Forward triumphantly

It’s a pandemic Friday and I’m feeling a little bit reggae and a little bit redemption.

So that means Bob Marley, I think. Crank up the volume.

Bluebird of happiness

A couple of months ago I was visited by a new type of bird. It was so different from anything I’ve ever seen in the People’s Republic that I had to keep looking to make sure it wasn’t one of the usual suspects. At first I thought it was some variety of junco.

But no: the eastern bluebird—several of them, actually—was making an appearance. They stuck around for a few weeks and then disappeared again. Dunno if they were just stopping on a migration or what, but I was very happy to see them.

I reckon we could all use a few bluebirds in our lives right now, so here are all my pix of them, male and female.

  

Pommes de guerre

There’s an old army censorship joke that probably first featured a Roman legionary as one of the correspondents.

The soldier’s wife (or, sometimes, his father) writes: “Now that you’re way the hell off in gods-forsaken Phrygia/Vicksburg/Gallipoli/Okinawa, what am I supposed to do about the potato patch? We can’t plant without you here to dig the ground. We’re going to starve here.”

The soldier writes back: “Whatever you do, don’t dig between the road and the back fence. That’s where the spears/guns/secret weapon plans are buried!”

The next letter from home reads: “What the hell? Some government guys showed up and just ripped up the whole place, from the road to the back fence. What the hell have you done?”

And the soldier replies: “Now plant the potatoes.”

Well, yesterday’s instance of White House Follies reminded me of that. Cadet Bonespurs was bloviating at representatives of farmers, ranchers and the food supply chain. Of course he could not let an opportunity to mouth off pass him by; the cameras were on, yo.

Among the horny-handed sons of the soil was apparently someone from the Old Dominion, where the Democratic governor and finally Democratic-majority legislature passed some mild gun control laws last month. The thought “Virginia” triggered some spark in the Kleptocrat’s reptilian brain, and he blurted out, apropos of nothing (as is his custom):

“We're going after Virginia, with your crazy governor, we're going after Virginia. They want to take your Second Amendment away. You'll have nobody guarding your potatoes."

#PresidentPlump clearly felt he was on a roll, and found that at the end of his sentence he needed to come up with some agricultural-related product, and was probably thinking about extra fries with his lunch that was overdue, so out came potatoes. Which is not a crop that Virginia produces in any particular quantity, and which—as far as I know—is not something that’s subject to a lot of thievery in any event.

I swear to you I am not making this up; there’s video. It's obvious that not having played golf since 8 March is really weighing on him.

Truth or dare

Holy crap, folks. The current occupant of the White House announced yesterday that he’s taking hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic against the novel coronavirus. He says he’s been taking it for “about a week and a half.”

Whether that’s true and he’s got the White House osteopath to agree to self-administered quackery, or whether he’s again lying through his teeth just to snatch attention from Barack Obama’s commencement address and to promote a drug that is unproven against COVID19 plus actually killing people with specific conditions is immaterial.

What’s absolutely factual is that he is completely 100% utterly, certifiably bat-shit crazy. God help us all.

Gratitude Monday: working at home

After a couple of management meetings last week in which both our business unit SVP and the company CEO laid out the organization’s plans for allowing employees back in the office in a safe way, I came to a realization.

First off, they’ve said all along that they’re not letting people back in until they’re convinced that they can do so safely. That means extra cleaning, face masks (the head of HR placed an order for masks a couple of months ago; still no sign), social distancing, staggered seating, new rules about conference room use, no outside visitors. They have to plan for individual jurisdictions in a global setting and meet all local requirements.

I think it was the thing about offices in high rises and only two people allowed in an elevator car at a time that made the nickel drop. My office in the People’s Republic is on the fourth floor; I could walk up, but I wouldn’t be wild about it.

Also, the face masks. Of course I would wear one. But my glasses would fog up continually, and the notion of shouting into conference calls through the mask really did not appeal to me as a good-colleague effort.

However, it turns out that the entire company, and my unit in particular (where a good portion of staff were already WFH), have demonstrated that remote workers are as productive as on-site ones. They’ve assured us that no one will be required to return to an office setting until s/he is comfortable with that. (The SVP, who has five children, made the point that “if you’ve got a screaming toddler and you really want to come into the office to get your work done, when we’re ready, that’s fine.”)

My realization was that there’s no particular reason for me to go in, even though the office is only a mile away from my house. My manager moved to Portland, Oregon, two weeks ago. I appreciated having face-to-face meetings with him, but that’s no longer a thing. My team was already dispersed—Florida, Texas, California, Washington; now we’ll add Virginia and Oregon to the “remote” list. I’m not going back to the office for at least throughout this year, and maybe never.

Well, that being the case, I needed a somewhat more ergonomic setup than my laptop on my lap in an IKEA chair. Facilities was happy for me to take what I needed from the office—chair, monitor, docking station, etc. I just had to put in a facilities ticket. As I was doing that, I checked in with one of my office neighbors—different team, but two desks away. I do this once a week or so. She and I amped up the holiday workplace decoration competition last December when we gift-wrapped our area. Last I actually saw of her was on one of the Virtual Happy Hours, with a glam turban on her head and looking very Rita Hayworth.

