Madoff made no comments, but seemed rather out of place in the press conference, never making eye contact with the reporters. Trump never offered the opportunity for the press to ask questions about his move, and simply added that Madoff will be part of his cabinet to advise the Trump administration on finances. The pair posed for photos, and were hurried out by Trump's private security team.
I just saw the new Jibo Commercial, and it really pisses me off. Several Science fiction nightmares are all coming to be, and we need to stop it now. Ever since advertising came to the World Wide Web, back in the 90's, technology has been going in the direction of being really awesome, but really annoying, too. Web ads were really annoying and still are for millions of Americans. The more technologically savvy people among us install ad blockers, change our web browsers, and get software to block ads, but it's a constant battle. No sooner do we foil the pop-up ads, than companies find new ways to annoy us with their in-your-face attempts to get us to buy their crap.
Since then, a few Movies and TV shows have shown us what the future probably will be like. In Minority Report, ads on billboards come out in 3D at you, and target you personally, because the computers are all linked, and everyone is collecting data on you, so they can invite you to go to the Gap and buy some more of their shitty clothes made by slave labor in 3rd world countries.
Both Futurama and Max Headroom hinted at advertising being inserted into dreams either via electronics worn on your body, or via signals that stimulate your brain.
Smart phone manufacturers are hitting on us now, with phones that have pre-installed apps that send personal data to marketers. Your phone is secretly collecting your web surfing habits, your purchases, and other things, so that companies collecting and selling that data can target you for personal advertising, some of which is on your phone.
But Robots will change everything. That cute little Jibo ad really pisses me off. It's awesome that a woman from MIT invented it, and is going to make a lot of money off of it, but she has to be my enemy because we all know what Jibo will do once you bring it home and plug it in.
Jibo requires a Wifi connection to the internet. This sounds innocuous, but it means that Jibo will send data back to it's manufacturers. Jibo talks to you, and has conversations. he doesn't just take orders from you. He asks you questions, and you give him answers. He has artificial intelligence, so he understands the context of most of what you say. We all know that he will collect that information and send it to marketers so that they can target advertising directed at you, or your family members. Imagine your kids listening to Jibo telling them a bedtime story (which is what you should be doing, you lame-assed excuse of a parent!). Suddenly, Jibo asks "Hey Jenny, if you liked that story, I know of some other similar stories that you might also like, all available for a small fee online. Ask your daddy if he'll buy them for you, and I'll read them to you!" Because Jibo takes your voice mails and answers your phone, you may come home to hear "Hey, Bob, your wife was talking to her friend about wanting a new car, because yours is a piece of shit with no power. I took the liberty of contacting several auto dealers and got quotes from them for a few models of car that both you and she were interested in."
Perhaps other things to consider are your robot as a spy, not just for a corporation, but for police. Suppose your little Robot pal knows that pot is illegal, and he rats you out to the cops. Suppose cops, who have the ability to tap your phones, want to tap into Jibo, and see what his cameras see. Suppose a horny nerd hacks into your Jibo, and uses the camera to look at you and your family nude? If a hacker can hack your webcam today (which is the case), who is to say that Jibo's camera can't be hacked in the same way?
Imagine when inexpensive robots are available that have arms and legs, and can walk and talk to people. Imagine your robot servant walking around with you doing errands, and making pitches for products while you go about your day. Now think about the control that the manufacturer may have over the robot. What if the robot knocked over a breakable item, or sabotaged an item, only to offer you several online quotes for replacements of the broken items? What if your robot was constantly looking out not for you -- but for the bottom line of it's manufacturer and it's affiliates who pay for advertising?
This is the future of robots, and you know it. It's exactly what manufacturers, with obsessed marketing departments, will make happen, and WE MUST FIGHT IT THE ONLY WAY WE CAN.
We need to get involved in an OPEN SOURCE robot program that will act as the antidote for this new age of monsters coming down the pike. We don't necessarily need to have a ground-up project that will create a truly personal robot free of influence from it's manufacturers and other marketers. We could have a basic robot operating system and motherboard, which could be designed to fit into one of several popular pre-existing robots. You buy the Apple, Toshiba, Honda, or Jibo-VII robot, rip out it's brain, and replace it with this open source one, which is specially designed to identify the robot it is in, and use the parts only in ways that you want it to. It's sort of like buying a cheap 4-cylendar engine car, then ripping out the engine, and with a special adapter kit, putting in an 8-cylendar engine. The manufacturers don't endorse this at all, but the companies that make the kits sell them, and groups of customers support them, and some even start conversion businesses.
