Bring it on, May

April 2008 is officially over in three hours.  Good riddance.  What a tiresome month.  May had better bring some good things, otherwise there will be heck to pay.

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done...

A shipyard is not the most cheerful place to work.  The atmosphere is so sickeningly Dickensian that you could almost imagine Sidney Carton (or was it Charles Darnay?) sidling up to Madame Guillotine.  THWAP!

In such a setting, you have to take the little things that make you smile and embrace them.  Dilbert helps.  I also play games.  For every pun I can use in an email, I get two points.  Obscure nautical references in conversation?  Four points.  Making comparisons between my supervisors and Captain Ahab, without them noticing?  Ten points.  A bonus point is awarded if I can sneak Pequod into the comparison -- "You're right, sir, it would Pequod an achievement getting complete cooperation on our little whale of a problem.  Perhaps you could spearhead the effort on this one?"

I also eat a sizeable quantity of Goldfish.  You know, those little cheddar fish-shaped crackers?  The ones that always, always smile back??  The ones whose incessant grinning and vacant eyes make you want to bite their heads off, which you can do because they are, after all, not even real fish and it does no good to anthropomorphize a cracker???  Why won't you frown, fish?!!

But mostly, for my own personal kicks, I rely on the absurdity of my coworkers.  Today I had to wait until after lunch.  One of the elderly gentlemen, who is the uncontested general of the Nap Time Brigade (see an earlier post from April), also believes that the farther away a person is, the louder he has to talk to them on the phone.  Today, the individual was at a desk approximately thirty miles away, so the old guy had to talk at a moderately loud volume to ensure the sound of his voice traveled intact over that thirty miles of telephone cord.  Our guy, so it happens, is volunteering to be a contestant on our command's version of American Idol, although we will not use that trademark and we don't limit ourselves to just singers.  If this was ten years ago, we would call it a talent show, but this is the New Navy and we are hip.  But, as it turns out, our Nap Time Brigadier General is an avid ballroom dancer, and regularly partners with his wife in such contests. 

Now I'm not making fun of this.  I believe ballroom dancing is technically challenging and a worthwhile hobby.  I commend the General for participating in such an activity, what with him being older than dirt.  But his enthusiasm just makes me smile.  I might have even giggled in fact.  You see, the General wanted to know the exact dimensions and composition of the stage he would be performing on, because a skilled a dancer as he needs the Proper Floor for his Proper Shoes, and if the Proper Floor was not available, he would bring the Proper Baby Powder so that he might prepare the Improper Floor so as not to scuff his Proper Shoes and affect his Superior Performance. 

I smile because, on the other end of that thirty-mile conversation, was some poor soul who probably was volunteered to organize this little talent show and had no idea where the talent show would be, or what kind of stage existed.  Up until that point, he had hoped and prayed that no one would volunteer and he could let it die quietly, but the General just guaranteed that wouldn't happen.  And just like Mr. Carton, you can bet he was praying to Jesus that this ordeal would be quick and painless.

THWAP!

It's the end of the world as we know it...

For people in my age group, that is, those of us born in the 80s, this is the first period of economic pessimism that has affected us. We weren't really cognizant of the stock market troubles in the late 80s, and we were still too young to feel the pain of the dot com burst--we didn't own stock, and gas was still cheap.

But in the past six months, I have watched my mutual funds reduced by 10 percent, and the value of my house has evaporated by a similar figure. When I started high school I remember seeing gas prices at 89 cents per gallon. That was less than ten years ago. A gallon of milk costs twice what it did when I started college, not six years ago. My cost of living raises are not keeping track with what seems to be an accelerating rate of inflation, driven by a growing global demand for our most basic resources.

Yet, to be quite honest, my standard of living has (to this point) been largely unaffected. Because we are fortunate enough to live in an industrialized (first world?) country, our lives are less affected by changes in market-controlled goods. Gas has increased 400 percent in ten years, but gas still only represents about four percent of my budget. Food prices are spiking, but grocery goods only account for fifteen percent of my budget. Non-inflationary items--mortgage and car payments, insurance and student loans--dominate my budget, and this little fact of American life insulates me and most of my neighbors from the worst affects of our current global economic crisis. When I dump $1400 a month into my mortgage, spending $2 instead of 77 cents on a pound of rice won't bankrupt me.

However, what hardly registers on our budgetary radar is causing riots in the third world. Families in less developed countries spend a significant portion of their daily wages on food, and during these rough times the cost of that meager nourishment is rapidly exceeding their income. Men are watching their families suffer from hunger, and out of desperation and dedication they try to get food however they can.

