My ex and I overspent considerably for Christmas of ’83 (it was mostly my fault) and were miserable when the bills arrived. We resolved ever after to faithfully save for Christmas club and spend not a penny more than we had accumulated for the year. The first year, we saved $404, and we increased it by about a hundred dollars each year.
By 1989, we had saved $900 for the year, and when we learned that good friends at church would have to choose between buying winter coats for their three growing boys or buying them Christmas gifts, we looked at each other and easily decided to give the family $100 out of our Christmas fund. Our friends bought gifts for their boys, along with the winter coats, wrapped them, and put them under their tree. While they were gone to Nashville to visit grandma, someone broke into their house and stole all the gifts.
On the other hand, I recall that in 1988, we spent a grand total of $50 to buy seven gifts for our 2-year-old daughter, and she was perfectly happy with what she got. (And we learned that while you are busy assembling the drum set for which you paid a pretty penny at Toys ’R’ Us, your kid has forgotten all about it and is busy playing with the box it came in.)
Has anyone noticed that no one ever gives Thanksgiving gifts (even though, in a way, it would seem to go naturally with the theme of that day) or, usually, even sends Thanksgiving cards? Attempts have been made to promote gift-giving and card exchange for Thanksgiving, but they have mostly fallen flat. Apparently, the prospect of good food and good fellowship are enough for most people. What if there were a change in our culture such that something similar happened at Christmas?
I’m not necessarily arguing for a culture of radical frugality. I am well aware that retailers make about half their yearly revenue in the Christmas shopping season. There are still small mom-and-pop businesses whose owners sit up at night wondering if they will last for another year or even make payroll this month, to support their families and contribute to the local economy, and I have no wish to see them go under. And even in the large retail chains, there are people reporting to work for their $9 an hour jobs for whom this is their only prospect of employment and their only chance to buy anything at all for their own kids or even pay the bills.
The point of Christmas as it exists now, sadly, is that one experiences either wild relief that he is not impoverished and humiliated, or equally wild despair that he is.
Still, I’m not out to persuade people to stop shopping. I do wonder, though, what it would be like if our culture changed so that the crowds at Black Friday were there to snap up the most popular toys—but for the purpose of donating them to the local orphanage—where clothes flew off the rack at stores, but so that you could give a sweater or a pair of slippers to your elderly neighbor or give new sneakers to the kids down the block whose parents were unemployed. What if each person wished only for a token gift for himself—some note paper, or a paperback book, or a CD—but was really excited by the prospect of how much he could buy for others who had no prospect of reciprocating?
Of course I know that even wise parents, not caught up in the mad rush for the latest fad toy, get a good deal of genuine pleasure in giving to their own children for Christmas. My parents would sit up until 2 a.m. wrapping many more gifts for my brothers and me than they could afford and give each other perhaps two small gifts apiece.
On the other hand, I’ll never forget when I took my daughter along—again, she was 2 at the time—while I put a frayed dress shirt in the Goodwill repository and told her I was giving a shirt to the poor people because that was what God wanted us to do. She beamed and gave me a big hug, and the next time a guest entered our house, she blurted out “Daddy gave a shirt to the poor people!” I still wonder if it isn't possible to generalize such a reaction throughout our society. Sales need not fall or cash registers stop ringing, but I can’t help but think there would be a subtly different flavor in a line full of people with their shopping carts piled high, most of whom were standing there to buy one or two things for themselves and the rest of their huge pile of goods for those who had nothing. I think it would really start deserving the name of “Christmas” shopping once more.
© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.
Monday, December 12, 2011
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Notable birthdays on St. Andrew's Day
Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, and Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of the Anne of Green Gables books, were all born on this date—Churchill and Montgomery on the very same day, in 1874. As one gets older, he may be uncomfortably reminded of these lines from "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift," written in 1731:
When I was a boy, my mother read Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer aloud to my brothers and me, chapter by chapter. Later, at 13, I read Huckleberry Finn and Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and was very taken by both, though too young at the time to fully understand Twain's satire on the King and the Duke in Huck Finn. Years later, to my surprise, I learned that Connecticut Yankee was the first exposure to Arthurian lore for the young C.S. Lewis, whose outlook was about as incompatible with Twain's as it was possible to be. Just as improbably, Twain and his wife, Livy, turn out to have been very good friends with the Scots Christian mystic and author George MacDonald, author of Phantastes, which Lewis credited with having quickened the whole supernatural world to him as a young man.
