The Story of Stuff

This web site says it all: www.thestoryofstuff.com. This is very important, well, stuff, and very pertinent to our current economic mess.

Birds

I was taking a break from doing some yardwork today and listening to the birds in the trees nearby. I could hear at least four distinctly different songs going at the same time, and this got me thinking. The birds were likely singing for different reasons, and the average person would be completely oblivious to the purpose of those songs, but to the birds themselves, those personal expressions would be very important. So, most people wouldn't register anything more than "hm, birds", if they heard them at all, while the birds were pouring their hearts out.

Meanwhile, the people below might be having conversations critical in their lives while the birds above would be entirely oblivious to any human purpose. A wren doesn't think a human is especially important because of what kind of car he drives, or where he works, or what he wears, as long as he leaves the nest alone.

I read somewhere that if you start thinking you're really important, you should try giving orders to someone else's dog, which gave me a good laugh.

So what does this mean? Just that importance is very relative, I suppose, and that a lot of people I've encountered get very caught up in their concept of self-worth (both high and low) to an extent that makes them act strangely sometimes. I was frustrated with my job yesterday and guilty of this myself, so it was good to be outside today and regain a better perspective.

Coupling

I've recently been working my way through the British sitcom series "Coupling", via Netflix. I'd first caught an episode on PBS very late at night, and was soon laughing so hard my wife came in from the other room to see why. It's essentially about three men and three women and their various romantic (and often sexual) adventures, but that description really doesn't do it justice. It's reasonably accurate to call it a British "Friends" with much earthier and more insightful humor and a far more creative approach. Several episodes use unconventional methods of telling the story (scenes shown out of order, etc.), especially by sitcom standards. If you rent it, I'd suggest trying at least the first two episodes, as the first one is a little weak by the standards of the rest of the series, if I recall correctly, probably because it carries the burden of setting up the relationships of the characters from then on.

One of my favorite bits involves one of the characters trying to pick up a woman from another country in a bar. She speaks no English, and he doesn't speak a word of her language (Hebrew). We first see the scene played from his point of view, then we see it from her point of view, with her now speaking English and him speaking a sort of pidgin Italian that he seemed to be improvising on the spot.

Another favorite is a scene played out through a subtext filter, meaning that the characters are all saying exactly what they mean, as opposed to the words they actually used.

But I think the best scene of the series that I've seen to this point is at the end of the episode "Inferno", in which the main male character attempts to explain the plot of a pornographic film called "Lesbian Spank Inferno" in terms that make it seem more artistic than the title would suggest.

For the most part, "Coupling" is played as a farce, with some typical dating/relationship issue starting out in a relatively normal way, then wildly escalating due to some misunderstanding or miscommunication. However, there are also occasional serious moments that tell us a lot about relationships, such as the end of season two.

NBC attempted an American version as a replacement for "Friends", which I haven't seen, but heard was a complete disaster by all accounts. If you've seen the American version, don't let that stop you from trying the British version. I'd heard they used the original scripts, only slightly modified for an American audience, and for some reason it just didn't work. The problem might have been that some of the funniest bits might have had to be cut or modified significantly to meet American television standards of censorship, and the full impact of the humor might not have survived the cuts.

All of the actors do a fine job, but what really makes the show are the scripts by Steven Moffatt. Between "Coupling", "Jekyll", and his award-winning episodes of Doctor Who, I've become quite a fan, and I'd be willing to take a good look at anything written by him in the future.

The Funeral and After

I spoke at my father's funeral, which was one of the most difficult things I've ever done. I knew it was going to be extremely hard for me, but I felt it was something that he would've wanted, so I kept reminding myself of that to get me through it. One of the positive things about the delay between his passing and the funeral itself was that it gave me time to think through exactly what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it, and the end result was truly exactly what I wanted (and I hope what he would've wanted).

I practiced before the funeral in an attempt to figure out if I could get through it without reaching a point where I couldn't speak, and to try to figure out how I could get through the tough parts. The bottom line is that, as tough as I thought it would be to do this, it was tougher than that, and frankly, I seemed to be breaking down about every four or five words instead of just at a few of the more emotional points. Still, I got through it and I'm glad I did it.

One of my sisters spoke before me with much lighter content, going for the funny reminisce rather than the serious point on the whole, but I have to say that she did it very well and did a better job keeping herself together than I did.

