John McCain screwed himself. At this point the games is pretty lost due in no small part to his poor positioning within the electorate.
If you're John McCain, you're facing a Republican base that's not particularly jazzed about your rather centrist track record. The base slaps you with the RINO moniker and claim they'd rather sit out an election than cast a vote for you. Curiously enough that centrist attitude puts you in good stead with independents; the same people who probably would have voted you into office had George W. Bush not pulled nasty, racist stunts in North Carolina back in 2000. But that's all water under the bridge now. Your solution: pick Sarah Palin. She's a dicey pick but she stands a good chance of winning over all those women, and you just might get a crack at making history with your presidency, trumping the half-breed in the process.
But it didn't turn out that way. Sarah Palin wound up revving up the base and only the base. Injecting an air of creepiness into the campaign, the woman you picked to excite the female vote has instead become a masturbation fantasy for die-hard Republican men. The women you sought to bring into your camp with the pick are just kind of grossed out. And you can't really blame them. Meanwhile you're forced to go along for the ride, feeding the racist sentiments of a base that represents and ever shrinking percentage of the American demographic. By the time you become aware of the monster you've created it's too late to back out.
On one side McCain is forced to distance himself from the naked hatred and racism boiling over from his ostensible base, while on the other side he's forced to push back against Obama in order to secure the independent vote. Caught in a vise, McCain is getting squeezed and the poll numbers reveal it.
We've got just over a week to go and much can change between now and then. Just wait for the White House to release a judiciously timed Bin Laden video. But this is not 2004 and the zeitgeist has mostly moved on. It's hard to see how McCain can release himself from the situation he's created.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
It Burns Me Up
Politics is my baseball. I don't much care for most American sports aside from the perennial squabbles between the Democrats and the Republicans. My only wish is that a third party were more viable, thereby making the spats more interesting. Getting to the point, right now we're in the middle of the American political World Series. I'd say we're getting to around the seventh or eighth inning, the Republicans are down by about four or five runs and they're looking pretty tired.
Anyway, the last debate spat forth a particular remark that didn't get picked up in any of the many media channels; in most instances it slides right past those paid to care about such things. Perhaps they were too distracted by all the other memes and catch phrases that emanated forth from the mouths of the aspirational. But I caught this one and it really burns me up...
Why do some anti-abortion types refer to their opponents as being "pro-abortion"? I think John McCain mentioned it his previous nationally televised chin-wag with That One. I skew pretty left of center when it comes to my political beliefs and I know a lot of people who would prefer not hunker down and get greasy with the anti-abortion/pro-life faction. The thing is that not one of the friends I keep would consider his or herself "pro-abortion". I can't think of a single woman who's so pro-abortion that she deliberately gets knocked up just because it's fun to drop a fetus or two on the floor every once in a while. That's pro-abortion. She's most likely pro-choice, meaning that if a woman really feels the need to do something with her body then she's free to do it, even something as unpleasant as an abortion. That doesn't mean she's really into it. It just means free to choose for herself. Nowhere implicit in that concept is any notion of being pro-abortion. To use that term is to conflate the issue at hand. In fact most people waging war over abortion are really arguing about two very different concepts that just happen to intersect on some pretty dangerous ground.
All this abortion garbage is, as George Lakoff has gone over, just a surrogate for control over women and enforcing a strict social order. At the core of it is a desire to ensure that women stay in their gender roles and remain largely subservient to male masters. When a woman is free to choose she's free to choose in the absence of any male oversight, and I think that makes a lot of people really, really scared. The rationale goes something like, "Shit, if women start making decisions for themselves what might happen next? And why stop there? Women making decisions for themselves is about as crazy as a black man becoming president of the USA!"
Anyway, the last debate spat forth a particular remark that didn't get picked up in any of the many media channels; in most instances it slides right past those paid to care about such things. Perhaps they were too distracted by all the other memes and catch phrases that emanated forth from the mouths of the aspirational. But I caught this one and it really burns me up...