Twain thought little of the young Churchill and his imperialist enthusiasms; another who took a similarly unenthusiastic view was American actress Ethel Barrymore, 5 years Churchill's junior, who refused his courtship with the observation that she could not tell that he would ever amount to anything. Tellingly, the woman Churchill eventually married, Clementine Hozier, was another statuesque beauty whose appearance strongly reminded others of Barrymore.
Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote the Anne of Green Gables books with an uplifting message though, sadly, Montgomery herself suffered from severe depression, and it is possible that her death in 1942 was actually a suicide instead of death from heart disease, was was officially reported. In a final improbability, Montgomery seems to have modeled the face of her heroine on a photograph of a "Gibson girl," New York ingenue Evelyn Nesbit, the sometime mistress of famous architect Stanford White; when White was shot to death in 1906 by Nesbit's madly jealous husband, Harry K. Thaw, Nesbit became a star witness in Thaw's sensational murder trial.
© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.
"Plies you with stories o'er and o'er
He told them fifty times before
How does he think that we can sit
To hear his out of fashion wit?
"But he takes up with younger folks
Who, for his wine, will bear his jokes
Faith, he must make his stories shorter
Or change his comrades once a quarter!"
When I was a boy, my mother read Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer aloud to my brothers and me, chapter by chapter. Later, at 13, I read Huckleberry Finn and Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and was very taken by both, though too young at the time to fully understand Twain's satire on the King and the Duke in Huck Finn. Years later, to my surprise, I learned that Connecticut Yankee was the first exposure to Arthurian lore for the young C.S. Lewis, whose outlook was about as incompatible with Twain's as it was possible to be. Just as improbably, Twain and his wife, Livy, turn out to have been very good friends with the Scots Christian mystic and author George MacDonald, author of Phantastes, which Lewis credited with having quickened the whole supernatural world to him as a young man.
Twain thought little of the young Churchill and his imperialist enthusiasms; another who took a similarly unenthusiastic view was American actress Ethel Barrymore, 5 years Churchill's junior, who refused his courtship with the observation that she could not tell that he would ever amount to anything. Tellingly, the woman Churchill eventually married, Clementine Hozier, was another statuesque beauty whose appearance strongly reminded others of Barrymore.
Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote the Anne of Green Gables books with an uplifting message though, sadly, Montgomery herself suffered from severe depression, and it is possible that her death in 1942 was actually a suicide instead of death from heart disease, was was officially reported. In a final improbability, Montgomery seems to have modeled the face of her heroine on a photograph of a "Gibson girl," New York ingenue Evelyn Nesbit, the sometime mistress of famous architect Stanford White; when White was shot to death in 1906 by Nesbit's madly jealous husband, Harry K. Thaw, Nesbit became a star witness in Thaw's sensational murder trial.
© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
The real spirit of Thanksgiving as practiced in the land of plenty
Taken near my apartment just now.
© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
A Muslim to fit western tastes?
I'm not sure if Boeing wanted to reassure western travelers that Muslims were not only safe, but glamorous, just like our own best images of ourselves; or to suggest to Muslims that flying Boeing's new 747-8 Intercontinental would make them glamorous (and, thus, less likely to be summarily removed from airline flights, like poor Irum Abbasi), but from anything I think I know about Muslims, Boeing has laid an egg with the photo in their new ad campaign.
What in Allah's name were they thinking of? Muslim women don't wear the hijab gaping oh-so-slightly open to reveal a tantalizing hint of hair, and no self-respecting Muslim woman would be caught dead in a pose that suggested that (a) she was intrigued by the non-believing male behind her and that (b) she was perhaps subsconsciously inclined to loosen the hijab just a little bit more, to attract his notice.
Are these people cracked? Do they think they are in some way doing Muslims a favor by portraying them this way? I for one tend to take a pretty dim view of the way Islam affects women, but aside from that, chastity seems to be something that the advertising industry just doesn't get.
© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.
Absolutely, positively, pointless
For years, employment at FedEx was the technical writer's dream. It was like lifetime employment at the Postal Service, but with self-respect and an aura of glamour. I did a contract stint there in '87, helped edit their Line Haul Ops manuals for an FAA Audit, wrote policies and procedures for their Information and Telecommunications Division, and actually met Fred Smith; I wanted to get on permanently, but that was the year of the stock market crash, and they imposed a hiring freeze.
