One more sleepless night
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Here we go again. Its after 2:00 and I can't get to sleep so I'm back in front of what one of my co-workers used to refer to as the "monster with one giant eye." While he still swears enmity between himself and all of computerdom, he has at least declared an uneasy truce. I'm afraid my relationship with computers is more akin to being addicted to a bad relationship. Earlier this evening I was talking about corporate mythology. I have a hard time with this sort of thing, because in my crew, our standards are so high when it comes to extra effort on behalf of our clients that I often get lulled into a sense of complacency about how truly monumental their efforts really are. What makes it diffucult in terms of corporate mythology is that I have an almost pathological fear of not being seen as being sincere when I say positive things. (I had a boss once who told me it was really important for morale reasons to compliment staff on their efforts on a regular basis. And when I say regular, I mean regular, like every Friday afternoon at 2:00. I know he was sincere in his belief that they were basically doing a good job, but I also know that no one really believed that he was, because the format was so contrived.) When I get to talking about exemplary performance I have a tendency to gush, and given that that is at odds with my "grumpy bastard' persona, it just doesn't seem to come out right. So I am not real good at this process of building our corporate mythology. If I was a really good administrator I would put a lot more effort into it, but I think its been demonstrated pretty conclusively that I'm not a really good administrator. I do have a few of these stories, though, and I think in a lot of respects this may be the best of the lot. Several years ago I was working in a smaller facility and on this particular Saturday night I was on-call. About 3:00 in the morning the night staff guy (Jim, for this story) called me to ask me to come in to work to cover for him so he could go try to get one of our clients who had called up threatening to commit suicide. I only lived about 5 minutes away from work, so I threw on some clothes and went in. Jim took the company van and went out to find the client. About an hour later he came back, upset that he had only been partially successful. The client had told him he was going to jump off a bridge. It turned out that the guy was going to jump off a street bridge over the interstate onto the roadway below. Jim got to him before he got all the way out on the bridge. He jumped anyway, but Jim being there caused him to rush, so instead of landing on the highway in front of oncoming traffic, he landed in the grass at the edge of the shoulder. The end result was one broken leg instead of one dead client. At the hospital it was determined that, to no one's surprise, the client was under the influence. Now, here's the extra effort part. A lot of folks who I tell this story to think going out to find a client to try to prevent a suicide in the middle of the night was a really impressive display of extra effort, but at the time that never occurred to either of us; it just seemed like the right thing to do. What really impressed me then was that although the client had talked to Jim several times during the night, he never told Jim where he was or where he was going to jump at. He said he was at a convenience store but that was all Jim knew. (Younger readers should keep in mind that this was back in the dark ages before you could get caller ID on your phone.) What Jim did know was that he heard an ambulance siren go by while he was talking to the client the last time. While I was driving to work, Jim called 911, told the dispatcher who he was and what he was trying to do and got the route of the only ambulance that was running at the time he talked to the client. Then, using a city map and a phone book, he plotted the location of the convenience stores along the route the ambulance took. With that information he was able to deduce that the only bridges within walking distance of the 2 possible convenience store locations were over the interstate, so he drove to the bridge on the street closest to the convenience stores and found the client.. by Cziltang 
Posted: Thursday, November 20 2003 02:10:42 AM

Thoughts on 'Stupid Criminal Tricks'
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I haven't added anything to the 'Stupid Criminal Tricks' section for quite a while now. It's not that I don't have any more stories, it's just that I haven't felt like reminiscing about that stuff for quite a while. Most of my SCT stories come from the first two places I worked, and while invaluable to me in terms of experience, they generally weren't happy times. I was in college, independent, had pretty much all the answers, was definitely smarter than most of the people I worked with, and without question knew more than the folks running the programs I worked for. (I was also humble and modest.) Additionally I felt compelled to tell everyone what I thought, which usually included directly saying (or at least implying) they were all idiots. So, I spent the better part of six years engaged in a series of running battles with administrators and board members. Luckily (I guess) I was young and had the energy for righteous indignation and fighting hopeless battles over trivial issues. Although most of my stories aren't painful memories in and of themselves, they are usually entwined with things that are, so I have to be in a particular mood to sit down to think about that time. One of the management gurus I was reading a few years ago talked a lot about 'corporate mythology.' (I'm not sure that was the label he put on it, but its what I have called it since then, as it seemed to have some of the kinds of connotations and overtones of meaning that I was trying to communicate.) 