I think that we, as a global community, have passed the point in our history when an undeveloped country could, of its own volition, climb out of the third world and join the ranks of the industrialized nations. This threshold is defined by the availability of natural resources, the ease of exploitation of those resources, and the ability of that nation to control those resources. Though always steep, this hurdle to economic sustainability grows steeper still as we, the industrialized brethren, efficiently consume these resources and as our global markets, whether through hedging, speculation or sheer supply and demand, assign value to these resources that forever put these commodities out of reach of our poor neighbors. Even if an undeveloped nation is rich in resources, this wealth becomes more of a liability as the global community looks to exploit it.

There is very little hope now that those third world nations, scattered across the world but concentrated primarily in Africa and south Asia, will ever rise from their humble condition. A stagnant economic misery will ensure subsequent troubles befall such a country:

The country will become a welfare nation, a global poor box, an eternal goal of missionaries and humanitarians. In line with the "teach a man to fish" analogy, perpetual allotments of charity will remove any vestige of independence from the populace.

Exhiled from legitimate economic pursuits, illicit trade will be accepted, even welcomed by the impoverished. It is exceedingly difficult to preach the immorality of opiates to men who, after seeing their families sick with hunger, elect to grow poppies. Gemstone smuggling, drug trafficking, human trafficking exist and thrive under governments made incompetent by corruption or bankruptcy.

Governments will rise and fall as often as the seasons change. Loyalty is cheaply bartered and many seek the head of state in order to improve the quality of life for their respective sects at the expense of their rival countrymen.

External investment in the country's natural resources will enrich the current government at the expense of its citizens.

A global humanitarian crisis will utterly destroy the third world. For instance:

The current issue is, of course, global warming. As a citizen of a developed nation, I will most likely avoid major life-threatening consequences of my polluting heritage. Going green is, for me, fiscal common sense at best and a social responsibility at worst. I'll put up solar panels and plug in my car when it saves me money. However, global warming could lead to a drought in a third world country that will destroy an entire season's crop and bring a famine unto millions. Once again, my good fortune to be born in America insulates me from suffering.

Another possibility is a worldwide pandemic. A growing likelihood is that a superbug, encouraged to evolve by our industrialized use of antibiotics, could become highly contagious and spread rapidly throughout the world. A mortality rate of just one percent could leave 3 million Americans dead, overwhelming our health care system and keeping our docs, who may have gone forth in humanitarian aid, here at home. In third world nations, absent adequate health care, lacking vaccines or treatments, the mortality rate could easily be ten times that of developed nations.

Just some food for thought this Sunday morning. As you can probably tell, I am awfully bored and had some time to kill on watch.

An interesting application of this Development Threshold is that it applies to any nation today as well as any nation in the future. We have so efficiently removed the resources of industrialization from the earth that we have discovered and mined all the minerals that are close to the surface. It is only through our technology and sheer industrial effort that we continue to mine and drill. Oil no longer seeps out of the ground in Texas, nor can you find gold in Californian streambeds. We have created an environment where we need oil to get to more oil, and we need steel to find more iron. If a global catastrophe removed most of the world's population and along with it our industrial capacity, we have left our descendants a threshold so high that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to recreate an industrialized society.

I knew it!

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, my (boss)^12, confirmed today what me and many of my Navy colleagues have suspected for quite a while: the Air Force is an over-indulged, sand-bagging fighting force whose failure to support our guys in Iraq belies its own illusion of self-importance.  Get over there and fly your remote control planes, for cryin' out loud. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/21/AR2008042100950.html?hpid=moreheadlines

Your Government at work

The clock strikes 1100.  Approximately ten hairless heads rise up above their cubicle partitions like a pack of prairie dogs emerging from their colony.  Timid at first, but ever emboldened, they cast furtive glances around the rest of the office.  Faces cast upward, they scent the air and comment on what was being consumed by their coworkers.  Finally satisfied by the relative quiet, a wizened old man in a flannel shirt solemnly nods and a younger male leaves the safety of his cubicle.  He reaches the light switch, looks twice down each corridor, and flips the switch.  Half the office goes dark as ten hairless heads retreat into their respective cubicles.  Each dons a ball cap placed strategically over his face, and proceeds to sleep.  All phone ringers are silenced.  Aside from the occasional self-indulgent snore, there will be no sound.  No disturbances.  No interruptions.  The clock strikes 1101, and the Hour of Darkness is upon us.

If you ever deign to listen to a government executive talk about the civilian workforce, you are bound to be told many, many times that our workforce is "experienced."  This, of course, means that everyone is old.  A corollary to this is that we aren't hiring young people, who just aren't attracted to life in the civil service.  Most would rather live out of their parent's garage and take a job at the local video store, which you know is going out of business soon, what with the Netflix and Redbox and all, but you don't care because hell, you get to watch whatever movie you want to and at least you are not sitting in some grey cubicle surrounded by octogenarians who you know will die the second after they retire because this is their life, and while that is depressing enough you continue to get emotionally attached to these people even though you know there is a very high probability that they will be dead in a year, just like that goldfish you loved for a week before you flushed it down the toilet.

