The City of Palo Alto has declared today to be Amelia
Bedelia Day—celebrate by being literal.
If you’ve not yet met Amelia Bedelia, you should. She’s
the subject of a number of books by Peggy Parrish, and today marks the 50th
Anniversary of publication of the original
volume. In it, when housekeeper Amelia Bedelia first arrives at the home of
Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, her new employers, Mrs. Rogers gives her a list of tasks
to perform while they’re out.
It turns out that Amelia Bedelia has what you might
call a machine-language simplicity about her. She takes every instruction
literally. Imagine, then, what the results might be if she’s told to “dust the
furniture” and “dress the chicken”.
Yes, indeedy—that’s exactly what happens.
But—it turns out that no one makes lemon meringue
pie like Amelia Bedelia. So—just as we have come to adapt to the quirks of our electronic
devices, Mr. and Mrs. Rogers find ways to accommodate Amelia Bedelia.
I think everyone who works in software ought to read
Amelia Bedelia. I introduced my historiography professor to her. Part of the
course included a module on statistics. He was what passed for a computer nerd
in the W&M history department in the early 90s and he’d never heard of
her. My own copy is well worn because I never tire of its amazing silliness.
Yes, all right—I am easily amused.
But so should you be. And; you should mark the day
appropriately. Take someone literally. Be silly. At the very least, have a slice of lemon
meringue pie.
If anyone’s wondering why the unemployment situation
is so dire, I submit that a major contributor is the unassailable fact that
97.9% of recruiters are just complete morons.
I’ve given you many,
many examples
of this in the past, but here’s one from just this week.
Email came into my queue on Friday from one of the
approximately 12,677 employees of a large, national recruitment firm
specializing in tech positions. It slugged “Noticed your resume – new job open
for a Sr. Product Manager (Start UP) – please apply!”
Well, coming from this particular operation, that’s
pretty meaningless. And, as is also typical for this outfit, the job
description was…not exactly straightforward. So I emailed him asking for
clarification:
And here’s what I got back from him:
Well, ooookay, then. He hadn’t answered my
questions, but he’d given me enough information to know the job’s not for me.
So I filed it in the appropriate folder.
Imagine my surprise, then, to find this in my queue
on Monday:
I needn’t tell you that the job description is identical
to what he’d sent before.
And, as I’ve said many, many times before: I just
don’t know how these people remain employed.
After squirreling
around for days, I finally got dinner on the pub table for the main
characters in my novel. Shepherd's pie & steak frites (it's a bit of a gastro-pub).
For some reason, I’ve kept going back to fill in
set-ups, & just could not get the damned shepherd’s pie out of the kitchen.
But I finally did it.
It was either that or just have them drink
themselves into insensibility—hours & hours, pints & pints.
Perhaps I should try drinking myself into
insensibility the next time something like this arises?
Today marks a major turning point in my friend
Marcia’s life: she’s decided to pack in her job as personal administrative
assistant to an IT exec for a major US automaker’s UK division. The corporation
is making all kinds of cutbacks & when they offered her a severance
package, she weighed up the options & decided that not working for them
would be better for her in the long run than continuing down the path she could
see before her.
Well, hell—I’m about 8000 miles away & I can see
that that particular path doesn’t lead anywhere you want to be, & I’m not
talking about the expected office relocation to Luton.
Marcia’s been with the company for just gone ten
years, sorting out calendars, travel, frozen BlackBerries & I don’t know
what all. I’ve got to hear about some of it, & all I’m going to say is that
I’m surprised the company is still actually selling cars at all.
I’m kind of sad about it, because when she turns off
her company laptop for the last time, I lose about 50% of my regular
readership. (I'm the comic relief in her workday.) But you would not believe the load of crap (a word she would not
stoop to use, but I’m an American & you expect that sort of thing from us)
she’s been managing, & I’m so relieved & happy that she’s had the
courage to recognize when she’s looking at “that’s enough” in her rear view
mirror, & to walk away. This past year in particular has just been beyond
the beyond—every time you thought you’d reached the absolute pinnacle of
corporate idiocy, you realized you were only at the base camp & had another
4000-foot climb to go.
