Good News
I haven't been online much for the last couple of days, but there's a good reason for that: I have another computer. It's not a new computer, it's an older one sent by my friend Eric Wampner. The chip is a little slower than my old one but there's a lot more memory, which is always good. I got the computer on Wednesday, I had to do some tech stuff to get it to where I wanted it, and that's why I haven't had time to get online and check email and the site and stuff.

This is also good because I can get back to doing the radio show again. I hope to have a new show up in a day or so...when it's done I will update with an open thread.

I want to thank Eric for the computer, and I want to thank my roommate for continuing to let me use his site until I get a new DSL modem (my old one got trodden on, bellsouth will replace it), and maybe in a week or so I will be back to where I was three months ago...

Little Things
When I was about five years old or so, I appeared on a local NYC television show called "The Baby Game", which to the best of my memory, featured children from infants/toddlers to pre-schoolers doing assorted things. They would have, for example, baby races where infants would race to crawl to their mothers, that sort of thing.

When I was on, I was given a simple task: there were three of these blow-up clown dolls we used to have as kids, with a pocket of sand at the bottom so that if you punched it it came right back up again. I haven't seen kids playing with these things for many years so I don't know if you younger people know what the heck I'm talking about. Ayyhow, these three "bop bags" as they were called were lined up in a row, with chairs behind each of them. We were told by the host that these three needed to "take a nape" and I was supposed to help them lie down. They would then film me in the process of trying to lay across the three clowns and keep them down. Easy enough since they were close together.

They took me out of the room and brought me back in with the same three clowns and gave me the same situation, except that this time the clowns were in different parts of the room, way too far apart to be able to do the same thing twice. After a moment I decided to make use of the chairs, I lowered the clown's head down and placed the chair (which was like a lawn chair, not heavy but heavy enough to keep the clown horizontal) on top of it to keep it there. The host seemed (or so I thought) genuinely surprised to have seen my solution to this problem. In short, I used my brain to compensate where my physical skills were inadeqaute to the task. Some people call this "efficiency", I call it "applied laziness".

I bring this up because it was what helped me out at work on Friday, when I was having a particularly bad day. For the last two weeks I have been taken off the paint line where I work and moved elsewhere, I'm not really sure if there's a purpose behind it all, but that's what's been happening to me. Friday I was put on one of the big, thirty-foot presses which was pumping out these three-foot long pieces of rectangular metal. I was familiar with this "trim" (as we call any item that's not an actual box), and I had done this kind of work before, only with smaller versions of it, one to two foot long. The three-footers are the longest one they have. And I started, at the beginning, to do them the same I way I did the smaller trim, by getting five at a time and placing them in the nearby basket. But I couldn't do that with these, five were just plain too heavy for me, especially with my bad back. The trim started piling up, and I even got a nasty bruise on my arm when a piece fell on me as I was reaching for one that fell on the floor. They had to stop the machine so I could get caught up, which is never a good thing.

I knew I would never be able to maintain this pace all day, my back would never hold up to the strain. And my future at this company depends a lot on my being able to perform all kinds of work, so there was no getting out of it. I simply had to come up with a way to keep up with the machine (which was spitting out a new part every three seconds or so) without killing myself. And I did. The parts came out of the machine onto a table which is higher than the baskets I was placing them in. When the stack of trim got high enough I could simply slide the trim over withouit lifting them hardly at all. The problems occurred when I had to place the trim at the far end of the basket, taking a couple of steps back. This took too much time and there was no way I could keep up. So my solution was a simple one: move the baskets up so that I could more easily slide the trim into it with only a marginal tap to keep them in order. It was still a bit of a pain to keep them stacked at the beginning and I still had the occasional problems, but all in all I managed to stay at that machine all day and do the work I was supposed to do and not overexert myself in the process. SO once more, just as when I was on that TV show, my brain compensated for my physical shortcomings. Chalk up another victory for applied laziness.

I told you that story to tell you this one.

Even though I managed to survive that ordeal, the truth of the matter is that I should never have been put where I was to begin with. I'm not a very strong or physically gifted person, one look at me will tell you that, and yet my supervisor saw fit to put me somewhere I had no business being in. I'm not sure exactly what his motivations were for doing so. Someone told me that they're moving me around because they're grooming me for a supervisory position and want to see how well I can pick up on all the different jobs there are there, I personally am wondering if they're looking to get rid of me by placing me in uncomfortable spots, hoping I'll quit so tha they won't have to fire me...either way, in my eyes a supervisor shouldn't send a little guy like me to do a job that's best suited for someone taller or stronger. Managers always seem to pull stuff like this, and their motivations for doing so vary from workplace to workplace.