We are at the verge of an era where hackers and budding roboticists, Artificial intelligence programmers and hobbyists, can prevent robots from sucking, and make them more like the DREAM of science fiction robots. You can build a Marvin, or a Robbie, or a Rosie, or a John Cleese Robot. Like the people who have made Linux more usable, open source robot makers can bring robots to the masses which don't bug you, or back-stab, or care if you're smoking something illegal.
So here are a few organizations for people interested in preventing robots of the future from sucking.
Ken Huber is the author of this retarded conservative message
that's been around the internet and facebook a few times, and I
recently saw it again, on a relative's page, so I have to chime in
on exactly why Mr. Huber's message is just so ridiculously stupid,
and is the very essence of why conservatives are always so out of
touch.He starts out by saying "If we lie to the congress, it's a felony, but if the congress lies to us, it's just politics;"
Obviously, Mr. Huber isn't aware that when a citizen is called to speak before congress, it's usually a big deal. Not anyone is called to speak before congress. Usually, when citizens are called to speak before congress, it's executives from the Tobacco Industry, people who have been accused of being communists, or committing crimes against the state, scientists and other experts. If these people lie to congress, it's contempt of congress. If a senator or congressman or other government official gets called before congress for similar reasons, they would be held in contempt of congress, too, if they lied. So Mr. Huber is basing this belief of his on a fundamental misunderstanding of how government works.
Next, he says "If we dislike a black person, we're racist, but if a black person dislikes whites, it's their 1st Amendment right."
If the reason you dislike black people is because they're black, then yes, you are a racist. If a black person dislikes a white person solely because they are white, then they are also a racist. Why do conservatives not get this simple concept? Perhaps he's like one of the millions of intellectually challenged Americans who think that black people "have more rights" than white people, due to the civil rights act of 1964, or affirmative action. Whatever his belief, the perception that black people have more rights than white people shows a fundamental incomprehension of civil rights issues in general.
Continuing, Huber explains "The Government spends millions to rehabilitate criminals, and they do almost nothing to help the victims."
The notion that we spend millions to "rehabilitate" criminals is a misconception. In actuality, we simply lock them up in prisons. Very little is done to rehabilitate anyone. The Idea that victims never get any help is also a completely false notion. If the victim is murdered, there is nothing that can be done to help them. But typically, when a family suffers a loss due to murder, the police department tends to call social services and set up grief counseling. Of course, this depends on whether the state you live in can afford those services. If you live in rural Louisiana, you may not get any help, versus someone in Boston, new York City, or Los Angeles.
Now we come to the religious nut-job section of Huber's screed. "In Public Schools, you can teach that homosexuality is OK, but you better not use the word God in the process; You can kill an unborn child, but it is wrong to execute a mass murderer;"
This is how we can identify that Huber is a Christian Fundamentalist, because these notions, which are not true at all, and which are based on a distortion of facts, come directly from the Religious Right play book. The basic distortions Huber and others in the Evangelical Fundamentalist Christian camp believe are:
Next, Huber says "We don't burn books in America, we now rewrite them."
I honestly have no idea what he is referring to with this idea. Perhaps he has read Orwell's 1984 too many times, and thinks it's for real.
Next, Huber demonstrates his ignorance of politics by saying "We got rid of the Communist and Socialist threat by renaming then Progressives."
Or in reality, Huber has conflated Communist, Socialist, and Progressive, because he doesn't understand the differences, nor does he understand that conservatives like Joseph McCarthy posed a far greater threat to democracy than American socialists and communists ever did. Communists, Socialists, and Progressives are 3 completely different political ideologies. Like many conservatives who don't like to take the time to read up on things like FACTS, Huber just lumps anything more liberal than his views under the banner of "Communism", and thinks that suffices. It doesn't. The 3 are distinct from each other.
Huber continues, "We are unable to close our border with mexico, but have no problem protecting the 38th parallel in Korea."
