Define waste

While wandering the Intertubes yesterday, or, more precisely, floundering through the swamp that Facebook can be, I happened to see Robert Reich's video promoting the concept of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). This is an old idea -- the notion that every citizen would receive a monetary stipend, no means testing or a bunch of bureaucratic hoops to jump through, that would be sufficient to pay for basic needs. If that basic income wasn't affected by a person also working, it could be a way to eliminate poverty.

To clarify, right now if you're poor and receive assistance, you get penalized for working. The modern welfare system (at least in the United States) has a number of disincentives for work built into it. If, for example, your family qualifies for SNAP benefits (aka Food Stamps), if your income goes up your SNAP benefit goes down, often dramatically and long before your income has climbed to the point where you truly do not need the assistance. Even worse, in some cases you not only don't gain anything, you actually go backwards, e.g., your income climbs by $25 and you lose $50 in SNAP benefits. (You're experiencing the raise after taxes; the system calculates the benefit as though you were getting the full amount before taxes are deducted. And, yes, the working poor pay taxes.) There's no reason to work more hours if all you're doing is screwing yourself.

If, on the other hand, you received a benefit such as the UBI that did not change no matter what you did, you would have an incentive to try to improve your situation. Make more money and you have more money to spend. More money to spend and the multiplier effect kicks in -- you're living better, and so are other people because more money is going into the economy. It's no longer a zero sum game where adding something on one end eliminates it on the other.

In the video, Reich starts with the premise that it's getting to where there are fewer and fewer jobs to go around. Thanks to improvements in robotics and cybernetics, fewer humans are required to do work in a wide variety of industries. So what happens when there are more people than there are opportunities for work of any sort? Do we continue to insist that everyone work or starve? Or do we admit reality and start providing for a way for people to lead halfway decent lives without forcing them to jump through meaningless hoops? In a more humane society, more employers would be like Kellogg once was: 100 years ago the Kellogg cereal company made a conscious decision to have the standard work shift be only 6 hours (this was at a time when 10 or 12 hour work days were common) but to pay enough in wages that workers could live comfortably on that short a shift. Kellogg wanted people to be able to spend time with their families or to, as Reich mentions in the video, feel free to pursue other interests. The 6-hour work day vanished during the 1930s, IIRC. But I digress.

Reich makes some good points, but I'm not optimistic we'll see anything remotely resembling a Universal Basic Income any time soon. As a society, we Americans have been steadily turning meaner and less charitable. Too many people live in absolute fear that someone somewhere is getting something for nothing. Spend any time in a supermarket checkout line, for example, and you're sure to see the Food Police in action: the people who seem to think it's their job to make loud nasty comments if someone with an EBT card (which is how Food Stamps are distributed these days) has the nerve to buy something - anything! - that doesn't meet with their approval. If the poor sap with the EBT card has his or her cart full of cheap pasta, the slam will be about the lack of a balanced diet and no fresh vegetables or protein. If the EBT user does have fresh fruit or maybe a pot roast in the cart, the slam is then about the benefits must be really generous if the user can afford to get a few bananas. And god forbid there's a "luxury" item like a tub of ice cream or a bag of chips -- after all, one of the rules for being poor is that you never get to indulge in any treats no matter how small or innocuous.  You're supposed to visibly suffer if you're poor, as if poverty wasn't enough of a punishment in itself.

In any case, the equivalent of the Food Police left a comment when I shared the Reich video on Facebook. The commenter expressed the concern that a person receiving a cash benefit would "waste" it, spend it unwisely on foolish items. Well, one person's perception of waste is another person's idea of a necessity -- or at least of a worthwhile diversion. You know, if you're on a fixed income and you can't afford much in the way of entertainment, maybe from a purely practical point of view it is a waste of money for you to go to Bingo once a week. But if that's your only indulgence why the fuck should anyone care? It's your money, not theirs.

If you give someone a gift card to Kohl's, you don't get any say in what they spend it on so what gives anyone the right to get judgemental about how other people are spending their disability checks or EBT benefits? In both cases you can claim it's your money, either directly or through taxes, but oddly enough people will act pissier about what total strangers do with an EBT card than they do about what someone they actually know does with a gift card they purchased directly.

And here's another thought, courtesy of the S.O. Instead of bitching about how people are using their EBT benefits, maybe we should be happy to see some tax money coming back into the local community instead of being pissed away on a $1.5 billion ship that this country didn't need and the Pentagon never asked for.

The commenter also mentioned knowing people who are on disability or Social Security who run out of money before the month ends. When that happens, they then hit up friends and acquaintances for loans or do stuff like go to the local food bank. I have three thoughts:

• If people are going to a food bank or trying to get other assistance (e.g., a utilities voucher), they probably need to. Most people don't stand in line on Obama Day or go talk to the folks at St. Vincent de Paul unless they actually need the help. If someone on Social Security is also relying on food bank assistance, this is a pretty good sign their budget it pretty tight. I know there are exceptions -- we had an elderly relative who went to every commodities distribution and food bank giveaway she heard about and hauled home tons of food she never used, but then she had lived through the Great Depression so her hoarding made a weird kind of sense. Most people aren't interested in getting canned mystery meat or multiple bags of lentils. Even the cheese isn't as good as it used to be.
• The fact someone is getting a disability (SSDI) check or Supplemental Security Income (SSI) check does not mean they are getting a ton of money. In 2016, for example, the minimum benefit payment is $733. Quite a few people on SSDI or SSI get that minimum benefit or not much above it. If your monthly income is that low, odds are that the money will indeed run out before the month does. So maybe instead of bitching about how poor those people are with money, as a society we should be thinking about increasing the amount of the benefits.
• If someone is asking you for a loan because they need some cash for beer or cigarettes or something else you view as foolish, there's a simple solution. Just say No. You don't want to support their bad habits? Then don't. Maybe they should learn to budget better or maybe they have expenses you don't know about, but if they're asking for money for stuff you consider a waste you don't have to give them anything. Just don't lecture them about their bad choices. You're not their Mom. Just like you're not under any obligation to give them an allowance for the candy store, you're not in a position to tell them how to live their lives. Not your circus, not your monkey.

