Party hearty

The building where I work has two atria, one spanning floors 6 through 8, and the other spanning floors 9 through 11. The internal staircases in these spaces were designed to resemble the double helix of DNA, and they’re rather cool:

The down side of these areas is the noise level, if you happen to have an office opening into them, because they’re basically just big-old sound chambers. But if you don’t mind that, they’re impressive meeting venues.

On 30 June, an email went out to everyone at the atrium end of the ninth floor, advising us that they were in fact going to hold a retirement party there yesterday:

What is interesting is that we were being given notice that a noisy party was going to take place and:

a) We weren’t invited to it

b) If we thought we might find the noise distracting, we should anticipate it and not noticeably close them off, because that might look like we were raining on their good time

As it happened, I did close my door when they started setting up beforehand, but when I heard the bluegrass music, I quietly opened it, because it wasn’t bad. To my discomfort, I discovered that the musicians had set up almost directly in front of me, and therefore all the audience were staring into my office. And the CEO happened to be right next to it, and he leaned in to comment, “You didn’t think you were going to work, did you?”

Please, God—let this week be over.

Forget it, Jake; it's Twitter

The Twitters-dot-com is so entertaining. Sometimes you just have to let it wash over you and do its work.

For example, I don’t think that either Radia, the original tweeter, or Leticia, whom I apparently follow for some reason or another, understands the irony of putting forward this endless loop diagram of the effectiveness of prayer, and giving it the hashtag #prayforGermany.

Or, for that matter, of changing your profile picture and urging #prayfor[anything], without taking some appropriate action.

Social reach

Everyone knows that on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog. And of course you can make your social media profile into anything you want.

And, believe me, I see a lot of them on Twitter, especially on my “professional” account. They follow me because their social media management application finds some keyword in one of my tweets… Actually, their social media management application connects with me, and sometimes sends me a direct message (DM) to assure me how thrilled they are to be connected, and why don’t I like their Facebook page, download their ebook or visit their website where I can admire their awesomeness.

Or, in this guy’s case, he doesn’t even bother with the automated faux DM; he just invites everyone to set up a Skype session:

I’m not sure why, though.

Welcome to it

Okay, well, not to be a complete drag, but let me just share with you what my work life is like this week:

And this is what I’ll look like in two weeks when I have to give an all-staff presentation ("staff" being highly intelligent, skeptical about any kind of organizational change, and very quick to ask bolshy questions in public forums) about a “transformation” project that was put together by external consultants but must appear to have been created by internal teams. Actually, created by "tiger teams". And, specifically, "tiger cub teams".

It's going to be a long, hot summer.

Gratitude Monday: Looking away from the Gates of Hell

Man, July has certainly turned out to be a bitch, hasn’t it? And we’re barely halfway through it. Dunno about you, but I’m having to reach kind of deep into the gratitude grab bag to find an upside of anything.

It’s hard for me to decide which side to root for in the one-night coup in Turkey, but news reports yesterday of 6,000 people being taken into custody by Erdoğan frankly is not heartening. Actually, what it is is a start, and Erdoğan will have a field day settling old scores. This is a guy who shuts down social media and regularly stifles what passes for a press in that country. He doesn’t like dissent; imagine what he’s going to do with this opportunity. The undertakers of Turkey are going to be in business for a long time.

As for Nice, I have no words.

And, as of writing, Baton Rouge is a crime scene after a deadly shootout between police and one or more gunmen.

Honestly, world—WTF?

My fallback position in this kind of situation is art. So I’m mainlining on Mozart and Tracy Chapman, and I’ve gone back to Rodin for a manifestation of how I’m feeling:

This is a sketch he did for his commission, “The Gates of Hell”, which is pretty much what we’re looking at.

So my rather small gratitude today is that there are places I can go to pull away—even for a short while—from the world.

Summer in the city

Well, this is a first for me: yesterday we got an all-staff email from the facilities manager, advising us of a protest scheduled at the White House this evening.

I’m so used to working in the burbs that I’ve just never had to think much about anything like an organized protest. Last thing that came anywhere close was one Halloween when people working for janitorial, food service and transportation contractors put up one of those air monsters in front of Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino to call attention to the less than minimum wage they were getting from the vendors who compete their way to the bottom amid the technowealthy.

