Note of the Living Deb

Sorry, but I am super angry about how a bunch of people are "doing" their jobs right now, especially certain high-pay, high-level jobs.


This never happened to me at work:

Boss: Debbie, why did you move that professor's test to be photocopied for tomorrow from the IN box to the OUT box without actually making the copies?

Me: I didn't.

Boss: I just watched you do it!


And so I never got to make any of these replies:

* No, you didn't. That's fake news/a conspiracy/a witch hunt.

* No, you were the one who moved it. Hey, everyone, our boss hid the photocopying job so that it would never get done!

* From where you are standing, it may look like that's what I did, but what you couldn't see from there was the dangerous paper clip. I feared for my life.

* I did that but it wasn't my idea. And now that you've shown your displeasure, I'm still going to just leave it there in the OUT box. Don't worry, all the photocopying jobs will get done in plenty of time.

* I am in charge of the photocopying room, so I have the power to block copying jobs that I don't think are good for this university. As a natural sciences major, I will block every request for liberal arts classes, no matter how many people are in those classes, even if those classes are required for the degree.

* Photocopying should be privatized. And, um, I bought those stocks in Kinko's before I accepted and started sabotaging this job. Also, I never talk to the people at Kinko's about what we do here, though I do talk to them a lot because they are my best friends.

* You act as if there is going to be a test tomorrow. If that turns out to be true, and there is no evidence of that, tests are a natural part of school, so we don't need to worry about them.

* Taxpayer dollars should not be spent on classes that are prerequisites, only for real classes.

* I may never have seen a photocopier before, nor even know what a paper jam is (huh, I thought jam was only made with fruit), but I have copied off my classmates' homework enough times that I think I know how to copy tests.

* That request was for two hundred copies, one for every single student in the class! No one needs that many copies, you socialist left-wing extremist.

* I'm giving it back to the professor to make two copies. Then she will give those to two more people who will each make two copies. Eventually, the total number of copies needed will trickle down to the classroom.

* Maybe the paper needed for that photocopying job is now missing, and that exact same amount of paper is in my desk at home, but I did nothing wrong.

* Who cares? No matter what I do, my union won't let you fire me. Or my contract has a golden parachute clause, so I'm rich either way.

You know, I don't really care if you're orange or have tiny hands or ridiculous hair or can only make stupid facial expressions. I can forgive you for having a grating voice. I don't even care if you have a big ego or a tiny ego.

And I don't want to punish people or ruin people's days by, say, donating in their name to a charity they oppose or talking people out of showing up for their events. I am opposed to revenge of all kinds. (Except in fantasies. I admit that I love fantasizing about revenge.)

But I am really tired of people not doing their jobs. Not just politicians, but all over our economy. There are so many people out there who need jobs and who are willing to do them that we should not have to settle for slacking, entitlement, or willful refusal, let alone gleeful, self-righteous refusal.

You know those co-workers who are only sick on Fridays. I once had a co-worker who called in sick during the entire week of registration. Uh huh. When she left during a hiring freeze (and I got to do both our jobs for the next nine months), I found that she had never dealt with key slips. She didn't like that job duty, so she just never did it and never found another way to get it done. She just let the stack get ever larger.

I know that some of my friends have the guts to apply for jobs that they don't know how to do. And they sometimes get those jobs. But these are job duties for which they are suited, and they immediately learn how to do them.

If your job is to decide whether to approve someone else's appointee, then you shouldn't ignore it and you shouldn't rubber stamp it. Do some work. Evaluate. Decide.

If you are in charge of regulating something, you need to understand both sides of that regulation. You want to minimize damages to the general public without causing too many problems for business. Not without causing any problems at all for business. People disagree about the best way to compromise between different interests, but it is your job to pick one of those ways to compromise. If you are choosing just one side over the other at all costs, you are not doing your job.

