don’t panic

Being a cynic, it’s perfectly within my nature to look for, and even expect, dark and sinister conspiracies. I don’t go overboard (okay, at least not publicly), but I’m the kind of guy who gets the “5% off” coupon at Vons two days running and starts to worry that the sleazy marketing guys have finally pegged me and are watching from that completely inconspicuous one-way mirror near the ceiling on the back wall. Hey, call me paranoid, but at least I’m not quite as far gone as the blue-suited homeless guy who hangs out there with all his possessions carefully locked up in a pair of hard suitcases that he pushes around in a shopping cart because he’s afraid it’s the CIA watching him from that same window. He’s harmless enough. He’s been living at our Vons now for about five years (in the exact same blue suit, or identical variations) and the most radical thing he’s ever done was to dye his hair orange. But I know how he feels. Especially today.

We live in a pretty quiet little suburb. The population of our fine city is just over 50k, about half of which is over the age of 70, or so it would seem if you’re trying to make a quick trip to the market for milk on any given weekday morning. I swear, our Henry’s Market could flick a switch and take over as a rest home in a heartbeat. Anyway, we don’t get a lot of “big-deal” crime. Even the gangs seem to give the place a pretty wide berth. You can find graffiti. but you pretty much have to go out of your way to see it. Our police force is composed of a couple of “we can arrest you’re sorry ass” squad cars, and about twice as many uniformed “volunteers.” Maybe they’re retired cops, I don’t know, but they’re all over 65. They’re really nice, and they actually do a whole lot more “good” than the “real” cops, who hide themselves in strategic corners so they can catch lost people making illegal u-turns in our industrial district. Like I said, it’s a quiet suburb.

Which is why I was all the more surprised when my wife pointed out an article in the news about a pair of bank robberies… in our neighborhood… both committed by females… within twenty minutes of each other. And the police were saying they were “unrelated.”

My conspiracy alarm was ringing like crazy in the back of my head.

Let’s say for a moment that the police are right, and the two women just happened to pick the same day and nearly the exact same time to make a career change into the exciting world of grand theft. Doesn’t that strike anyone as just a wee bit unlikely on the probability scale? In five years living here, I’ve never seen a single report of another bank robbery. Maybe they happen all the time but it’s no big story so it gets passed over on the evening news in favor of the more important issue of whether J-Lo is truly filing for divorce or something like that. Even if a bank gets hit twice a week in our neighborhood, the odds that a pair of female wannabe’s would strike within the same half hour are just astronomical. And I’m a cynic, remember? I don’t believe in coincidence.

But if it’s not simply Loci having a laugh at us, then what? The mind starts with the truly paranoid and works it’s way slowly back to reality. I envision dark sub-government mind programming projects gone awry… Something in the realm of Borne Identity meets La Femme Nikita. Or how about something in the water? Maybe it’s subliminal messages in the muzak at the Vons, and the homeless guy is right about the CIA…

Or maybe it’s just a spike in desperate females. Robbing a bank rarely pays very well, after all, how much money in small bills can you carry while you run down the street? $5000, $10,000? After more than that you’d need a shopping cart and a couple of suitcases… wait a second… naah.

No matter how you slice it, events like this have to mean something. “Impossible coincidence” is an indicator that something isn’t quite on kilter, and whether it’s a government conspiracy, or a blooming social problem, the last thing in the world we should ever do is simply call it random chance and ignore it. Nothing is ever “unrelated.” We are all tied together in a thousand ways, and everything we do, no matter how small or insignificant, effects us and those around us in some manner. Our daily lives are the product of a million little decisions, only a handful of which actually belong to us. We are influenced, led, marketed, tricked, and seduced nearly every minute of the waking day. Our “private” thoughts are the result of someone else’s advertising campaign; a hundred million products all vying for a moment of our conscious, or better, our unconscious attention. You doubt?

“Reach out and touch someone.”

“The quicker picker-upper.”

“A little dab’ll do ya.”

“Have it your way.”

“Where do you want to go today?”

“It’s everywhere you want to be.”

“Drivers wanted.”

“Betcha can’t eat just one.”

“Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t.”

“Breakfast of champions.”

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How many of the products could you identify from the slogans above?

Who was the 10th president of the United States?

That’s what I thought.

This was on CNN this morning, and I almost thought I was reading the National Inquirer.

Okay, there’s dumb, and then there’s just plain moronic. This is a junior in High School who drinks down an unknown chemical from his chemistry class. Aside from the fact that he wasn’t even paying enough attention in class to know what they were working with that day (which automatically qualifies him for the Idiot Awards) he literally risks his own life over… a dare? Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner!