Why do some anti-abortion types refer to their opponents as being "pro-abortion"? I think John McCain mentioned it his previous nationally televised chin-wag with That One. I skew pretty left of center when it comes to my political beliefs and I know a lot of people who would prefer not hunker down and get greasy with the anti-abortion/pro-life faction. The thing is that not one of the friends I keep would consider his or herself "pro-abortion". I can't think of a single woman who's so pro-abortion that she deliberately gets knocked up just because it's fun to drop a fetus or two on the floor every once in a while. That's pro-abortion. She's most likely pro-choice, meaning that if a woman really feels the need to do something with her body then she's free to do it, even something as unpleasant as an abortion. That doesn't mean she's really into it. It just means free to choose for herself. Nowhere implicit in that concept is any notion of being pro-abortion. To use that term is to conflate the issue at hand. In fact most people waging war over abortion are really arguing about two very different concepts that just happen to intersect on some pretty dangerous ground.
All this abortion garbage is, as George Lakoff has gone over, just a surrogate for control over women and enforcing a strict social order. At the core of it is a desire to ensure that women stay in their gender roles and remain largely subservient to male masters. When a woman is free to choose she's free to choose in the absence of any male oversight, and I think that makes a lot of people really, really scared. The rationale goes something like, "Shit, if women start making decisions for themselves what might happen next? And why stop there? Women making decisions for themselves is about as crazy as a black man becoming president of the USA!"
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
The Microsoft Tech Support Rabbit's Warren: Down We Go
A couple of weeks ago, lost in my unemployment funk, I ran an experiment in customer service. Here's how it went...
Microsoft Vista includes with it a suite of shitty widgets, gadgets or whichever name MS chose that hadn't already been snagged by Apple. I'm pretty fond of the clock gadget since I've got friends and family members scattered across the globe. Courtesy of the clock gadgets I'm spared the task of having to remember time zones. I needn't explain more.
Ordinarily they should look something like this:
Its a clock. Pretty simple, huh? Big hand points to the minutes, little hand points to the hours.
Well, I booted my system on night to find that the clock instead looked like this:
Totally unreadable, but the clock gadget is hardly a necessary component of the operating system. Other gadgets, such as the Contacts gadget and the System Monitor gadget exhibited similar corruption.
I poked around on the web for a while, searching for any documented evidence—and more importantly fixes—relating to this kind of problem. There were a few, I tried them and none of them worked. Later that night the corruption miraculously disappeared after I did what amounted to nothing. The Microsoft fairies has swept through my machine and righted all wrongs. I could go to sleep a happy man.
The next morning I fired up my machine to find the corruption, like a nasty case of genital warts, was back in full bloom. My fixes had failed, even my attempts to roll back to a previously working image of my discs had met with poor fortune. Then I had an idea.
These components come native with the OS, I thought, so Microsoft should be able to solve the problem. I'd never contacted Microsoft's customer support line before; I've always had a natural aversion to dealing with Microsoft in that manner, but this time my logic went something like this:
"If they can't fix the problem you won't be charged the $60," I was informed.
"Let's do it," I agreed. And down into the rabbit's warren I went.
The first tier tech to whom I spoke was a very personable woman. She patiently listened the problem I was encountering and asked me a few probing question. Had I restarted my system? Yes. Had I attempted to use the gadget restore feature? Yes. Had I checked for solutions online? Yes. Had I attempted to re-register my DLLs? Yes. We could both see where this one was going. "Would you mind if I took control of your system?" she asked. Of course I didn't mind. She then directed me to open IE and navigate to a particular page that would invoke an ActiveX control that would in turn let her view my system. That's when things went pear shaped.
"I'm telling it allow the ActiveX control but nothing's happening," I told her.
"What are the menu options you're seeing?" She then described a list of menu items that should have been visible but in fact weren't.
"The one you want me to select isn't there," I told her. "Shouldn't this be easy?"
She let that remark hang while she laboured further with me on trying to get the remote control app installed. This tête-à-tête continued for what was about another twenty minutes, neither of us getting any closer to solving the problem, we were too embroiled in trying to solve the problem of installing the tools that were supposed to help us solve the original problem.
"I think your tech support needs tech support." If she found the remark amusing she didn't let me know it.
A few minutes later I told her I'd solved the problem; not with the corrupted gadgets but with the installation of the remote control app.
"How did you do it?" she asked.