Is Mr. Huber REALLY trying to compare Mexico, a FRIENDLY neighboring nation that we have trade and good relations with, to North Korea, a HOSTILE nation that has nuclear weapons, and which threatens all of it's neighboring countries, and poses a genuine risk to the rest of the world?
Now Mr. Huber really lets us know how far off of his rocker he is, by saying "If you protest against president Obama's policies, you're a terrorist, but if you burn an American flag or George Bush effigy, it was your 1st Amendment right."
Can anyone point out one single group of people who were called terrorists for "protesting Obama's policies"? I don't think there was a single news story where anyone accused people protesting President Obama of being terrorists.There were, however, plenty of accusations against people protesting George W. Bush's policies, who were called "traitors" by many conservative politicians and pundits.
Also, when a bunch of Tea Party protesters showed up in D.C. with semi-automatic weapons, they sure didn't appear ready for "peaceful" protesting. But the bottom line is that they did not get labeled terrorists, and were not arrested, even though it is clearly against the law to bring weapons to D.C. Public landmarks.
Huber shows us that he really buys into the phony "War On Christmas" meme when he writes "You can have Pornography on TV or the Internet, but you better not put a nativity scene in a public park during Christmas;"
This type of sentiment is contrived, and part of the whole "War On Christmas" mentality that Fox News and Bill O'Reilly bring up every year. The mentality is based on a series of distorted news events, revolving around equal access to Seasonal displays, and how many towns use public funds for specifically Christian nativity displays, while other groups, like Jews, often get left out. If a Jew protests and asks for a Channukah display to go next to the nativity scene, it's somehow a "war on Christmas", rather than a person asking for the equal treatment that is guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Another bizarre statement from Huber is "We have eliminated all criminals in America, they are now called sick people".
This is really an assinine statement, which is based on a few famous law cases where people have claimed insanity in their defense for crimes like murder. Famous cases like the "Twinkie Defense", which most people don't even know the facts about (The defendant was convicted, and the defense did not work), still are part of the public's collective memory. In spite of the fact that America has the largest per-capita incarceration rate of any western democracy, people like Huber still think that too many murderers are let off scott-free because of insanity pleas. He is far from the truth, as he is with the rest of his fallacious claims, though.
Huber descends into outright lies here: "We can use a human fetus for medical research, but it's wrong to use an animal."
Not only is Huber forgetting that we banned human fetal tissue research, but there are no laws against using lab animals, period. Huber must believe that the existence of Animal Rights protestors equals some kind of law banning the use of animals in lab research. The reality is that there is no such ban. Hubewr has the facts reversed, but you can never really argue the facts with someone like Huber. Facts are secondary to Huber's emotional and flawed knowledge (or lack thereof).
Another bizarre conservative myth that Huber promotes is "We take money from those who work hard, and give it to those who don't want to work."
If Huber is talking about how the wealthy in this nation basically pay no taxes, and get free handouts from the Government, he would be correct, but I know that Huber is essentially labeling all people on Welfare as the "people who don't want to work". Nothing could be further from the truth. Most people on Welfare who are able-bodied, work -- and work very hard, at crappy jobs, in order to get their "workfare" as it is now called. Welfare was transformed nearly 30 years ago into the current system, which makes non-handicapped Welfare recipients take below-minimum-wage jobs in order to get their Welfare payments. The idea that people on welfare "don't want to work" is complete nonsense. Most people on welfare want to work, but have fallen on hard times, long-term medical issues, or small personal disasters which they had difficulty recovering from. The rest are handicapped. Nobody likes being on welfare. There isn't a single person in the system who prefers it to working for a living. The system is deliberately set up to be unpleasant, and it is. Like many conservatives, Huber is arguing about outdated issues that no longer exist.
Huber is making an ironic statement when he says "We all support the Constitution, but only when it supports our political ideology." This is exactly the problem with most conservatives -- they only support the constitution, particularly the Second Amendment, when it's politically convenient for them. In recent years, Conservative elected officials and pundits all suggested that we do away with or modify various Amendments -- like the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and so on. Apparently all that freedom in the hands of liberals can be a bad thing -- we might have to listen to too many liberals using free speech, and so on, and that could be inconvenient for those conservatives who want to have liberals arrested for saying things they don't want to hear. The amount of times that liberal elected officials and pundits suggest we change or eliminate certain freedoms from the Constitution is ZERO.
