Define “Service”

A friend put a note on Facebook about the fact that “The Air Force must really need more Electrical/Computer Engineers. They sent me an email saying they will pay $33,000 a year +full benefits while in school so long as you work for the USAF and DOD afterwards. GPA requirement is only 3.0.. Of course I would never do that but I always am just shocked by how much money they throw at people, even before graduation they will have invested almost $100,000 in these people.

“It's too bad for them my conscience and my soul are a bit more expensive than that.”

I replied, “Too bad for them, good for you.”

One of his other friends responded with, “Yeah people who serve their country are terrible human beings.”

That started a collection of responses that pretty much left me out of the loop. However, I spent a bit of my home improvement carpentry time contemplating what “serve your country” means to me and, apparently, everyone else. Service is defined in Webster’s as “the action of helping or doing work for someone” and “a system supplying a public need such as transport, communications, or utilities such as electricity and water.” I expect the sarcastic responder has a different definition of the word, but I’m pretty happy with the traditional explanations. There is a rash of “thanks for your service” lip service being paid to military personnel and veterans. It’s hard to believe many actually believe their words, since the majority of Americans keep electing Representatives and Senators who don’t believe in providing decent military pay or veterans’ benefits. Talk is cheap and politicians and conservatives talk cheaper than anyone.

There is a concept I try to get my head around often described as “Love the Warrior, Hate the War.” “Love” is a pretty strong word and one that I do not apply loosely to my personal feelings. I don’t love all that many people and those I do love are rarely people I’d describe as traditional warriors. So, don’t take it too personally if I don’t love you and still hate the war you fought. Honestly, I’m not that big a fan of humanity in general so I’m not picking on soldiers any more than politicians, religious nuts, bankers, investment scam artists, cops, bureaucrats, construction workers, or guys who live under bridges in cardboard boxes.

Many of the members of our current military are victims of the poverty draft. Their reasons for “serving” (to use the term applied by others to being a soldier) are varied and only occasionally connected to patriotism. Some “reasons” are downright stupid and others are sad. A military poll found the top five reasons for enlisting were “education, stability, respect, community, and adventure.” You’ll note “service” is not in that group. One of the commenters to a website reporting that poll had his own top five, “1. There are no jobs where you live. 2. There are no jobs where you live. 3. There are no jobs where you live. 4. There are no jobs where you live. 5. There are no jobs where you live.” I believe that kid’s list is a lot more accurate than the more idealistic, if no more patriotic, list the military poll found. Most of the military is staffed, from privates to the Joint Chiefs, with people who don’t have the skills to make a useful contribution anywhere in society, so they make a destructive contribution in the military.

Back to the original stimulus for this conversation, the idea that my friend was refusing to “serve his country” by not considering the Air Force’s generous offer.

Who is serving his country better or more: an Air Force electrical engineer or an electrical engineer who specializes in alternative energy research or manufacturing? How about an engineer who designs new products that will be manufactured in the United States; even consumer products? Where does an engineer who becomes an educator fit into the service formula? Or an engineer who works for one of the power distribution companies whose mission is to harden the electrical grid to make it less vulnerable to physical or software hacking terrorist attacks? How about an engineer who dedicates some of his early career days to volunteering for the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps Vista?

I know which side of everyone of those questions I fall on. The military is notorious for loyalty to itself; not just in the US but over the course of history. The whole idea of patriotism is entangled with nationalism, a bad motivation under all circumstances. Being patriotic to one’s country is a complicated issue. What exactly is our patriotism directed to? The Constitution? That is often one of the first luxuries to be sacrificed in any time of war, from the Revolutionary War to the Patriot Act and the NSA’s most recent abuse of privacy. There have been more than a few challenges to civilian rule in modern times: General Lucius Clay’s unauthorized attempt to taunt the USSR into an act of war in 1961; General Curtis LeMay’s arrogant tantrum threatening to “make a strike” against the Russians without Presidential authorization; CIA mobster William Harvey’s general disrespect and dishonesty in his attempt to drag the US into a war with Cuba at the Bay of Pigs; a fair number of US citizens still believe the military, military-industrial complex, and the CIA were involved in the assassination of President Kennedy (Yep, I’m one of that group. The CIA has consistently proven itself to be one of the least patriotic collection of mobsters in human history. They have been in a constant race with Russia’s Secret Police for that honor.); Oily North’s participation in the conspiracy to prevent the return of the Iran hostages until after Reagan’s election; the military and military contractor behavior during the Katrina hurricane disaster; pretty much everything the ex-military gangsters of Blackwater/Academi and Halliburton have done in those corporations’ history;  the ease and amorality of the pathway between a military career and a military vendor’s career; and the terror our military has inflicted on the world with their never-ending War on Terror.

The real question is in joining the military is a young person serving the Constitution, the people of this country, the government, the ruling political party, or the 1%? Carefully look at that question and your answer because those diverse masters are too often contradictory. The Constitution has fared poorly during time of war, so if that document and its best intentions are your motivation, you should probably be a war protestor rather than a warrior. The “War on Terror” has been particularly hard on the Bill of Rights.  There are those who argue that the Bill of Rights is a luxury that should disappear during war time, even when that war is unjustified and irrational. If that’s the case, we are considerably less of a democracy and even more unjust a society than most patriotic Americans would like to admit. Many times the people have had to be “sold” on a war by the politicians and the 1% who will profit from any war preparation and actual warfare will make them “filthy rich” in the best application of that phrase. Any time you are “serving” anything, you should know who benefits. Serving the government is the last thing any citizen should be doing; governments are supposed to serve citizens or be overthrown. In the case of military “service,” the beneficiaries of  that service are probably not who you think they are or who they should be.

Technorati Tags: patriotism,nationalism,united states of america,politics,war,war on terror,civil rights,constitutional,law,military,service

#48 Easy Solutions, Poor Results (2000)

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Thomas W. Day

In the year-aftermath of the country's many kid-killings, but especially the Loveland, Colorado school massacre, lots of people seem to have identified simple solutions to the problems that cause our kids to hate each other enough to want to kill. A real news reporter and columnist (the kind who don't seem to exist these days), H.L. Menken, said " There is always an easy solution to every human problem - neat, plausible, and wrong." 

I highlighted the word "wrong" because a big reason  we don't have many real news reporters is that we don't have many real news readers.  So, in case this rant manages to fall into the hands of non-Rat's Eye subscribers (all of whom are brilliant intellects and above average in all respects), I want to be sure that Mr. Menken wasn't misunderstood. 

Popular solutions haven't become any less simple or less wrong since his time, but we have a lot more simply wrong solutions to sort through.  This is based on the honestly simple fact that humans don't seem to be able to figure out who should reproduce and who shouldn't..

For instance, one of the parents of a girl murdered in Colorado told the Colorado state legislature (also known as the "Colorado State Home for the Overpaid and Mentally Deficient") that the lack of organized religion's presence in public schools is the root of the breakdown in the country's morality.  During America's religious primetime, lynching innocent folks was pretty popular in many of the Bible Belt states; and in all of the states below the waist.  I could be wrong, but that doesn't seem like a big moral improvement over anything going on today.  When I was a kid, the country, practically, had universal organized Christian activity in school. All around the country, you couldn't tell public schools from secular schools, unless the teachers were all wearing habits.  Kids were a hazard to other kids back then, too.  Maybe more so than today.

Minnesota's often-goofy governor claimed that more kids need to have guns so that the nuttier kids with guns would be afraid to use their guns. Our oversized, under-thoughtful Governor may be out to lunch.  Or out to referee a WWF match.  Or promoting his latest ghost-written book about his wasted and fantastic youth.  Anyway.

Colorado's problem was that there were too few guns in school?  There was a gun in every pocket, in the U.S.A. of the 1850's, and people got shot for just about any brainless reason you can think of. I suppose, eventually, it could be true that "a well armed nation is a polite nation," but how many reasonably mannered folks would have to die to complete that evolutionary correction? It's an interesting argument that failed the test in a simpler time.  It probably won't improve with more people and more problems in the mix. On the other hand, I guess it's possible that getting the damage done quickly might be just as efficient as letting it go on for another 225 years.