I think most of our elderly workers hate their jobs as much as those twenty-something video rental specialists think they would hate those jobs.  Unfortunately, the old people are now committed to working for the government.  Once a government employee hits 15 years of service, it doesn't make financial sense to get out and give up the chance for retirement at 30 years.  They hate their jobs, but they cope.  They work less.  They work slower.  They darken half the office at lunch so they can sleep.  And now I'm typing in the dark.  Touché, old people.  Touché.

<<oldpeople.bmp>>

You are an idiot. Please hang up and try again.

I absolutely hate feeling incompetent at anything electronic.  It makes me feel old.  Usually I do pretty good with tech, but voicemail kills me every time I check it.

I have a voicemail for my desk phone, a voicemail for my work cell, and a voicemail for my personal cell.  All three systems are completely different.  To delete a message I press *D on one phone, 2 on another phone, and 7 on the third phone.  And I can never remember which one goes with which system.  I always pick the wrong key, and I start to panic when that crass bitch on the other end starts to get impatient with me and brings up that "invalid entry" crap.  I know it's the wrong key, you parsimonious hag.

I have gotten pretty decent at my personal cell, but on my work phones I am so maladroit that the systems actually give up on me.  They come up with some lame excuse and at times submit that I seek

Cell phone:
"It appears our system cannot process your entries.  Try again later. <click>"  Translated:  "Our system was designed for individuals with IQ equal to or better than a thumb tack.  Please come back if you ever achieve high-level brain activity. <click>"

Desk phone:
"Invalid entry.  Please get help and try again. <click>"  Translated:  "Invalid entry.  You are an excellent candidate for a private room in your local psychiatric ward.  Please try again when you can adequately function in society. <click>"

Kill Chuck Norris

Well, a couple of Pennsylvania kids got caught plotting to kill Chuck Norris:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,349608,00.html

School officials acknowledge the hit list, which also listed for good measure a couple students and administrators, was probably a joke.

Of course it was a joke. Everyone knows you can't kill Mr. Norris. He can single-handedly defeat twenty armed bad guys without scuffing his boots. His signature facial hair is both flame retardant and bulletproof. Judging by the frequency of his infomercials, the man never stops exercising. He will beat you.

And, more pointedly, no one wants to kill Mr. Norris. He is like Jesus with a sweet roundhouse kick. His efforts with the Texas Rangers cleaned up that sin-ridden state. What, you thought that was a TV show? No sir (or ma'am), that was a documentary. He is just that good.

Mr. Norris has developed into a pop culture cult icon. He was the hero in the last few minutes of Dodgeball. He is referenced constantly. My old Ultimate Frisbee team had a play called "Chuck Norris." It wasn't physically different from any other play we did. But as we executed it we would scream "Chuck Norris!" and it would scare the crap out of people. Or at least distract them. Just by invoking his name, we were able to triumph in his reflected glory. Someone else in history had that kind of star quality. Please see the second sentence of the previous paragraph.

So while some idiot school administrators in Pennsylvania "take seriously" the threats, we know that no one wants to kill Chuck Norris. And they couldn't if they tried.

Sidebar: I just realized you can't spell culture without "cult." I have this vision of a book cover with an image of Paris Hilton or whoever the newest pop whore is surrounded by cult-looking people. And it will be called "Pop CULTure" with some catchy subtitle. The book could be crap but with a title as awesome as that how could you not buy it?

It worked!

The email posting worked!  Kinda…

My email server likes to take attached files and embed the filename randomly in the text of the email.  If you notice the last sentence of the previous post, my poignant statement was interrupted by <<screenshot.jpg>>.  Very inconvenient.  I was about to fix it, but then decided it should remain as a testament to my struggle.  That, and a fault in the interpretation of the Java applet prevented me from saving changes.

Java blockin'

For some reason my work computer cannot run Java even if its motherboard
depended on it. Which is sometimes does. The CPU is conveniently
located within kicking distance and boy, its failure to perform even a
simple app really grinds my gears. I've seen better script reading at a
high school drama club. Not that I've ever been a part of a high school
drama club.

So now I am blogging via email. Somewhere in this post, assuming this
whole setup works like it is supposed to, you should see a screenshot of
my computer's latest endeavor at being more than just a warm pile of
silicon and plastic.

I realize of course that my government-owned Dell, had it been fortunate
enough to exist as a home PC, would probably be functioning like a
well-behaved, law-abiding computer. Unfortunately this machine is
hampered by a legion of network-administered programs designed
specifically to keep me from completing any useful task. A boot-up
takes twenty-five minutes. The network people know my Java isn't
working, but I shouldn't be using Java anyway, they contend.
Essentially, I am enslaved to a slave PC. It sucks. Anyway, we'll see
how this blog-by-email thing turns out. Maybe I'll do it more.

Oh, the Navy is also blocking Facebook as of yesterday. What's up with
t <<screenshot.jpg>> hat?