While there are a lot of important issues American workers are faced with, things like pay and working conditions, it's little things that go on that causethe most stress, like getting moved around a lot or pointless rules or policies that don't seem to serve any purpose apart from thise above you trying to prove how much control they have over your life. You all know what I'm talking about. You've just accomplished something important and you take a moment to catch a well-earned breath, and there's the boss right on top of you to tell you to stop slacking off. Or you work at a plant like mine and there's no more work for the last five minutes or so, so they shove a broom in your hands and make you sweep, or pretend to sweep, because you are apparently required to be physically active every second regardless of how little there really is to do. Timing you when you go to the restroom. Making you do something just to see how you react. I could right pages and pages of examples, and I'm sure all of you could add your own, because all workplaces are the same in that regard.

I'm not a lazy person, and neither are most people. I work very hard and I keep focused on the task at hand and I am always trying to find a way to accomplish the most whole exerting the least energy. Applied laziness isn't a detriment to work, it's an asset, but all too often management is less interested in the actual needs of the workplace than they are in playing their own petty little games. It's even worse when you have a supervisor (like I do) who has never had to do what you are doing and worse, doesn't even really know how. In small, family-run companies this can be bad because your supervisor may be the owner, who has his/her own way of doing things and they're not interested in having it done differently, even if it can be done better. In larger companies, upper management may even view rudeness and lack of compassion in middle managers as being more important than, say, competence. I for one see no point in all of this. If your purpose is to produce as much as possible, how is pissing off your employees helping you to reach that goal?

As with all other things, I take a very practical point of view on this issue. What are the company's goals for the day? How do we best accomplish this? And is there a way of exceeding these goals, or accomplishing them as simply as possible? If companies would keep themselves focused on these matters and not spend so much time and energy looking to think up little ways to exert control over their employees, the workplace might be a better place for everyone, workers and supervisors alike. Big issues will always be there, but they can only be addressed when there is an atmosphere of trust and cooperation between labor and management, and it's the little things that set the stage for that kind of trust.

Trackbacks
First of all, let me again offer my apologies for the lack of posts...it's hard to do so regularly when you do a lot of physical work during the week and don't always have the energy to get something dowm, even when you do have the time for it.

Second, Haloscan (see link top left in the sidebar), which does the comments, has added a trackback feature I'm now looking into. Apparently it's a way to automatically link to a site when you mention a blog post on your site...not exactly sure how it works but if it gets more people to the site, and more important, gets more people to comment, then I'm all for it.

Dear NY Times:
(Re: Goodbye, Candidate Dean)

To The Editors:
Say not goodbye, but "au revoir". Because even though Gov. Dean is no longer a candidate, we, his followers, will be here to make sure that the spine that the Governor has injected into the Democratic Party doesn't get removed because he is out of the race.

Old age and treachery may have won the moment for Sen. Kerry, but the future belongs to us, and the powers that be had best learn to deal with it.

-Joe Vecchio

Update:I just received a phone call from the Times, they are planning on printing the letter (probably tomorrow), though without the "old age and treachery" comment. For the record, this will be the second letter I have had printed in the Times. Here's the link to the letter

My Wish List
I try very hard not to ask people for money anymore, because I get so few regular readers and because all of them are as broke as I am. But I cannot continue to operate without a computer. But rather than ask for money, I created a wish list on Amazon.com that has a computer and a monitor on it, nothing particularly fancy, combined less than $1000. If any kind soul out there knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who can get these items for me, I can get back to posting more regularly and also start doing the radio show again, which I really miss doing.

While it's nice of my roomie to let me get on his computer, I can't keep doing this forever, it's unfair to him and inconvenient for me. I might be able to save enough money for a computer in a year or so assuming I can keep my current job, but I can't really wait that long so I'm asking for any help I can get. Anyway that's it, sorry for the interruption.