If you are unwilling to do a job duty, you should not apply for that job. If a job duty that you are unwilling to do gets added to your job after you are hired, I understand not quitting right away. But do start looking right away once you realize that you won't be able to negotiate your way out of doing that duty.

This is part of why I never applied to be a graduate coordinator. There are time-sensitive forms that must be signed by the chair. Sometimes the chair is absent during the entire window of time during which the form can be signed. So compassionate graduate coordinators learn to forge signatures. I understand that and even approve, given the conditions. However, I am not willing to forge signatures myself. So I never applied for those jobs. I admit that I didn't lobby for another signature to be accepted, but I wasn't involved in that area myself; I was just kind of next to people who did that, and it didn't occur to me.

Some jobs are really hard and no one could be expected to do all the job duties. You should do at least the most important ones.

If something is against your religion, get a job that doesn't make you do it. If the job makes you let other people do something against your religion, I don't see how that's your problem. If you think it is your problem, look for a different kind of job. There are so many kinds of jobs.

People who do not do their jobs, or do them badly, should be given a chance/warning/training to improve. If that doesn't work, they should be fired or transferred to different jobs that they will do. At the very least, they should have their salaries drastically reduced if those salaries were based on the assumption that they would actually be doing their jobs.

People who break the law should be prosecuted. Breaking the law is more than just not doing your job. So law breakers should not just be fired and they certainly should not be given huge compensation packages for leaving. I keep getting these petitions that say someone has done something horrific and therefore should be fired. No, they should be prosecuted and given a fair trial.

I just found out that one sector of my city's government is doing a great job. I know, shocking! The guy in charge of sidewalks gave a talk at our neighborhood association meeting. They decide where to put new sidewalks based on things that actually make sense like whether the area is high density, low income, doesn't have too many trees in the way, and there's something people might actually want to walk to nearby. They warn you in time to move your plants, they pay for terracing, and they help you move your irrigation system.

Can you imagine a world where everyone competently did their jobs?

To all my readers who competently do your jobs or otherwise make sure that all your important job duties get done, I thank you. And I'm pretty sure that's every single one of you.

First of all, why are public rest rooms an issue? That's weird.

Second, what I think is the weird thing about public rest rooms is not what's in the news but that they are a thing which is still kind of "separate but equal" in modern times. Why do we even have that?

Our society is weird about nudity, yet it thinks people of the same sex should be allowed to be nude in public together in locker rooms. And share dorm rooms. And that same kind of thinking is probably involved in rest room philosophies. I mean, I guess some people re-arrange their clothing in rest rooms, so I guess it's similar. Plus men actually pee right out in the open. But I really don't see why we don't just have female-like rest rooms (stalls for everybody) and let everyone use them.

Third, I was realizing that I never notice anything about the other people in a public rest room with me except their locations. I am looking for a vacant sink at which to wash my hands, for example, so I really am noticing the spaces between the people. (I do the same thing on buses and can pass right by people I know without noticing them!)

One exception: My favorite restaurant has giant cardboard cut-outs of famous people and they put the male one in the female rest room and vice versa for some reason. I admit to panicking a bit when I saw a man in the rest room, but my first though was, "Oops, am I in the wrong rest room?"

And finally, I wish I could think of a good way to show solidarity with people who have to think about which rest room to use. When Nazis made Jews wear yellow stars, other people could wear yellow stars in solidarity. But I can't think of anything like that for this situation. Normally I can be quite creative, but it's just not coming to me.

Person A: I realized very early on that grown-ups are liars.

Person B: Yeah, but that's not the worst of it. Children learn, explore and grow. Adults shrivel and shrink. They want to force the whole world to stay the same so that they don't have to change.

Person C: Actually, adults keep learning, but only in one or two fields: their career and maybe one hobby. It's all about always being supremely competent. They don't want to start anything new because they'll look like idiots.

Person A: It's all over by the time they're 30.

Person C: If they have kids. Kids force you to notice new things. Dating also inspires you take risks, just to meet people. Once you get married and get your first real job, it's all over.