It's a fine company that enjoys well-deserved success, but like any large corporation, suffers from a large volume of communication that appears to have been written by a nervous mid-level manager, struggling to inflate his words to sound important and with an anxious eye cast over his shoulder at the Vice-President who might be reading it. This morning, a job ad apparently written by one such manager appeared in my e-mail inbox, titled "Project Management Principle." (In this case, it's supposed to be Principal, meaning "the chief person involved.")
It begins by telling me what everyone knows: that FedEx is a dynamic and growing company. It continues with the following glut of pointless and misleading verbiage as to what a project management "Principle" does:
Translation: The Corporate Initiatives Program Management Team manages projects, ensuring good results by using best practices and mentoring less-senior employees.
If a member of this team ever joins the ranks of the unemployed and becomes desperate, instead of standing at an interstate ramp with a sign that says "Homeless and hungry, please help, God bless you," it may say something like this:
For now, at least, the writer of the job description is still employed, and he finally gets around to saying what this position actually is, and does:
Translation: sets up users to use a software package called Primavera, assigning passwords, creating user profiles, etc. Works with tech writers to make sure Primavera-related terms are clearly defined and written down somewhere, so they can be explained to anyone who needs to know, and that instructions for using the software are available. Keeps tabs on how many people are using the system. Keeps the system running through (not trough) staying on top of other software that flags errors and problems. Acts as the go-to person for Primavera for the rest of the computer division and key business users.
In other words: it's not a Project Management Principle (or Principal) position at all, or even a tech writing position: it's basically an administrative position of the type that, had computers been more widely used in my dad's day, might have been done by someone who had had 2 years at community college.
And the qualifications for this job include...? You probably know already. "Master's degree preferred." Absolutely, positively, unnecessary.
© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.
It's a fine company that enjoys well-deserved success, but like any large corporation, suffers from a large volume of communication that appears to have been written by a nervous mid-level manager, struggling to inflate his words to sound important and with an anxious eye cast over his shoulder at the Vice-President who might be reading it. This morning, a job ad apparently written by one such manager appeared in my e-mail inbox, titled "Project Management Principle." (In this case, it's supposed to be Principal, meaning "the chief person involved.")
It begins by telling me what everyone knows: that FedEx is a dynamic and growing company. It continues with the following glut of pointless and misleading verbiage as to what a project management "Principle" does:
This position is part of the Corporate Initiatives Program Management team. The team supports strategic programs of FedEx Corporation by facilitating and executing on programs that are critical to the long term success of the Corporation. The position supports the implementation of Project Renewal across the operating companies and Services by facilitating various work- streams, creating and implementing departmental program management processes, tools and techniques. Leads projects to enable realization of benefits for the programs, ensures best practices are used, and provides visibility to senior management on the current status of programs. Provides mentoring for the development of those in less senior positions.
Position Information:
Translation: The Corporate Initiatives Program Management Team manages projects, ensuring good results by using best practices and mentoring less-senior employees.
If a member of this team ever joins the ranks of the unemployed and becomes desperate, instead of standing at an interstate ramp with a sign that says "Homeless and hungry, please help, God bless you," it may say something like this:
The bearer of this display is part of a growing constituency of American stakeholders seeking to restore equity and maximize individual well-being by soliciting targeted placement of discrete amounts of capital, with the goal of leveraging such voluntary disbursements to realize enhanced synergies with the market economy and move toward full parity with other stakeholders. Investors are invited to review opportunities in this sector and consider what commitment level will most effectively align their own goals with those of this segment of the economy.
For now, at least, the writer of the job description is still employed, and he finally gets around to saying what this position actually is, and does:
Responsible for assigning security and creating profiles for new users in Primavera P6. Maintaining P6 Global dictionaries and administrating services. Maintaining P6 P6 Documentation, with the assistance of IT Technical writers, including but limited to, Configuration documentation, Oracle services agreement, and External interface documentation. Responsibilities will also include development and adherence to, P6 standard administration guidelines and change control process. Responsible for development and use of reports to assist administration activities. Responsible for verifying data population and interface operation to ensure data integrity, trough reporting and error logging software. Will provide a single point of contact with IT support personnel and a primary point contact to all Renewal Purple Core users.
Translation: sets up users to use a software package called Primavera, assigning passwords, creating user profiles, etc. Works with tech writers to make sure Primavera-related terms are clearly defined and written down somewhere, so they can be explained to anyone who needs to know, and that instructions for using the software are available. Keeps tabs on how many people are using the system. Keeps the system running through (not trough) staying on top of other software that flags errors and problems. Acts as the go-to person for Primavera for the rest of the computer division and key business users.