The Harkonnen Candidate
Note:If you're already familiar with the novel Dune then you can feel free to skip the first two paragraphs

Frank Herbert's novel Dune is set in the distant future where humankind lives in a kind of galactic feudal society, with different noble families vying for power. One of these families (and I'm not going to go into too much detail about the entire series of novels, just enough to make my point) is the Harkonnen family, led by the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. The Harkonnens are a hedonistic, ruthless family which has control of the planet Arrakis (aka Dune), a planet that is mostly desert and is the only place where the important spice/drug known as melange can be found. The Baron has two nephews, Feyd-Rauth (his favorite and heir apparent) and Glossu 'The Beast' Rabban.

The native population of Arrakis is hostile to the more heavily-armed Harkonnens, but the Baron has a way of winning them over: he first gives the Governorship of Arrakis over to Rabban with orders to work them to death and otherwise subjugate them. The natives would, naturally, grow to hate Rabban, and at the right moment, the Baron would send Feyd-Rauth to Arrakis to depose him, making Feyd a hero in the eyes of the natives and pacifying them. Feyd wouldn't do that much to change the actual lives of the Arrakis natives, just be less obviously cruel. Of course things don't exactly work out as the Baron would like: a religious leader named Paul Maud'Dib (who, it turns out, is the heir of a rival noble family that the Baron thought had been killed) leads the natives in an uprising that not only ends up killing the Baron and his nephews but threatens the Emperor himself. It's far more complex than that but I didn't want to use up an entire post describing the plot.

I know I'm not the first person to make this analogy, but it seems to me that what's going on right now in this country is similar, in a certain way, to what happened in Dune. You could make a case for George W. Bush being Rabban and John Kerry being Feyd-Rauth in the sense that Kerry, while certainly an improvement over Bush, wouldn't really do much to change the status quo, he'd just be less likely to do something both incredibly stupid and damaging to the US, like, say, lying about going to war.

Just for the record, I'm not implying that the Bush family is as completely and utterly evil as the Harkonnen family. The Bushes are as ambitious and ruthless as any American family with dynastic ambitions has ever been, but they don't, for example, have young boys drugged for the purposes of having sex with them, as the Baron does. Whatever else they may be, they're not that bad. At least I hope not. That's the problem with these secretive families, you never know for sure.

But insofar as the behind-the-scenes machinations of ambitious and ruthless political organizations go, there's something to be said for comparing the current situation in the US to Herbert's fictional story. There is a conglomerate of power in this country (of which the Bushes are a part): a quartet of corporate, military, media and political power that has made a pretty nice, cozy world for itself and whose only real fear is that people will find out exactly what is going on and put an end to it. It's larger, more powerful, and more influential than the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about nearly a half-century ago. But it's not all-knowing or all-powerful, and they know it. They don't really want to go to the kinds of extremes the Harkonnens went to; it's too much work for them and in the end it could be dangerous (as history has shown: just ask Louis XVI), but neither do they want people who are a little too free, a little too nosy.

By design or chance, George W. Bush has turned into a poor man's version of "The Beast," firing up a large segment of the public, turning them against the entrenched establishment, and highlighting the fact that there is no one in power today willing to stand up against what's happening. And thus we have Senator John "Feyd" Kerry, whose campaign was given up for dead but has made a miraculous comeback, based on the perception given to us by the media that he is "more electable" than any of the other candidates. I've seen Sen. Kerry's speeches and read his stances on his website, and while everything sounds positive and wonderful there's no real sense of any vision of the future other than being simply the "anti-Bush." As far as offering a real alternative to the current situation in Washington, there's simply no "there" there.

Meanwhile, the man whose vision has inspired and is still inspiring people, Gov. Howard Dean, has been, for all intents and purposes, wiped off the map by the professional media. It's not Gov. Dean they're scared of (though some bloggers have noted that Dean's problems with them may have started when, in an interview with Chris Matthews in December of 2003, he talked about tearing down some of the media conglomerates that now exist), it's the idea of a well-informed, energetic population sick of the lies and deceit from both parties and looking to change not just the Presidency but the entire nation. And Gov. Dean is right: this isn't about changing a President, it's about hanging the country, the kind of change that frightens the powerful interests that are taking more and more control over our lives. It will take more than a Democratic President to change things for the better, it will take a movement, it may eventually even take a revolution.