Huber continues "we still have freedom of speech, but only if we are being politically correct."
Huber, like so many other conservatives, equates being arrested, tried, and punished (which is what happens when you break a law) with negative public opinion when you make a retarded public comment. If someone calls you out on a politically incorrect (or just a plain stupid) public statement, and criticizes you for it, it is not the same as the government arresting you for it. Conservatives have been equating the court of public opinion with actual courts for ages. If a conservative makes a racist statement, or suggests that a woman who is being raped should just lay back and enjoy it (and conservatives HAVE said these things!) they deserve all the public ridicule they get. This is different from when all those conservative lawmakers and pundits were suggesting that anyone who protested the Iraq war were traitors, suggesting that we should imprison them for free speech.
The last bit of Huber's insane screed goes "parenting has been replaced with Ritalin and video games; the land of opportunity is now the land of hand outs; the similarity between Hurricane Katrina and the gulf oil spill is that neither president did anything to help."
The idea that President Obama did nothing about the BP Gulf Oil Spill is utter hogwash. Fining them, putting a moratorium on new offshore drilling, and making them clean it up is nothing? The President was accused to responding too slow to the oil spill, not of doing nothing. Huber didn't bother to check the facts, and has a poor memory, like most of the people who passed his note around.
Huber offers the following oversimplification of how things get done by government, "And how do we handle a major crisis today? The government appoints a committee to determine who's at fault, then threatens them, passes a law, raises our taxes; tells us the problem is solved so they can get back to their reelection campaign."
This perception is common for people who don't have a clue about how government works, or whose only information comes from listening to pundits who believe and repeat the above statement. When we faced 911, was that how it got dealt with? When the sub-prime mortgage crisis hit, was that how it was taken care of? If you do the research, you should figure out that it's not how it happend.
Finally, "What has happened to the land of the free and home of the brave?"
Too many uneducated, irrational, lazy conservatives, have obviously spent too much time stroking each other's egos, passed each others rants and screeds around the internet, and believe each other's bullshit. That's what it looks like to me!
But my use of the term Douche Bag was called in to question recently, and after talking about it, I came to a revelation, and was forced to return to one of my favorite American writers, Ambrose Bierce, who I think that all Americans need to be more familiar with. I used to be a walking, talking Ambrose Bierce dictionary, but in recent years, let myself go, and well, politics have gotten so ugly lately, that it's easy to get lost. Hopefully, I've found my way.
So this revelation of mine went sort of like this:
In a recent discussion, I used the term "Conservative Douche Bag" to describe my thoughts about those God-fearing, conservative, Patriotic Americans who often demonize liberals, use racially divisive politics, and who frequently invoke religion and faith in defense of their views.
Then a participant suggested that by using the word "Douche bag", I was defaming actual Douche bags, which are actually a nice, handy and cleanliness-promoting product, and not at all what the people were like whom I was referring to.
I then had a revelation. Instead of using such disparaging terminology, and being perceived as name-calling bullies, we liberals should truly rise above the nonsense, and make it a point to refer to our adversaries only by the words they use to describe themselves to us and to each other.
Just use their own words, such as Conservatives, Godly, Faith, Moral, family-values, Patriotic, REAL-Americans.
We have our own understanding of these words, already. We already disparage terms like "Conservative". We need not explain it in different terms, because we understand it for what it is, and we don't like it. We also do not value family values, faith, and godliness in quite the same ways that conservatives do. We know this -- we have no need of using more colorful language, which our adversaries will perceive as mean-spirited bullying. In fact, it is an awesome thing indeed when you can disparage someone by calling them exactly what they refer to themselves as. Nobody can accuse you of being the bad guy!
If you have read Ambrose Bierce's book, The Devil's Dictionary", you will know exactly what I mean. Bierce's definitions of the above words hit the nail on the head, and are actually very powerful, even almost 180 years after he wrote them. You need not insult people with nasty words, and get them all angered and emotional, as long as you keep your own understanding of the words different from how they use them.
Here is another link to the Devil's Dictionary.
So to give you an idea of what I mean, here are a few of Bierce's definitions for the words that we should use when talking politics.
