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. :-)

NHL Playoffs - A Way of Life

I've been a Philadelphia Flyers hockey fan since the late 70's, and I've never discussed it here because there hasn't been anything worth discussing since I've been blogging. Until now.

The Flyers were the worst team in the league last year, and painful to watch. As I type this, they've won their first seven game series, and are leading their current series three games to one. They have an upsetting tendency to blow two goal leads, but their goalie has gotten hot at just the right time, and they've been pulling rabbits out of their hats at the critical moments when they most need it.

The only problem with the NHL playoffs is that they tend to become a lifestyle because of the sheer number of games, especially while you have a rooting interest. Happy as I've been, it's been very hard to get anything done for the last couple of weeks. My wife has said that she's happy that my team is winning because it makes me happy, but on the other hand, she really wishes they'd lose so I could get more done around the house.

After suffering with cheering for a lousy team the last couple of years, the house can wait just a little longer. :-)

Dexter

I've been renting the first season of the TV series "Dexter" through Netflix, and wanted to put a big recommendation out there for those of you who may not have seen it.

This series is about a serial killer who works as a blood spatter specialist for the Miami police department. He was raised by his adoptive father, a police officer, who gave him a moral code to live by to keep him undetected. He only kills murderers and other people who've been up to something nasty (and only then if there's definite proof of their activities), not because he sees anything wrong with killing other people, but because it's a relatively safe way for him to indulge the urge. He's a reasonably functional sociopath. This of course raises the question of whether he's a bad guy because he kills people, or a good guy because he only kills bad people. I know my own answer to that question, but others might not agree with my answer, and that's what makes this fun.

The resulting series is very unique stuff. Dexter comes across as a likeable guy, even though you know he doesn't actually feel anything for anyone else and is just trying to figure out how to fit in well enough to survive. I think they stray a bit, actually, because he does seem to care for his adoptive sister at the very least. I can make a reasonable argument that his other human relationships are nothing more than cover, except for her.

Science fiction series often use an alien character to comment on the human condition, and "Dexter" does the same thing in its own way. There are scenes in this show that you simply won't see anywhere else. One of my favorites is when he's about to slit the throats of a captive married couple, but pauses to ask them for relationship advice to help him deal with his girlfriend. I also love the bit where the police call him to inspect his own crime scene, which turns out to surprise him in one very key respect.

The supporting cast is also consistently interesting and entertaining, and their characters come off very much as real people, with positive and negative aspects to their characters.

I have one disc (four episodes, I think) to go to complete the first season, and I'm looking forward to it. Very good stuff.

Mindfulness - Modern and Monastic Life

I'm finding that there's something I really need to work on. I seem to be balanced and mindful at home and at work (though there's still plenty of room for improvement), but when I break my routine I often fall right back to my old bad habits. It's not a big deal, and in fact I'd be very surprised if I had achieved that kind of balance in every environment so quickly and easily. At least I know what I have to work on.

I still don't fully understand the idea of becoming a monk. To me, it seems like stepping away from conventional life in order to better cope with it, then never coming back. Couldn't you do more good for the world by being more involved in it? I guess if I understood, I'd be a monk myself.

National Health Care Plans

We've been hearing a lot about the two Democratic candidates' national health care plans, with the Pennsylvania primary being hotly contested as I write this. I don't think anyone is going to argue that, in a country as relatively wealthy as ours, someone in desperate need of health care should have to go without medical care only because they can't afford it. But my primary question about health care has remained seemingly ignored by all of the candidates. My question is: what are you going to do to control rising health care costs? Any national health care plan that doesn't address that problem is only shifting costs when the real reason that a national health care plan is so desirable to so many people is that health care is increasingly unaffordable.

I suspect that there are several reasons for this, the main one being that nobody has an answer, and if they do have an answer, it'd be very unpopular with a lot of powerful people. A lot of people would like to blame the insurance industry, but that argument fails quickly. The insurance industry doesn't increase health care costs; it merely has to figure out ways to pay for whatever costs exist.

So what needs to change to stop spiraling health care costs? Some doctors point the finger toward insurance companies because of their rapidly increasing malpractice insurance costs (which means that the doctors in turn must charge more), but that's a short-sighted view. Malpractice costs are high because those dollars used to pay high malpractice suit settlements have got to come from somewhere (and yes, the insurance company will make their profit, as all businesses do). So what is generating those large malpractice suit amounts? Simply put, it's the juries that award them. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be large awards for cases that merit them, but I have to question how many of these large awards are truly justified. We've all heard the story of the elderly woman who won millions in a court settlement by taking McDonald's to court for hot coffee she spilled in her own lap in a drive-through. There are medical malpractice cases that are the equivalent of that.

Bringing medical care costs under control is going to require cooperation at every level of the process, and frankly, somebody's golden goose (and most likely several golden geese) is going to have to be cooked to do it. It's going to take someone with courage and power to accurately identify the real problems and address them, and I don't know what it's going to take to enable that person to step up.

I do know that the candidates aren't going to address the real problems during the primaries, because what the voters want to hear is that someone is going to pay their medical bills, and they don't care who it is as long as it doesn't sound as though it has to be them.