'Corporate Mythology' is the body of stories about employees who have gone way above and beyond to provide legendary customer service; the kind of thing that distinguishes great companies from the rest. The idea was that companies should find examples of this kind of exemplary customer service and make those stories part of every new employee's orientation (or indoctrination, as the case may be). Over time, a company would then build up a sort of 'mythology' that is more effective at communicating the company's values than any orientation presentation or personnel manual could ever be. Since we've hired some new employees recently and since I am routinely inflicted on all new employees as part of their orientation, I've had occasion to think about some of our corporate mythology and in the process dredged up memories of things that are definitely NOT in that category. One of the things that I find curious is that in thinking back over my career, I've collected more stories about stupid behavior by staff and other alleged professionals than I have about stupid criminals. I'm not sure what that means, exactly. Perhaps it is a reflection on my expectations for professional behavior. Given the number of these professional stupidity stories, I may have to change the name of the collection. I remembered the following incident a few days ago: Willie and the Bovine Idiot By way of background for this story, let me say that I am 'pig people'. When talking about the animal kingdom in anthropocentric terms, for me pigs are intelligent and driven, cows are stupid and lazy. At the time this story occurred, three of us at work were engaged in a rather silly game where we tried to find creative ways to describe good things in swine terms and bad things in bovine terms. Silly, yes, but harmless and I remember some of it being pretty clever. Willie was from a small town and was one of those guys who, fifty years ago would have been the town drunk. Like Otis on the Andy Griffith show, he would have worked menial labor odd jobs and been drunk most of the time and would have been harmless as long as he didn't get behind the wheel of a car. But, it wasn't fifty years ago, times had changed, and he was behind the wheel of a car. Willie and a friend were arrested passed out in a car in a ditch after having run over several stop signs on gravel roads in a rural area. The charge was Criminal Damage to Property and they had hit enough of them that the total cost of the signs made it a felony. Willie wasn't terribly bright (there was some evidence that he wasn't even driving and that his friend had conned him into trading places after they hit the last sign and were in the ditch before the cops came) and there was documentation of some organic brain damage. He was having a really tough time finding a job, as there isn't much demand for farm hands in town and on top of everything else, he had a broken arm in a cast due to some unspecified, apparently unexplainable accident. We thought maybe we might be able to get him some job training and job placement assistance through vocational rehabilitation programs. We generally weren't too successful with that sort of thing, but I did manage to get him an appointment with the state VocRehab office. I drove Willie out to VocRehab for the appointment, and went with him to see the counselor because I had all the documentation to back up the information we had put in the referral forms. When we got to the guy's office, the first thing I noticed was a cartoon poster on the wall of two dancing cows with a caption, 'Friends are for heiffer and heiffer' and I'm thinking to myself, 'Great. Cow people." We spent about 10 minutes in the office and the guy talked with Willie and asked him some general questions about his education and skills. Then he got a real sad look on his face and told us that he would really like to help, but they couldn't provide services for temporary disabilities like broken arms. I was so dumbfounded that he had completely ignored all of the paperwork I had sent in, not to mention the evidence of personally talking with Willie that I blurted out (in what is surely one of the least tactful things I've ever said), "We're not here about a broken arm, we're here about brain damage!" The guy looked shocked for a few seconds, then his face lit up, he got a really big smile and he said, "Oh, good! We can do brain damage." by Cziltang 
Posted: Wednesday, November 19 2003 09:06:21 PM

...and life goes on.