There are still a few things to tend to regarding my father's passing, but most things are done, and I'm ready to get on with doing the things I need to (and want to) do. I'm back to work, which has been especially difficult. The people I work with did a fine job of handling emergencies during my absence, and my boss was very good about allowing me any time I needed, but I've learned that the people I'm dealing with on claims had a tolerance level of only about twenty four hours before they started saying "I've been patient, and I need you to do this for me now." Trying to do seven days' work in four days simply doesn't work, so it wasn't a pleasant week to say the least, even with very sympathetic support from my co-workers. I think I have a shot at catching up by the end of next week, and that'll just have to do.

Dad

My father passed away this morning. At times like this, you'd like to have something particularly profound to say, because your feelings seem so complex, but it's hard to say anything clear for exactly that reason. My mind has been a jumble of everything I ever felt about him all day today.

My father moved a substantial distance away when I was in my teens, which meant that we didn't see each other very often over a period of many years. I have a lot of positive memories of him from when I was relatively young, but our more recent contacts often felt as though we were living very separate lives. Distance and a lack of contact will do that.

And yet, as several people reminded me today, he was always my father, and there's a very real impact to losing him. I think of the times I meant to call him, but was just too busy and planned to do it sometime in the unspecified future. That can't happen now. Still, I can't think of anything I wanted to say to him that I didn't, or anything that I said to him that I regret, which is a very good thing, and something that not everybody in my situation can say. I think we could have been closer if we'd had the opportunity to spend more time together, and I grieve that loss more than anything else. My wife has said that some of her favorite parts of me obviously came from him, and I believe that's true, and it's to his credit that that's the case.

The nature of the obstacles we face in our lives has a lot to do with who we are, and he had more than his share of obstacles in a couple of respects. Life had been very hard on him, and in that sense he's free now. Wherever he is now, I wish him peace that I don't know he'd ever found in this life.

More Eyes Would Be Better, Right?

Years ago, I was in management with the corporation I still work for (though in a different capacity). Upper management had decided they'd had enough of a particular kind of mistake being made, and so they made a rule that whenever one of your subordinates made that kind of mistake, you had to go to a big meeting in front of everybody else in management and explain to the entire group why that mistake had been made and what procedural change you were implementing to prevent it from happening ever again.

I can't fault upper management for taking a position that a certain type of mistake is unacceptable and trying to do something about it, but it doesn't take a genius to see how ridiculous this way of handling it is. On one particular occasion, one of my people made the Mistake of Doom. When I questioned her about it, she replied that she was well aware of exactly what the procedure was and exactly how unacceptable that mistake was, but she'd simply slipped up. She was human; what can you say to that? I had to come up with some lame procedural change for the meeting, but at the end of the day, the fact is that human beings mess up from time to time, no matter how unacceptable that mistake may be and how careful the person who makes it was being.

I found myself reminded of this story last week when something happened to one of my peers, but it requires a little background to lead up to it. My job is complicated and the stakes are high. There can be serious legal consequences if we make the wrong kind of mistake. Furthermore, we're required to constantly multitask and everything is on an extremely tight deadline. Someone decided several years back that it'd be a Good Idea to take one of the most experienced people and have him monitor everybody's work on an especially complex subprocess to make sure we did a better job with it. And sure enough, everybody took his advice and the subprocess improved.

Time passed, and upper management decided that it worked once, so it'd be another Good Idea to add a similar review for another subprocess. Then over the last two years or so they added another two. So not only do we have our actual superior watching what we do, we also have no less than four other people looking over our work and telling us how to do things better. As you can imagine, it gets more than a little frustrating having four very experienced people going over your work with a fine tooth comb looking for mistakes. It's not a question of if they're going to find mistakes; it's a question of how many and how big the mistakes they find will be. My very competent peer was being nitpicked over a minor error noticed by one of those reviewing people, and had to explain why she'd made the error and how she was going to avoid making it again in the future. The simple truth is, when you're doing everything as fast as you can and getting interrupted by someone roughly every three minutes, you're doing extremely well if your mistakes are occasional and minor.

I have this Paranoia-style vision of management deciding that we're not productive enough, so they keep pulling the most experienced people away from the actual work to review everybody else's work, until you eventually have thirty two people standing around the one person doing the actual work, each of them yelling advice simultaneously (and some of that advice being contradictory). We're not there yet, but we're working on it.

Greetings from Corporate America!

Our working group was recently pulled into a meeting where we played each person's recorded phone greeting (the one people get if we're already on the phone) in turn and were encouraged to critique them. This struck everybody as a little strange, because we're all supposed to use the same wording. In practice, there were little variations, but nothing major. The boss wanted us to sound more enthusiastic in general, but other than that nothing much came of it. This left us mystified, because we took roughly an hour of our working day from jobs where being extremely pressed for time is a given, for what seemed like no good reason.