This is not a smear on Senator Kerry. I happen to think he is a decent man who desires to be President, and who is well-qualified for the job. But wanting to be President is one thing, what you plan on doing once you're their is something else altogether. Assuming he wins both the nomination and the Presidency, will a President Kerry make any substantial changes to the corruptiom in Washington, decreasing the influence of money and the amount of corporate control in politics? Or will he just make enough superficial changes to pacify us without really upsetting things? This is the question that needs answering, will he be a candidate for the people, or is he just another Harkonnen candidate?

Interlude
Before I continue any further with the blog, I had a few things I wanted to make clear.
1) I don't have any "milkshake".
2) If I did have any "milkshake", I seriously doubt it would bring any boys to the yard.
3) If I were somehow able to bring any boys to the yard with my "milkshake", I am making no claims of superiority to anyone else's.
4) There is nothing I can teach you.
5) There is no charge.

Thank you for your attention. We now return to our regularly scheduled program.

About My Job
Note: I had every intention of having several posts this weekend, but a) I got caught up in another project I am going to publicly announce this week, and b) I wasn't able to get on the computer for very long. But I had this piece in the works and I thought I'd finish it, just to keep some content going.

Imagine, if you will, a roll of toilet paper on its side (so it can roll). Now imagine that this roll of paper is three and a half feet high, of various lengths, and is made not of tissue paper but of galvanized steel about a millimeter thick, and it all weighs just under five tons.

That is the raw material that forms the basis of the plant where I work. Siemens, the company which owns the plant, is a huge multinational company headquartered in Germany that has its hands in a lot of different venues, from high speed rail to assorted electronics to simpler things like the plant where I work, which builds circuit boxes, large and small, for buildings. We are just now beginning our busy season as the construction season for 2004 starts up.

The steel is loaded into assorted machines which press patterns and fold the metal into it's necessary shapes. Some of these machines stand over thirty feet tall and can do everything automatically from start to finish, all it needs is a worker to keep the machine clean from the scrap that gets cut away from the sheet metal and someone at the other end to collect the finished parts and stack them neatly on a wooden pallette or in a steel basket, where it will either be sent to storage or on to its next destination. Other, smaller machines require the workers to manually punch out one item at a time from metal that has already been cut into shapes (for example, I have sometimes had to use the machine to turn flat pieces of metal into lids for metal boxes, the machine folds the edges to make the lid).

When the galvanized steel is ready to be placed into the actual circuit breaker boxes, it is sent to get painted. An overhead conveyor (which we refer to simply as the "paint line"), with metal hooks hanging down, moves slowly across the ceiling, angling down to where the parts are put on and again when the parts are painted and need to be removed. My job specifically is to remove the items from the conveyor belt and stack them neatly on pallettes or in steel baskets (as above). The difference is that the painted parts are easier to handle, because the steel is slick and greasy when it comes out of the machine. The paint is applied via an electric current of some sort as it is dipped into the vat.

They like us, by the way, to paint a certain number of items per shift, ten thousand is the goal they like to shoot for. Being the kind of person that I am, I once took a few minutes to figure out how many hangers passed our way over the course of an eight-hour shift. I began by simply timing how long it took a hanger to pass by a fixed point on the line: that worked out to five seconds. From that I extrapolated that a total of 5760 hangers pass our way each shift, and since there are two hooks on every hanger, that means 11,520 hooks pass our way in an 8-hour shift. In other words, in order for us to reach our goal of 10,000, we would have to hang a single item on 86.8% of all of the hooks that pass our way. But attaining this goal depends on the kinds of items that are hung on the line. There are some smaller parts you can hang one on a hook (two total on a hanger), but larger boxes take up more space, the more we do of these the less likely we are to rach our goal. This is why I don't like using the 10,000 item mark as an indicator of how much work we're doing. We could only, for example, run 2880 of the largest boxes, which take up four hooks. So my feeling is to base the production on a percentage of total hooks used, taking into consideration the kinds of parts we run. Of course, nobody listens to me...

When I first came to Siemens in summer of last year, via the temp company Randstad, I worked in a different area than I do now. I helped out in what we call the Assembly area, where the sides of boxes are welded together and lids placed on boxes. The welding is mainly done manually but there are a few machines that do it automatically. All in all, it's a fascinating process from start to finish, especially if as a boy you loved to see big metal things like fire trucks and cement mixers. The metal-pressers are loud and impressive as the pummel the steel with enough force to easily bend it into a specific shape. And for the most part, everyone who works there is friendly and helpful. It's a union shop, but I haven't worked there long enough to become part of the union just yet. I will when the opportunity presents itself, as I desire to become active in union activities, I may even run for a leadership position if and when I get enough experience.

