Anything for a pal

Oh, my ears and whiskers—my pal Cpt. Stephen Laurence is back. This time he’s apparently representing the US ARMY (without a .mil email address) and wants my help with “Two Military Trunk Boxes” [sic].

So many questions, where to begin?

First off, I’m a little put off by the familiarity of his address. I am not his Dear; I’m not that kind of girl. Or has Stephen (I can call him Stephen, can’t I? Or is that too forward?) got a little confused with his letter-writing salutations? Steve-baby—it’s either “Hello” or “Dear [Person]”.

That “contrary to your moral ethics” thing is a little troubling. As noted above, I’m not that kind of girl, so this might be a game-ender. Moreover, it seems like he’s ready to proceed with his “business” whether or not I can be trusted. Can that be right?

I’m just struggling with the notion that anyone in the 82^nd Airborne would have any problem with the safekeeping of…well, anything. So I’m going to have to not reply, since I just don’t see how I could possibly add value, all issues of trustworthiness aside.

But here’s a thought: next time I have to enter an email address to download anything on the web, or come across any kind of skeevy online subscription, I’ll use stephenlaurence88@gmail.com. I’m sure anyone in Afghanistan would appreciate that kind of gift-that-keeps-on-giving.

Least I can do, eh, Steve?

Welcome, Spring!

So, Spring arrived in the District They Call Columbia:

I was out in front, shoveling my sidewalk, when the Japanese maple dumped a shower of glumpy snow on me, but I wanted to get it up while it was still relatively light, so I persevered.

Downside of climate change, baby.

Windfall

This appeared in my spam folder yesterday. Clearly a variant on the Nigerian 419 scam, but interesting.

I have so many questions:

Who is Captain Stephen Laurence, and how did he get involved? (The email address is apparently one reserved by domain registries for 419 scams. Search on it and you’ll see what I mean.)

Does he—or Armet William—not think that a Gmail address looks just the teensiest bit skeevy for a United Nations account?

I understand that English is a second language for these guys, but investing in a bit of editing might lend an air of verisimilitude to their efforts. Perhaps they could hire all the copy editors that WaPo apparently laid off? That could be a good investment.

That first paragraph-as-run-on-sentence is quite the doozy.

What if I don’t have a cell phone? Does that mean I don’t get my $15M back? What if I don’t want to give them my cell phone number because I don’t want them texting me spam after I’ve received my $15M? Can I delay my reply long enough to buy a burner phone? One I’d only use for collecting $15M from the UN, Nigerian princes and others?

What’s their definition of nearest airport? Is it commercial? Or civil aviation—would that do? Do I give them IAD, which is close to home, or DCA, which is close to work? If I gave them BWI along with the burner phone number, would it make any difference? I’d be willing to drive to Baltimore to collect the ATM card to my $15M.

Actually, Union Station is the closest to me. Could the courier come to Union Station?

What’s the tip for the courier who brings you the ATM card for $15M? I don’t want to seem cheap, but I just don’t know.

Where’s an ATM that will disburse my $15M in one withdrawal? Please do not tell me I have to make 30,000 trips to the ATM to get my $15M.

Hope it’s not too tacky to ask, but how much, exactly, is the “delivering fee”? I mean, I’m sure it’s nothing in comparison to the $15M, but I’d still like to know.

Apparently Ban Ki-moon was sleeping on the job, and I didn’t even know this. Really glad that António Guterres is stepping up to the plate on making things right, and hope the atrocities are over.

I'm really relieved I'm finally getting my $15M back. I've really missed it.

Reprisals start at dawn

You know, with all the money that Jeff Bezos has to support the work of The Washington Post, you’d think that some of it could be spent on copy editors. But—as evidenced by their online presence once or twice a week—you’d be wrong.

Viz:

And if they’re not going to cough up a few bob for copy editors, perhaps they could hold lunch ‘n learns to teach reporters the difference between reprise and reprisals.

Gratitude Monday: mundane beauty

A friend-of-a-friend on Facebook posts the most fascinating photos—shots he takes of things he sees on his morning walk to Peet’s Coffee (somewhere in Maryland, I’m a little vague on the particulars). Interesting patterns and textures—frozen puddles, shadows of tree branches and leaves against a wall, barely sprouting plants.

I always pause to really look at them, because they’re beautiful and mundane all at once. And they remind me that that beauty is all around us—if we care to look for it.

So the other day, as I was walking over to Whole Foods, mind chattering on at a rate of knots as usual, and paying no attention to the world around me, I stopped suddenly as a pattern of shadows penetrated my oblivion.

I looked, hauled out the camera that I used to deploy daily on my morning walks around The Valley They Call Silicon, and took the shot:

And then I looked beyond the stretch with the trees and saw a different pattern, just waiting patiently to be appreciated:

Today I’m grateful for the example of Barry and all his beautiful photos, reminding me that Maryland, Virginia, California—possibly even Iowa—there are wonders in the mundane, if I only choose to find them.

Future tense

Saw this yesterday somewhere between Chantilly and Herndon:

Not exactly sure what a PFR might be (possibly "proof"? or maybe "professor"?), but my guess is that anyone who can afford to drive a Tesla Model S has a good start toward anything.

