Everybody to get from street...

Here’s a thing new to me:

A couple of days ago my manager sent round an email asking for his staff members’ cell phone numbers. “I would like to be sure I have everyone’s proper numbers.”

Now, this isn’t the tech/business world where your employer demands that you be contactable all the hours God sends, and my work isn’t exactly mission-critical, so there’s no need to call me at 0330 demanding [some arcane datapoint over which I have no control anyway]. This is by way of me saying that so far I haven’t given out my mobile number to anyone at work.

A few members of the greater team immediately hit reply-all and handed over their digits, but I’ve so far abstained.

Then yesterday the CFO/CLO sent an all-staff email announcing that the company’s going to conduct a test of their “emergency contact process”. We’re supposed to reply to a group text so they can collect response-time data for…data collection purposes.

In theory this seems an okay thing. After all, our place of business is in downtown Washington, D.C., which could have emergency-bad things happen to it. And we are in the scientific arena, which makes us a potential target for Repugnant-Kleptocrat emergency-bad things, so I can see that they might want to be able to reach everyone in a timely manner to communicate emergency-bad things to us all.

(As an aside—why are there never emergency-good things? Wouldn’t it be nice if there were?)

But here’s the deal: yes, I have a mobile phone. But I do not live in it. It is literally on for less than one hour out of 24, while I’m on Metro. I occasionally turn it on if I need to check something on the Web, or I want to notify someone that I’m running late. I do not call people on it just to chat, and I only text as a last-measure form of communication.

And yet, despite me telling people I need to speak with about important matters that mobile is the worst possible way to reach me, I still turn on the thing to discover three-day-old voicemails or texts from yesterday morning.

Folks—the shelf-life of voicemails and texts is pretty short, so if I tell you that I don’t ever have the phone on, please use my preferred methods of communication: email or landline. Or else somehow just beam your important thoughts directly into my brain.

So, the upshot is: yeah, I’ll give my digits to my manager (although I suppose I could debate how “proper” they are), and yeah, I’ll try to remember to have the sodding thing on at the day and time of the planned emergency drill. But I’ll just point out that were this drill to be a real emergency-emergency, I’d still be in the street.

It's not paranoia if it's happening

For some reason Google signed me out of one of my accounts yesterday. When I logged back in, it tried to get me to “verify” a phone number where they can call me for whatever purpose they take it into their heads to execute.

At no time have I ever tried to associate a phone number of any stripe with a Google account. However, I do have an entirely fictitious set of digits that I use for the times when you absolutely have to give some online entity a number if you want their “free” thing.

So here’s the creepy thing: I’ve never “given” that number to Google, so they obviously scraped it from times when I was using Chrome as the vehicle for “signing up” for something online.

I tried, but they don’t give you an option for “Hell no, I won’t verify anything.” So I just deleted it and clicked continue.

They tried again to get me to bite, but I just clicked Done, and I appear to be okay.

For now.

Dressed for success, unpresidented

I was going to write about something else today, but then this story flashed across my social media feed…

(And before I get to it, let me just say that I have no intention at all of spending the next four years writing about all the crap that’s about to flood from the White House, joining the sewage already flowing from the Capitol cloaca. Because that would be more than a full-time job, and I do not have the blood pressure to deal with that shit.)

But I just had to pass on the Washington Post’s Reliable Source gossip column report on an interview that the Kleptocrat-elect gave to the New York Times in which—after he once again bashed Meryl Streep—he proclaimed that for his upcoming inauguration (oh, Lord—I’m not sure my fingers can type this without my entire body wanting to howl with laughter), “There will be plenty of movie and entertainment stars. All the dress shops are sold out in Washington. It’s hard to find a great dress for this inauguration.”

Now, let’s consider the degree of pathetic wish fulfillment these two statements require. Because we already know that his inauguration team is having a very hard time finding even D-list celebs who are willing to perform for this Klown Kar of Kakistocracy. And I really hope that those who are signing on are getting payment in advance, because this jerk and his toadies are consistent in only one thing, and that’s stiffing the hired help.

But that whole bit about the state of party frock availability for this event utterly surpasses just about everything the Klown-in-chief has ever tried to palm off on the public to hype himself. Is he imagining that this vast wasteland of formalwear will mean that women will show up at the various events wearing yoga pants and I’m With Her tee shirts? Or that they’re flocking to Philly in search of frocks?

Or perhaps he’s laying the groundwork for a later claim that the tens of thousands of gorgeous women who really, really wanted to show their support for him had to stay home because of a dearth of finery suitable for the occasion?

Well, whatever.

But the whole reason I’m posting this is actually this comment posted to the story.

Whoever toleranceisbest is, s/he won teh Interwebz yesterday.

Gratitude Monday: Living in a fishbowl

The building where I’m living has been in the process of renovation for the past ten months. Something to do with asbestos abatement, which of course is a good thing. (There’s apparently been some discussion back and forth amongst residents about just how extensive the asbestos danger is; legal representation may have been consulted.)