This book is supposed to tell me that I can make a real difference in reducing poverty. It starts off talking about the UN Millennium Project which I first learned about in the movie "The Girl in the Cafe" (which has a very fun-to-watch protagonist). The point is that we actually know how to reduce poverty; we just have to make it a priority.

Here are their suggestions:

1. Write to your political representatives.
2. Organize letter-writing campaigns.
3. Write letters to local newspapers.
4. Sponsor an awareness event (at which everyone writes letters).
5. Adopt a Quick Win.
6. Join existing networks such as One Campaign in the US, Make Poverty History in Canada and Fair Share Campaign (now also Make Poverty History) in Australia.

Bleh. Politics. The book chastises me for not realizing that some politicians will do good, especially if they get encouragement. I'm not so good with the letter writing stuff, but I may join or at least monitor the One Campaign.

The book is a compilation of essays all informing us of various kinds of economic and other inequities and philosophies on how to fix them. Here's a quote that struck me: "[O]nly humans take from nature far more than we need to survive, and in that process many millions of our fellow human beings are left without the basic means of survival, generating a non-sustainable social, economic and political world. At the same time, this irrational behaviour endangers our own living conditions because it threatens the ecological base on which we all depend." I don't normally tie poverty and ecology together in my head.

One article that really threw me explained how my favorite environmental charities may be making things worse. "[M]uch of what we perceive as 'virgin rainforest' may well have actually undergone significant modification by indigenous people, or indeed even be the product of their cultures." And when some charities buy up this land, they also kick out these peoples who have been caring so well for the land. Now I'll have to do more research on my favorites. The author of that article works with the UK's Rainforest Foundation. I'm going to check out the US chapter of that organization as well.

Another article that really threw me was the one explaining that religious organizations are some of the very best organizations at delivering help to the poor. Specific strengths are "their responsiveness to and respect of the poor, their trustworthiness, their honesty and fairness, and their attitudes of caring, loving, and listening." The fairness surprised me. And I'd always assumed they'd be moralistic and divisive because of my own experience with religions and in taking history classes. And in fact they "scored less well on the extent to which they empowered poor people to participate in decision-making and help themselves, and on their accountability to local communities, and they were often seen as a source of conflict rather than unity." So ha! Except that a World Bank study of twenty kinds of organizations ranked religious ones as second only to community organizations in which the poor themselves participated in their ability to deliver help to the poor. Scoring worse were "kin and family, local leaders, non-governmental organizations, shops and moneylenders, private enterprise and traders, banks, politicians, police, health services, schools, [and] various government agencies." So maybe I shouldn't dismiss religious organizations out of hand even though I really, really want to.

One thing I love about my country is all the many different subcultures. My two favorite subcultures are geeks and hippies. I love geeks because of their fabulous brains and because the below-average level of social skills leads to a below-average level of, well, various kinds of social lying. Too bad they spend a lot of time working on such boring things as computer guts. Most of my friends are in this subculture, where thinking is a good thing.

I love hippies because they're laid-back and creative. Too bad there's an above-average level of fluffy-headedness. Few, if any, of my friends are in this subculture, but I am a member of the local coop, which means I get their newsletter every two months, and I quite enjoy reading this.

Who else would publish a recipe for "Tangy Citrus-Cran Flax Muffins"? Oh, yeah.

This latest issue is the "Big Bike Issue" in honor of Bike Month, which is in May. The most well-known activity is Bike-To-Work Day (Friday, May 16), where, basically, people like me are encouraged to try biking to work and rewarded with free breakfast if they go to any of several stations set up across the city.

But check out this event: the 3-1-1 Pothole Ride.

"During this bike ride, cyclists will locate and make a list of those teeth-jarring, frame-cracking, chain-rattling cracks and holes that threaten to ruin our morning commutes. Our list will be reported to the City of Austin for repair. Afterwards, we'll share our findings at REI."