In other words: it's not a Project Management Principle (or Principal) position at all, or even a tech writing position: it's basically an administrative position of the type that, had computers been more widely used in my dad's day, might have been done by someone who had had 2 years at community college.
And the qualifications for this job include...? You probably know already. "Master's degree preferred." Absolutely, positively, unnecessary.
© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.
Monday, September 12, 2011
Mission accomplished?
I love my country and want to see it reclaim its former greatness, which is why I grieve to see how far wrong we went in response to 9/11. On that day, the whole world was with us. In response to the events of that day, our then-President urged everyone to go out and shop, insisted on finding a non-existent link between 9/11 and Saddam, initiated a war in Iraq that eventually brought Al Qaeda to Iraq where it had not been previously, bungled the chance to capture Osama at Tora Bora, eventually involved us in two wars which he refused to raise taxes to fund, squandered our entire budget surplus, illegally bypassed his government's own FISA courts to engage in warrantless wiretapping on American citizens, countenanced waterboarding, a practice for which we had court-martialed American officers in the Phillippines War of 1900 and had hanged Japanese officers as war criminals after WWII; and, finally, multiplied a security state apparatus so that the many agencies, and the number of people holding top secret clearances, are larger than Al Qaeda itself, while airline passengers submit to invasions of their personal dignity that would have outraged the Founding Fathers.
All this happened, in part, because the Bush Administration could not be bothered to pay attention to warnings about Al Qaeda in intelligence briefings (and even a warning of the risk of attacks on tall buildings via airplane) before the event and even allowed some of the 9/11 hijackers to board flights, although they were listed on "no fly" lists, because government personnel didn't check the lists.
We fought two wars not only without paying for them but without reinstituting a draft, staffing the whole endeavor by sending family men and women from the National Guard and blue-collar kids who saw this as their only chance to get a college degree. We sent them into Iraq without adequately reinforced vehicles or adequate body armor, sending them home as shattered wrecks while the government sought to cut veterans' benefits and had to dismiss the commandant of its own Walter Reed Medical Center over the scandal of poor care. We sent enlistees into multiple tours of duty through "stop loss" orders. Our military is overstretched, while the recently departed Secretary of Defense had to fight his own bureaucracy to cancel ridiculously expensive weapons systems that didn't even work, and a quarter of the money spent on military contracts for the past 10 years turns out to have been wasted.
Today, we no longer have the respect of the world. It hesitates to follow us on military undertakings, doubts the continuing soundness of our currency as a worldwide reserve currency, looks on aghast as a small faction of yahoos and know-nothings holds the United States Congress hostage, resisting the control of its own party leadership and all but bringing government to a halt over the issue of raising the debt ceiling, which had already happened 87 times since World War II (mostly under Republican administrations!). The country we delivered from Saddam is now moving steadily into the orbit of Iran, while in Afghanistan, soldiers of that country's army are deserting in droves. Meanwhile, the world beats a path to China's door to seek its friendship, while fewer people in the United States are employed than were in the work force on 9/11, middle-class wages have actually decreased, in real terms, since 1970, and Warren Buffett pays less in taxes than does his secretary.
Is this why people died on 9/11? So that we could present a face to the world as a once-great country steadily being ruined by clowns and thugs, bankrupt of principles and proudly indifferent to ideas?
We elected a man 3 years ago as leader of the free world who seems, in retrospect, to have been chiefly interested in showing how balanced and adult he was. He inanely proclaimed that his advent would mark the moment when the rise of the oceans began to decrease, but had to go to the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change empty-handed. He personally traveled to Europe to seek the endorsement of Chicago for the Olympics, but faced with toxic, hostage-taking political tactics from his opposition, he continually gives in. His self-esteem is perhaps intact, but he is not functioning as a leader, and more's the pity, considering his high intelligence. Meanwhile, among the most intelligent candidates for his office from the opposition, all but one had affirmed a monumentally stupid pledge to refuse a budget arrangement that would have included only a dollar in tax increases for nine dollars in reductions. One of his most likely opponents governs a state where the largest segment of workers holds minimum wage jobs and touts this as an economic miracle, and denies that climate science is settled, while wildfires rage unchecked throughout his state, the worst in recorded history, exacerbated by conditions whose origin he refuses to acknowledge.