Heh, I thought, this is going to be great. "I used Firefox."
Yes, Firefox worked better with Microsoft's website than Microsoft. Oh the irony.
What then transpired was about two more hours of being repeatedly put on hold while the pleasant yet overwhelmed tech support agent ran my issue up the food chain in an effort to get to the root of the problem. Her final solution was to have me download third party clock gadgets that would in fact work, despite the fact that the native Microsoft gadgets remained corrupted.
"No, no, no," I told her, "that's not a solution, that's a workaround. I called to get a solution to the problem, not to be told about a workaround I already knew about. You're going to need to try harder."
"I'd like to transfer you to an escalation engineer."
"Okay, let see what else can be done. Thanks."
So there I was, two hours lost for nothing, and I'd been shunted to another part of the call center. The next person assigned to my problem was nice enough, but beneath the veneer of concern was a hint of resentment. After all it was 1:30am where he was and I'm sure he didn't care to be dealing with these problems at this time of night. In an effort to break the ice and get him to deal with me on a personal level—really build a stake in the issue—I told him that was soon to travel to India. I asked him about southern India, the place where I'll be going, while we ran a series of hard disc checks. He really didn't give a shit. Okay, I thought, we'll have it your way.
His way was ultimately just like the first tech's but longer. After a further three hours of aimless meandering the final solution was proposed: reinstall the operating system.
Think about that for a moment within the context of the "deal" proposed by ringing Microsoft's tech support in the first place: they either fix it or you don't get charged. What the OS reinstall represents is a bogus deus-ex-machina. No matter which problem you have with Windows, Microsoft can always, as a final resort, declare that your only remaining solution is to reinstall the OS. We'll take our sixty dollars now, please. No shit I can always reinstall the OS. The reason why I called was to fix the problem WITHOUT reinstalling the OS. The corrupted components shouldn't corrupt in the first place. And if they do, then Microsoft should be able to fix them without placing undue burden on the affected customer. Apparently that's not the case.
And neither was I surprised. For years the tales of Microsoft's tech support have swirled around technology companies. Most of us working in the tech industry are savvy enough to support our own equipment without having to resort to hotlines. On this occasions the reasons for my deep-rooted suspicions of Microsoft's tech support were confirmed. The company itself is as needlessly complicated as the software it produces, so much so that the software itself is in fact a replication of the complexity of the company played out at a different scale. It's all one big mess with a powerful marketing arm. If you get caught in the labyrinth, like I did, don't expect to find an easy way out.
Microsoft Vista includes with it a suite of shitty widgets, gadgets or whichever name MS chose that hadn't already been snagged by Apple. I'm pretty fond of the clock gadget since I've got friends and family members scattered across the globe. Courtesy of the clock gadgets I'm spared the task of having to remember time zones. I needn't explain more.
Ordinarily they should look something like this:
Its a clock. Pretty simple, huh? Big hand points to the minutes, little hand points to the hours.Well, I booted my system on night to find that the clock instead looked like this:
Totally unreadable, but the clock gadget is hardly a necessary component of the operating system. Other gadgets, such as the Contacts gadget and the System Monitor gadget exhibited similar corruption.I poked around on the web for a while, searching for any documented evidence—and more importantly fixes—relating to this kind of problem. There were a few, I tried them and none of them worked. Later that night the corruption miraculously disappeared after I did what amounted to nothing. The Microsoft fairies has swept through my machine and righted all wrongs. I could go to sleep a happy man.
The next morning I fired up my machine to find the corruption, like a nasty case of genital warts, was back in full bloom. My fixes had failed, even my attempts to roll back to a previously working image of my discs had met with poor fortune. Then I had an idea.
These components come native with the OS, I thought, so Microsoft should be able to solve the problem. I'd never contacted Microsoft's customer support line before; I've always had a natural aversion to dealing with Microsoft in that manner, but this time my logic went something like this:
- It's not a critical component of the OS
- Microsoft should be able to support their own software, even if I'm sure they can't
- The problem is going to be a tricky one to resolve since it involves the corruption of a set of files—these sorts of problems always push tech support staff to their limits
- I'm unemployed and I've got loads of time to waste on such a fruitless exploit
"If they can't fix the problem you won't be charged the $60," I was informed.