Flipping the legislative coin, a significant number of the country's lawmakers think the authors of the Second Amendment were just kidding around.  There must be 3,700 gun control bills scattered around the House and Senate. And another 7,400 similar bills litter various state government buildings.  Personally, I suspect that anything short of yanking the guns out of the cold, dead hands of every individual in the country won't do anything to improve safety in schools, or post offices. It's just an easy answer to the wrong question.

The problems kids face are far messier than surface changes in law can alter. Kids, of all ages, are a lot smarter than parents, teachers, legislators, and cops allow. Kids see what we do, and put more weight on action than words. What kids are seeing adults do is . . . anything we feel like doing.  From any objective perspective, there are no "standards of behavior" in modern life.  From the President's office to life on the street, rational and moral behavior is something that rarely happens enough for anyone to notice.

Maybe one real difference between now and yesterday is that it's a lot easier for kids to see what's really going on. Cops and politicians have always been, by and large, crooked and self-serving and dangerous. Today, we get to watch that behavior every night on television. If you want to read about it, do an Internet search on "police brutality" or "political corruption," and be ready for a long, depressing evening. While political figures have always been, on average, crooks, in the past it was harder to have that rubbed in our faces. Today, electronic and traditional media bury us in Washington's muck and the slimy activities of our local governments. "Public service" is a phrase that is completely out of fashion.  We don't even bother to label "carpetbaggers," these days.  We just expect it from anyone who's corrupt enough to want to hold a public office.

Try to think of a group that hasn't looked awful, when the public's attention is in that direction: the clergy, medicine, United Way and a hundred other "non-profits" that are little more than corporate empires, the military, the police, and on it goes.  In fact, pretty much any place the media light gets shown, we find a selfish corruption being illuminated.  The easy solution is "censorship."  Repressing the information isn't going to work, or happen. That genie's out of the bottle. What needs to happen is a dramatic change in how we deal with abuse of the public trust. First, there has to be some public trust.

Kids don't have any problem seeing through cultural smoke screens. They, instantly and intuitively, understand what we're saying with our actions.  When we chew up the Earth's resources, thoughtlessly and recklessly, we're practically screaming at them, "We don't care what your lives will be like after we're dead, we want to party now!" While any damn idiot knows that there is an end to the world's resources, lots of damn idiots are in control of wasting those resources at rates that are becoming measurable in "days of life left on earth." A lot of things are going to come to a screeching halt, in not very many years, and, if we don't care about the lives of our children, why should be expect them to care?

Tom Hayden once said, "My country let me right the wrongs." (And what happened to Tom, after Jane left him for the easy life of a billionaire's trophy bimbo?) The list of things that need to be done, so our children will believe they are wanted and that they have a reason to hope for a future, is practically limitless. The time for doing those things may be very limited.  There are no easy answers for any of these questions.  The best we can hope for is that there are answers.

December 2000

#47 Getting Paid to Lie (2000)

[This might be the most painful of all of my past Rat Rants. At the time, I worked for a big medical device company that did, in fact, pay me to lie. They didn’t pay enough, so I resisted. The price of resistance was really high, though. Eventually, my options became “Quit or die.” I quit.]

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Thomas W. Day

I want to start a movement. (Not that kind of movement. There is plenty of fiber in my diet and thanks for asking.). I want to organize all of the employees who are being paid to tell small or humongous lies into a coherent labor movement. The movement's slogan will be "Hell no, we don't know. Ask the idiot who made that decision."

My little grassroots movement would start in Fortune 500 middle management and work its way down the chain of command to the boys and girls who collect your money and hand burgers and fries through windows. Within a few years, those pitiful "company spokespersons" who never say anything more truthful than "we have no comment at this time" or "The Diddly Squat Corporation has never engaged in illegal activities and denies all of the government's allegations" will get to say, "The CEO's office is right this way, folks. I've asked Security to forcibly retain Mr. Doofus in his office until he answers all of your questions."

Imagine the consequences.

For example, I recently spend a long painful day, stuck in the Kansas City airport. I had expected to take a one hour Vanguard flight back to Minnesota. I ended up waiting for 3 hours in Kansas City, detouring through Chicago, scrambling, frantically, to my connection, and sitting for another hour while the plane loaded and unloaded passengers. I finally made it home, seven hours later than my scheduled arrival time.

All through this ordeal, I listened to Vanguard's uniformed and underpaid liars fabricate reasons for why more than one hundred customers were being inconvenienced. Since I arrived really early, in my usual paranoid fashion, I saw the whole story develop. My original flight was cancelled because an insufficient number of passengers had arrived early for the flight. Like Vanguard's role model, Northworst, this dinky wannabe airline likes to see all flights properly overbooked to maximize the airline's return on investment. That tactic bounced me to a plane that was stuffed with ticketed bodies, connecting from Dallas to Chicago through KC, which would depart an hour after my original flight. Bad enough, but it got worse.

The Dallas flight was, literally, bonked from the airport when a freight truck smacked into a wing and a replacement had to be found for that plane. The replacement came from a flight that was scheduled to arrive in KC a little later, also bound for Chicago. By the time that plane arrived, a second Chicago-to-Minneapolis flight was forced off schedule and three plane loads of people were waiting to get onto two planes.

It began to snow. A lot.

I had done my most convincing "angry passenger" routine and had obtained a boarding pass (instead of the stand-by option the clerk tried to hand me) for, not only the flight to Chicago but the connection to Minneapolis. That got me on the Chicago plane early and securely. A dozen or more folks, who got on through stand-by passes, got yanked from the plane along with miscellaneous freight and luggage, to allow for extra fuel required for the (now) severe weather. As the plane left KC, two and a third planes worth of passengers were stuck in KC, waiting for one plane arriving in a couple of hours and another that was scheduled to arrive in six hours.

The stories told to passengers mutated as the morning progressed. At 6:00AM, another early bird and me were told, simply, that our flight had been cancelled. As we were leaving check-in with our transfers in hand, we heard other passengers getting the crunched-plane-in-Dallas story with no mention of the original flight cancellation. When the first load of Dallas passengers arrived, they were told that they would be directed from the plane they were on to another, later scheduled plane, to keep their plane from losing its place in the airport's schedule. Somewhere during this performance, the story changed to the airline was trying to protect our safety by routing us all to Chicago to avoid being trapped in the KC weather. As the day went on, the stories got weirder and less believable. The conflicting stories and outright fairytales started blending into a screenplay that Rod Sterling would have loved telling.

All because the people facing the customers were not allowed to tell those customers the truth about why all this was happening to them. Imagine the relief and focus all of those frustrated wishful passengers would have felt if they'd have been told, "One of our many pinheaded executives decided to save a few bucks and his idiotic decision has cost all of you a half day of your lives." I, personally, would have felt a lot better about it all, just hearing the truth instead of the constantly evolving lies.

Of course, the zombie exec would have had to face the music/cacophony caused by his idiocy and, hopefully, he or she would have been fired. As we all know, too well, all corporate systems are designed to protect the guilty and punish the innocent. In most companies, even when the guilty is identified, the innocent are punished and the culpable are promoted.

Still, my little movement would put an end to this kind of guilt avoidance. The No More Lies Union Golden Rule would be "everyone paid less than $100k is allowed to always tell the truth or to pass the question on to someone who is paid enough to make lying worthwhile." The corollary rule would be "those responsible for any screw ups will be held accountable." Let's see how many MBAs and lawyers and accountants want to be executives if all customers are provided with the execs' home phone numbers and addresses. And the truth.

May 2000

#46 Scary Marketing (2000)

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Thomas W. Day

I had the honor and pleasure this week to attend a marketing training presentation for a new, incredibly complicated medical product. The presentation was competent and informative . . . and scary.

The thing that has always amazed me about the medical industry is how dumb the customers must be. In case you're under the mistaken impression that medical "customers" are patients, get real. Nobody gives a flying flock of spotted and buttered desert turtles about patients. The end-all-be-all in medicine are doctors.

For a few moments, in the early 90's, there was a thought that HMO's and hospital administrators might slither into that driver's seat. Doctors saw that coming and grabbed those positions, too, putting themselves back in control faster than  Hillary could shout "Willy, put that back in your pants and zip up!"