Anyhow, she asked how it’s going with me, too, and when I said I was going to take home some office kit she offered to help. She has an SUV; I have a coupe. I hesitated, because I’m reluctant to put people out and I was anticipating a whole big deal about getting the docking station, keyboard, mouse and monitor bundled up. But then I thought it would be a grace to accept her kindness. And I did.

Well, as it happened, it took me all of five minutes to pull apart the docking station and toss everything but the monitor into an Amazon shipping box. By the time I’d done that, JS was there (bringing back one of her monitors because she’d bought her own back in March). Within about three minutes more, we were rolling the chair with the monitor on the seat out, and she had it into her SUV in no time.

Less than 15 minutes total, she wheeled the chair and monitor over my doorstep and was on her way. It was so much simpler than the Big Operation I’d envisioned. So easy, in fact. So easy.

I have to work out the arrangement—I want it where I can look out onto the bird feeders, but I also want the ability to roll it all away when I’m not working. But now I’m set for whatever comes, except for printing. But the up side of that is that I’m not consuming entire hectares of rain forest every week.

So I’m grateful my company supports the choices I make about my work location. I’m grateful I can set up in my house and carry on my work without a mask. And I’m very grateful for JS’s kind help in making this happen in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

Casting a spell

Yesterday I had to hawk up objectives for my MBO (management by objective) for this quarter. Evidently they were due on 30 April, but stuff. So here we are, halfway into the quarter and just coming up with MBOs.

Around 1030 my manager IM’d me asking if he could get them by COB, so I basically manufactured four that seem relatively appropriate and IM’d them back.

I also added a fifth: “Commit no detectable felonies.”

He approved the four and made number five an OKR (Objectives/Key Results). Because OKRs are aspirational.

He’s careful about wording MBOs in such a way that they don’t negatively impact bonus pay.

Well, it’s Friday, so let’s have something uplifting. I love Annie Lennox’s voice, and here she is, banging out the R&B classic, “I Put A Spell On You”.

Together

Ever since the onslaught of the novel coronavirus—meaning, since people started realizing that COVID19 was not going to be “like the flu”, but was going to start killing us by the tens of thousands—anyone with an email account has been getting the online version of the corporate we’re-in-this-with-you commercials with the somber piano music and keep-us-in-mind-for-all-your-money-spending-decisions message.

In addition to such emails from United Airlines’ CEO, the Paris hotel where I stayed in 2018 and every supermarket where I have an affinity card, I’ve been getting about two a week from a fast-casual restaurant chain in D.C., who are obviously really anxious.

But I think the absolute biscuit for self-serving marketing messaging goes to Mash & Grape, from whom I bought two bottles of booze about three years ago because they have a flat-rate shipping fee. It would have been three bottles, but they didn’t have the rum in stock, and they didn’t bother to tell me that. I had to call them to find out why the total dollar amount didn’t match my order. I've never even looked at their website since.

Here’s their opening gambit:

I mean, of course: “Let’s get through this together!” is such a sincere notion when paired with four bottles of bourbon. Which I don’t drink.

Recycling news

A few months ago, Fairfax County announced that they were no longer accepting glass as part of their recycling pickup. If you really wanted to have your glass added to some sort of non-landfill destination, you had to take it to specified collection points, where you fed it through portals one bottle at a time. There’s one—just one—in the People’s Republic, so you know they weren’t serious about it.

Well, a few weeks ago, I went to drop off two bags representing my consumption since some time in December. Here’s what I found:

They’d removed the one collection point, allegedly because of the pandemic. And, in fact, they listed three in the county where you could take your glass.

Well, obviously, people were not amused:

But last Saturday I swung by, and the County had blocked off entry to the entire parking lot and stuck that poxy sign right there.

I seriously despise this excuse for government.

A little squirrely

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve noticed a squirrel that looks much darker than the little toerags I usually see around the People’s Republic.

Wikipedia tells me that the melanistic morph of the Eastern Grey Squirrel most frequently is found around the Michigan-Ontario area. But apparently Teddy Roosevelt imported some breeding pairs to Washington, D.C., during his presidency. I don’t know why—they’re all greedy little furry landsharks that dig up my potted plants, regardless of their coloration.

But I’ve got one in my back yard. Joy.

Gratitude Monday: Privilege

Friday was the 75^th anniversary of VE Day, so I took the day off to remember the time when the civilized world smashed Nazis instead celebrating them. Can you just imagine the 40 millions of dead whirling in their graves that not even a century later, we’re letting fascists threaten elected officials, swarm unimpeded through state Capitols and pervert the Department of Justice?

Dang.

Well, my idea for the day was to hit a nursery to check out camellias, replant an azalea bush and shift shelves in a kitchen cupboard so I could have all my stemware in one place. Then I drank champagne.

It was actually very productive, and I was heartened by the news that the thugs in the White House are going viral, so to speak.

So today I’m grateful for paid time off, for having a garden to dig in and for being able to afford wine. I well understand that these seemingly simple things make me privileged, and I really, really appreciate it. I also appreciate that those who sacrificed everything to defeat fascism 75 years paid the price for my comfort.