"Let's do it," I agreed. And down into the rabbit's warren I went.
The first tier tech to whom I spoke was a very personable woman. She patiently listened the problem I was encountering and asked me a few probing question. Had I restarted my system? Yes. Had I attempted to use the gadget restore feature? Yes. Had I checked for solutions online? Yes. Had I attempted to re-register my DLLs? Yes. We could both see where this one was going. "Would you mind if I took control of your system?" she asked. Of course I didn't mind. She then directed me to open IE and navigate to a particular page that would invoke an ActiveX control that would in turn let her view my system. That's when things went pear shaped.
"I'm telling it allow the ActiveX control but nothing's happening," I told her.
"What are the menu options you're seeing?" She then described a list of menu items that should have been visible but in fact weren't.
"The one you want me to select isn't there," I told her. "Shouldn't this be easy?"
She let that remark hang while she laboured further with me on trying to get the remote control app installed. This tête-à-tête continued for what was about another twenty minutes, neither of us getting any closer to solving the problem, we were too embroiled in trying to solve the problem of installing the tools that were supposed to help us solve the original problem.
"I think your tech support needs tech support." If she found the remark amusing she didn't let me know it.
A few minutes later I told her I'd solved the problem; not with the corrupted gadgets but with the installation of the remote control app.
"How did you do it?" she asked.
Heh, I thought, this is going to be great. "I used Firefox."
Yes, Firefox worked better with Microsoft's website than Microsoft. Oh the irony.
What then transpired was about two more hours of being repeatedly put on hold while the pleasant yet overwhelmed tech support agent ran my issue up the food chain in an effort to get to the root of the problem. Her final solution was to have me download third party clock gadgets that would in fact work, despite the fact that the native Microsoft gadgets remained corrupted.
"No, no, no," I told her, "that's not a solution, that's a workaround. I called to get a solution to the problem, not to be told about a workaround I already knew about. You're going to need to try harder."
"I'd like to transfer you to an escalation engineer."
"Okay, let see what else can be done. Thanks."
So there I was, two hours lost for nothing, and I'd been shunted to another part of the call center. The next person assigned to my problem was nice enough, but beneath the veneer of concern was a hint of resentment. After all it was 1:30am where he was and I'm sure he didn't care to be dealing with these problems at this time of night. In an effort to break the ice and get him to deal with me on a personal level—really build a stake in the issue—I told him that was soon to travel to India. I asked him about southern India, the place where I'll be going, while we ran a series of hard disc checks. He really didn't give a shit. Okay, I thought, we'll have it your way.
His way was ultimately just like the first tech's but longer. After a further three hours of aimless meandering the final solution was proposed: reinstall the operating system.
Think about that for a moment within the context of the "deal" proposed by ringing Microsoft's tech support in the first place: they either fix it or you don't get charged. What the OS reinstall represents is a bogus deus-ex-machina. No matter which problem you have with Windows, Microsoft can always, as a final resort, declare that your only remaining solution is to reinstall the OS. We'll take our sixty dollars now, please. No shit I can always reinstall the OS. The reason why I called was to fix the problem WITHOUT reinstalling the OS. The corrupted components shouldn't corrupt in the first place. And if they do, then Microsoft should be able to fix them without placing undue burden on the affected customer. Apparently that's not the case.
And neither was I surprised. For years the tales of Microsoft's tech support have swirled around technology companies. Most of us working in the tech industry are savvy enough to support our own equipment without having to resort to hotlines. On this occasions the reasons for my deep-rooted suspicions of Microsoft's tech support were confirmed. The company itself is as needlessly complicated as the software it produces, so much so that the software itself is in fact a replication of the complexity of the company played out at a different scale. It's all one big mess with a powerful marketing arm. If you get caught in the labyrinth, like I did, don't expect to find an easy way out.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
The Cut
My employer finally got around to enacting some layoffs. They've been a long time coming.
Ever since the company's inception, layoffs have been eschewed at every turn. "It's not a part of our culture," or so went the mantra. The company weathered the catastrophic downturn of 2001 without retrenching a solitary employee and the corporation was probably better for it. It maintained the warm fuzzy reputation that had hovered above it's corporate head like a halo since the day it was founded.
