the internet connection issue.
I use the offensive coordinator analogy in my description of the events ahead because experience tells me it’s an absolute necessity to adopt the mindset of a strategic thinker, trying to get past the layers of defense in front of me in search of a victory. Nothing less than a touchdown will suffice.
The first lesson for an offensive coordinator to know when trying to get Comcast Service restored is to understand the defense. The first layer of defense is the infinite phone menu loop with no option to get me in touch with the person I need to talk to – the scheduler. Round and round you go with all sorts of helpful suggestions about how to check the status of your service via their website except um, I can’t reach your website right now because I don’t have internet service. Well, only partially true. I can get spotty access to it via my cell phone with Wireless turned off, but it’s painful and slow.
Falling spears from the back yard
Back in the good old days – about 5 years ago, you used to be able to penetrate the phone menus by repeating the word “representative” over and over again until the automated system would reply “Alright, let me get you in touch with a representative”, followed by – you’re number 26 in the queue. It might cost me a half hour but at least I could get to a resolution. Not anymore. You can scream “REPRESENTATIVE! REPRESENTATIVE! all day long and you’ll just get asked if you want to hear the main menu options again. So forget about the phone system and talking to a representative, it ain’t happening. Lesson 1: Skip the phone menu.
The second lesson an offensive coordinator needs to know is how to break through the second layer of defense – the chatbots. Comcast has all sorts of chatbots that are basically automated responders that mimic the same options you hear on the phone system, so they are basically useless for what I need. The trick is, when presented with options to chat about “Billing, Tech Support, New Service, or “Other“, choose the “Other” option. The “Other” option led me to the eventually chatting with a real person. Not talking to mind you, chatting, while entering about 10 words per minute with my thumb on my cell phone. Baby steps, but I’m happier at this point because now I can explain that my situation doesn’t fit into one of their predefined scripts.
Over the next hour I chatted/texted with several people who, based on their names were all from India, which isn’t an issue unless you have a non-standard problem — because clearly they are reading and typing from a script. In some ways I prefer typing instead of talking because I have a heckuva time understanding the accents anyway. God bless ’em for doing the needful but I can’t help but register how sub-optimal this experience is.
Before the odyssey was over I was transferred in chat twice, so I had chatted with 3 different departments about my service disruption. 60 minutes into it I felt like I had penetrated the defense and gotten down inside the red zone when I finally achieved a message back from Praveena that “someone from scheduling” would call me back in the next 24 hours and I had a real honest to goodness ticket number! Yay. Almost done.
I was holding my plans for a celebration until I had some actual results because in a previous call I had been given a ticket number and the promise of a call and hadn’t heard anything. At this point, I’m sorry but I’m from Missouri and you’re going to have to show me. Stopping here felt a little like settling for a field goal. Hold my beer, I’m going for the end zone.
That’s when I decided to send in my flee-flicker play and express my dissatisfaction with the process in the hopes of REALLY getting some service around here. And it worked.
Praveena thought she was done with me and asked if I had any additional questions. Yes as a matter of fact I do, Praveena. Could you please see to it that my account is credited for time with no service? I wanted to motivate them in some small way to make my appointment sooner rather than later by letting them know I had no plans of paying for services not rendered. Sure Mr. Toner, I can help you with that. I can refund you for 2 days. Um, but I’ve been down for 5 days and it will be at least 7 days before I have service restored. Are you sure your math is correct?
“The system will only allow me to offer you 2 days because it thinks the outage was 2 days.” Great, but MY outage will be closer to a week. Offer denied. You can either offer me 7 days credit, show up here by Monday or else I call Century Link.
Mr. Toner, I just remembered, I can hook you up with our billing department. They can take care of you. 75 minutes into the experience the next chat representative, Subu from billing, was excited to offer crediting my account with $20 for my inconvenience. Let’s see Subu, I pay $200/month and I’m going to be out for about a fourth of that. My math tells me you’ll need to credit me more like $50.
“I’m sorry but my system will only allow me offer you up to $20.”
Thinks to self: Okay that’s it, Subu, you disappoint me. Century Link coming back into the conversation….
That just won’t do, Subu. Either you fix the billing and I get turned back on by Monday or else I’m going to cancel on Monday and sign up with Century Link — and I won’t be paying beyond Feb. 14th.
Mr. Toner I just realized, I can put you in touch DIRECTLY with the scheduling department. I am so sorry for your inconvenience. 90 minutes into it, I have an appointment scheduled for a real live human being to arrive at my home this coming Monday, 4-6pm. Touchdown. I penetrated the entire defense, got the ball in the end-zone and should be due a healthy credit because there’s a note attached to my account that I’m due 7 days credit.
Climate Change is real and has many negative side effects. Plan accordingly.
Rush Limbaugh was a sorry excuse for a human being. The examples of this are well documented from making fun of Chelsea Clinton (a minor at the time), to mocking Michael J. Fox’s disability, to his cheering of AIDS victims to suffer.
There are 2 things that are truly sad about this, none of which has anything to do with Limbaugh. The first is, rags like the Wall Street Journal have the audacity to write opinion pieces focusing only on the impact Limbaugh had on the so-called conservative movement, ignoring his egregious behavior as a not-so-clandestine racist. The second is you, the Limbaugh listener. Common sense should have told you to turn that ignoramus off.
Freezing Texans, you know, the ones who are burning their fences to stay warm, aren’t fans of limited government right now. But they were when they voted for Greg Abbot for governor, and Ted Cruz and John Cornyn for Senator.
Every state has to make choices about limited government vs. the welfare state model. Texans chose to go it alone on the power grid and are now paying a price. This is what my father used to call natural consequences. Maybe it wasn’t the right decision, but spending a few nights in the cold might fix that for the next time. All good.
In the midst of the crisis Texans found their senior senator Ted Cruz hopping a flight to Mexico to enjoy some rays while the food lines grew longer and the water shortages persist. As Atlantic write David Graham pointed out, Cruz’s sin was not so much hypocrisy because all politicians can be accused of that in some form, but that he failed to use what power he had to lift a finger for his constituents. Taking a page from the Trump playbook, he bolted for a warmer climate and recreational opportunities for himself.
The thing to watch according to Graham, is whether the response by elected leaders is performative versus useful. Witness last night’s Fox News interview with Gov. Abbott who, try as he might, tried to put the blame on the Green New Deal, which as we all know hasn’t even materialized yet. So far the response has been predictably performative.
View from my PDX Window 