One of my peers figured it out a little while afterward. There's a big push from high levels to improve our customer service numbers, and apparently somebody feels that finding some way to improve our greetings will have that impact. My own opinion is that there are much better ways to pursue that goal.

My guess is that changing things that would actually improve customer service (like putting resources into getting checks issued to people more quickly) would involve spending money, and they're unwilling or unable to do that. Changing our greetings is effectively free. Someone at a high level has been assigned to improve customer service results and doesn't have the authority or budget to address any real issues, so he or she had to come up with something that looked good, even if it didn't have any real impact.

In the corporate world, it's important to be perceived as doing something, especially if you're not. And thus, the nonsensical meeting.

I was going to stop throwing bricks at the corporate world for a while after posting this one, but something happened today that I can't resist. In fact, I plan to write a version of it into a Paranoia scenario. However, I'll leave that particular brick for another day.

Groundhog Day

I'm not much of a Bill Murray fan in general, so I didn't get interested in this movie until I read more than once that it had a lot of fans in various spiritual communities, which made me very curious. And so it was that "Groundhog Day" found its way onto my Netflix list.

I thought I remembered this being marketed as a comedy for theatrical release, and while there are definitely funny parts, that's not truly accurate. The spiritual component comes from this guy starting out as, well, not a nice guy, to say the least, and through the course of the movie you watch him change. He tries all of the crap any of us would probably try under similar circumstances. It rings true, or the movie simply wouldn't work. You know where it's going all along, and yet you feel as though he's earned it by making all of the necessary mistakes a thousand times (probably literally) until he finally learns how to truly build a good life.

There are plenty of laughs along the way, especially if you find Bill Murray funny in the first place. I loved him in "Stripes" and "Ghostbusters", and found him annoying in everything else I've seen him in before this. No, I haven't see "Lost in Translation" yet, but it is on my Netflix list. So the bottom line is, "Groundhog Day", highly recommended. I watched it twice in a row (second time with director's commentary), which says it all.

"Thank You for Calling Big Honkin Corporation. I'm So Effin' Happy You Called that I Could Just Scream...

This call may be monitored or recorded for Bad Things to hold against me in my annual review. How may I help you?"

How does that sound to you? With a few alterations to protect the identity of my employer (and allow me to keep my job), this is the length of the new greeting I'm now required to use at work. You've probably heard similar greetings if you have any reason to call a sufficiently large company. I don't know about you, but hearing this lengthy run of drivel doesn't leave me feeling warm and fuzzy about the company I'm calling.

I knew this was coming because I'd had reason to call the Even Larger Corporation that owns the Very Large Corporation that I work for, and heard this sort of greeting when I called them. I figured it was only a matter of time before we shared the joy as well, and I was right.

So why do we have such a ridiculously long greeting? Well, the "monitored or recorded" part is supposed to be a legal requirement, even though there's supposed to be a pre-recorded message saying the same thing that callers hear before they get to us, so it sounds like duplication to me. My guess is that there was a committee talking about what to put in the greeting, and everybody felt they had to add something to show they were participating in the process. And I'd also guess that not one of them read it out loud even once.

Does anyone really think such a greeting sounds friendly or natural? And if not, why require it?

This is just the tip of a particularly goofy iceberg. More on that another time...

Violent Sports and Buddhism

My favorite sports (football and hockey) are also among the most violent, which obviously presents a problem from a Buddhist perspective. It's hard to reconcile peaceful intentions for all beings with cheering for your favorite NFL linebacker knocking the opposing quarterback into next week. Not to mention reveling in a good ol' hockey fight.

Well, I'm not going to try to reconcile it. While I don't fully embrace the idea of two hockey players pounding the heck out of each other the way I used to, I still enjoy those sports the most, and that's just the way it is. There's still beauty in a completed 50 yard pass or a series of quick passes between hockey players resulting in a goal. One of my favorite things in sports is seeing a goal coming in a hockey game moments before it actually happens, and that's skill, not violence.

I know there are less violent sports, but honestly, I find most of them boring as heck. Maybe in time the violence will bother me more and my tastes will change, or maybe not. Maybe I'm just not going to become that spiritually developed during this lifetime. In the meantime, I'm going to continue to enjoy the excitement of the NHL playoffs. :-)