This is not the America I grew up in. We are badly in need of a course correction. We need to recognize that actions (including the actions of man toward the environment) have consequences, that wars must be paid for, that social burdens should be shared, that the debt ceiling is merely the way we pay for programs that have *already* been passed, and not a new referendum on them, that the way to fight terrorism is not through an undeclared "war" against no sovereign state with no boundaries and no foreseeable end, that turns our nation into a "security state" that would not seem unfamiliar to residents of constitutionally oppressive regimes and that has government agents forcing women to remove breast prostheses and adult diapers at airports; that our crumbling infrastructure of roads, bridges, and tunnels is a national danger and a scandal in the rest of the developed world; that we spend twice as much per capita as the rest of the developed world on medical care while having health outcomes that lag behind theirs, and that we rank 44th in the world, behind Turkey, in public acceptance of biological evolution, while candidates for the office of President feel obligated to show up at a venue like Saddleback Church and prove their good character to the likes of Rick Warren.
Have we lost our minds?
© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Promise is not performance
What is the point of staking your business's reputation on something that, in the nature of the case, you can't possibly control?
I am thinking of the new billboard ad for Kroger that promises "faster checkout," as well as the ad for Walgreen's that I just heard on AOL Radio saying that a customer went to Walgreen's and "with no lines, he was in and out in a flash." (Never mind that that seems to imply that people have stopped shopping there, which is one of the only reasons that there would be no lines.)
I have shopped at both Walgreen's and Kroger for over 35 years now, and speed is not among the virtues of either. Indeed, as I have pointed out to a Walgreen's manager, it is my experience that, even if I am there at 2:00 in the morning and with no other customers in the store, I will have to wait. Walgreen's clerks dawdle, and it seems to make little or no difference how much or how little customer traffic there is at a given hour.
I won't say that Kroger cashiers are *as* bad, but they aren't much better. Even when one of them tries his or her best, the store's equipment may malfunction; the cashier who checked out my entire order this past Sunday had to call another employee to help her figure out why the scanner would handle everything but the bunch of bananas I was trying to buy.
(Sadly, those aren't the only issues. As long as their shelves are fully stocked, all is well, but ask for a product that you normally buy there that you couldn't find on this visit, and you are wasting your time—indeed, in my observation, employees and management of both places seem bewildered and unaware of the product you are describing there to begin with, even when it is their store brand!)
If I were a Walgreen's or Kroger manager, I might, indeed, privately hand a token to two or three customers each day and tell them that if they weren't checked out in 5 minutes, their order would be free, and I would then use that as a tool to improve the quality of service. But even the very best business should expect, as a result of its success, to have more traffic, which means more and longer lines. For a business whose service isn't even very good to begin with, to advertise itself as though it offered better service than other places is absurd.
© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.
I am thinking of the new billboard ad for Kroger that promises "faster checkout," as well as the ad for Walgreen's that I just heard on AOL Radio saying that a customer went to Walgreen's and "with no lines, he was in and out in a flash." (Never mind that that seems to imply that people have stopped shopping there, which is one of the only reasons that there would be no lines.)
I have shopped at both Walgreen's and Kroger for over 35 years now, and speed is not among the virtues of either. Indeed, as I have pointed out to a Walgreen's manager, it is my experience that, even if I am there at 2:00 in the morning and with no other customers in the store, I will have to wait. Walgreen's clerks dawdle, and it seems to make little or no difference how much or how little customer traffic there is at a given hour.
I won't say that Kroger cashiers are *as* bad, but they aren't much better. Even when one of them tries his or her best, the store's equipment may malfunction; the cashier who checked out my entire order this past Sunday had to call another employee to help her figure out why the scanner would handle everything but the bunch of bananas I was trying to buy.
(Sadly, those aren't the only issues. As long as their shelves are fully stocked, all is well, but ask for a product that you normally buy there that you couldn't find on this visit, and you are wasting your time—indeed, in my observation, employees and management of both places seem bewildered and unaware of the product you are describing there to begin with, even when it is their store brand!)
If I were a Walgreen's or Kroger manager, I might, indeed, privately hand a token to two or three customers each day and tell them that if they weren't checked out in 5 minutes, their order would be free, and I would then use that as a tool to improve the quality of service. But even the very best business should expect, as a result of its success, to have more traffic, which means more and longer lines. For a business whose service isn't even very good to begin with, to advertise itself as though it offered better service than other places is absurd.
© Michael Huggins, 2011. All rights reserved.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