Would you like fries with that?

The topic du jour on NPR and other news media seems to be fast food workers having the gall to strike for higher wages. To say the stupid runs deep in most of the discussions would be an understatement. What amuses me no end is the suggestion that the folks working at McDonald's and other grease pits should simply acquire additional technical skills and move on up the career ladder. So who's going to serve the burgers once the current crew is gone? And why should the new employees be any more willing to work for shit wages than the folks assembling the Whoppers and Thickburgers are now?

The harsh reality is that we live in a service economy. One reason the average age of a fast food employee is 28 is that the fastest growing job sectors are the ones at the bottom of the economic scale: burger flippers, nursing home attendants, hotel maids, discount store cashiers. There aren't enough jobs to go around for the people with the four year degrees now, so what kind of miracle is supposed to occur to permit the workers at the bottom of the economic and social hierarchy to move up? We've all been hearing the stories for years, the ones about recent college grads discovering they've incurred thousands of dollars of student loan debt and now can't find a job that actually requires a college degree or that pays enough to live on. If they ever put down their smart phones and I-pads long enough to figure out just how thoroughly they've been screwed by society's lies, there'll be riots in the streets.

Further, the people doing those jobs work damn hard for the pittance of a wage they do collect. Isn't hard work supposed to result in a financial reward? Why is it that the jobs that society absolutely needs -- all the service workers of various types, from fry cooks to garbage collectors -- are the jobs that garner the least respect? Over and over we get to hear that entry level jobs, the ones that don't require much in the way of training, shouldn't pay decent wages. Neither should any job that requires physical exertion or that results in your hands getting dirty. If it doesn't require multiple years of education or if you're standing while you do it instead of sitting at a desk it's not a job that the elitists think is worth doing. There is a remarkable amount of hostility out there towards the idea that the guys working at a tire shop should make as much as the dudes selling you life insurance, all of which seems to be premised on the the classic white collar vs blue collar distinction. Doesn't matter how hard you work, if at some point doing the work day you're reaching for the GOJO, then your job isn't valued by the chattering class.

Given that there are businesses out there in almost every sector of the economy that do pay their employees decent wages and still manage to make a profit, it seems rather self-evident that the businesses that persist in paying low wages are motivated more by pathological greed than by necessity.

The cartoon is from the Virginia Tech newspaper, The Collegiate Times, and is now 20 years old. Some things never change.

Alternatives to the Evil Empire

There's been a lot in the news recently about Walmart and the way the House of Satan (aka The Evil Empire) screws over its hourly employees: low wages, miserable scheduling, abusive working conditions, you name it. A number of people have tried to make various arguments why we should forgive the Evil Empire its sins, including variations on "but we po' folks need a place to shop for cheap shit," "it's what all employers on the low end of the wage scale do," and "it's not possible to turn a profit and sell for low prices simultaneously." Bullshit on all three.

Taking them in reverse order, there is the stellar example of Costco. Costco sells goods at remarkably low prices. Granted, you have to buy a membership, but that membership aspect isn't what makes Costco a decent place to work. It's the company's overall ethic and business philosophy. Sam's Club is also a membership discount retailer, and their human resources policies are classic House of Satan. What drives a business to treat employees like human Kleenex is an underlying corporate philosophy that values squeezing the last possible dime of profits out of every transaction -- a modest profit isn't good enough; the profit margin has to be ginormous. Granted, the corporate model in general lends itself to profit maximization above everything else; shareholders have been known to sue boards of directors and CEOs if they decide dividends have not been sufficiently maximized. That's a subject, however, for a different post. For now, suffice to say that Costco demonstrates it is possible to sell products cheaply and still pay livable wages, provide decent fringe benefits, and co-exist with labor unions. Businesses do not have to operate like Walmart; the ones that do have made a conscious decision to do so.

Second, the "all low wage employers do it" is pure nonsense. As a person who has labored in the trenches of low wage employment (at various times in my life I've been a nursing assistant, hotel maid, and dash waxer in a car wash) I know that the fact a job is a minimum wage position does not mean the workers also have to tolerate some of the garbage Walmart is notorious for doing. Example: I worked as a nursing assistant or restorative therapy aide at four different nursing homes. All four provided the same level of skilled nursing care, had similar numbers of patients and staff, and in each case the entry level wage was whatever the legal minimum wage was at the time. Two were decent places to work; two sucked. Why did two of them suck? Management. At one, management deliberately cultivated a climate of uncertainty: you wouldn't know from week to week just how many hours you were going to work in a week or what days you would be scheduled. Each weeks' work schedule would be posted at the last minute, making it impossible to effectively plan either your budget or your life. Working in a nursing home is stressful to begin with; adding stress was a good way to guarantee a higher turnover rate among employees.