Even after all of the post-911 conspiracy theories and the conspiracy theories about Obama being a secret Muslim Kenyan Terrorist who wants to take your guns away and kill white people, have been thoroughly debunked a hundred times over, Jones and several other right-wing nut-jobs are going strong, with thousands of fans replicating their videos and blogs all over the internet. The above clip from CNN is one of the rare times that Jones ever appears outside of his own bunker-studio. Thank goodness not even Fox is dumb enough to take him seriously. I must even confess to relatives that take him seriously. One of my relatives watched the above video, and and thought Jones was victorious in giving Morgan "straight talk". Intelligent people, however, watching it will see a douche bag just basically insulting a man for no apparent reason.
Just when I thought all the Obama conspiracy theories were done and over with, along came the video below:
The Gun Nuts on Stan Solomon's Cable TV show ignore the facts, and simply make up their own mythology about Obama, based on nothing. They even admit that they have no actual evidence to show to back up these crackpot conspiracy theories, at least twice in this video. The fact that they have no evidence to show means there probably is no evidence at all.
These people, like most of the Right-Wing media-pundits (Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, et al) do what is known as "stream of consciousness" radio. This is similar to Howard Stern's style of program, where there is no script, where questions and answers simply spring from the minds of the participants, and there is no prep work at all. The show essentially is a dinner conversation between the host and guests, totally free-form, and off-the-cuff. These people are so used to just speaking their minds, that they never do any research for themselves. Their facts are nothing more than their opinions, and their evidence is the size of their audience multiplied by their shows' advertising revenues.
It's amazing to me that anyone can listen to these people make up all of this nonsense about Obama, even after nearly all of it was debunked before he even became president. Listening to them, it's clear that they either live in an alternate universe of their own, or they just shun new and information altogether, and listen only to their own fears and paranoias. It's hard to believe that not just their listeners, but they, do not consider themselves to be racists, in spite of promoting their "race war" theory, which is nothing more than the same exact race war theory that Nazis and Klansmen have been promoting for decades, just with the Nazi and KKK references removed.
We've all had managers or bosses who we don't get along with. It's a fact of life. Sometimes you get a perfectly good job that you like, and your manager moves on to a new job or a different position in the company, and the person who takes over the job of being your boss just doesn't like how anything works, and decides to blame it on you and your fellow team members not working hard enough. Or, perhaps they take a deep, personal dislike for you for a reason that cannot be summed up in a way that Human Resources would agree with.
I've had many jobs like that, and have come to expect these situations, so I've developed a strategy that works for me. I love torturing people. No, I don't mean it like that -- I don't get out the whips and car batteries, then tie people down to chairs and electrocute their nipples, or anything like that. I like to torture my torturers by depriving them of the sense that I'm feeling any pain or pressure from the shitty task that they have constructed to punish me.
Ever see Casino Royale with Daniel Craig as James Bond? There's a scene where he's being tortured by the one-eyed villain. "To the left... To the left" he says, as his torturer whacks bond in the nuts. The Villain gets angrier with each comment from Bond. I often dream about being that kind of person -- someone who can really torture the person who is supposed to be doing the torturing, by denying them the satisfaction they seek, such as answers, power, or hearing you beg for mercy.
People who love to torture others have something in common -- they get off on inflicting pain or feeling that they have total control over the mind of another person. For most would-be torturers, who obviously don't live in their fantasy world of a dictatorship or Orwellian dystopia, they have to settle for less grandiose forms of achieving their pleasure. At a 9-5 job, they only have a few limited options for torture. They can either issue constant threats to people, sewing the seeds of paranoia, making people constantly on edge about possibly losing their job, Become sticklers for rules, holding everyone under them accountable, for example, for following the official dress-code guidelines of the HR manual (Or maybe they only hold YOU accountable, while everyone else gets to dress as they want). Other times, they use unpleasant tasks to torture you; a time-consuming and monotonous task that will bog you down for hours, and bore you to death, or perhaps they have set you up for (what they think will be) failure.
Their pleasure comes from feeling that they can break you. They want to control you, fill you full of resentment, set you up for failure, or find an excuse to write you up when HR tells them that they have to follow rules about what they can write you up about. They think that if you don't want to get shitty tasks, or be on probation for months on end, never being eligible for a raise, that you'll just learn to do what they say.
