A Commonplace Life

Any day out of the office is a good one. I went out to do a couple inspections today.

I found and rescued a trapped bird at one of the sites. I felt moved to tweet about it, using the fancy-Dan new thingie I found called Twitter. Maybe you've heard of it.

(Tweet:) I rescued a fledgling who got his foot caught in a slot in a steel beam at a natural gas production facility. They never thank you.

Ran around and did the rest of my stuff. On my way back to the office I stopped to carry a tortoise off the highway. I have to do at least one turtle rescue each spring, so now my spring is complete I guess.

(Tweet:) Rescued turtle from the highway. They never thank you either.

Sometime after I got an email that some natural gas production management company in Austin, Texas, was following my tweets. Haiku ensued:

Some gas company
Follows my tweets, who knows why?
Hope they like haiku

Of course when I investigated this Leading Upstanding Natural Gas Management Company I found they were NOT following me. They had something like 100 followers but were only following one person, and it wasn't me.

The answer is obvious. I had mentioned natural gas production in one of my tweets. They must have some sort of twitterbot, a critter I didn't know existed, that searched tweets for those words, followed anyone who mentioned them, and then unfollowed them again. It was all just an elaborate way of spamming, in other words.

I'm annoyed at that of course. Spammers Must Die. Still, you have to admire all the hard work and dedication needed to pull off this particular bit of annoyance. And they didn't steal anything but my time and Twitter's bandwidth, didn't steal anyone's pension, didn't kill anyone, didn't overthrow any small oil-rich countries, so by the standards of Good Honest Businessmen they're not all that slimy at all. Probably.

Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder is not the organic-based disease that (I think) is better known. Rather, OCPD is just another wrong way to look at the world. You could summarize it as faith in The Rules, combined with bafflement and suppressed rage when The Rules don't work, when following The Rules doesn't lead to success, when other people flout The Rules and are not immediately struck down by Lightning from On High.

People who work for the government are often subject to OCPD. Whether that's because they've worked with the system for too long, because they had this blind faith in The Rules all along, or because of some combination of the two, I do not know.

I would say that if you're entrusted with enforcing the regulations, it is not a bad thing to think that The Rules should be followed and that they are important. I will also admit that I have bouts of OCPD myself. Fortunately, I deal with people outside the system. I deal with the real world. And, dare I say it, I am not entirely stupid. So there are limits to how blindly I will follow The Rules. And a lot of my particular OPCD anger is against the rules themselves, for having been written (as they sometimes are) in ways that can't be enforced or understood, and in ways that move us away from the very goals for which The Rules were written in the first place. Nevertheless, I can be unreasonable about The Rules. I know it. I really shouldn't get down on other sufferers the way I do.

The problem is that as with everything else, in bureaucracy and in faith in The Rules there are degrees, there are levels. Generally you have more rigid, less intelligent faith in The Rules as you move up from us front-line cannon-fodder to the middle management levels; then less and less, until you get to the top layer of the bureaucracy, the legislature, who have no respect for the laws at all. And as you move right-to-left across the organization, from those of us who deal with the public to those who deal with front-line workers, but not the public, to those who are so far back into the organization that they don't even know the public exists, you get a greater and greater level of the disorder.

In short, you, Joe Citizen, might deal with me and think that I am an unreasonable, inflexible bureaucrat. But you have no idea. No frickin' idea at ALL. We front-liners have to deal with deeper and deeper levels of bureaucracy, the support staff and the people who support the support staff and the people who support them, and each succeeding remove from reality means that their heads are jammed in that much higher and tighter, until no light can reach them at ALL and their brains turn to mush from lack of air.

Which brings me to our Department of Information Technology.

There was a time when each of our divisions had their own IT staff, who would take care of our problems and fix whatever needed fixing. Now, one thing the higher-ups always say is that they want to do what's right to help us, that they value our contributions, that customer service and keeping us informed, that consulting with us about what we need, are all vital, and that they will spare no effort to take care of us. But they took everyone's individual IT staff and ripped them away from us, of course without consulting us at all-- they just did it. And the new DIT acts in the same way. They won't fix anything we need fixed, but they will reach down and change things at random in our computers and software. Change things so that our old programs, that we still need to do our work, won't work any more. Change things so we can't fix their screw-ups. Change things so we all have the DIT screensaver with quotes from the DIT mission statement, and it comes on after 10 minutes, and you can't even change THAT, for heavens's sakes.

They say this is important for purposes of computer security. Computer security is important; they read that in a column in BYTE somewhere, I think. So we're going to have it, whether we need it or not.

Which we don't, because all our computers are in a locked, secure building, and don't have anything but public information on them anyway. Of course my messages asking that my computer be allowed to go more than 10 minutes idle before everything locks up and I have to log in again have gone unanswered-- one of the secrets of the DITiots is that, like most service providers who claim that Your Call is Important to Us, they make it impossible to actually reach anybody or talk to anybody. (At that, the inability to contact anyone at all with my problems is a step up from what my cell phone company, Alltel, does; or what Charter, my cable and internet provider, does. They ship my calls off to the same guy in the Philippines, who has a third-grade education and command of no more than six words of heavily-accented English. It's amazing how quickly and cheaply this guy who doesn't speak English can dispose of those annoying customer service calls.)