I’ve known Marcia since my days at Newbridge
Networks in the UK. She was PA to the European GM (then the CEO), & I was
on the same floor. Not sure how it is that we connected, but we did, for which
I’m truly thankful. When the bottom fell out of my world in September 2001, she
was one of the friends who helped prop it up. & then again in 2003, 2009,
2011 &…well, you get the drift.
Marcia’s my friend who’s a bell
ringer. I’ve had the spectacular pleasure of climbing into bell towers (some centuries old)
to watch her band ring a couple of times. Through her, I even got to go into
the tower of the Washington National
Cathedral, because it turns out there’s this global confraternity of ringers,
& we went up one Sunday afternoon for a practice. Beat that with a stick, why don’t you?
Here’s Marcia at Mount Vernon, from that
same trip she took over here:
Ringing is so complex, so involved—watching it done
on both church bells & hand bells, I kind of understand how Marcia’s had
the ability to manage all that corporate nonsense for all these years—you concentrate
on what’s needed & ignore the external noise. Peals can go on for hours
& you have to be on top of where you are & where you need to be for all
that time.
Marcia came back over a few years later & I had
one of the best Thanksgiving celebrations in my life in her honor. I brought
out the good china (which hasn’t actually been used in the seven years since),
did the turkey with stuffing (my great-grandmother’s recipe), mashed potatoes, pumpkin
& pecan pies, the whole nine yards. I even toyed with the idea of that
green bean casserole (you know the one I mean), but since it wasn’t part of my
childhood holidays, I bagged it right away. (Another friend from the Newbridge
time told me that if I really wanted to provide the ultimate middle-class
American Thanksgiving experience, I should have Cool Whip with the pies, but I
went with whipped cream. &, for the record, I don’t like either pumpkin or
pecan pie; but it was fun to watch Marcia try them.) Marcia & two other friends
were there & it was absolutely stellar.
Even though the kitchen sink backed up. But that
happens to be a holiday tradition for me, so that’s okay.
Well, anyhow, Marcia’s going to spend time with her
grandchildren, maybe work on the cross stitch project I’ve been hearing about
for around eight-nine years, hack at the hedge in the back garden & possibly
get in some more ringing. She won’t be fighting with archaic IT systems, German
admins with BSE, execs
thinking she can suspend the laws of physics with respect to time/space or the
rest of that crap.
I don’t have any recordings of Marcia’s band, but I’ll
send her on with this:
&, my sistah—I think you’ve earned a glass
of rioja.
For the past three days, I’ve had the protagonists
of my novel
sitting in a country pub, waiting for their dinners. I’m stuck—& this time
my [blah-blah]
device doesn’t seem to be working.
Raymond Chandler advised writers who lose the plot to
have a guy burst through the door waving a gun. Old NaNoWriMo hands tell us to
parachute ninjas into the story & have our characters deal with them.
I’d just settle for a shepherd’s pie & a nice
plate of fish & chips. & another round of ale.
By way of follow-up to my post about Drama
Queens (of either XX or XY chromosome configuration) on Facebook, here’s
something I came across.
Not DQ material, exactly. And not entirely a
humble-brag. But this sort of invitation to one’s friends to share some
appreciation of how special one is (which specialness one is extremely careful
to call out), seems to lie at the core of the whole FB phenomenon:
I mean—the idea of going to a reasonably public
forum (public because you’ve lumped all levels of associates, from passing
acquaintances to live-in lovers, into the category of “friends”) and, well,
just gushing like this is completely cringeworthy.
Isn’t it?
And the fact that such gushing elicits (as it was
obviously intended to do) equally cringeworthy encomia just…well, I believe I’ve
gone into insulin shock.
An interesting story in the WSJ about how public
libraries are trying to interpret
their mission in the 21st Century.