Now that's changed. There's a new sheriff in town and he's got different ideas about these things. The shareholders demand value, and that means heads must roll. Mine was one of them.
I'd been lurking the hallways of the company for over 10 years. Plucked out of Australia after finishing my studies in electrical and electronic engineering, I arrived for my first day of work sight unseen. My first role at the company was as a lowly hotline engineer. Sometimes cranky users of the company's products would phone in to rant about whatever was on their minds at the time. Like the bedridden elderly, most of them simply wanted someone to listen to their tirades. Treat the person first and the technical issue second. Most of the time I never got to step two.
Wind forward ten years and I'm a Senior Manager of the company's web site, an aspect of the business that it hardly considers central and with the new broom sweeping through considers largely expendable. I'd liken to situation to a dysfunctional romance, one that kept itself going based on the memory of glory days long in the past. The company hadn't broken up with me yet and I lacked the stones to break up with the company. Finally someone took action.
The writing was on the wall long before we were dragged into the executioner's chamber. The Director to whom I reported was being conspicuously dropped from any discussions of the future state of the company and its web site; the Senior Director to whom he reported had espoused her views of a smaller, leaner web group at the company. To be honest I tended to agree with her approach. So when the hammer fell on over 60% of my team it came as no surprise. Most surprising was the people the powers in charge sought to remove. Two of the developers on my team prop the site up in ways that senior management will only truly understand once they're gone.
But as I've repeated to myself over and over under my breath in an effort to reprogram my mind, it's not my problem.
My problem now is how to fill my days until business school starts at Berkeley in August.
Ever since the company's inception, layoffs have been eschewed at every turn. "It's not a part of our culture," or so went the mantra. The company weathered the catastrophic downturn of 2001 without retrenching a solitary employee and the corporation was probably better for it. It maintained the warm fuzzy reputation that had hovered above it's corporate head like a halo since the day it was founded.
Now that's changed. There's a new sheriff in town and he's got different ideas about these things. The shareholders demand value, and that means heads must roll. Mine was one of them.
I'd been lurking the hallways of the company for over 10 years. Plucked out of Australia after finishing my studies in electrical and electronic engineering, I arrived for my first day of work sight unseen. My first role at the company was as a lowly hotline engineer. Sometimes cranky users of the company's products would phone in to rant about whatever was on their minds at the time. Like the bedridden elderly, most of them simply wanted someone to listen to their tirades. Treat the person first and the technical issue second. Most of the time I never got to step two.
Wind forward ten years and I'm a Senior Manager of the company's web site, an aspect of the business that it hardly considers central and with the new broom sweeping through considers largely expendable. I'd liken to situation to a dysfunctional romance, one that kept itself going based on the memory of glory days long in the past. The company hadn't broken up with me yet and I lacked the stones to break up with the company. Finally someone took action.
The writing was on the wall long before we were dragged into the executioner's chamber. The Director to whom I reported was being conspicuously dropped from any discussions of the future state of the company and its web site; the Senior Director to whom he reported had espoused her views of a smaller, leaner web group at the company. To be honest I tended to agree with her approach. So when the hammer fell on over 60% of my team it came as no surprise. Most surprising was the people the powers in charge sought to remove. Two of the developers on my team prop the site up in ways that senior management will only truly understand once they're gone.
But as I've repeated to myself over and over under my breath in an effort to reprogram my mind, it's not my problem.
My problem now is how to fill my days until business school starts at Berkeley in August.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Corporate Life - The Exodus
The department for which I work underwent a sort of reorg a couple of weeks ago. Marketing absorbed a huge chunk of sales and support. My career started out in support, staffing the hotline and troubleshooting the bullshit problems of pissed off engineers. Always fix the person first, then fix the technical problem. It's always easier that way.
So now we're a honkin' big organisation, full of over-inflated egos that demand perpetual assuaging and reassurance. Those of us in the rank and file, namely me, spend our time scratching our heads in an effort to work out why the hell the move was executed in the first place. Better alignment? Maybe. A parting gift from the outgoing CEO to his man with marketing plan? Now you're getting warmer. Redundancies? Ah, we're starting to hit the mark.