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My, how time does fly when you're... well, busy. It's been over 3 weeks since I last sat down to write. It doesn't seem like it has been that long, but a calendar full of days without entries is a stark reminder that it is true. Reasons? Lots and none at all. Work has been brutal. We've been helping an elderly friend move to a new apartment. I've been watching the Rugby World Cup matches when I've had half a chance. I'm having problems with pain in my "mouse hand" wrist. Yeah, lots of reasons, and none of which would be sufficient to stop me if I wasn't avoiding my computer. I know that last one is a bit foreign to a lot of people, but sometimes I do avoid my computer. Partly because I don't want to mess with the e-mail (I get most of my bill notices electronically now) and partly because I have a couple of pending essays I am afraid of (actually I'm afraid they will be way more involved than I had intended, which means they should probably be split into more manageable topics and I'm not quite sure how to do it) . A lot of this is still fallout from the internal paradigm shift I've mentioned before. Part of it is that I had an opportunity recently to have way too much contact with a friend of mine who is a practicing alcoholic (actually, he isn't a practicing alcoholic, he's pretty much past the point of practice, he's to the point of being really, really good at it) which forced me to confront in real life the issues I deal with second hand while running a treatment program. Now that I'm past it (his parole officer sent him to in-patient treatment in another part of the state) I can look back with at least a wee bit of objectivity and realize that for all the ugliness of the situation, what I did and didn't do, what I thought and how I tried to deal with it were all mostly consistent with what I would have professionally advised someone else in a similar situation. There were, however, some discrepancies; I didn't always handle things right, and I learned that it is a lot harder to deal with an addicted person up close and personal. In the future, I won't be quite so hard on family members I used to contemptuously dismiss as "enablers." It's a hell of a lot harder to be strong and hold the line when its personal. My philosophical preoccupation with personal responsibility colors my world view to the point that I just won't take excuses from people I am involved with. In my friend's case, as painful as it is when talking about someone I've been close to and have trusted for over 30 years, the simple fact is that I'm not his friend anymore. Actually, it is probably closer to the truth to say that the person I have been friends with since we were in Junior High doesn't exist anymore, and I am not friends with the booze that is pretty much all that's left. I was hanging in there until just recently, but we've passed the final point where that was true. We've now entered the realm where he's just a guy I know and know quite a bit about. The ironic (and profoundly sad) thing is that he probably doesn't have a clue. This may sound a bit strange given my profession, but I was OK with him being an alcoholic. It was his choice and as long as he was willing to deal with the consequences of that choice, I was willing to hang in there. But just recently he started talking about "they did this to me," and "they" made me a bum because "they" won't let me drive to a decent job, and other drivel of that sort. There are very few circumstances where I will accept that kind of nonsense as an excuse. I also detest anyone who believes a blackout should excuse whatever behavior they don't want to be responsible for (in this case, falling on my wife and knocking her through a glass window in the process. Luckily for all concerned, the cuts on her arms, although deep, were not close to any arteries.). So I've been sitting on this stuff, not really wanting to talk about it and unable to get past it to talk about anything else. And, I think it affected me more than I wanted to admit. I have what I believe is a personal definition of "friend" that is just a bit out of the ordinary. I hear people talk about this friend and that friend and this friend from college and that friend from church and I just don't relate to the concept. They talk about friends, good friends, and really good friends and I don't get it. In my world, all those people would just be acquaintances and guys I know. Friends are people you would trust with your life. I had two friends; my high school buddy and my wife. I just lost half of my friends and it was a little more than I wanted to deal with. With that said, I guess I'm pretty much past it and ready to move on to other things. Not "over it," mind you, just ready to get on with other things. Maybe now I can get back to writing regularly.by Cziltang 
Posted: Monday, November 17 2003 06:54:24 PM