From what I hear, Walmart does post schedules fairly far in advance. However, one of the games Walmart does play with schedules is to keep as many employees as possible as part-time workers. Most of their stores are open 24/7; nonetheless, most workers are there less than 30 hours in a week. Why? Because if they go over 30 hours in a week, they qualify for the Walmart health benefits plan. Instead of doing the decent thing -- scheduling to maximize full-time employment and thus allowing their human resources to benefit from the company health plan (not to mention avoiding the need to juggle multiple part-time low wage jobs) -- they go in the opposite direction. Walmart trains its managers to respond to requests for more hours of work from employees by steering employees to the local social services office to apply for Medicaid. Again, I will grant that the nature of the business requires that some workers will always be part-time -- certain times of the day or days of the week will always be busier than others so full staffing isn't always going to be necessary -- but Walmart's policy of trying to minimize as much as possible its number of fulltime employees has been well-documented, as has its policy of steering workers toward welfare to supplement work.

Finally, there's the "where will we go for cheap crap?" rationale. Well, depending on just what type of cheap crap you need, there are places like Family Dollar, Dollar General, and so on. Family Dollar is almost everywhere, thanks to the low start-up cost for the franchise, and they're cheaper than Walmart on a lot of items -- you just have to learn to shop carefully and recognize that the inventory at Family Dollar or Dollar General is not going to be as huge as that of a Super Walmart. Aldi is a good cheap source for groceries -- the chain has its own in-house brands and a limited product line, but, depending on what you need, they're cheaper than Walmart. Target has been beating Walmart's prices lately, so have various regional or local chains. Before assuming Walmart is your one and only option, look around.

I never have understood the fascination with Walmart and the belief so many people have that everything there is a bargain. Back when I was in grad school at VaTech, a new Walmart opened in Christiansburg. People were so excited about it that there was actually a shooting in the Walmart parking lot over a parking space. We waited until the initial insanity died down a bit and then checked it out. I did get a good deal on a television set, but when I took the time to comparison shop for stuff I was buying on a more routine basis, there were better deals at Rose's, Hill's, and Kmart. Nonetheless, Walmart did a nice job of snuffing all three of those chains. Advertising does indeed work wonders when it comes to consumer perceptions.

The Help, a review, sort of

I finally got around to reading The Help this week. For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past three years, the book is a best selling novel that describes the lives of African American maids in Jackson, Mississippi, during the early 1960s. The movie version came out last year; it received several Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. I didn't see the movie or read the book before we left Atlanta -- my name hadn't reached the top of the waiting list at the library.

Turned out the book was worth reading. The quality of the writing is decent, especially for a first novel, and the story line overall holds a person's interest. It didn't contain any major surprises -- I knew that life in the segregated South was a bizarre sea of contradictions, with whites paying blacks to cook, clean, take care of kids, and nurse the elderly but at the same time insisting that blacks and whites couldn't possibly drink out from the same water fountain or use the same toilets. There's some major cognitive dissonance going on when you don't want your maid pissing in the same porcelain as you, but at the same time you're eating food prepared by the maid, sleeping on sheets she washed, and living in a house she's cleaned. The servant is too dirty and/or crawling with germs to use your toilet, but you're willing to eat the soup she's cooked?

In any case, all those contradictions have been well-documented many times and from multiple perspectives, both as fiction and as autobiography (e.g., Coming of Age in Mississippi). We all also know that Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1960s was full of bigots, and that it was a particularly perilous time and place for anyone black who gave any appearance of supporting the civil rights movement. The Help didn't break any new ground, although there was some hoopla over the audacity of a white author daring to write in the voice of a black maid. That controversy, such as it was, struck me as flatout stupid. If writers could only write from their personal perspective, that would mean male authors couldn't have female characters in novels, young authors couldn't have anyone elderly, black authors couldn't include white characters, and you could never set a novel in a time period other than the one in which you were currently living . . . the whole point of writing fiction is being able to imagine how the world looks from a perspective other than your own.

Anyway, The Help did resonate with me. I found myself remembering my summer in Chicago as exploited labor a mother's helper many years ago. The summer of the year I graduated from high school I responded to a Help Wanted ad in the local newspaper -- Chicago families tended to advertise for  live-in help in newspapers in the western Upper Peninsula and northern Wisconsin; middle class urbanites apparently still viewed the northwoods as being full of potential Scandihoovian maids fresh off the boat and ripe for working for shit wages -- and was hired by a family that I'll call, for convenience's sake, the Kaplans. The deal was, if I recall correctly, $25 a week plus room and board, with Sunday morning and one weekday off.

Working for the Kaplans was an education. I went into the experience fairly naive and emerged as a nascent Marxist. It wasn't that I'd never had a job before. I'd been working since I was 12, mostly stoop labor in the summer picking strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and cucumbers but with some other odd jobs tossed in. However, the Kaplans were my first experience with an employer who seemed to confuse employees with indentured servants. They didn't go quite so far as building a separate water closet for me in the carport like one of the families in The Help does for their maid, but they came close. (Mrs. Kaplan made it pretty clear my blue collar white ass had better not ever go anywhere near the plumbing in the master bedroom.)