Since doctors are the target audience, the tenor and content of medical product advertising is what makes me nervous. You'd like to think that a device that can save or lose lives would be taken seriously, wouldn't you? If you wouldn't, I will, twice, to make up for your limitations. We'll all be disappointed.  The gist of all medical product marketing is "lots of pretty colors and catchy pictures." Useful information is hidden deep (and small) inside the product packaging and is thrown away with the bloody towels and used pointy objects after surgery. The constant message aimed at these highly educated, occasionally respected physicians is "this device will not require you to do any work or know anything" about your profession.

The marketing message is full of New Age nouns turned to verbs (by tacking "ize" on the end) and verbs turned to nouns with old fashioned misuse. Spiffs and perks abound.  Companies put together "care packages" of free junk for physicians and their lab underlings. They box up loads of useless gadgets and print all kinds of mindless messages on sticky notes, for the sales reps to give away, when they interrupt what ought to be a physician's busy day. The product names are catchy (or funky, depending on your perspective) acronyms that remind you of new cars or video games. There are dozens of non-technical "product training" meetings presenting information that could be understood by a grade school kid.  All training meetings are held in uncompromising places like Maui, Disney World, the Bahamas, and Vail. These training vacations are somewhat scaled down for nurses, but offer "let's pretend we learned something here" CEU's so the nurses and techs won't have to suffer through real accreditation classes.

Does this kind of marketing really influence physicians and surgeons? Damn straight.  The industry line is that medical product sales is a "relationship business." That means the doctors have a dependent relationship on the sales representatives for everything from babysitting services to tickets for athletic events to the fee for the afternoon golf game. Often reps are also responsible for providing a basic understanding of which organ is being operated on during a given medical procedure. The only other "profession" with this kind of relationships is Congress and the soft money lobbyists. Just like the politicians, doctors have become so comfortable with the constant bribery that it's necessary to do this stuff just to get to talk to a physician about a new drug or device.  Just like Senators and Representatives, not that many of the target audience knows enough about the subject to understand the technical details.

All this has led us to a very scary place in medical development. The products, both drugs and devices, have become incredibly specific, complex, and powerful. Properly used, we can compensate for the failure of just about any physical or mental function. Improperly used, current technology can replicate most physical or mental catastrophes.

Engineers, kept isolated from customers and product users by anti-tech Marketing goofs, create more and more complex products with features to treat non-existent maladies. To justify these pointless features, the "more is better" philosophy gets thrown into an endless loop between R&D, Marketing, and the docs. Nobody understands the purpose for anything, but we keep adding more things to prove we can fill all available space.

Marketing tactics use "creative" terms and acronyms that explain absolutely nothing useful. Detailed explanations are abandoned in the drive to prove that "less words, more pictures" will catch the customers' attention.  Industry uses inventive, non-physiologic scenarios to sell product features to docs who, apparently, don't know enough about physiology to question those fabrications. We blow statistical smoke up their butts until they can't tell the smog from the patients.  Product planning uses logic like, "Biowhatsit has three retro-bozo-refabulators in their Bonqulator, we need five in ours to be competitive." We build in five and find a doc to run a "clincal" to prove that five of these useless things was clinically necessary.

In the real world, the overwhelming majority of all medical products are used in their "nominal" condition. Docs take a neurostimulator, a pacemaker, a mechanical heart, or a surgical tool out of the box and use it as it was preset by the factory. Docs may be untrained and operating totally in the dark, but they know better than to fool with the stuff because they don't have the slightest clue how it works.  Sometimes a physician will actually resort to asking the sales rep what to do and I can't begin to describe how bad things can get when that happens. I have abandoned sports equipment in my garage that has more surgical capability than the average MBA-clone sales rep.

At the other end of the knife what do we, who may become patients, do to protect ourselves? My first advice is to be very careful what you sign if you ever find yourself in a hospital. If you assume that your physician is not much more interested in your well-being than a used car salesman, you'll be in a pretty accurate frame of mind. There is no place in life where a second opinion is more valuable. Third and fourth opinions are good, too.  What we ought to do as a population of prospective patients is to get the FDA and Congress off of their butts and make them fix this system or find employment flipping burgers and bobbing for French fries.

Once we boot the lobbyists out of Washington, we ought to be working at booting the bribery out of medicine.  Currently, medicine has taken the military-industrial complex's place at the federal funded corporate welfare trough. Just like the pack of vampires who sucked the country dry building useless and incompetent weapons in the 1980's, medical drug and device manufacturers drained the country of vital juices in the 90's and are still at it.

Personally, I think it's time to put some teeth in the nation's treason laws and start going after those who become rich cheating the public. After a dozen or so ex-CEO's take the needle or suck down a lung full of cyanide gas, get out of the way of industry reforms.  If the execs have to pay the price for their corporate failures, change will happen, with or without doctors knowing what they're doing.

November 2000

#45 A Rat-like Political Experiment (2000)

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Thomas W. Day

George Washington said, "The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the American people." I suspect he'd be a bit dismayed at the way we're currently managing this experiment. For those who follow the Rat Rants, you probably suspect that I have mixed emotions about the results of our Presidential election (however it turns out). You'd be right.

Sixteen years ago, we tried a guy who once was a supporting actor to a chimpanzee, after letting California prove this same dude wasn't up to the challenge of sitting on a chair in the governor's office. For eight long recession years, Ronnie succeed in looking confused, which is what passes for "charisma" and "communicating" in the modern media-muddled world. After almost a decade of indictments, convictions, cover-ups, treason, and burying the country under an astounding who-knows-how-many-trillions national debt, Ronnie left office, as sentient as a Bush brother after a ten day binge, and a conservative national hero. Go figure.

Following in those stumbling footsteps, the Bush family has, apparently, been grooming the nation for this day. First, George the First appeared to be no mental threat to anyone outside of Kansas or Texas; a do-nothing Vice President following in the two hundred year old heel marks of do-nothing Vice Presidents. Still, after what happened this year, you have to wonder if he didn't have some control over the "opposing party" and the national consciousness (the ultimate oxymoron). If the Demolicans hadn't found someone even less interesting to run against Bush in 1988, we'd have never heard of (and learned to love) his little buddy, Danny.

Four years of listening to the Danny Quayle babbling brook conditioned the country to living with a moron a heart beat away from a fool. Somewhere, in that large building, I'm sure there is a button that could destroy the world, but we also learned to take comfort in the secure knowledge that neither of those two goofs could find that button in their lifetime, let alone in four years. Bush spent his time trying to get us to look at him long enough to read his lips and starting wars to distract our attention from his criminally warped children. Danny occupied his time trying to get his foot out of the Lincoln bedroom's trash can.

In hindsight, it appears that George Sr. was getting us ready for life with George Jr. Once you've suffered a speech from a mathematically, grammatically, and generally intellectually impaired Vice President, what's to stop you from doing the same with an equally talent-free President? All George Jr. adds to this mix is absolutely no working experience at any job whatsoever. And a lifetime of failure at every highly-paid menial task he's stumbled upon.

And now, after eight years of prosperity and economic stability, Americans are ready to resume the Reagan-Bush trickle down years. Because, and let's be real here, the only thing George Jr. had to offer was an upper class tax reduction. That was the only stand the man took in a year and a half of campaigning against every reform proposed during that period, even reforms offered by members of his own party. Any kind of review of Bush's record as a person or a candidate would make anyone, even his dad, wish there were some minimal qualifications required before a citizen can run for President.

George didn't win the hearts of the majority of voters, but he may have won the majority of electoral votes. (For the fourth time in history, Alex Hamilton gets his revenge.) Just considering the almost half of the voting public who tossed their fish toward Bush, I have no idea what this choice meant. It couldn't have been a completely selfish economic decision. The state that suffered an actual recession under Clinton-Gore, California, went for Gore. Californians are advertised to be the most self-absorbed people in the country. It couldn't have been a reaction to the phony morality play the Republicans have been staging for the last eight years. Bush is an acknowledge drunk, druggie, convicted small time criminal, party animal, and general purpose rich-kid screw-up. So what were those folks voting for?