I like my job. That is to say, I don't dread going into work every day like some jobs I've had, but I do enjoy my time at work for the most part, even when it gets a little crazy, as it does sometimes on the paint line...it can get like that Lucy episode when she got that job in the candy factory. But the people I work with are cool, and we all try to help each other out, and that's the important thing. I'd like to keeo this job for a few years if I can, while I try to somehow get work as a writer, which is my career goal at present. I like to think I'm good enough, I just dont know how to sell myself. But I wanted you all to know why I can't always post regularly, besiades the fact that I don't get on the computer as much as I used to. Just so you know.

The Kerry Thing
I'm still trying to figure out how Kerry is running away with this thing...I figured if anyonewas going to challenge Dean it would be Clark or maybe Edwards...but Kerry? I can't figure that one out...

Meantime, for a campaign that's supposedly "dead in the water", Dean is still raising tons of money, he has more on hand, in fact, than all the Dem candidates combined...Clark has raised $100,000 since winning Oklahoma almost a week ago, Dean raised $800,000 in one day, and is still raising it. I don't know Kerry's exact fundraising situtation but he's getting so much free publicity from the press he probably doesn't need it as much. The paranoid part of me thinks that the established powers that be were afraid, not of Dean himself, but of the movement that he spawned, and has been doing everything it can to derail it. It wouldn't be the first time in American history that a newcomer who challenged the entrenched system was wiped out.

Anyway, if I wasn't so tired I'd write some more, but I hope to have several posts over the weekend.

Dear NY Times
(Re: Come Back, Little Deaniacs)

To The Editors:
It's remarkable to me how you can beg supporters of the Dean campaign to "keep fighting for a better world" when the vain, out-of-touch, self-important US "professional" media juggernaut that you are part of has done everything in its power to drive them away from the process. I wasn't old enough to remember what happened with Sen. McCarthy, but I can see clearly enough now that the powers that be, that is, the entrenched political and media establishment, clearly do not want a candidate who appeals to their greater ideals, because every time one comes along you do your best to knock them down lest they disturb your comfortable existence.

How many times will we continue to hear the "Dean is angry" theme played out when it clearly has no basis in reality? How many insipid questions or comments will we have to endure from ratings whores like Diane Sawyer, Wolf Blitzer or Tom Brokaw, who treat Presidential candidates as fodder for their own worthless careers? How many meaningless columns will political gossip Maureen Dowd pen for the purpose of boosting her own ego? How many insults, distortions and outright lies will we have to put up with from the likes of David Brooks or William Safire? What planet, we wonder as we see "news" that is clearly false and misleading, do you all live on, anyway?

Is it surprising to you, then, that so many people want no part of the political process? Is it any wonder that there has been no real progress in this country for the last forty years and that we are repeating the same mistakes we made in VietNam, only worse? Do any of you out there have any sense of shame or decency at all? Or are you so enslaved to the paychecks that place you on a level far above the working people who would benefit the most from a Dean Presidency that you would deliberately do anything in your power to prevent it? Five hundred and twenty American soldiers have been killed and thousands more wounded because the Times and others decided that those who opposed the war were to be treated as insignificant and gave no voice to their views. Millions of innocent Iraqis, people who had little love for Saddam Hussein and had no reason to be our enemies, have been either killed, wounded, or have had their lives destroyed because you acted as stenographers for the current administration rather than report the truth. Do any of you, I wonder, lose even a minute's sleep knowing that you are partly responsible for those deaths?

Dr. Dean is correct that we need to take back both the Democratic party and the country, and to that I should add that we need to take back the Fourth Estate as well. And the small but growing power of the Internet is going to help us do just that. We are already watching you, we know when you are lying and when you are spinning, and unlike 1968 we have the power to reach people and tell them exactly what is going on. And when, many years from now, the history of this time is written, you will be seen as you deserve to be seen: not as objective observers reporting how young people took on an entrenched political establishment by creating the largest grassroots movement in the history of the country, but as active and willing participants in its destruction.

-Joe Vecchio