The Kaplans lived in a renovated brownstone in a neighborhood north of the Loop that had been posh in about 1890, had hit the skids for awhile, and was on its way back up. If I had to categorize the family politically and socio-economically, I'd say they were upper middle class liberals. Mr. Kaplan made a comfortable income working at a white collar occupation, Mrs. Kaplan got to be a stay-at-home mom (except she never was at home), and they had the requisite 2.5 kids (a boy and a girl from Mrs. Kaplan's first marriage, and a toddler from the current relationship), and they paid lip service to progressive causes like civil rights and school integration. The family was technically Jewish but thoroughly secularized -- they didn't even have a mezuzah by the door. For sure, they never went to temple and the Sabbath was a day like any other. 


As the summer progressed, I felt sorrier and sorrier for the two older kids. The toddler had it the best -- she spent her days with me. We walked to the park, we hung out with the other mother's helpers and their charges, we played with the puppy (the family had recently gotten a standard poodle), and in general the kid got to be a kid. As for the older kids, it may have been summer vacation for everyone else, but not for them. Their mother had their lives scheduled down to the nanosecond: summer school, guitar lessons, piano lessons, tennis lessons, swimming lessons, you name it. They got to rush from lesson to lesson, and come home for their evening meal of Spaghetti-Os, and then get hustled off to bed. The kids lived on a diet of Franco-American and Chef Boyardee; the poodle got chopped sirloin. When the kids weren't being hustled from lesson to lesson, they were listening to their mother's little lectures guaranteed to put them in therapy by adolescence. The son was stupid, the older daughter was unattractive. One of Mrs. Kaplan's favorite lectures to her daughter involved the crying need for rhinoplasty to "fix that Jewish nose" as soon as she was old enough. What type of mother tells a 10-year-old she needs a nose job while simultaneously instilling shame about her ethnic and religious heritage? Then again, Mrs. Kaplan's goal in life seemed to be to turn herself into a shiksa, complete with bleached blonde hair. She'd already bought herself a perfect Hollywood starlet nose.


It didn't take me long to figure out I'd been snookered. The other mother's helpers and nannies enlightened me pretty quickly to the fact I was working for a lower wage than average. The Kaplans had given me a day off that didn't synchronize with the traditional maid's day off -- no doubt a small attempt at preventing me from hanging out with other maids and finding out just how much more money and/or better working conditions I'd enjoy elsewhere. Maybe they didn't realize just how much time there is for schmoozing while sitting around watching toddlers play in a sandbox. Turned out my employers had a reputation in the neighborhood. The maids who were permanent, year-round help told me the Kaplans had a nifty habit of hiring a live-in housekeeper/nanny to work September through May for about four times what the teenage summer help got paid and then firing that person as soon as they had someone like me lined up for the summer months. 

So, in retrospect, what's the take-away, the bottom line? I guess what it comes down to is that, everything else being equal, some people are always going to be assholes. In a way, I was a lot luckier than the maids in The Help. When you're a person of color, you can never be sure if you're being treated like shit because the boss is a bigot or if you're being treated like shit because the boss is an asshat who treats everyone that way.  In my case, it was pretty clear the Kaplans were just jerks who'd try to take advantage of anyone unfortunate enough to end up working for them. Back in the 1960s, they went trolling for naive farm girls to exploit; no doubt now they're paying an undocumented immigrant with a marginal grasp of English to walk the dog.

Working hard or hardly working?

This week is Georgia Telework Week. Georgia's governor actually did something reasonably sane (or at least innocuous) not long ago, and signed a proclamation declaring September 11 through the 17th Georgia Telework Week. Employers are supposed to encourage workers who can do so to work from home. Large Nameless Agency announced it was encouraging all division managers to have everyone who could telework do it for two days. Sounded good to me.

So here I am, at home, in my jammies and bunny slippers, so to speak, "teleworking." Or I would be if I had anything to do. In one of those typical feast or famine situations LNA is so good at creating, I have no work to do. I'm caught up. If I were sitting in the office, I'd be doing almost the same thing I'm doing here -- wandering around the Intertubes, playing an occasional game of Sudoku, and maybe writing a personal letter or two, but with the additional factor of being grateful my monitor isn't visible from the office doorway. I've always thought teleworking would be a good thing to do -- after all, I can do nothing at home and get paid for it as easily as I can do nothing in the office for 8 hours.

I do occasionally wonder how one of my colleagues manages to stay sane. He's fast, too, and is always well ahead of the production schedule. The issue we're supposedly halfway into editing right now is November, but, like me, I know this guy is already into his January assignments (all one of them, at this point; the Editor in Chief needs to pick up the pace on accepting stuff). I think he meditates a lot -- or has mastered the art of sleeping with his eyes open. There are times when I wander past his office, glance in, and he's sitting there in some sort of trance, looking like an android where someone's flipped the switch to Off. I at least keep a stash of magazines in a filing cabinet so there's always a copy of Orion or Smithsonian to fall back on. I don't think my colleague does.

I'm never really sure if the reason I manage to stay ahead of the game when it comes to work is because I'm halfway good at what I do and reasonably efficient, or if I'm really, really bad. The performance reviews we get at work are completely meaningless, so who knows? The criteria for "fully successful" are all purely subjective; there are no metrics. I do know I tend to edit light -- I don't change an author's words just because I would have said something differently; as long as a sentence is understandable and grammatically correct, I'm probably going to leave it alone -- but I also know that I see stuff, major howlers, that my colleagues missed in galleys . . . and they all supposedly agonize over an article for many days before deciding it's ready for production. I never agonize. I figure if the authors are happy with what they see in the edited proofs, it's good to go -- it's going to be their names on the title page, not mine, and I have no desire to step on their voice.