It could be an iteration of that experiment Mr. Washington described. Seriously.

In 1998, in Minnesota, voters decided on the odd premise that a professional wrestler might be as skilled, competent, and believable as either of the moronic professional politicians the Demolicans offered us. Of course, the Repubocrats and the press were convinced that nobody would "waste their vote" on a professional wrestler who ran from the edge of a political party that only barely existed in Minnesota.

Wrongo, Mongo. Minnesotan voters took the view that two things would be accomplished with their vote; we can send a message to the Demolicans that we're not taking any old junk they decide to pawn off on us and we can find out just how technical a job being a governor really is.

Nobody's managing these tests, however. We overestimated the Repubocrats' intelligence and failed our own gut check. The two political parties didn't learn a thing from the loss of the governor's office. This last election presented voters with the same old group of nincompoops and ruling class butt kissers, but voters didn't call the political parties' bluff and chickened out before the revolution did any damage to the powers that be. An uncontrolled experiment doesn't return useful data. Just ask the FDA, drug companies do this kind of crap all the time.

The other part of the experiment has played out pretty well, though. I've always maintained that 99+(a lot of 9's past the decimal point)% of all executives contribute absolutely nothing useful to the facilities they mismanage. If that's true in the private sector, it has to be more true in government. At worst, Jesse Ventura hasn't done any worse than any of our past traditional party goofs. At best, he has been incredibly consistent to his own beliefs and statements. So, we've learned that either this job is unnecessary or any fool off of the public streets can do the job well enough. '

We might be about to run that same experiment on the President's office. Don't get me wrong, Americans have filled the office of President with a long and hilarious collection of morons, crooks, and clowns in the last 224 years. The two party system hasn't done much for quality government, but it has sure provided lots of great material for political cartoonists and satirists. When our politicians aren't trying to get us all killed, they are almost always good for a laugh. But George W. Bush is an experiment at an almost perfect level. He has absolutely no useful qualities or experiences to offer to the position (not completely unlike Gerald Ford, but with less intelligence and coordination). If the republic can survive GWB, we'll know two things; anyone can do the job and the job is completely unnecessary.

A few years back, the federal government closed down everything but "essential services" for a few weeks while Clinton and the Gingrich crowd waved their private parts at each other. At that time, each branch of the federal government identified who their "non-essential employees" were and sent them home, with pay, until the politician's put themselves back under zipper and suit pants. Hopefully, someone noted which jobs were non-essential and that information was stored some place where NSA and AEC employees won't take it out, play with it, and forget where they put it. When this next four years is over, we can add the office of the President and Vice President to that list and get rid of all of the non-essential government positions. After which, we'll have reduced the federal budget to about $42,000 a year and we'll be able to pay off the national debt by the middle of the summer in 2005.

So pay attention fellow Rats. The country is about to fire up a really interesting experiment.

October 2000

Putting Customers Last

We’re camped at a place called “Rockhound State Park” in New Mexico and the public servants for the New Mexico State Park system have been all over the place on this trip. On average, New Mexico’s state park employees are no better or worse than anyone else’s. Unfortunately, that means they are mostly pretty useless.  It’s rare and special to find park rangers who know anything about the park where they work. The park management is most often absent and arrogant. It’s clear the state has dedicated a lot of money to creating and maintaining these parks, but it’s equally clear that no one is watching the store.

This park, for example, is using some federal money to spruce up the bathrooms. Nice idea, but it’s just a bathroom remodel, not a total rework requiring a from-the-ground-up reconstruction. If you were having this kind of work done in your home and the construction company insisted on disabling your entire bathroom, you’d fire them. Not here, though. The contractor locks up the bathrooms and the state employees lock up the bathrooms in the visitors’ center, so any tent campers and campers without bathroom facilities are shit-out-of-luck. They don’t even bother to put signs on the doors, they just lock them up. That is, clearly, the  kind of thing that ought to get someone fired. But not in government work.

Likewise, the US public has become more complacent about arrogant bureaucrats all over the country. I think the “Fines Doubled in Construction Zones” legislation is a symptom of that arrogance. Since when did a highway worker’s life become more valuable than a citizen/taxpayer’s life? Those four-foot tall concrete barriers highway crews use to isolate themselves from traffic have to be dangerous for the traffic. I’d love to see a study that counts the number of injuries and deaths caused by those barriers. Once we have that number, we can compare that to the number of highway worker injuries from when nothing more than signs and flagmen protected the construction crews. The other highway construction tactic that pisses me off is when road crews block off miles of highway, diverting traffic from divided lanes into narrow two-way traffic zones. They typically work in tiny sections while pushing drivers into miles of slow moving, dangerous, single-lane traffic. A more reasonable system would be to block off no more than a few hundred yards more of the road than is being serviced.

Citizens are being asked to accommodate bureaucrats and government workers far beyond the service provided by those un-civil and hardly-servant employees. There is no good reason for it. Nothing government does is of more value than the citizens it is supposed to serve. If government employees cared to know why the public resents them so overwhelmingly, this is exactly why. That cynical police motto, “Protect and Serve,” was a good idea. Someone should try it.

Technorati Tags: New mexico,state park,rockhound

#44 The High Cost of Overpriced Management (2000)

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Thomas W. Day

If you didn't see this one coming, you haven't read a single Rat's Eye, ever. I'm nothing if not not-subtle. (While my past English profs would have a field day slashing red lines through that double negative, I'm leaving it in because of its irritant value.) In my 35 years of employment, I've worked for companies that were:

• small and totally unprofitable,
• large and going bankrupt at the speed of sound,
• small and bagging money like a New York drug dealer, and
• huge and listed on every Fortune 500 list ever cobbled together for the purpose of misleading investors.

I think I can apply way too much personal experience to the cost of overpriced management. In fact, I can provide examples of actual companies that lived and died in the real world. Of course, the names will remain slightly disguised in the interests of protecting the incredibly guilty.

Unfortunately, the toy I'm using to do the math for this Rat Rant is Microsoft's Excel 97. For those of you not cursed with this piece of software, I apologize. For those who have found various marginally legal or totally illegal ways to "find" this program on your computers, I recommend that you play with the numbers and experience the many ways that you've been screwed over by management salaries. (Yes, there are macros in the file and if you don't enable them you'll have to figure out your own company salary distributions.) Just to make this toy as simple as possible to understand, I put together a quartet of examples for you to play with. However, you can enter your own information into the shaded cells and play with the calculations. Here is the spreadsheet: salarygame.xls. [Sorry, I don’t know how to put a spreadsheet on Google’s Blogger, so the tool is gone. Email me if you want a copy to play with.]

The first example (Small & Bankrupt) is of a company I worked for in the late 1970's. It would be a mistake to assume that the pack of execs who mismanaged this company cared about profitability or the company's survival, but the example demonstrates how simple a turn-around would have been. The company had gross profits (before salaries) of $425,000 on a gross income of about a million and a half. Because the execs were executing a slash-and-burn game with the company's assets and products, they stripped off all of the "excess cash" for themselves, to the tune of $150k salaries for each of the "owners." (The company "owned" nothing, because these guys were experts at leveraging nothing into yet another quarter-million dollar loan.)

Like most small businesses, even 20 years ago, this company had a hard time attracting talent and labor. The bottom line was almost a quarter of a million in the hole, which finally sunk the company about six months after I abandoned ship.

Obviously, the management of a company with this kind of history doesn't deserve anything resembling top dollar for its performance. These guys paid themselves like they were winners, but they couldn't have hit the ocean from a life raft. Dropping their salaries 60%, to $60k a year, could have radically changed the complexion of the company. If that money were simply put into the bottom line, the company would have shown a $49,880 profit. If that money were equally distributed among the rest of the employees, the two middle managers would have been making $57,210, the three engineers would have made $52,443, and the assemblers would have earned $15.49 an hour. All good wages for 1980. For that kind of money, there would have been no issue with finding talented people for the company's positions.