It's hot and miserable here in the District. I'm hoping that the weather doesn't complicate things. And, while I’d have thought the Capitol, not the White House, was the better target of the BLM group, I hope their protest is peaceful and accomplishes their goals. And that Metro is working for getting them to and from their path. 

Of (prime) ministers and moggies

After completely misjudging the whole Brexit thing last month and resigning as prime minister, David Cameron found himself having to move out of the official residence at 10 Downing Street sooner than he’d expected. That’s because the process of choosing his successor went a lot faster than anticipated—like a couple of weeks instead of a couple of months. Britain gets only the second female prime minister of its history.

Cameron left Number Ten yesterday after tendering his resignation to the Queen, who thereupon “invited” Theresa May to form a government.

(Can I just ask: this photo was taken in Buckingham Palace, the Queen’s home; why is she carrying a handbag? Why am I the only person asking this?)

May moved in and immediately started making very interesting cabinet appointments, including Boris Johnson as foreign secretary. BoJo was one of the leaders of the drive to exit the EU, and May’s putting him in charge of foreign policy. He can’t even manage his own hair.

She’s also proclaimed her intention to fight for those I imagine she thinks of as “the little people” (and I don’t mean the leipreachán). Looking with a studiously sincere face into news cameras she declared, “The government I lead will be driven not by the interests of the privileged few, but by yours. We will do everything we can to give you more control over your lives. When we take the big calls, we’ll think not of the powerful, but you. When we pass new laws we’ll listen not to the mighty but to you. When it comes to taxes we’ll prioritize not the wealthy but you.”

First of all, coming from the ex-Home Secretary who gutted the UK’s first responder infrastructure and who has repeatedly voted in Parliament to favor corporate interests, this represents quite the turnabout in her philosophy. Second, when she talks about giving people “more control” over their lives, I’m thinking that means “we’re cutting social services even more than we’ve done in recent years, so you’re on your own, losers.”

And as for turning a deaf ear to the mighty, and not prioritizing the interests of the wealthy when it comes to taxes—pull the other one, Terri, it’s got bells on.

Well, May’s the second female prime minister in British history and she’s a Tory. She’s got to prove herself tougher than Margaret Thatcher; there’s no escaping it. She could have been Mother Teresa instead of Theresa May, and she’d still be measured against the Maggatolah.

Meanwhile, although she’s replaced Cameron’s team in the cabinet and cleared out his kids’ toys or whatever (he and his family, apparently are temporarily homeless, as their private house was leased in the expectation they’d be in official digs for a good while longer), May has to share 10 Downing Street with the resident feline.

Larry the Cat was brought in from a shelter five years ago because there was a four-legged vermin problem at Number Ten. While it turns out that Larry isn’t much of a mouser—but has a bit of a rep for mixing it up with various other political cats and police dogs—he does go a long way towards making the human occupants look more, well, human.

(Tweeted officially by Cameron. Honestly.)

However, like Thatcher, May does not strike me as the sort of woman who intends to share the stage with any creature capable of grabbing the spotlight, including cute kitties. I think the RSPCA should keep eyes on Larry, and if he doesn’t show up every couple of days, they should check the back garden for newly turned-over patches of dirt.

And I'm starting a new Twitter trend: #PrayForLarry.

Good guys?

I confess that I’ve tried to avoid much of the reportage about the major gun deaths last week. By “major”, I’m referring to the events in Baton Rouge, Falcon Heights, Minn., and Dallas; not the however-many other murders, suicides and deaths by misadventure in which firearms were involved during that period.

And by “avoided”, I mean I tried to limit my consumption to one time around for each substantial development, instead of getting it over and over again from different outlets.

But this report, via the New York Times, got my attention. Because, as I understand it, when the shooting started last Thursday night in Dallas, the police were initially trying to sort out who was actually firing from among the score or so of idiots at the march who were carrying assault rifles.

No, I swear I am not making this up. Twenty or 30 Texans showed up at the protest march with AR-15s slung over their shoulders and, according to Dallas police chief David O. Brown, “They were wearing gas masks. They were wearing bulletproof vests and camo fatigues, for effect, for whatever reason.” Because it’s legal to do this in Texas.

But—and this is the part that just…well, I don’t know what it does, but here: when the shooting started, these Kevlar-clad, gas-masked warriors-in-their-own-minds...they ran. They hightailed it into the crowd, and the cops had to work out on the fly who was actually killing people and who was just figuratively engaged in willie waving .