Even still, when I strolled into a meeting this morning I was kind of surprised to overhear that the VP who came over to Marketing as part of the shift was splitsville. Yeah, not more than a month after the move was made official she bailed. There are a couple of rumour sources in the company that I like to check on this sort of stuff, and in this instance he knew nothing concrete. Bear in mind that he reports into this woman's organisation, so the cone of silence around the exit wasn't exactly shocking. Two hours later it was confirmed.
This kind of thing is going on all over the place now. Nobody should be reclining back in his or her Aeron chair, picturing the long, safe career at the company that stretches out ahead. It's time to put the spit shine on the resume, kiddies, nothing is certain anymore.
So now we're a honkin' big organisation, full of over-inflated egos that demand perpetual assuaging and reassurance. Those of us in the rank and file, namely me, spend our time scratching our heads in an effort to work out why the hell the move was executed in the first place. Better alignment? Maybe. A parting gift from the outgoing CEO to his man with marketing plan? Now you're getting warmer. Redundancies? Ah, we're starting to hit the mark.
Even still, when I strolled into a meeting this morning I was kind of surprised to overhear that the VP who came over to Marketing as part of the shift was splitsville. Yeah, not more than a month after the move was made official she bailed. There are a couple of rumour sources in the company that I like to check on this sort of stuff, and in this instance he knew nothing concrete. Bear in mind that he reports into this woman's organisation, so the cone of silence around the exit wasn't exactly shocking. Two hours later it was confirmed.
This kind of thing is going on all over the place now. Nobody should be reclining back in his or her Aeron chair, picturing the long, safe career at the company that stretches out ahead. It's time to put the spit shine on the resume, kiddies, nothing is certain anymore.
Corporate Life - The Exodus
The department for which I work underwent a sort of reorg a couple of weeks ago. Marketing absorbed a huge chunk of sales and support. My career started out in support, staffing the hotline and troubleshooting the bullshit problems of pissed off engineers. Always fix the person first, then fix the technical problem. It's always easier that way.
So now we're a honkin' big organisation, full of over-inflated egos that demand perpetual assuaging and reassurance. Those of us in the rank and file, namely me, spend our time scratching our heads in an effort to work out why the hell the move was executed in the first place. Better alignment? Maybe. A parting gift from the outgoing CEO to his man with marketing plan? Now you're getting warmer. Redundancies? Ah, we're starting to hit the mark.
Even still, when I strolled into a meeting this morning I was kind of surprised to overhear that the VP who came over to Marketing as part of the shift was splitsville. Yeah, not more than a month after the move was made official she bailed. There are a couple of rumour sources in teh company that I like to check on this sort of stuff, and in this instance he knew nothing concrete. Bear in mind that he reports into this woman's organisation, so the cone of silence around the exit wasn't exactly shocking. Two hours later it was confirmed.
This kind of thing is going on all over the place now. Nobody should be reclining back in his or her Aeron chair, picturing the long, safe career at the company that stretches out ahead. It's time to put the spit shine on the resume, kiddies, nothing is certain anymore.
So now we're a honkin' big organisation, full of over-inflated egos that demand perpetual assuaging and reassurance. Those of us in the rank and file, namely me, spend our time scratching our heads in an effort to work out why the hell the move was executed in the first place. Better alignment? Maybe. A parting gift from the outgoing CEO to his man with marketing plan? Now you're getting warmer. Redundancies? Ah, we're starting to hit the mark.
Even still, when I strolled into a meeting this morning I was kind of surprised to overhear that the VP who came over to Marketing as part of the shift was splitsville. Yeah, not more than a month after the move was made official she bailed. There are a couple of rumour sources in teh company that I like to check on this sort of stuff, and in this instance he knew nothing concrete. Bear in mind that he reports into this woman's organisation, so the cone of silence around the exit wasn't exactly shocking. Two hours later it was confirmed.
This kind of thing is going on all over the place now. Nobody should be reclining back in his or her Aeron chair, picturing the long, safe career at the company that stretches out ahead. It's time to put the spit shine on the resume, kiddies, nothing is certain anymore.