The next example (Small & Profitable) was a company that had struggled for almost 15 years to break even. During the early years, the execs/owners limited their salaries to reasonable numbers because they recognized that their contribution to the company's success was marginal, at best. But when the company suddenly stumbled on a successful product line and the bottom line flipped polarities, they started doing "equivalent salary" searches to justify making themselves instantly rich. In less than a year, they tripled their take-home and followed that with similar (but smaller) increases for other management people. Instead of sharing the wealth with the folks who made it possible, a very dedicated hourly work force, the execs hoarded the company's good luck to themselves. The end result was steadily declining growth and market share and a decade of complaints about the quality of the workforce. Within five years, the average tenure of their assembly workers declined from ten years to eleven months, and the quality of the product followed.

This example shows that if the company had held the management salary line during the first year of profitability. The constant complaint was "we can't keep good people on the assembly lines." At $8.50 an hour that was a problem, at $14.50 (what we could have paid if we'd have put all of the excess exec salaries into hourly wages) we'd have had people standing in line to apply.

My loser big company example (Big & Brain-dead), managed to gross huge numbers for a few years while producing a net loss for its conglomerate owner. The salaries and bonuses it paid to executives were so huge they were obscene. The company was part of a group of like small-minded corporations that constantly petitioned to the federal government for higher technical green card quotas because of a non-existent "skilled labor shortage." Hit the button for this company and see how much they could have been paying engineers ($176,229) if they'd have cut back their non-productive executive costs and plowed that money straight into technical positions. Somehow, I'm pretty certain that plenty of talent would have been found for that kind of money. Unfortunately, money doesn't often equal talent when it's spent on executives.

Finally, I pick on one of the companies that is regularly found on Fortune Magazine's many lists of top companies. This is yet another company constantly whining about the lack of technically skilled employees. If you look at their corporate statement, you'll find that they pay their top execs an obscene average of $11M in salaries and bonuses and stock options. This is a company that averages $13.50 an hour for assembly workers and $80k a year (including bonus and benefits) for technical employees. How serious do you think their employee problems would be if they paid $27.60 an hour for assemblers and $163,565 a year for engineers?

It's amazing how many problems can be solved by cutting back expenses for the most unproductive workers in a business. If you have an example you'd like to have added to this spreadsheet, let me have it maybe we'll start a revolution. Like that will happen in my lifetime..

October 2000

Where Were You?

Gun owners always bring up two old fallacies when they try to defend the incredible rate of gun violence in the US: “A well-armed society is a polite society.” and “As any student of history knows, gun control figures prominently in the designs of totalitarian states.” The USofA is the best armed society in the world, with 89 guns per 100 citizens (as of a 2007 survey), and I find it hard to imagine that anyone would classify us as “well mannered.” The NRA has bought and paid for a collection of gutless and moronic congresscritters to maintain a national inability to make decent estimates as to how many households are gun-toting, but most estimates put the number at about 40%. That’s not far from the “traditional” number of armed American households, so if history were on the side of the “defenders of freedom” argument, you’d think we’d have some evidence in our history. We do not have any such evidence.

The well-armed citizens of Andrew Jackson’s 1830’s regime did absolutely nothing to stop the forced “Trail of Tears” march, the ethnic cleansing of the Cherokee,Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations. In fact, well-armed citizens often stood along the trail harassing the victims and, even, occasionally killing one or more including grabbing children from their mothers’ arms and bashing them to death on rocks and wagon wheels.

During the 1892 Homestead Steel Strike, the military was called in to bust the union after Pinkertons and the local cops failed to successfully violate workers’ rights. I’m sure you’ll be amazed to learn that the hundreds of thousands of well-armed Americans around the country sat on their hands and watched Andrew Carnegie’s goons, local cops, and the Pennsylvania State Militia crushed the strike and tossed the steel workers back into near-slavery. There was plenty of violence on both sides of the labor battle, but damn little contribution from the well-armed society that read about the strike, the strike breakers, and saw the Pinkerton goons abusing their neighbors and fellow workers. In the end, the busted strike cost workers income and rights all over the country as the union collapsed along with most of the union movement and the mine owners retaliated by lowering wages and increasing work hours.

Likewise, the 1894 Pullman Strike was settled with military assistance and cost workers a few more rights and a crapload of jobs. Still, no response from the armed citizenry who were supposed to believe will rise up and defend democracy, freedom, and the American Way. In fact, the average American disapproved of the strike because it inconvenienced them slightly, along with agitating the Faux News of the day; the yellow journalism Hearst newspaper. Grover Cleveland, the jackass Republican President of the time created Labor Day as a diversion to placate unions and the rare semi-alert American laborer. Eugene Debs, one of the union organizers, went to prison, studied Karl Marx, and became a socialist who ran for president five times. Eventually, our tolerance for democracy hit a new low when Woodrow Wilson’s merry band of goons tried and convicted Debs for in 1918 under the Espionage Act of 1917 and sent a presidential candidate to prison for 10 years. If an armed public were capable of being incited to revolt in the interest of freedom and democracy, you’d think jailing a legitimate candidate who received 900,000 votes might have done it. But it didn’t.  Apparently, putting up road blocks between capitalists and their war profits is an unacceptable and unforgivable crime.

In 1903, the Colorado Labor Wars gave the armed public yet another chance to grow a pair and rise up on their hind legs. “There is no episode in American labor history in which violence was as systematically used by employers as in the Colorado labor war of 1903 and 1904.” The Blackwater goons of the day, the Pinkertons, and the state militia abused miners at will, even publicizing some of their abuses in national newspapers. After numerous beatings, murders, illegal imprisonment of miners and their families, a couple of incidents of military sniping and general purpose class warfare, the miners were forced back to work or fired for union activity. The state of Colorado’s citizens revolted, mildly, passing a referendum requiring an 8-hour workday. The new corporate-owned Republican governor tabled the constitutional amendment and the legislature let it die. 

When Herbert Hoover sent Douglas McArthur’s Army and six tanks to dispatch/disburse the “Bonus Army” (WWI vets who had been screwed out of the cash value of their “service certificates” so that bankers and other Great Depression scammers could continue their corporate welfare party.), there is no record of the millions of American gun owners rising up to defend fellow citizens who had fought for them in the first “Great War.” The majority of Americans turned their heads just as you might predict they would if they were disarmed.

That was then and this is now, right?

How about the 1968 Chicago Police Riots? Crooked cops went on a rampage, beating the crap out of war protestors, political campaign workers, bystanders who just happened to be walking, driving, or standing in the general territory of the crazed and crooked police (Remember the Time Magazine headline, “Cops on the take can’t take orders?”) ; including Hugh Heffner who was just picking up his morning paper when he got clobbered. Just a “bunch of hippies,” right? Not worth your gun-toting time to protect their rights from the powers that be.

How about the 1970 Ohio State National Guard Murders? Talk about the moment when the government comes to end civil rights. It’s hard to beat the inspiration that should have come from the murder of four students after the crazed military goons fired 67 rounds into a crowd of peace protestors. We’d just “escaped” from 8 years of the terror of liberal Democratic government. Gun ownership was hitting all-time new highs. Where was the outrage? Where were the armies of pissed off and armed citizens? The government was overstepping every Constitutional boundary and a fair number of Nixon’s goons were ready to send the military after anyone who disagreed with their power grab and profit-taking. Still, no protests, except from the kids who would be asked to dump blood and futures into this regime.

And today?

 

 

There is no shortage of moments in American history where liberty could have been defended by the mostly-bullshit-filled Second Amendment proponents. Every opportunity has been ignored. Where do these gun loonies show up? At political rallies, in movie theaters, at Starbucks, in restaurants, and in grocery stores. They are not fighting for liberty, they are scaring the shit out of the rest of us. These crazy fucks don’t give a flying damn about freedom, democracy, or liberty. They are wannabe terrorists who don’t have a clue why the Second Amendment is in our Constitution. Because of them, I think it’s time to repeal that poorly considered portion of the Bill of Rights.

 

One of the more obvious things about gun owners is that they are practically never anyone you might consider to be revolutionary, defenders of liberty, progressive, or, even, liberal. They are overwhelmingly conservative. Conservatives, by definition, are the least likely people on the planet to have to worry about being harassed by “the government.” With the obvious understanding that “government exists to protect the rich from the poor,” you would have to be a Fox News simpleton to imagine that our military, police, or any other government agency would be “coming for my guns” if you are anything less than an armed Arian Nations KKK-sheet-wearing nutball. If you aren’t a noisy nutball, even then you’re pretty damn safe from the US government.