Of course if I ever DID get through to someone DITiot in power and told him my concerns, I'd just get the Stupid Stubborn Cow Look and "Are you seriously saying that you're against computer security?" Inner-zone bureaucrats always have that brainless look and a no-win question ready for you, should you dare to attempt to illuminate the lightless abyss in which they dwell.

And then I'd probably get a reprimand for having a bad attitude. That's happened too.

However, I have discovered a way to solve the ten minute computer lock problem. If the computer never goes idle, it won't be idle for ten minutes; if it isn't idle for ten minutes, it won't lock. And there's a hardware device that can prevent the computer from going idle for as long as you wish. A device literally millions of years in development.

It's called a rock. If you balance a rock on the mouse button so it sends a constant stream of mouseclicks into the comptuer.. problem solved.

Or so I've heard. I wouldn't have a bad enough attitude to actually try something like that MYSELF, you understand.

Essex Paving

Somewhere near “the middle of the mitten” you'll find the twin towns of Alma and St. Louis, Michigan. When I was a kid we called Alma “Smellma” because of the odors from its refinery. St. Louis has its industrial history too.

The Pine River flows through here, and as it passes St. Louis it goes by a large earthwork structure that looks remarkably like the base of a huge pyramid. The resemblance is apt, because this is indeed a tomb.

( Read more... )

Mr. Chris Andrews
Lansing State Journal
120 E. Lenawee St.
Lansing, MI 48919

Dear Mr. Andrews:

As a state employee, I have to put up with a number of risks. For one thing, there are a large number of ignorant rednecks who want me dead for no reason whatsoever, and not all of them are in the Michigan State Senate.

Of those who aren't, a fair number are Militia types who live in the back woods around here, claiming they're not part of the State of Michigan or subject to its laws; cleaning their guns; and thinking that their buddies McVeigh and Nichols done real good when they blowed up that there government office building in Oklahoma City.

I suppose you're going to cry Freedom of the Press and congratulate yourself on serving the public by publishing a searchable database of every state employee, complete with names, salaries, job titles, and addresses. But what you have done, accidentally or not (and I have a hard time believing you didn't realize this in advance) is to paint a big red target on the back of each and every employee of the state. If any of us get killed because of this, our blood is on your hands.

Didn't it occur to you that perhaps cops, prison guards, environmental enforcers, the people who step in between abusive parents and their children or who get between battered and battering spouses, might have enemies? And we don't really need enemies. Nobody in that Federal Building in Oklahoma City had ever done anything to harm McVeigh or Nichols. None of them knew their killers, and the killers knew none of them. It was simply enough that they worked for the government.

I think that in fairness to the rest of us, you should post your own address, phone number, personal e-mail, and salary. And while you are at it, I suggest you provide those of all your friends and loved ones, the name of the school your kids go to, and what time classes get out, for the convenience of any child molesters who might be watching.

Your friend,
Hafoc

Do you know what the penalty for nagelwresting is?

There isn't any penalty for it. Whatever it is, it isn't illegal, chiefly because nobody's ever done it.

It's good to remember that pretty much all our laws and regulations prohibit something that some lowlife scum somewhere actually did once. I can assure you, there is no Washington office devoted to dreaming up ways to prohibit things that nobody has ever done, or wanted to, or suggested.

We have burdensome child labor laws because Honest Businessmen saw nothing wrong with hiring children to work twelve-hour shifts in textile mills. And they no doubt praised themselves for doing so on the grounds of the economic opportunities they were providing. JobsJobsJobs!

We have burdonsome pollution laws because Honest Businessmen saw nothing wrong with pouring smoke into Pennsylvania skies until people were dropping dead all over town, or pouring solvents into Ohio rivers until they caught fire and nearly burned the city down.

We have fair labor laws because Henry Ford, among others, saw nothing wrong with hiring bands of armed thugs to beat or kill any "troublemakers" in his plant who thought the workers should have some say in what was in their contract-- and after all, it was Ford's property, wasn't it? Didn't he have an absolute right to control who was there and what they did there?

We have worker safety laws in honor of the thousands mangled in machinery or dead of black lung, brown lung, asbestosis, silicosis... and if the danger bothered them, they should go get a job somewhere else. Except there wasn't anywhere else.

Every single burdensome regulation the Honest Businessmen squeal about is damning evidence that the "enlightened self-interest" that is supposed to make Honest Businessmen behave in a responsible manner, didn't.

Perhaps we are smarter now. Perhaps we are more moral than we once were. Perhaps if we took all those regulations away, the Honest Businessmen wouldn't return to those old abuses.

Or not right away, anyhow.

Perhaps.