At least with the journal, the gaps with no work whatsoever are fairly short. We're a monthly, stuff comes in all the time, the lulls are relatively infrequent. That wasn't true of my first two years at LNA. I was assigned to a workgroup in the writer-editor services branch (which no longer exists, but that's another story) to work as an "author's editor." LNA has a policy that every article for external publication, every research piece the scientists submit to journals like the New England Journal of Medicine, Clinical Infectious Diseases, etc., has to be checked by an actual editor before it can be cleared for submission. They want to be sure that not only is the science accurate, but that LNA's researchers aren't going to embarrass themselves with bad writing. It was not a bad gig, I got to read some interesting material, but the work flow was totally dependent on when/if LNA researchers submitted something for clearance and requested editorial services. I'd get one thing at a time, for example, a 2500 word article on tuberculosis and drug resistance, and be told I had three weeks in which to edit it. Three weeks! To check a ten page paper. It was a project that in most cases could be done in a few hours -- a full day at best. I never did milk those projects for the full time allotted, but I also never turned them in as soon as I finished them. I've had tadpoles before, and I know how production quotas work. Besides, you never know when you're going to get handed something that's sufficiently nasty that it really does take ten times longer to finish than you thought it would. 

In any case, I'd finish a project, let my team lead know I was ready for something else. . . and then I'd sit. . . and sit. . . and sit. . . day after day waiting for something else to land in the In Box. There is a reason I became the Sudoku Queen of Corporate Square. When the journal advertised for a copy editor, all the experienced editors in my work group, including my team lead, told me not to apply. "They work really, really hard over there." "The deadline pressure is horrible." "They're just overwhelmed all the time; they can't keep up." It sounded pretty damn good compared to being paid to sit and stare at cubicle walls 8 hours a day.

The work load is a little heavier, but it's also totally predictable -- the journal is a monthly, so we all know that every month each copy editor will have a minimum of 7 articles to edit, more likely 8 or 9, and that we all have one or two other responsibilities. As publications go, we don't have a particularly brutal production schedule, nor are we understaffed, at least not on the copyediting side. It's pretty easy to keep up with the pace of production once you're oriented to the schedule. The only mystery is how good or bad the articles will be, i.e., how much clean-up will they need. Some research shops run like well-oiled machines -- their principal investigator has overseen enough submissions to our journal that the papers come in formatted exactly the way our style dictates; they're close to publishable without us doing a thing other than running it through our software for formatting. Others are a mess. I've seen a few where the initial impression is "This is written in Klingon." Most fall somewhere in between. 

Adventures in bureaucracy

I've finally moved, at least in cyberspace. Back in July 2009, shortly after Large Nameless Agency acquired a new Director, a re-organization was announced. As part of the effort to get rid of the cooties left by the previous administration, a great reshuffling would occur, various centers and divisions would vanish in the name of efficiency (and, not coincidentally, provide an excuse to jettison upper-level management that had been cronies of the old Director)(for awhile the standing joke at staff meetings was "What Center director got fired this week?"), and it would all be done quickly.

Those of us working at the sort of job I have (i.e., anyone below a GS-13, you know, the people who do the actual work at the agency) were told no worries, the changes will be mostly on paper, the work won't change, and you won't physically have to go anywhere. The only thing that will change, and it will happen soon, is that you'll notice your electronic address, the part of your email identity that tells recipients who you are, will reflect the new reality. Pshaw. In true bureaucratic fashion, it took many, many months for my identity to switch from MyName(LNA/CenterWithinLNA/Division/Branch) to MyName(LNA/MysteryAbbreviation/NoLongerExistentCenter). That identity, we were told, was a placeholder. We were told what the Mystery Abbreviation stood for, but no one had a clue what it did (if anything) or why our old center was still showing up if it had been eliminated. 

Well, the permanent change has finally occurred, a mere 21 months after it was first announced it would happen. I noticed not long ago that I am now MyName(LNA/NewDivision/NewCenter). Oddly enough, though, only one other person in my work group is showing that new address in emails; everyone else is still stuck in the placeholder. Bureaucracies definitely move in mysterious ways.

Workers Memorial Day

From the latest issue of MMWR:

Workers Memorial Day recognizes those workers who have died or sustained work-related injuries or illnesses. In 2008, a total of 5,214 U.S. workers died from occupational injuries, and 49,000 deaths annually are attributed to work-related illnesses. In 2009, an estimated 3.28 million workers in private industry and 862,900 in state and local government had a nonfatal occupational injury or illness. Of those workers, 1.7 million in private industry and 374,100 in state and local government were transferred, placed on work restrictions, or took time away from work. An estimated 2.6 million workers were treated in emergency departments for occupational injuries and illnesses in 2009, and approximately 80,000 were hospitalized (CDC, unpublished data, 2011).

And how's your week going?

I'm dealing with camel snot and lung worms. No wonder I have writer's block.

Scale bar = 1 mm.

Gourmet tip for the day: make sure any snails or rats you eat are well-done.