On the other hand, if you are an unarmed Occupy kid protesting the rape and pillage of the American Treasury by our well-dressed criminal banking class, you’re going to get your ass handed to you by every goon with a SWAT patch on his uniform or a riot-control suit to play in. If you are foolish enough to possess weapons while supporting any sort of change in our corporate oligarchy you are probably going to be shot or rounded up and tried for treason. For the most part, the people who are most likely to be harassed by any government on the planet are also the least likely to own guns. But we know that’s not the NRA’s crowd, right? Those folks will be helping with the round up long before they make a useful contribution to restoring democracy or creating a fair society. They are, after all, conservatives and conservatives support the status quo no matter how evil it may be. They always have and always will.

Sucking Professionally and Academically

I’m currently reading a book (Quiet, by Susan Cain) that about introverts, introspection, and the polar opposite of those qualities which seem to be valued irrationally by our brain-dead culture. The chapter I’m currently working through is focusing on my all-time least favorite school, Harvard Business School. In my experience and study, I believe the best thing any business that hopes to be successful can do is to purge all MBAs from positions of responsibility (The best way to foolproof any system is to remove the fools from the system.) and ship as many HBS MBAs to the competition as possible.

A friend of mine recently went through a job search and, happily, found a position with a research firm in Michigan. I’m glad he has work, he’s glad he’s finally re-employed after a painful period of financial instability, and his new employer is, I hope, happy to have his talents at their disposal. I hope this is a “happily ever after” story.

If I were back on the hunt for work, though, his new employer wouldn’t be on a list of jobs I’d want. The reason is that this employer uses the HBS bury-them-in-bullshit interview system for employee selection. There may be nothing on earth I despise much more than the “interview by committee” selection system. I’ve gone through it myself a few times and have been selected by the process at least three times. Only one of those three turned out to be a good experience for me or the employer and that one happened because the owner of the company, and chief engineer, overrode the “committee” and made me an offer before the committee members came to a consensus. I turned down one of the other two jobs because I found a better opportunity before they made up their minds and the third job was one of the worst experiences of my working life.

A small part of my distain for the HBS “pull credit up, push blame down” mismanagement style comes from the dichotomy their multiple personality philosophy forces on their minimally skilled “students.” Quiet quotes the school’s profs saying “If you’re preparing alone for class, they you’re doing it wrong. Nothing at HBS is intended to be done alone.” and “Don’t think about the perfect answer. It’s better to get out there and say something than to never get your voice in.” The idea seems to be to derive every decision from a committee and for the committees to be driven by the noisiest, least prepared, least thoughtful members. Not only is that the idea, but it is absolutely the end result of their mismanagement style. The dumbest, most arrogant, least technical, least knowledgeable, loudest, threatening fools rise to the top and Decisions are consistently foolish. The work atmosphere is consistently childish and hazardous to those who think on their feet, as opposed to those to emote on their feet. If you can’t make a decision on your own, do your own research, make up you own mind, what useful contribution can you make to a committee? The answer is, of course, “none.” However, that hasn’t slowed our empire’s worst companies from swirling around that toilet bowl.

Harvard Business School’s influence on a huge variety of organizations has been catastrophic. To be clear about how completely useless HBS is, remember Larry Summers is the school’s President. Summers is on record for never having made an intelligent decision about anything in his life. He is at the heart of the world-wide economic depression we’re currently struggling to escape and he was chosen to lead this worthless institution after doing a perfectly miserable job in the Clinton administration. If you chopped that lardass into bite-sized chunks, he wouldn’t make good dog food.

#43 When Did Whiners become Winners? (2000)

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Thomas W. Day

"Eat the rich,
"There's only one thing that they're good for
"Eat the rich
"Take one bite now - come back for more " Aerosmith

I guess I first noticed this in the early 90's, when Neuter Gingrich and George ("I'm not always a wimp") Bush started speaking in public. Still, it amazes me that so many whining old men hold positions of power in Washington. What's up with that?

"Well, I woke up this morning
"On the wrong side of the bed
"And how I got to thinkin'
"About all those thing you said . . . "

A few weeks back, my clock radio woke me up with the simpering whine of Trent Lott and an equally pitiful sounding politico named "Connie Mack."

(I thought Connie Mack was a baseball minor league. When did a professional sports franchise get the right to run for public office? Did we allow our current pack of elected morons to hold a Constitutional Congress and I didn't hear about it?)

Anyway, these two doofuses were bawling about how traumatized they were by the federal government's "armed invasion" of the Miami home where Elian Gonzalez had been held. It sounded like a pair of East Coast trust fund babies trying to convince their mother to let them borrow the Mercedes and the mountain resort for the weekend. I practically smashed the bedside stand, trying to put a stop to that awful noise.

I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of irritant gets votes in the hope that they'll shut up once they get a job. It doesn't work. Quit voting for them, whoever you are.

"And I just can't see no humor
"About your way of life
"And I think I can do more for you
"With this here fork and knife "

A couple of decades ago, some brilliant media commentator went on record saying that no woman would ever be elected President of the United States because a woman's voice would not be capable of calming a panicked American public in times of crisis. Times have changed. For the last twenty years, we've been packing the House of Representatives and the Senate with rich and whimpering frat boys whose voices make blackboard scratching sound musical. Was this a liberal conspiracy to condition our ears for the first female Chief Executive? Make me listen to that Connie Mack character for thirty seconds and I'd vote to replace him with Phyllis Diller or Mad TV's Cabana Chat lady. If we'll tolerate these voices, discriminating against any human (or not) aural characteristic has come to an end.

Back in the 80's, I wondered about the aural capacity of folks who could tolerate listening to George Bush through four years. Things have gotten much worse. I'm astounded at the people who put up with thirty seconds of G.W. Bush. That man could irritate a rock. Combine a middle aged spoiled brat with that Texas "we all talk through our noses down here" thing and you'd think that ought to create a combination that would trap the man in his country club for life. You'd hope. And you'd be wrong again. All that moral damage we were told that rock and roll would cause has taken a different sort of toll on the American public. We're all freakin' deaf!

I guess it was bound to happen. After two hundred and some years of laughing at those grumpy old English men with speech impediments who punctuate every speech's conclusion with "hurumph, hurumph" or "here, here" followed by "mumbly, mumblay, mumbly," it's probably our turn to be stuck with an embarrassing sounding government. Now, the rest of the world can record our politicians' public utterances and play them back for comedy relief on their late night talk shows. I know that Danny Quaile provided the world with that sort of entertainment, so maybe we're just adding more fuel to the world's comedy quotient. Still, it's going to be painfully embarrassing to travel overseas until this problem is fixed.

For me, this is doubly humiliating. Not only are these whiners running my government, but they're, mostly, from my generation. We should have seen it coming. All of the macho guys from the Baby Booming generation got toasted in Vietnam, fried their brains on dope, got rich in rock and roll bands and have dropped so far out of the mainstream that they can't find it with a fishing pole, or gave up on politics, altogether, after wasting a few years charging windmills in the 70's. That leaves the country in the hands of the Ivy League dorks who couldn't get lucky or noticed, unless they waved the contents of their billfolds out the windows of their Porches and Beemers. What we're left with for public offices are the kids who were drawing an allowance from their parents long after their 40th birthdays.

Even knowing all that, I want to know why they're getting votes? When did Americans lose all aural discrimination? Are we so used to traffic noise, tinny television speakers, and crappy car radios that we don't know the voice of authority when we hear it? Maybe the way to fix American politics is to improve the noises we all live with. If we got a good stereo system installed in every kitchen, maybe we'd get a better class of politician.

July 2000

#42 Customer Service in Our Times (2000)

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Thomas W. Day

Supposedly, the 80's were the decade of quality management and the 90's were the decade of customer service. I read that somewhere. I don't believe it for a minute, though. I'd call the 90's the decade of pretending to care about customers while doing the exact opposite of what any rational customer would expect.