(3-1-1 is the non-emergency police number we are to use when reporting such non-emergencies as potholes.) Only a bunch of hippie freaks could think up a cool event like that. (No, I am not going, though. I am not a bicyclist.)

They also published what looks like the entire How Not To Get Hit By Cars article which "shows you real ways you can get hit and real ways to avoid them. This is a far cry from normal bike safety guides, which usually tell you little more than to wear your helmet and to obey the law. But consider this for a moment: Wearing a helmet will do absolutely nothing to prevent you from getting hit by a car!" I recommend it if this subject is of interest to you.

And there are some good bicycling stories. Here's part of one:

"The truck driver tracked me down 5 minutes later, a half-mile down the road. He was a very shaken old-school Austin hippie, not the psycho fascist I had imagined. He never saw me ("I was watching the traffic.") He felt the impact and looked in his rear view mirror to see me wobbling in the road. He thought the car behind him hit me. He told me he was so glad I was alive, he wanted to hug me. We hugged. I thanked him for coming back and told him to watch out for cyclists."

In conclusion, bike safely, and watch out for cyclists!

I have an apparently odd dislike of people taking my plate away at restaurants. I only know it's odd because waiters clearly think that if they were perfect, they would notice the exact moment I finish eating so they can be there to whisk it away. They refer to this strategy as getting the plate out of my way. Because, uh, I would now like to stick my elbows on the table and I can't because there's a plate in the way? Because the vision of a used plate reminds me of dirty dishes, and I am so sensitive that even though I don't have to do them myself, just the thought of having dirty dishes in the same room with me is something I shouldn't have to deal with?

This morning, a plate disappeared while I was still chewing my last bite. I guess that waiter is high-fiving people back in the kitchen.

From my perspective, the best these poor waiters can do is to ask me first. A real question, asked as if they don't already know the answer. Usually, it's "May I take this out of your way?" Then I get to say, "No, thanks, I'm still working on it" or "Actually, may I have a take-home box please?" This is annoying to me and a time-waster for the waiter, but it's the best compromise I've seen.

At buffets, I think they try to compromise by taking the plate away while you are gone for another trip at the buffet. But this means that if you got a little too much rice, you don't get to save it for your next serving unless you have a dining companion who will stay behind and ask the waiter to leave the plate alone for you. It looks like waiters would really rather have the whole dining party get up at once though so that the disappearing plate act seems more magical.

Anyway, I know this about my culture and it's just a thing I have to deal with somehow.

One problem is that some people are finished with their plates when they still have food on them. This makes the waiter's job very difficult. How does he know if I'm really finished? I've learned I should never set my fork down if I'm still eating or even if I'm still deciding whether I would like to have some more. (No, this is not so that I can stab the hand that makes a grab for my plate. It's just a signal to help the waiter read my mind properly.)

Yesterday I achieved my greatest victory over the evil plate snatchers.

Phase I: A croissant is served with too much strawberry butter. I eat the croissant while it is still hot. When the waitress comes, I put my hand over plate saying please don't take this.

Phase II: Eggs, bacon and lemon-poppy-seed Belgian waffle is served with syrup and melted unsalted butter. One of the best foods in the world is hot breads with melted butter, but the butter has to be salted or it's just totally wasted calories. I don't know why I'm like this, but I am. Strawberry butter comes to the rescue!

(Yes, I could ask for salty butter, but I don't like waste and I don't like asking for stuff.)

I spread half the remaining butter on half of my waffle, eat that half of the waffle plus half the eggs and a fourth of the bacon. Robin finishes his meal and moves his plate over to the side. I take the strawberry butter plate off the table and hide it on the far side of the table, behind the table cloth where the waitress can't see it.

Phase III: The waitress comes to take the plates away. I ask for a take-home box. She says she will box it up herself. I ask Robin if he would like his potatoes included. No. I have no chance to get this butter on the plate. The waitress then takes every single plate and every piece of silverware.