Sitting at the mean girls' table

The hot topic on the employee discussion board at work this week has been "workplace bullying." It appears I'm not the only one to have noticed that the organizational culture at Large Nameless Agency tends to be a tad . . . cold? hostile? unpleasant? not particularly nice? It's one of those interesting contradictions -- Large Nameless Agency, which is supposedly a leader in promoting health and wellbeing and that has developed a much-publicized anti-bullying message for use with youth, apparently has a fairly nasty and unpleasant internal culture that provides fertile ground for workplace bullies. The topic of workplace bullying was suggested to the board's moderators, they put it up, and it looks like the volume and intensity of the responses has surprised quite a few people.

LNA always scores really low whenever they do government-wide surveys of employee morale and job satisfaction -- we're never quite as far in the toilet as Homeland Security, but we're remarkably far down the list. People aren't happy. Other topics on the discussion board have inspired numerous comments about unresponsive management, waste, contradictory policies (i.e., the official policy says one thing; the way it's implemented is the opposite). Lots and lots of the infamous "disgruntled employees."* Which, all things considered, is pretty strange given the perceived importance of the work the agency does. You'd think it would lead to job satisfaction to know that the public thinks you're doing something important. Apparently not, at least not when the internal culture isn't one that makes employees feel valued, or, even worse, helps foster a hostile work environment. And, going by the comments posted, quite a few people are experiencing or have experienced a definitely hostile work environment.

The comments fall into both of the obvious categories: the boss who is a power-hungry ogre who treats certain underlings like crap (e.g., picks out a scapegoat and encourages everyone else in the division to pick on that one person, too), and the co-worker who for some reason feels compelled to make other co-workers' lives wretched. Every work organization is bound to end up with a few examples of both, but LNA appears to have an over-abundance. In the not-quite-4 years I've worked at LNA I've witnessed more mean-spirited trolls in positions of power and more Heathers who refuse to grow up and play nice with others than I think I did in my entire previous, rather checkered work career. I've held a number of jobs over the years, in the private sector, in academe, and in government, and LNA sets some sort of record for lousy leadership and dysfunctional work groups. I've worked in places that suffered from a leadership vacuum, in places where one person had decided that he or she was Prom Queen forever, and in places where the boss was a megalomaniac micro-managing control freak -- but LNA is the only place I can think of where I've witnessed the trifecta. I like what I do for a living, but I don't particularly enjoy the environment I do it in. Hence, the countdown clock.

One thing the discussion on the board has made clear is that, even though I've had a few unpleasant experiences here at LNA and I've witnessed some others that boggled the mind, the weirdness I've encountered is absolutely nothing compared to the garbage some people have gone through. It almost makes the private sector look good.

My personal experience with LNA has been that it does what can only be described as a (and I'm being charitable) piss poor job of both orienting new employees to the agency and providing training for managers, a toxic combination that almost guarantees hostile work environments will flourish. The overall philosophy appears to be a combination of sink-or-swim and mushroom management (keep everyone in the dark and feed them bullshit). There are pockets that seem to function well, but overall? Not a pretty picture.

I really miss Omaha.

[*The use of this term to denigrate or discount people who aren't happy in the workplace has always baffled me. Doesn't anyone ever wonder just why the employees are disgruntled?]

It only took 2 years and 3 ergonomic evaluations

but yesterday I was finally able to replace this:

with this:

Thinking about work

I shouldn't be thinking about work on the weekend -- after all, one of the charms of being R.I.P. is that supposedly once I step out the door on Friday afternoon I don't have to think about anything happening in the office until the following Monday morning -- but it was an odder week than usual.  It was also one of those weeks that had me once again being grateful I've almost never had to be in a supervisory position (I don't think ordering teaching assistants around counts -- that's not a manager-underling relationship, it's more like master-slave).

In any case, I'm wondering if the colleague who was out sick all week will be back in the office on Monday.  The Atlanta air apparently tried to kill her -- an asthma attack over the Labor Day weekend resulted in a trip to the ER, and that in turn led to hospitalization while the doctors try to stop the wheezing.  That in itself would not particularly noteworthy -- deserving of some twinges of sympathy maybe, but people end up getting sick or injured all the time.  You wish them a speedy recovery, but that's usually about it.

No, this time it affected me -- not surprisingly, when someone's in the hospital indefinitely, co-workers are going to have to step in to cover for that person.  However, we were at a point in our production schedule where the bulk of the editing for the November articles should be done.  Our desktop publishing guy starts layout in InDesign any day now, so at this point every article should be close to the final step in the process. We split what was in our colleague's queue so we could take care of what we all thought would be the final bits to get the articles into production. 

Except it was not the final bits.  Of the 7 or so articles assigned to this copyeditor, none, zero, zip, nada had even gone to the author as page proofs (we send page proofs to the authors for corrections and last minute revisions; we send galleys after layout for a final proofreading before it goes to the printer so they've got two shots at fixing stuff we screw up).  So we kind of do a collective, WTF?! -- a week until deadline and nothing's gone to an author yet? -- sigh, and move on -- and then we start discovering our colleague hadn't placed the graphics into the production review folder.  The manuscripts had references to figures in text, but there were no figures filed where they should have been.   That's when the collective pissing and moaning turned intense. 

We actually have a clearly defined procedure to handling the graphics that accompany an accepted paper:  as soon as we get the downloaded manuscript, we're supposed to move any and all figures into a folder on the share drive so our graphics expert can check them ASAP.  That way if authors submit figures where the resolution is too low, the dimensions are too small, or there are other problems we can kick the figures back to the authors for repair work fast.  More collective pissing and moaning, with probably the lowest volume coming from the graphics expert -- she was actually seeing things a few days early instead of having to go hunting for them at the last minute. 