We've all heard the statistics that tell us that most businesses only hear from 1-4% of dissatisfied customers. Those of us who studied customer service and product loyalty have seen the numbers that tell us that the other 96-99% of customers just swallow their disappointment and go away. We've been shown that 90+% of the folks we've disappointed NEVER come back. No matter how much marketing we throw at them, those customers remember the shafting they received and do their best to avoid making the same mistake twice.

The old numbers said that each of those burned-for-life customers told eight folks about their experience and that word-of-mouth connection spreads the news to as many as 100 potential or existing customers. That might have been true in 1980, but those numbers are ancient history today. We're living in a new world of direct experience information and, while the MBA crowd doesn't know it yet, it's really easy for a single ripped off customer to warn off thousands of victims from a product or company.

For example, in 1994 I was just getting into the Internet, through maillists and newsgroups. I'd purchased a Back-UPS Office 500 from APC (who's marketing mantra is "legendary reliability") and that product turned out to be a disaster. Instead of protecting my computer from power interruptions, the APC product introduced dozens of interruptions and, eventually, screwed up my computer so solidly that the hard drive had to be reformatted. Since the UPS had a warranty, I attempted to get some assistance from the manufacturer or the dealer (CompUSA).

Of course, CompUSA sent me to the manufacturer. Anyone who's ever bought anything from CompUSA knows that they are a customer-hostile organization that exists only because of their (sometimes) low prices and available inventory.

APC's Tech Service rep told me that my product had been released with a glitch that did exactly what I'd described. He sent me to Customer Service where I was told I'd have to box the unit and ship it to them for replacement. It has always seemed to me that, when a manufacturer admits to selling a defective product, the customer shouldn't be liable for the shipping for repair or replacement. I mentioned that and got a stern lecture about APC's "reputation for excellence," something the Customer Service person thought that "everyone knows" about and respects. I didn't know squat about APC, but I learned plenty during the course of getting this product replaced and having the $20 mail-in rebate voided because of the way APC chose to make the replacement (with an alternate product that didn't have a mail-in rebate offer). (with an alternate product that didn't have a mail-in rebate offer).

So, I wrote all this up and stuck it in a letter to a half-dozen newsgroups. I got a few letters from folks thanking me for warning them about this funky company. That was the end of it, for me. I have avoided APC, while purchasing a dozen or so UPS units for my employers, ever since. Count me as one customer in the 96% who never go back.

But my opinion of APC didn't end there. I got an email from a guy from Holland, about a month later. He said he'd read my article in a Dutch newspaper and thought I might get a kick out of the translation. I gave him my address and he sent me a copy. It was an article about the "new" communication link between customers. My article was included as an example of how a single customer could influence hundreds of potential customers, all over the world. There were a half-dozen articles, all in the same vein as mine, which did a half-dozen companies no good at all, I'm sure. Who knows how many Dutch computer users saw my article about APC? How many read it, worldwide?

It still hasn't ended. I get an email, about once every few months, from someone thanking me for the APC warning. So, what kind of statistics can you derive from all this? If only one in a hundred customers complain to a company when they find their hard-earned money was wasted on a product, how many people do you figure write someone about an article they've read, like the one I wrote? One in a thousand? One in ten thousand? This is the kind of word-of-mouth with which advertising can never compete.

I'm not the only guy to write this kind of "review," either. I see detailed product/company comments on a regular basis and they hold a lot of weight for me, too. In fact, I'd value a direct customer experience opinion over a professional reviewer's opinion by an order of magnitude. Anyone who didn't have to, personally, pay for the product or service isn't really a customer.

The weirdest aspect of my personal opinion of APC is that the replacement that I, finally, received from the company has been working, flawlessly, for all these years. It's practically an invisible part of my office. Every a year or so, when I'm vacuuming the office, I jar the desk hard enough to dislodge the UPS from its outlet and I get to hear it beep and flash its LED's, letting me know it's still working. A couple of times in that period, Midwestern lightning storms have shut down our neighborhood's power and the UPS is the only electrical thing working in the house for that period. Still, I can't notice the little beige box next to my computer without remember that APC cheated me out of $40, by my calculations. They substituted a cheaper UPS than the one I'd originally purchased and they weaseled their way out of paying a $20 rebate. I guess it's a principle issue. I paid too much for what I got and I didn't get what I intended to buy. So, in my mind, APC may always be a dishonest company.

So why do companies insist on writing hostile customer policies? Why do they keep trying to piss us off, when we're actually doing them a favor by taking the time to complain? My guess is it's because there's no glory in providing decent customer service. Nobody gets to put a glossy high-tech advertising campaign on a resume. Nobody gets to present a dog-and-phony show, with overheads and spreadsheets showing how much money was saved by cutting X feature/function/cost out of Z product, to pack of detached executives who have absolutely no connection to or interest in whoever might be foolish enough to buy Z product. Nobody collects brownie points for cutting the budget from Customer Service and adding to the pile of dollars available for executive bonuses. Providing actual customer service has absolutely no sex appeal. Talking about it is all anyone really wants to do. Doing it requires too much thought and effort.

June 2000

#41 Why Oh Why Did You Go Away? (2000)

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Thomas W. Day

I

was recently offered the opportunity to try out a new telephone service. The old one, U S West, was expensive, featureless, and about as friendly as Doc Holiday a day away from his last glass of whiskey. The new one, Media One, is very personal, easy to contact, and actually sent an installation guy to do the changeover at a time that didn't require me to take a day off work. Imagine that! The new service gave me every feature available from my old telephone company for the same money as adding a single one of these features would have cost from U S West. To get every feature from Caller ID to Auto-Redial to an improved Internet connection to VoiceMail, I spent about $4 over the old basic phone bill. I doubt that I'll use half of the stuff that's on my phone now, but 21 features for $4 seemed like a reasonable deal. Add all that to getting to speak to a real person when I call for information and a the very informative and conscientious guys who have been out to do installation work on two different systems, and it was a no-brainer for me. Goodbye U S West!

A solid month after I dumped U S West, I got a form letter from their Customer Service Center. "We want to understand why you no longer have U S West service. If this service was terminate without your knowledge . . . If you did choose to leave U S West, and your decision was based on a problem you may have experienced, we would like the opportunity to regain your trust and your business . . . We also recognize there's competition for your business. We welcome this competition . . . Sometimes customers switch companies for what may seem like a 'better deal' at the time, only to be disappointed later . . . You are important to us. Please call . . . After a century of service, your satisfaction is still our number one goal." And so on.

What the heck? I had a bad day at work. I needed a good laugh, so I called their 800 number.

First attempt, "We're sorry. This number has been disconnected. Please check your number and try again. If you believe . . ." I hit redial and got through the second time.

"Welcome to U S West . . . (yada yada yada "you can go to our website" etc.) In order to assist you, you will be required to enter your telephone number . . . " Forty-seven pointless key entries later, I remembered why I hated calling U S West for anything.

Once, during a thunderstorm when my phone line went dead, I called them from a payphone to get the repair process started. Since I wasn't calling from the phone number I was trying to get repaired, the freakin' system refused to accept my repair request information. I discovered that, if you ignore the automaton voice long enough, you'll get a "customer service person." Soaked to the bone and on my last quarter, I got the same routine from the live person (if he really was living) that the brainless automated system had given me. "Sorry sir, but we can not take a repair order for a residential telephone from a number not listed to that customer." WHAAATTTT? If it was freakin' working, why would I call to get it fixed? And so on.

Back to my hopeless attempt at providing U S West with a bit of "why I'm leavin' you" feedback. I remembered that, if you ignore all of the automated instructions and pretend you still use a rotary phone, there are one or two living voices that may lower themselves to answering a customer service call. "All our representatives are busy right now. Your expected wait will be approximately 18 minutes." Intermittently, I am informed that the robot voice is "sorry you're having to wait so long. Your call is very important to us." (Who is "us?" The Borg? Obviously, no human cares about how long I'm waiting.)

Fortunately, I have a hands-free phone and it's an 800 number and I'd rather tie up my phone line than take a chance on getting an incoming call from a telephone solicitor or some jerk who wants to shame my wife into paying her credit card bill. So I left the phone on hold and went off to start dinner.