The process involves stripping away the wallpaper on the corridors of each floor (approximately a quarter of a mile from one end of the building to the other), replacing the popcorn-sprayed ceilings, and then repainting. They started with the top floor and have been slowly working their way down to where I am. 

When I saw the wall underpinning I confess that it seemed something hovering between urban decay and an underwater world. Don't know if it's just what the walls look like after the wallpaper's been steamed off, or some kind of primer for the next stage.

Here are some pictures of the walls in the transitional stage, to give you an idea:

And here’s what the penthouse floor (yes, that’s what they call it) looks like post-renovation:

But when my floor got stripped down, I discovered that someone has both an artistic and a whimsical bent, because I got off the elevator one day and found these fishies floating in the rather aquatic environment:

That was great, but a few weeks later, I went down to the storage level using a staircase in the opposite direction from the way I go to work, and I discovered that the fish fantasist must live at my end of the building, because starting just outside my door, there was a whole series of aquatic life presenting itself at various points along the walls.

So today I’m grateful for the pleasure that this unexpected discovery, quite literally at my doorstep, has given me.

Wedding terror

I think this story has moved way beyond the Royal Wedding; I’m talking, of course, about the millinery confection that Princess Beatrice wore to the nuptials.

She—or her hat—has become an Internet meme. It’s even made an appearance on the heads of the Administration team monitoring the Abbottabad raid on Osama Bin Laden.

Where else but the Internet are you going to use “Princess Beatrice”, “hat” and “Osama Bin Laden” in a single sentence?

And now the hat (original, I presume) is going to be auctioned on eBay to raise money for charity. 

Super food

Well, hmm—I knew this was probably cued up: a new epidemic in the post-gluten, all-kale-all-the-time world that we face.

Yes, an epidemic of youths (or, in some areas, youts) facing another ten years in their parents’ basements, desperately trying to obliterate their anxieties about college entrance exams and failure to secure Series A investment in their app that’s the Uber of grunge bands with…

Well, just watch. If you dare.

This trend may have begun in the UK, as you can tell from the language (helpfully subtitled), but so did the fascinator.

Do you want to see either of these things in your subdivision? I mean—what happens when they start wearing the kale on their heads? We may indeed be looking into the face of Armageddon.

Mapping the year

Still on the theme of starting the year, but without anyknown tsarist involvement, here’s my wall décor in my dining room:

It’s my hardcopy mind map for what I want 2017 to include for me. There are major categories, subset nodes and sub-subsets.

I like using colored stickies for this function. For mind-mapping, stickies are about equal with a big-ass whiteboard. (The last time I did mind-mapping, for a class assignment in the Valley They Call Silicon, it was an extremely frustrating effort, due to lack of whiteboard, big-ass or otherwise, and no inspiration to use the stickies. The results were less than stellar.)

In fact, this time around, I actually started with a big-ass whiteboard, in my office, and transferred all the nodes to the stickies so I could erase all evidence at work of attempting a personal life and transport the information home.

Since then I’ve transposed much of it online using a mind-mapping software package that’s a bit of a kludge, but easier to manage because I already have the visual notion of what I want included and in what hierarchical structure. Back at Stanford, I was trying to do it all online from the get-go, and there was a lot of resulting blood in the vicinity.

Anyhow, I now have some shape for dealing with 2017. Let’s hope I end it better than my Romanov relatives.

From the tsar's mouth

My office door is basically Snapchat IRL: I tape pictures on it, and after some period of time, I take them down.

Since yesterday was the first work day of 2017, I put up the meme from my post here; just the photo with the Russian text over it. There aren’t that many of my colleagues who'd recognize the tsar (which I find rather sad—there are Ph.D.s on every floor), much less be able to read the Cyrillic alphabet (about which I am less judgmental).

There is one, however—as it happens, my manager. After he earned a degree in Russian Studies, he went to Moscow to bring democracy to the Former Soviet Union. It didn’t stick, of course, but I don't hold that against him, because apparently democracy didn’t stick here, either; it just took us longer to realize it.

Anyhow, he looked at the photo, translated the words in his mind and asked, “Is that an actual quote from him [Nikolai]?”

“I found it on Twitter, so probably yeah…”

The year ahead

I thought this meme, making its way around the Interwebz, is apt:

The approximate translation is: I am convinced that ’17 is going to be a better year.

As it happens, whether 1917 was a good year depended entirely upon who and where you were. From my perspective, a hundred years on, it was actually pretty awful all around. Although the Bolsheviki probably considered it more of a win than Nicholas II when they looked back on it.

Yeah—it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Gratitude Monday: The wild, wild web

As we head into this new year, I believe that this advice from one of the great 20^th Century role models for smart and self-confident women will serve us well:

So today I’m grateful for the resources of the Internet that allow people to explore a range of views, find information, debunk lies, share ideas and find entertainment.

These resources, in short, that rational and compassionate humans can use to stand up to would-be dictators of all stripes.

Because it's going to be a bumpy, bumpy night. All year long.