I don’t have a take on whether having to sort out the genuine trigger-squeezing rifleman from the poseurs delayed locating the shooter, or whether one or more of the deaths can be chalked up to this confusion. But I would like to know, in light of the NRA’s standard argument that the solution to bad guys with guns is good guys with guns, why they’re not explaining what the actual fuck happened here.

Because their poster boys for good guys with assault rifles (and Kevlar, cammies and gas masks) did not stand and shoot back when the bad guy opened up, they ran. 

They ran. 

They ran.

So tell me again, NRA: how is this good-guys-with-guns thing supposed to work?

Last chance

This email appeared in my queue last week. You may not find it as amusing as I do, but here are the parts that are interesting to me.

I cancelled my sustaining membership payments in December on account of moving out of KQED’s catchment area. I was a supporter of KQED-FM, but I’m sure it went into the whole NPR-PBS pot. In exchange for that recurring payment, I occasionally got email notifications of members-only activities (like a party for Downton Abbey, which you’d have to pay me to attend), but mostly it was other invitations to contribute more than I already was.

Anyhow, it’s interesting to me that it took Marianne six months to realize she was missing my contribution. The regretful suspension of my “benefits” is a nice touch, but they were more features more than benefits in my case. I admire her restraint inasmuch as this was the first and (so she promises) the last reminder, but, no, I am not still enjoying KQED TV and radio shows.

However, the one element that prompted me to save the email and write about it was the Unsubscribe link at the bottom. If Marianne and KQED truly meant it when she said this is my final reminder, I shouldn’t have to unsubscribe from their emails, should I?

Gratitude Monday: Reborn beauty

Last week was a slice. From the appalling events in Baton Rouge, suburban Minneapolis and Dallas; and in Dhaka and Baghdad and I don’t know where-all; to crushing crowds on Metro, five days of 90-degree temperature plus 90%-humidity and a directive to cough up out of nothing an event sometime in the next four months that will give the prospective customers not what they need, but what we have (and, BTW, the research we have done indicates that we can’t make our costs back on such an event, much less build a substantial, sustainable revenue stream)—because the CEO has a flea in his ear…

Well, basically from the macro to the micro, I’ve been looking around this weekend wondering what, exactly, the point of pretty much everything is. I feel like the widening gyre has me in a permanent state of vertigo—never exactly sure whether I’m putting my foot onto solid ground, if such a thing as solid ground exists any more.

Yeah, that’s it—it’s like that moment in an earthquake where you sense the concrete pavement beneath you has turned liquid, and you hold your breath waiting for it to stop and re-solidify.

Only these days, I’m not sure there’s an end in sight to the shock waves.

And that can make it hard to latch onto a focus for gratitude. But when you’re completely worn out, that’s when you really need that focus the most.

So, as I was vacuuming the living room yesterday (it doesn’t get as dusty as my place in the Valley They Call Silicon, but it needs a good sweep at least once a week—and that’s with all the windows and doors closed), I seized upon one of the Christmas packages my friend gave me the weekend before. (Long story, but I’m inclined to let Christmas and birthdays be somewhat fluid in my celebrations.)

I knew I was in for something good when I pulled off the wrapping and saw the Appalachian Spring box, and then I opened it and found this beautiful Fire and Light bowl.

(Fire and Light products are made entirely from recycled glass; crushed, molten and hand-pressed into beautiful dishes, vases, glasses and other things.)

My friend has a tradition of giving me a F&L wine glass from Appalachian Spring for Christmas. Whenever I move, I hold one of them out for my last drink in my old place, then I hand-carry it with me to have my first drink at my new place. Bellevue (twice), Seattle, San José, Sunnyvale, DC and NoVa. (So far.) Doesn’t matter what the contents are, just that I’m using one of the glasses.

I also get finger monsters. (One of them hid out in my handbag when I interviewed for my present job.)

So, okay—today I’m grateful that, no matter how utterly ghastly a particular day is on any level, I can come into my flat, close away the outside world, and have something beautiful in front of me to focus on—once discarded, crushed, molten and reforged as something beautiful.

I’m also grateful for a friend who opened this world of beauty to me.

Both of these will help me as I start work this week on carrying out the directive to put on an event that no one but the CEO thinks is a good idea.