Phase IV: The waitress returns with box and check. I open the box and look longingly at the remaining strawberry butter. Then I realize I can wipe the rest of the butter off the plate with my waffle. Victory is mine! All mine!

There is a tendency with Americans, and probably life forms in general, to hog everything they see, without regard to long-term repercussions, that is disturbing me.

I am afraid there is something about our psychology that gives us this tendency. Here are some examples.

If one is in the mood for a turkey sandwich, and gets taken to a buffet which has turkey sandwiches available, one will not generally just eat a turkey sandwich. We can't eat everything on the table because of physical limitations, but we tend to get as close as we possibly can. I know at least one person who refuses to go to buffets so that this won't happen.

I saw on a show about pets that if you feed your dog a small piece of cheese, the dog will be very happy and will make it clear that another piece of cheese would be welcome. The same happens if instead you give the dog an entire slice of cheese. The show was trying to get us to help us save our dogs from themselves by giving them several small pieces of cheese rather than several slices. I've heard that dogs tend to eat everything in their bowl, even if they end up throwing up later. I've heard that animals in the wild eat from a carcass as quickly as they can before other animals find it.

It's been shown that people tend to take a serving of something, regardless of the size of that serving. Say you have a bowl of nuts with a spoon. People will tend to take one spoonful, regardless of the size of the spoon.

Priorities, schmiorities--I want to find time to do everything. That's a philosophy I've heard and tried to adopt.

People living on Easter Island cut down every last tree. They had no place else to go to find more trees because they were in the middle of the ocean, and trees were vital to their culture.

People tend to not take the very last bit of something, until finally someone does.

Why this bothers me so much, besides the results of getting huge and needing big houses to fit all our crap into, is the way we can just run out of things. The way we use up every last one of something and then talk about the good old days. What good old days are we going to be talking about later? The good old days when we had gas? When we had edible fish? When the Texas coast wasn't at Austin, but at a mythical place called Galveston? When we used to have climate-controlled buildings? I am getting a little scared.

Of all the species, humans are probably the best at looking out for the future. But this is hard, because the future is hard to predict. Every time it seems like something bad might happen, but then it doesn't, people worry less. For example, we haven't yet been ruined by overpopulation, we haven't yet run out of gas. See, we always figure something out, so surely we'll figure something out again.

I think sometime we won't figure something out, or if we do, there will be a gap between when that happens and when we needed it. One problem I'm just now getting hit over the head with is that capitalism is not working to show us when resources are getting scarce. So long as they are still cheap to get right now, they are going to be sold cheaply. So long as they are still sold cheaply, we aren't going to see a problem.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Why can't we invent things in anticipation, instead of waiting until necessity has arrived? Surely there's some way to motivate ourselves. People have been trying alternate forms of energy capture for over 50 years, but I don't think we've gotten very far, and the progress we have made has been possible only because of a minority of hippie fruit loops. (Maybe that time they gave us means that when later we freak out and start building millions of a new kind of power plant everywhere, they won't be nuclear.)

So that's the other problem with predicting the future. All kinds of fruit loops are predicting various futures and preparing for them. And when you guess wrong, it can get you in trouble. For example, check out Merle Sneed's story of a guy who became convinced that the Rapture was going to happen on a certain date and time and that he was going straight to heaven on that day in Did the Rapture Happen? Needless to say, preparing for this view of the future was not a good idea, even though some people did try to help him: "This fellow immediately went to the boss and tried to resign his job because of his impending ascension into heaven and all. The boss, to his credit, recognized a temporary delusion when he saw it and gave the him a leave of absence, just in case the Prophet had his eternal calendar a little hosed up." (I recommend following that link, by the way.)

Sometimes the future is so obvious that we do make it a habit to prepare for it. For example, many of us brush our teeth daily, go grocery shopping before we run out of food, go to work every day even when we're not broke yet, pay our electric bill when the energy is still flowing, or return library books before the due date. So things could be worse.