They’re putting on hog butchering demonstrations (Overland
Park, Ks.) and running virtual bowling leagues (Des Plaines, Ill.), among
other activities. Along with books (hard copy and electronic) and videos,
they’re lending musical instruments and construction tools.
And in addition to improving lectures on local
botany and ancient Greek pottery, they’re offering rock concerts and stand-up comedy shows.
I haven’t noticed any of this hoo-ha at any of the
six library systems that I use in the Valley they call Silicon. I do know that in the
Milpitas branch of the Santa Clara County Library, on the mornings they hold
the toddlers’ story time, you have to park at the top of the garage because the
lower three levels are packed with SUVs and mini-vans, and you wade through massed squadrons of very upscale strollers parked by the stairs to get to the
adult non-fiction section. But that’s pretty traditional.
Although I think some of the stories are told in
Mandarin.
I’m not sure how I feel about all this new-fangled
approach. I thought the North Seattle branch of the public library had lost the
plot when it only had about six aisles of books and devoted the rest of its
space to computers, DVDs and CDs. The
system did have books, because I used to request them and have them delivered
to NS for pick-up; but they didn’t seem to have as many as the King County
system.
So much for their image of being the national vortex
of intellectual achievement.
I mean, it was like that old “Laugh-In” joke: “I
went to the Beautiful Downtown Burbank Library, but their book was checked out.”
I grew up with and in the Pasadena Public Library.
My first paycheck job (you know—an actual paycheck that you had to deposit in
your bank, as opposed to being paid in cash for babysitting) was with PPL,
shelving books in the Children’s Room of the main branch. I researched papers
in the periodical stacks, where I’d get lured away from the stories I was after
by magazine advertisements from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. They had a
listening room, where you could plug into classical music or jazz or Broadway
shows; and they rented out a couple of electric typewriters by the half-hour.
(Hey—that’s how Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451; only he used the UCLA
library for that.)
And PPL was in the vanguard of expanding services
to its patrons. They were the first library I ever heard of to open on Sunday
afternoons. Back in the 70s, they were primary movers in the Metropolitan Cooperative
Library Service (MCLS)—where libraries in communities surrounding LA city
pooled resources. You could check out materials from any one of the
participating libraries through your own system.
Of course, I’m a little fuzzy on how you found the
danged things, because they still used those card catalogs to list all their
holdings.
But if another library in the system had what you
wanted, you could request it and pick it up at your local branch. It opened
up a major chunk of the world to you. Amazing.
A few years ago I stopped by PPL’s main branch. It’s
a venerable building, as
such things go in Southern California. I walked into the main hall and found
table after table laptop-ready, with masses of electrical outlets and high-speed
Internet access. They had a coffee kiosk in the courtyard off what used to be
the Fine Arts room. And it isn't Starbucks!
But with all the new high-tech offerings, I didn’t
see the niche where the old winos used to come in when the library opened, park
in one of the overstuffed chairs and stay until closing—warm in winter, cool
in summer. I wonder where they’ve gone?
Unless they’re at the hog-butchering lectures or
logging onto the libraries’ public computers.
I’m sure you’ve noticed it on Facebook: someone will
post something along the lines of, “I’ve totally HAD it. This is THE END!!!!”
or “Men/women are all assholes!!!!!” These may or may not be followed by 17
posts from friends asking “What up???”, and maybe (or maybe not) some elaboration
from the originator.
Frankly, in my experience these sorts of posts get
lost amongst the “Just checked in to [some place I’ve never heard of] for
[pizza/cocktails/burgers/bikini wax]”, “Cutest EVAH cat picz” and multiple
variants of various Internet hoaxes—the ones that used to be emailed around.
I mean, let’s face it: there’s a boatload of
banality on FB.
But it apparently doesn’t go unnoticed, and someone has taken the time to pull together evidence of Drama
Queens on Facebook. I am relieved to note that some of the DQs’ friends are
on to their tricks. I especially like the one that starts, “I now understand
how it feels to not be able to get over someone”.
Okay, they may not have the charm of Dog Shaming, but they are amusing.