Twenty-four minutes later, pass through my office and a voice is calling. "Is anyone there? Hello?" I talk to Leo. Leo is a very nice person who has not been told that he would be getting this sort of call. But he made a stab at shipping my call to another department, the Product Service Center.

I'm back on hold with a new automated voice. This time the Borg Lady doesn't bother to tell me how long I'll be on hold.

I'm guessing for the entertainment value, the Product Service Center Borg Lady quotes U S West's prices for all of the new features I'm now getting from Media One. Adding them up in my head, it sounds to me like my $4 worth of Media One features will cost about $60 from U S West. What can a Product Service Center person do to knock $60 down to $4? This ought to be interesting. Still, the Borg Lady chants, intermittently, about how important I am to U S West and that someone will answer my call if I live long enough.

I smell food burning.

Twenty-eight minutes into this game, I decide it's less entertaining that I'd hoped it might be. I want to finish dinner, watch a basketball game, and write this Rat Rant. I will never know what U S West would say to bring me back "home." I bet the Product Service Center person would have told me how they'd like to be as customer friendly as Media One, but they just don't have the money, technical capacity, or the management willpower. Sort of like Lilly Tomlin's old "because we're the telephone company," except they don't have anything to threaten me with because I'm no longer their customer.

I wonder how long it will be before Media One starts hiring U S West's out-of-work executives and it becomes impossible to remember why I bothered to change telephone companies? I'm going to ship this one and put it in the archives so we can accurately measure the "time to mediocrity."

April 2000

#39 Modern Economics (2000)

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Thomas W. Day

In the 1950's overstuffed corporations, managers were made to be the factory floor's enemy by design.  Any manager who was appreciated by the people he managed was denigrated as being "soft" and inefficient.  Nothing changed much through the 60s, except that we began giving up industries to Japan because management was so busy, patting itself on the butt for its lousy performance, that the ruling class didn't notice the water circling in the economic toilet. 

In the 1970s, bad management was usually blamed on the fact that technical folks who were being promoted to managers were not "people-people."  The good ole' boys laying this blame were non-technical managers who were not particularly skilled in any activity, except office politics which is only marginally a people-skill.  Entrenched management certainly wasn't skilled in personal relations, or any people-oriented activity other than sucking up to the next level of power.  Still, technical skills were generally turned into management liabilities and the powers that be kept on being what they'd always been. 

By the early 80s, management began to notice that the country had been in a recession for nearly a decade.  (That's the kind of mental acuity that comes with good breeding and higher education.)  Not that noticing the disaster caused them to reconsider their basic anti-labor assumptions or to accept any part of the blame for the recession, but it was a start.  Mostly, the nation's awful execs blamed business failures on "inefficient American labor" and went hunting for cheaper labor overseas.  That seemed like a successful tactic until Japan moved some of its manufacturing here and discovered that American labor was equal to any, including Japanese.  So equal that several Japanese manufacturers produced the best Japanese products in the U.S. 

Japanese managers walked around so much that they sometimes got in the way of the production line.  And the Japanese managers were very technical, mangling another MBA myth.

The American management solution was to focus attention on increasing middle management productivity.  Since upper management can rarely spell "productivity," this was a clever tactic.  The answer to our shriveling economy turned out to be painfully simple.  It was especially painful for the people who did the actual work.  What happened was that middle management became a two-for-the-price-of-one position.  Once again, middle managers were selected for their technical skills but there was also a minimal effort made to encourage development in the person-to-person aspects of management.  Labor managed to cut its own throat, politically, so that management was able to crank up productivity demands while reducing actual labor costs.  More than a decade of Republican-owned law-making helped push this management "advancement" along pretty brutally, too. 

Now, we're reaping the rewards of having let management pay itself in seven-figure denominations for four-figure competence.  Even the rich can only vote themselves rich for so long before the house of stocks and bonds collapses in a light breeze.  I keep hearing about the stalling economic recovery and Wall Street's confusion regarding why that recovery is moving so slowly (if you can find signs that it's moving at all).  There's nothing confusing about any of this.  The spread between the rich and the rest of us is measured in light-years.  If the government were to stop propping up the few profitable industries that still attempt to produce real products, the economy would fall flat on its face. 

April 2000

#38 The True Meaning of Business Dress Codes (2000)

All Rights Reserved © 2000 Thomas W. Day

"Back of tranquility lies always conquered unhappiness." -- David Grayson

Unfortunately, this subject can be explored in about a paragraph. If I did that, I'd be stuck looking for another topic to tack on to the end of this Rat, so be forewarned; I'm going to waste some space here pretending this is a more complex issue than it really is.

One of the Twin Cities papers had a big business section spread, a few days ago, describing a half dozen of the area's newest instant millionaires. This group of guys posed for their fifteen minutes of business news fame in jeans and tee-shirts, rumpled khakis and an NBA-logo sweatshirt, or bicycling shorts and a short sleeved sport shirt with a pocket protector stuffed with pens (probably stolen from the company's office supplies). Not a suit among the bunch. Their message is; successful people wear comfortable clothes.

The same day, I listened to an NPR report about the infestation of the casual workplace and the economic problems that was creating for the Fifth Avenue boys and girls who design and sell $1,000 suits to executives and wannabes. The suit builders are trying to drum up interest in "dress up Thursday." The bulk of their market is brain-dead Fortune 500 executives and they hope to convince these hopeless morons that "productivity" can be improved by choking off the blood to the brain and making workers wear clothes that would overdress a Texan spending Xmas in Nome, Alaska. Of course, it makes sense that the suit pushers would be pushing suits. It doesn't make sense that anyone could believe that discomfort increases productivity.

At the root, dress codes are about power. There's nothing more to it, for 99% of office workers who are forced to waste precious resources on antiquated clothing styles, because of company dress codes, in order to keep marginal jobs. For the 1% who actually face live customers and are pretending to "show respect" for those customers by wearing overpriced clown suits, this discussion could be out-to-lunch.

But for the majority, when how we look is more important than how we do our jobs, we're not paying attention to important employment clues. In reality, dress codes are based on a lack of respect. (I could have said that, right at the top of this essay and saved you several minutes of valuable reading time.) That's what they were about in high school and that's still what they're about. To those of us forced to wear tourniquets around our necks, it's pretty clear that being asked to kill brain cells is not an issue of respect or productivity. It's about fear.

Like cops and politicians who couldn't earn respect under any situation, executives who instigate dress codes are mistaking fear for respect. It's possible that they don't care about the fine points that separate one emotion from the other. The existence of an employee dress code is a symbol of disrespect for the employees' skills and value to the company. A dress code screams, "a significant portion of your salary is being paid to entertain me, your boss. I want you to wear a clown suit and you're gonna do it because you don't have any other options."

With all the noise generated in the media, regarding the country's labor shortage and the difficulty in finding people to fill skilled positions, you'd think that creating employee-hostile policies would be a foolish move. Apparently, there are a lot more of us to go around than employers would like to admit, because there is no shortage of awful employers or company policies that create miserable workplaces.

As an employee, being in a position where geek clothes are required ought to be a wake-up call. When you are in demand, nobody talks about what you look like or what you're wearing. You won't have to deal with this kind of crap, when finding people who do what you do is more difficult than poking a criminal in the eye while standing in the middle of the U.S. House of Representatives. Don't kid yourself about this. If what you wear is more important than what you do, you are highly disposable.

Taking the-glass-is-full perspective, employee-hostile company policies are management's way of pointing out a precarious personal employment situation. As Andy Grove (Intel's ex-CEO) tried to tell us a while back, our employer is one of the customers in our own personal business. When that customer is telling us that our product is insignificant, we ought to be paying attention. Being reasonably free Americans, we have lots of options. We can attempt to increase our value to our employer or increase our employer's awareness of our particular skills to the employer's business. We can find a new employer who recognizes our unique contributions and value. Or, we can go back to the drawing board and develop new products (skills) to attract new customers (employers).

What we shouldn't do is accept an employer's disrespect for a few extra bucks and a moment's imagined security. Bobby Dylan once pointed out that "he not busy being born is busy dying." That goes for your career, too. And dead folks don't get much respect.

April 2000