Bottom line -- I got stuck trying to do a fast edit on several papers that very clearly had not seen the hand of an editor at all yet, despite the colleague reassuring me on the phone that they were all "just about ready to go for a second edit."  Just for the sheer hell of it, I did a line by line comparison of the one that had been in the colleague's share drive folder and the original as submitted, and the only apparent change was the one on the share drive had been run through the software we use for styles -- where I come from, formatting doesn't count as editing. 

And, as I've been doing this clean-up work, I once again found myself thinking I'm so happy I'm not a supervisor -- because if there was ever someone who deserved to have a paper trail built, a less than successful performance review declared, a P.I.P. implemented, and (eventually) a nudge out the door for sheer incompetence delivered, it's probably this colleague, a woman who is extremely likable on a purely social level but is obviously working at a job that she is totally unsuited for. 

The real kicker, of course, is that when I chatted with her on the phone yesterday she was annoyed as hell that our team lead had actually assigned those articles to other editors -- because even though she has no clue when she's getting out of the hospital, and even though she was no where close to having any of them done, she's totally convinced she would have wrapped them all up in time to get everything into production by Wednesday.   

It's an absolutely classic example of most people being incapable of assessing their own strengths and weaknesses with any degree of accuracy.  The least competent workers are always completely convinced they're doing a stellar job, and my colleague is no exception. 

It's also a good example of finding out stuff I really wish I didn't know.  It's always so much easier to commiserate with co-workers when you can halfway believe their bitching. 

Employee evaluations

We underwent that bizarre annual exercise in mutual misunderstanding at work recently, the performance review.  Large Nameless Agency refers to it as the PMAP.  It has multiple components, of course, some of which relate to the overall goals and standards of the agency as a whole and some of which are specific to an individual's job.  The employee gets a score for each component (1-4, with 4 being the best), the scores are then averaged, and the resulting average determines whether a person is Exceptional, Fully Successful, Less Than Successful, or a Total Loser.  Or something like that.

As sure as the proverbial swallows returning to Capistrano, the typical performance review results in the employee getting a couple of Exceptionals and a couple of Fully Successfuls, regardless of just how good or bad the employee actually was.  I have never known anyone below a GS-13 who managed to score solid Exceptionals, just as I've rarely known anyone to be less than Fully Successful, although the latter does happen occasionally.  There are Reasons -- one is that it's generally a lot easier to determine when someone is truly screwing up than it is to figure out that someone is consistently above average in every aspect of his or her work performance.  (There's also the fact that if all you are is Fully Successful, there's a cap on how much of an end-of-year bonus a person can get.  Exceptional employees can get the mega-awards; the Fully Successful might get a one day Time Off award, a hearty handshake, and, if they're really lucky, a cheap pen.)

Also as sure as the swallows returning, every employee spends a fair amount of time griping after the fact about their review being Wrong -- because every employee, no matter what their actual level of competence may be, is convinced that he or she is above average in some way.  I, for example, am completely convinced that I am absolutely stellar at complying with arcane bureaucratic rules, like the protocols for naming and archiving files (being borderline obsessive-compulsive helps considerably).  Thus, when my supervisor gave me a mere Fully Successful on the part of the evaluation that included that type of activity I was Seriously Annoyed. I came really close to actually insisting on an addendum to the review that would state, in effect, that I was the Queen of Electronic Files Organization, a move that would have no doubt succeeded in convinced my supervisor I was definitely OCD, and not just borderline.  

I am told there was a time when the annual performance review consisted of basically a pass/fail grade -- you were either doing your job, or you weren't.  In the latter case, you'd get stuck on an improvement plan to give you time to shape up (and the agency time to build the file they needed to fire you if you didn't) before the next review. To me that makes more sense, which is no doubt why they stopped doing it. And it could be worse -- when I worked for the Park Service, there were 5 levels. 

Actually, what would make even more sense would be for my supervisor, the person who signs the forms indicating whether or not I'm doing a passable job, to drop by more often than once every six months so that maybe, just maybe, she'd have some clue as to just what it is I and my colleagues do. Due to some quirks of the organization and the fact supervising us isn't the only thing she does, our supervisor occupies office space on one of LNA's campuses while my colleagues and I toil quietly away in a building in an office park 5 miles distant.  She sees the final product (so does the whole world, for that matter), but she doesn't see the day-to-day behaviors, the interactions at editors' meetings (she doesn't attend, even by telephone, which has struck me as odd since I started with the journal 9 months ago), who's showing up on time and who's getting there late and leaving early. . . which, now that I think about it, is probably just as well. Given a choice between extremely hands-off management and the potential for micromanagement, I'll take the former every time.

The appliance purge has begun

A few months ago an unauthorized refrigerator and a couple microwaves were removed from a more or less common area on our floor here at work. Ever since then rumors have circulated that building management was going to conduct an office audit to see what other devices might be sucking electricity without the blessings of management. Apparently the rumors have become more substantial because the last few days have seen a lot of hand cart action as dorm-type fridges and microwaves make their way from offices to individuals' cars in the parking lot. The powers that be had better actually conduct the audit or there are going to be a lot of folks really annoyed at having removed something for apparently no reason.