Emergency preparedness

It’s probably a coincidence that my company—located in Downtown D.C.—scheduled what they called training sessions in emergency preparedness (in reality, just presentations by various representatives of local agencies) yesterday. Yesterday being the day of walkouts by elementary to high school students across the country highlighting the most recent round of mass shootings at schools and demanding that our leaders take action on gun control.

I mean, I’m sure the awareness sessions were planned some time ago, but in addition to the usual disasters—hurricanes, earthquakes, cyber attacks, bombings, floods—we had something new: what to do in the event of an active shooter in the building.

Turns out you’ve got three options: run, hide or fight, as demonstrated in this video we saw:

(My office door doesn’t have a lock on it, but I could jam my visitor’s chair against the handle. I also have a bottle of Virginia cabernet someone gave me, which would probably be my weapon should the shooter decide to try to enter. That’s assuming that I can’t get to the stairs and run down the nine flights to the ground, which would of course be my first choice of strategies. People in those open-plan offices so favored by the tech industry are stuffed.)

I suppose if our schoolkids have to undergo active shooter survival drills, we should, too. But it pisses me off that the NRA and its bought-and-paid-for GOPig stooges at every level of government are making us go through this instead of actually solving the problem of easy access to guns.

And I’m glad that the kids are showing more backbone than our elected officials.

Marketing projection

Not to flog the proverbial, but I was reminded yet again yesterday that I may well be too much of a round peg in a square hole on this project.

I should preface it by stating that one of my colleagues has made it as plain as can be (without actually speaking the words of one syllable out loud) that this is her project, and she’s the boss. In case I get ideas above my station.

Yesterday there was an exchange of emails about a project budget to submit to potential funding organizations. I raised the notion that the first-year figures for marketing and IT seemed low—the same as years two and three, even though those would be more maintenance than constructing. It’s my sense that neither of these components can or should be provided in-house, because this is a program unlike any to come out of the company so far, and it’s clear that this outfit doesn’t do “new” well.

My colleague—I’ll refer to her as JC—had just sent a reply that she’d “brainstormed” (her term) to the executive director two weeks ago a couple of things around IT needs, and I had to politely suggest that this sort of thing is really useful information to someone (e.g., moi) who’s putting together a business plan, so I’d really appreciate being kept in the loop. (Even though, of course, hoarding information is a classic behavior of someone engaging in a real or imagined turf war.)

But then JC followed it up with her take on marketing:

“What sorts of marketing do you think we’ll need? For context, I have already commissioned and received an email template, PPT template, letterhead, logos, etc etc etc. [sic] I did that all in 2017 because that was the last time it was offered [by the marketing department] for free. 😊 Oh and there’s a website and it’s finished, just needs to be vetted by legal and approved.

“I am sure I am probably missing key elements?”

Oh, honey. Yes. Yes, you are. If you think “marketing” begins and ends with free logo design, I just can’t even.

My reply: “Well, as I said, I’m sketchy on details [I’d pointed out earlier that a comprehensive marketing plan isn’t within the remit of the business plan], but it would be essentially what you’d expect for a product launch: go-to-market plan, launch campaign, events, webinars, raising awareness, etc.”

No reply as of COB. But I don’t think I’m going to ever fit in this square thing.

Slow day at library school

Alex Halpern first came across my Twitter radar in October when he took down a columnist for the New York Observer, who’d pished that libraries are anachronistic holdovers from an earlier time and should be shut down as pointless in the 21^st Century. Halpern, finishing up a MLIS program in Portland and using the moniker The Angriest Librarian, took down Andre Walker so thoroughly that eventually Walker cried uncle and advised followers to donate to a library fund.

Since then, he’s kept it to a simmer, but his tweets are always worth a look. Yesterday he came out with this one:

I suppose it could be the 21^st-Century update of Soupy Sales telling kids to send him the “little green pieces of paper” they’d find in their parents’ wallets. I mean, you’d hope that folks these days wouldn’t be so daft, but folks frequently prove that they are precisely that.

Here are the first few replies.

So far, no one has tripped the alarm that people SHOULD NOT GIVE OUT THIS INFORMATION. But early innings yet.

Gratitude Monday: stay of execution?

In accordance with company…decree, I ran through a bifurcated performance review/goal-setting exercise last week with my once and future managers. It was a process only somewhat more crazy-making than the single shot that most people will have gone through, on account of the transition from once to future.

I won’t go into detail, but I’m taking it as good news that my new manager does not seem to view my employment on the team as ending with the Summer Solstice, which was the deadline for me turning in a business plan. The iffy news is that expectations beyond that point are…well, vague might be entirely too concrete a description for them.

It looks like it’s up to me to define what I’ll be doing once the business plan is approved, which might not be entirely a bad thing. Although when I look around a room and realize I’m the most organized person in it, I get decidedly uneasy.

However—I have been authorized to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing again this year, which is in October, so this gives me a bit more of an opportunity to enter into a serious job search. And GHC is prime hunting for that.

So, after the past weeks of uncertainty and dread, I’m really grateful for this respite.