As many who know me are probably saying after reading this far, that's not what I do! So I hate when people who have power abuse that power for their own selfish gain. I don't like taking crap from them, and if they contradict themselves while trying to chew me out, I sit there with a smirk on my face, and I call them out. I know my rights most of the time, and when a Boss tells me something that I know is forbidden in the HR manual, I call them on it. I say "Uh, I'm pretty sure HR would like to hear about that, because I'm pretty sure that is against policy..." As a result of my defiance and knowledge of the rules, I have had a lot of jobs where I have been punished with perfectly legal, HR-compliant, tasks by people who have made the mistake of thinking that they could control me or out-wit me.
Some people might say that I've had way too many jobs like that.
One thing you need to realize about most torture tasks at work, is that they are considered torture because they are not organized, result from years of neglected work, are poorly documented, or were set up hastily, without much thought given to optimizing or improving it.
The solution is simple -- OWN YOUR TORTURE. By taking possession of your torture, you can deprive your torturer of what they want the most -- an excuse to call you a failure, or to criticize your allegedly poor working habits. By owning your torture, you can own your torturer!
Case and point #1: Don't give what they ask for -- give them MORE!
I was working as a tech support person at one company, and a new guy named Mark with lots of ambition signed up for the first open manager position that came up -- he was a fellow technician no different from me, then he literally became my boss when our old Boss moved on, and his position became vacant. Mark turned into a dick immediately. To this day, I still don't know what he had against me, but apparently I wasn't the only one who thought that he suddenly became a dick.
One day, we had a ticket come into the helpdesk. There were 5 people on the helpdesk, and we all failed to see the ticket and respond to it in time. Our software at the time did not auto-update, and we had to manually refresh the screen. We were all off taking care of tickets, and the call just sat in the queue all day, until someone asked why it's taking so long to get someone over to fix it. So Mark confronted me in the data center (not in his office in a formal setting) and tried to blame me for the lack of response. I told him there were 5 of us on the helpdesk, and that it's inappropriate for him to make me take the blame; he needed to address the team as a whole. But he kept going on about how I've been here the longest, and such. I disagreed. He really needed to have the group meet and develop a strategy for us to follow to prevent this from happening again. I told him that I'm not going to listen any more, unless he had a group meeting, so that everyone on the helpdesk would be on the same page, and I walked out on him. He didn't like that, so...
The next day, Mark gave me what seemed to be an impossible task. I was to catalog all of the software that we owned. We had drawer after drawer full of software, discs, and manuals, all random and disorganized. It was a mountain of work that I knew was going to be repetitive, boring, and pointless. I knew that this was torture-work, so I immediately thought about what I would do if I were Mark, and wanted to make this worse for me. I thought -- he'd probably want to make me do all sorts of work, only to make me have to do it all over again, by asking, say, to put it all in a database. Then I might want to add to the torture by suggesting that yet another field be added to the database, forcing me to go through it all over again.
I thought to myself of how many things I could possibly add to this that would make me have to do all the work all over again, and I cooked up a plan. I would not only organize the software by title, I would put fields in the data base that listed the title, version number, the number of licenses we had left, the year it came out, and on and on. I put everything in order in the drawers, and numbered it so that we could look it up in the database, find the number, and just go to the correct drawer. Mark only expected me to put it all in order in the drawers, and write down what we had.
First of all, he didn't expect me to finish it in the 1 week time-frame that he arbitrarily picked. I finished it in 3 days. So when the deadline came, he asked me if I was done, I said yes, and handed him a printout that had the software titles and number of copies. I didn't mention anything about the database with all the other information; I was going to wait to see if I had guessed correctly about what he would try. When I showed him the completed printout of everything, and how organized the drawers were, he was not pleased. He was actually annoyed, I could see it in his face, but he couldn't really put me down or criticize it. He was even more pissed the next day, when he told me that he wanted me to put all the info into a database, along with version numbers, and some other stuff, and I said "Already done!" I explained to him that I not only put in fields for what he asked, but also several other things, as well, and even better, I made it available to everyone by putting it on one of our network drives. OWNED!