Monday, January 21, 2008
New Tunes - No Wait, These Are Old
I've been spending on music again, such is my wont. For reasons I can't adequately explain, This Mortal Coil leaped into my head about a week or so ago. I'm not sure why. Their main hit was a version of Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren", which The Cocteau Twins' Liz Fraser warbles forth with her usual hyper-produced gloss. The first time I heard it was probably back around 1990 or so; my brother and I were getting into all of that stuff at the time. We taped most of Triple J's Hot 100 for that year, which was an attempt to collate the listeners' favourite songs ever. The list was peppered with plenty of alt-rock gems from the eighties, most of which rounded out the top ten. Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" took the top spot, but the video tape spooled out its final millimetre three songs before it aired. We never got to catch it.
Seventeen years later (ah crap, it's been that long) I'm drawn back to it. Unsurprisingly it holds up. TMC were ahead of their time, just as were the bands from which the members were drawn.
Right now track 9, Barramundi, is concluding. Lisa Gerrard is belting the notes out of her considerable pipes and my ears are loving it.
I've missed you, This Mortal Coil. Let's slip on our gothiest outfits, blot out the sun and talk about spiders in a dark corner. It's good to have you back.
Seventeen years later (ah crap, it's been that long) I'm drawn back to it. Unsurprisingly it holds up. TMC were ahead of their time, just as were the bands from which the members were drawn.
Right now track 9, Barramundi, is concluding. Lisa Gerrard is belting the notes out of her considerable pipes and my ears are loving it.
I've missed you, This Mortal Coil. Let's slip on our gothiest outfits, blot out the sun and talk about spiders in a dark corner. It's good to have you back.
Monday, January 07, 2008
Back to the Corporate World
I took three weeks off from work over the Christmas/New Year break. The company I work for was closed from 21 December until 2 January, but I took both the preceding week and the subsequent three days off. My parents were in town. I kind of had to do it. Everyone at the company was compelled to take three vacation days on 25, 27 and 28 December. We're in cost-cutting mode right now and we've been in that mode for a really long time. A really long time.
Budgets are getting slashed across the board. This quarter my department's budget is down 4% over last quarter, which in turn was reduced about 4% over the quarter before. It's a cycle that's been going on for some time. Each quarter we tell ourselves that the next quarter will be rosier, better but sure as we all need to shit, the next cut comes around. We're left little else to slash now. There are no more training dollars, no more money left for entertainment or travel. The only things left are essential services and heads.
Which leads me to the rumour I heard today: layoffs. You won't have to scrutinise the coffee grounds too deeply to come to that conclusion. When you've cut just about everything else but people and your CEO is calling for a significant ongoing reduction in costs then what else can you cut?
But it's not going to happen on the current CEO's watch. He's too avuncular for that.
Which brings me to my next event at work today: I met the new CEO. He's an affable enough guy. My first meeting with him left me impressed. He talked about the need to boost sales, which is true and I told him we're all looking forward to some new leadership, which is also true.
I reduced my inbox from about 400 unread emails to about 200. Our intranet was given a new lick of paint and it's not particularly good. I ate a salad for lunch.
Budgets are getting slashed across the board. This quarter my department's budget is down 4% over last quarter, which in turn was reduced about 4% over the quarter before. It's a cycle that's been going on for some time. Each quarter we tell ourselves that the next quarter will be rosier, better but sure as we all need to shit, the next cut comes around. We're left little else to slash now. There are no more training dollars, no more money left for entertainment or travel. The only things left are essential services and heads.
Which leads me to the rumour I heard today: layoffs. You won't have to scrutinise the coffee grounds too deeply to come to that conclusion. When you've cut just about everything else but people and your CEO is calling for a significant ongoing reduction in costs then what else can you cut?
But it's not going to happen on the current CEO's watch. He's too avuncular for that.
Which brings me to my next event at work today: I met the new CEO. He's an affable enough guy. My first meeting with him left me impressed. He talked about the need to boost sales, which is true and I told him we're all looking forward to some new leadership, which is also true.
I reduced my inbox from about 400 unread emails to about 200. Our intranet was given a new lick of paint and it's not particularly good. I ate a salad for lunch.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