No-sugar update - No worries. I did have a splitting headache this morning and took ibuprofen. It came back this afternoon and I took more. Now it's gone again.

I frequently get headaches, and ibuprofen works on them, and sometimes it takes more than one dose, so this fits right in with my normal daily life. Just like getting colds do, although they never start with lightheadedness. Nevertheless, I decided to google "sugar addiction," just to see if I'd find anything.

One source (who charms its readers by referring to us as "sick fucks") says "Withdrawal symptoms can include lethargy, tremors, headaches and depression. Generally, these effects are slightly less intense than the similar withdrawal symptoms associated with caffeine." Lethargy and headaches. Eerie.

Here's another disturbing quote, this one from pony: "My head is throbbing from sugar withdrawal. Ow.
Two things similar to last year's sugar fast:
1. Huge headache on day 3.
2. Very little hunger pangs." Today is day 3 for me. I've had the same hunger pangs I always have, though.

From another source, "The symptoms of sugar withdrawal can include headaches, fatigue, depression, drowsiness, skin eruptions, and mucus or throat discomfort. Some of these symptoms, especially the mood swings, fatigue and drowsiness, can occur on a daily basis as the blood sugar rises and falls on a high-sugar diet. . . . sugar withdrawal symptoms may last for a week or two. . . . Think of it as a voluntary case of the flu, and commit to working your way through it. In a few days it will be over, and you'll be on the other side, looking at a lifetime of health." Um, downright scary.

This idea that sugar withdrawal exists has been supported by scientists working with poor little rats with chattering teeth.

The always fabulous Wikipedia points to another source which states, "Beating sugar addiction may seem like a hopeless battle, but just like any drug addiction, you have to have a structured plan to win the war. I make no claims that it will be an easy battle. You won't be vomiting in back alleys or shivering in bed all night, but you will have the uncontrollable desire for something, anything that will give you your sugar fix."

I wonder if there are cravings, tremors, or depression in store for me later this week.

For the record, I am not a fan of addictions. These are not things I want to collect and treasure. Anything that's telling my body that it needs something that it doesn't really need, and that's telling me that it's urgent and I won't be allowed to concentrate properly until I get my fix, well, that's not my idea of a good idea. I'm not a real fan of dependencies, either. So based on that and my new-found knowledge, it seems like I should change my behavior somehow. I mean long-term, not just for one week.

The comparison to caffeine reminds me of my friend who got so sensitive to caffeine that even small fluctuations in quantity subjected him to withdrawal symptoms, so he switched to decaf. Last I heard, he still felt the urge to have coffee, but he felt that the coffee flavor of decaf allowed for a lovely placebo effect.

Now, I do crave sweets sometimes, but the cravings don't drive me to distraction. I just get something or I don't. No big deal. I've never noticed having a sugar rush either. (I might just be a bit dense.)

I'm not having cravings now, except for food in general. But are my headaches, which I've had frequently since high school at least, the result of a varying consumption of sugar? If so, am I going to be like my caffeine-addicted friend where consumption of any amount at all could lead to a withdrawal headache (three days later), or can I just keep it under a minimum and be okay? Or do I just need to keep it constant, heh heh.

Because I am absolutely not going to give up added sugar (so long as it is still available to me and I am not yet diabetic or prediabetic). There are too many delicious, fabulous, luxurious, awesome sugary creations. And although I can imagine a life with no ice cream of any kind, no pie, no cake, no donuts, no chocolates, no chocolate milk, no hot chocolate, no eclairs, no snack bars, no cookies, no pudding, no bread pudding, no yule grit (rice pudding), no sugary cereals, no quick breads, no muffins, no sweet potato casserole, no La Madeleine strawberry jam, etc., I can also imagine a postapocalyptic world (because I've read Alas, Babylon). That doesn't mean I want to go there.