Personally, I think a good solution would be to give this building an additional break room -- a couple more microwaves and another full-size refrigerator in a common area would remove some of the incentive for people bringing in their own appliances -- but that's never going to happen when there's a shortage of office space now.

[Digression -- I always feel like I should be including a Dilbert cartoon when I write about work, but can never manage to find one that fits.]

Sad day at work

Our illegal microwave is gone.

It vanished yesterday, thanks to the idiocy of people unwilling to clean out the illegal mini-fridge.

An explanation: Our 5-story building has two break rooms, one on the third floor and one on the fifth. Each break room has one microwave, which kind of leads to traffic jams at lunch time when there are several hundred people working in this building. So naturally microwaves occasionally appear in places they're not supposed to be, and everyone politely pretends they don't see them while at the same time quietly taking advantage. Mini-fridges also pop up here and there, and the same thing happens.

Well, we'd had an unauthorized microwave in an alcove in a hallway on the floor where I work for almost as long as I've worked here. A few months ago a mini-fridge appeared in that same alcove. It started getting used, of course (saves a trip up the stairs). Then last week, while it was packed full of food, it was accidentally unplugged. It is absolutely amazing how quickly the contents of a mini-fridge can rot when there's no power.

On Monday someone opened the fridge. The stench was unbelievable. So a request went out for people to remove their rotting food -- but no one stepped up to admit that any of the decayed items were theirs. Similarly, no one would admit he or she was the actual owner of the refrigerator. The apparent choices were (a) live with the stench indefinitely, or (b) ask Maintenance to deal with it.

And how did Maintenance deal with it? By hauling it to a dumpster. And, as long as they were removing it, the building manager had them take out the unauthorized microwave, too. So now it's back to stair-climbing and queueing up at lunch time.

I won't miss the fridge -- I didn't keep anything in it -- but, as a basically lazy person, I am going to miss that microwave.

Never argue with the editor

Feeling good about the job

The lastest MMWR Recommendations & Reports issue came out yesterday. I looked at the title (Recommendations for Partner Services Programs for HIV Infection, Syphilis, Gonorrhea, and Chlamydial Infection), opened the PDF out of curiosity, and then thought to myself "This looks vaguely familiar." And then it hit me: six months ago I edited that puppy, or a big chunk of it. At the time I had no idea where the manuscript was eventually going to be published.

I may complain about the vagaries of the bureaucracy occasionally, but I must admit I do get to read some intriguing stuff as part of the job.

Important e-mail from my boss

The people I work with do have their priorities. This landed in my In Box a few minutes ago flagged with the big red exclamation point.

Politics and work

I'm listening to the roll call vote at the convention and being reminded of that old saying about there being two processes you never want to see up close: sausage-making and politics. Which may be why my back is to the television.

Was involved in an interesting conference call at work today. I've been a tad cynical about the project I'm assigned to. We're doing strategic planning right as administrations are changing, so I had visions of the document being rather a wasted effort. Apparently not. One of the people much higher up the food chain than I am, a fellow who spends a fair amount of time wandering the halls of Congress briefing various senators and representatives on one aspect of this project, says there's a lot of pressure coming from both sides of the aisle. According to him, doesn't matter who's in the White House, this strategic plan will go forward. I'm not sure if that makes me feel better about the work or not. Guess it does add some pressure to make sure nothing too truly stupid or short-sighted sneaks into it.

Update: Well, that was good theater. Nicely staged, although it happened faster than I thought it would.

Adventures in the bureaucracy

A few weeks ago the director for my branch of the Large Nameless Agency that employs me sent around an e-mail asking that anyone interested in being deployed in the event of a public health emergency identify him or herself. People had to be willing to travel at the drop of the proverbial hat as well as be willing to work at odd times (nights, weekends). Why they'd be interested in having writer-editors as part of a response team mystified me as old hands at LNA tell me it used to only very specific scientific types (i.e., actual epidemiologists) who got tapped to be on the response list. Who knows, though, maybe there is a remote possibility it would be good to have someone checking the press releases for dangling participles and misplaced hyphens before telling folks, "Hey, did you read The Stand? Guess what? It's no longer fiction."

In any case, being willing to do almost anything if it provides an opportunity to escape from the cubicle (including, obviously, being exposed to unknown pathogens), I volunteered. Yes, I said, put me on the list. I then forgot about it. I am super low in seniority among the writers at LNA -- there's no way I'd ever get tapped. I was, of course, wrong. Turns out only two or three of us wordsmiths volunteered, and, no surprise here, we've all been at LNA for less than two years. As with bureaucracies everywhere, apparently the only people who ever volunteer for anything are the folks who haven't been at LNA long enough to have their curiousity and/or ambition extinguished.

This week I began the process of getting all the various bureaucratic hurdles cleared that will allow my name to be added to the response list. Yesterday I passed both the physical and the respirator training. Next week I'll start the paperwork in motion for the other items on the list -- but the biggie was the physical. However, being middle-aged and sedentary aren't the handicaps I'd feared they would be. It appears the major qualification for being judged physically fit was simply being able to breathe and walk unassisted, although they did do both a lung capacity test and an EKG to confirm the visual evidence. So who knows? Maybe I will get to escape the cubicle occasionally after all.

[The respirator is a glorified dust mask. I will never, ever be one of those people at LNA who get to wear the nifty spacesuits with a self-contained air supply. ]