For all he knew, they could have been working with sulfuric acid that morning. And you have to give Runner-up Idiot Awards to his “buddies” who actually allowed him to go through with it. Gaah! The only sad part is that the guy didn’t qualify for a Darwin Award. At least then we wouldn’t have to worry about the possibility of him passing on his genes.

Every so often I check the job market in San Diego and other places I would like to live. It’s a sobering experience. Right now, I’m the “stay at home” parent, and my wife works, but we know that at any moment that could flip-flop again. Or, if things in “America’s Finest City” continue to rise in cost (the median home price is closing fast on $500k and everything from gas to milk is more than almost anywhere else in the nation), we may both soon have to get jobs just so we can pay rent.

So this morning I hopped on to Monster.com and did a few quick searches. In ten minutes I was shaking my head disgust and disbelief. I remember the job ads from the last time I went hunting, and some things just don’t change.

Is it just me, or are the people who write those things dreaming?

When people ask me what I do (or did, since I’m a “homemaker” now), I usually describe myself as a “web developer”. That title seems generic enough to cover the range of tasks that make up my resume. I know better than to call myself a “programmer”, or one of a thousand different flavors of “specialist” (ie: SQL, DHTML, PHP, ASP, Flash, etc…).

With this in mind, and knowing the industry pretty well, it amazes me to see job wanted ads that are so unrealistic that they should really be four different jobs, not one, and they want this superman to work for peanuts, as a contract employee (translation – no benefits), have at least 5 years experience in all “required skills”, and be expected to work 50+ hours a week. Oh, and it’s an “entry level” position.

Right.

You can usually spot the trouble listings right away when they combine web design with super programmer. It goes something like this…

Experience in the following areas is REQUIRED:
- Design and development of corporate brand identity
- Pre-press, packaging, direct mail pieces, print advertisements
- Traditional design and typography skills a MUST.
- Strong experience with database driven Internet architecture, ASP.net and Microsoft SQL
- Hand coding proficiency in XHTML, CSS, C++, Java, VB, XML
- Thorough knowledge of e-commerce systems and implementation
- Search engine optimization and web placement

and on and on…

There are also some key phrases I look for in the “RESPONSIBILITIES” section. Things like:

- Perform other duties as assigned to ensure the success of our clients and the company…

Like what? Taking out the trash? This is the micro-manager’s way of covering his or her ass when they start piling on the “piddly shit.”

-Regularly update web content and make improvements and enhancements

Of course, they don’t tell you when you sign-up that their site has 2000+ pages in three different languages. Oh, and they want to add e-commerce to the site as an “enhancement”. But they need it by next month, and it has no budget. Then they explain that there are about 20,000 products, which change quarterly.

-Determine users’ needs, strategies, and goals and develop and maintain a website that meets those needs

What can you say? This is a whole industry. They call it “marketing”.

-Provide guidance, training, and support to staff

I love this one. What they really want is another web guy in case you get run over by a truck or something, but they don’t want to pay for that, so they make it your responsibility to be sure someone else knows what to do should you be out on vacation and the site goes “kaploee!” Right. Like I’m going to sit down and in a couple of hours train Franklin from the shipping department (everyone else is too damn busy) in HTML, FTP, server management, Photoshop, website architecture, six years of college design and topography, and network administration (which they will have tagged on to your task list by the third week on the job). And of course it will turn out that good ol’ Frank will start to get that glazed “how long until lunch” look in his eyes whenever you present to him anything more complicated than operating a toaster.

And we wonder why so many people end up working the aisles at WalMart. It sounds downright wonderful compared to a “fast-paced” career in the internet world. Then of course, when I work at WalMart, it’s kind of hard to do my job from home.

In the book Earth by David Brin, there’s an interesting situation in which the planet itself literally wakes up. Gaia, the Earth Mother, also turns out to have the ability to bring death upon whomever she chooses, whether it be the corrupt politician, or the corporate CEO who allows his company to dump toxic waste into the sea.

This strikes me as being wonderfully crafted justice. I mean, it would be so great to have an all-powerful being capable of extricating individuals that have no respect for others or the planet they live on. Sure, I believe that God will judge us some day, and He may get peeved at the lame-brain who throws his candy wrapper out the car window, but is He going to do anything about it now? Unlikely, or at least not in a way that anybody else will recognize as justice served.

But imagine if there was a being who might choose to zap off a few fingers of that same bithead. It wouldn’t take very long before people stopped doing that sort of thing.

I got to thinking about all this due to one a beer cans I found on the complex property. The first time I saw it, I was coming in with my hands full of groceries. It was sitting on it’s side on the second step of a small flight of stairs near our door. Convinced that the maintenance staff would surely see it and remove it, I went in and forgot about it. But then this morning I noticed that it was still there as I walked with my daughter to the school bus. Now though, it appeared that at least several people had stepped on it, smashing it flat. Cursing under my breath, I snagged the can as I went back into my house.

It may not seem like something worthy of death, but stuff like this really, really irks me. It’s not so much what it is, as much as the circumstances that caused the empty can to be left there in the first place. What kind of uncaring slob drinks a can of beer and then just gets up and leaves the empty sitting there?! Don’t they have any respect at all for the other people around them? Are they so freakin’ self-centered that they simply don’t care? Is it laziness? Stupidity? All of the above?

In my eyes, there is no excuse for this kind of behavior. None. It so enrages me, that I do find myself thinking that the world would be a far better place if people who have this sort of mindset were simply removed so that there would be no chance of their offspring further infecting the gene pool. It really makes me wish that Mama Gaia would indeed wake up and hold us all accountable for our actions.

My guess is she would be pretty damn pissed.

And it’s not so much that we’ve been lousy stewards of the planet, because we have. But it’s more to do with attitude. Day to day, I try. I do what I can to be conscious and conscientious of my world and what I am doing to it. Could I recycle more. Sure. Could I buy a zero-impact environmentally friendly home and live as “one” with nature? I wish, but it’s not within my means. But I care. I think about it. I still feel terribly guilty if some piece of trash gets sucked out my window while I drive down the freeway in my car, which is spewing out pollutants into an already taxed atmosphere. I still cringe when I consider the sheer volume of “trash” that is magically whisked away when I place it into the dumpster by my home. I am acutely aware that the mountains of non-biodegradable waste that I produce each year are simply being stockpiled in somebody else’s back yard, and don’t simply go away.

So am I any different than they guy who leaves his empties on my stairs? Yeah, I think I am. Trash is trash, no matter where it’s left, but if we loose the desire to even try and take care of this planet, then we simply don’t deserve to be here.

Over at CNN they were talking today about Frank Quattrone finally getting his due. Mind you, this is his retrial. This time around it appears they added “charges of obstructing justice and witnessing tampering” to his crimes.

And the thing that always gets me about these trials is when the news media explains, “…he plans to appeal.” Appeal?! A retrial? There should be a law that says, if you appeal a case, and you loose the appeal, then they double your sentence. And your lawyer has to join you. That way, the law community would seriously think twice about supporting clients just for the money. Justice? What’s that? It’s all about publicity, baby!

But you know, the doubling concept could work in more general practice as well. Forget three strikes, just double it each time. If the first time you get 6 months for armed robbery, the next time you get busted you get a year, then two, then four, then eight. By the sixth offense it’s basically life. And that’s if you only start with six months.

And if the jails get crowded, we can start up a FIFO system. That’s “first-in, first-out.” You simply put a cap on the number of inmates, and any time you go over that cap, the guy at the top gets zapped.

Yeah, yeah… I know it can’t work, but it’s still nice to think about.

Heinlein had an interesting idea for punishments. Make them truly fit the crime. If you run over somebody on a bike and then bail, they strap you to a bike, hit you with a matching car, and then wait the appropriate amount of time before letting an ambulance help you. If you survive, you’re punishment is done and you are free to go.

I also tend to think that you should have to argue your own case. A lawyer can take care of the details afterwards, but you should be required to at least sit up there and seriously sweat it first, in front of a group of your “peers” (yeah, right… How many people are peers for Michael Jackson?) and explain yourself for fifteen minutes. If you’re a complete dunderhead and make a fool of yourself, then oh well. The Jury can take that into consideration when they try to understand why you shot four people in cold blood, three of them innocent bystanders.

“We the jury, find the defendant, stupid, on all counts…”

And those convicted for “crimes of idiocy” should be forced to do really pointless tasks for long hours, things that we would have given to a machine to do, like putting the heads on Barbie dolls or something. “You can go free when you’ve attached three million heads… You only have 2,987,362 more to go!”

Yeah, that’s the way law should be.

What would be a fitting punishment for somebody who made 120 million off of us in 2000?

How about we air-drop him, naked, and without a penny to his name, right into the middle of Haiti or Bangladesh? If he can survive for three weeks without visiting any consulate, he can go free.

Now THAT would be reality TV!