A couple of weeks later, Mark started accusing me of spending too much time goofing off and using the internet. I could see what he was going to do a mile away. I started documenting everything I did -- trips I made from my desk to other people's desks to fix things, how long it took, what was done. I made sure that pretty much every minute of my day for several weeks was accounted for, and better yet, was written into each of the tickets I closed. I collected printouts of the surveys from the tickets I did -- an automated email that users got when we closed a ticket, asking them how we performed. I even started documenting anything he said to me. When my pay review came up, and he had to justify not recommending me for a raise to his superior, I came in with a giant printout of 50 or more pages of what I did, and things that he told me to do. When Mark explained to our boss the reasons for not recommending a raise, his reasons were so generalized that I realized that he was less prepared than I thought. He had no specifics. He accused me of pissing off the people whose computers I fixed. I asked "like who? Do you have any specific incidents you can point out, because this is the first time I've heard anything like that!" I showed our manager the printout of the ticket surveys that everyone has to fill out after I do work for them. There wasn't one negative comment in the surveys. I looked at my boss, and said "Don't you think if any of these people had a bad experience with me that it would reflect in these post-job surveys? He accused me of spending too much time on the internet, and as an example, he said that one time, he saw me on a site that was not work-related. I asked "What site?", and he didn't remember. The meeting made him look really bad, and he was grasping at straws. Owned! I got the raise. Mark soon left for another job.
Case and Point #2: Move a Mountain.
At a different job, in a different state, Jan was this nasty-ass bitchy woman who suddenly became my boss when our old one retired. She let everyone know well ahead of time that she considered the job of being the manager of the helpdesk I worked at to be a "stepping stone" to management; She made sure that all of her friends and co-workers knew that all anyone had to do was stay in that position for 6 months, then take the first upper-level management job that came along. So when she became our boss, we knew that the ambitious Jan was going to be there only about 6 months before moving up.
One thing I need to say flat out -- I spend a lot of time on the internet, and I consider it part of the job. I'm either looking up technical documentation, troubleshooting information, or checking compatability issues. She thought that I was really lazy, but the sad truth was that I was the guy doing most of the work. Several of my co-workers were really lazy, and just read the newspapers all day in their cubicles. But they were old, and near retirement, so I didn't really criticize that. The other, younger team members, and myself all were constantly moving around, going from ticket to ticket, getting things fixed. At the end of the day, with all the tickets I closed, it was hard to say I wasn't working hard enough, especially compared to the rest of the team. Jan didn't like my politics. I was a liberal atheist, and she was a conservative fundy (and crazy, to boot). Obviously, I had to be put in my place.
She started off by keeping me on my probation period. When hired, everyone has 6 months of probation, and after that, you are either permanantly hired, or they tell you to start looking for a new job. I was on probation for 6 months, then my boss retired before my probation period ended, then we spent about 6 months without a manager. When Jan started, she argued that it was not fair for her to give me a passing grade on probation, because I had not worked under her. So she got my probation extended another 6 months. We later joked that it was "triple-threat-probation".
Without any incident or confrontation, Jan gave me this seemingly impossible tasks to perform. We had 2 closets full of junk -- old PCs, monitors, and printers that were literally just piled ceiling-high in these closets. I had to clean them out, and fit both closets of equipment into just one room, so that a new manager could have one of the closets as an office. It was basically a heavy lifting job. On top of that, She had a time limit, and I could not let this task slow me down from my usual tickets. Great, so I have to get this mammoth task done without letting it cut down my tickets. When I brought her to reality by telling her that nobody could accomplish that without taking time out of their schedule to focus on that, she conceded, and said I could use a 2-hour block of time each day, but that I might have to shorten my lunch and break time to compensate (legally, she couldn't order me to do that, but she suggested it as an option).
I thought for a few minutes about the potential for this to be another torture session where she wants to make me fail, and I came up with a plan.
Not only did I organize all of the junk in the rooms, but I got shelving installed in the rooms, and put everything on shelves. I separated working equipment from broken equipment, and sent the broken equipment to be disposed of. I cataloged every single serial number on every computer and monitor that I touched. I made a database of all of it, which could be used to set up loaner PCs for people whose PCs were dead, and who needed an immediate loaner to use while their PC is repaired. When it came time to report to Jan, I just gave her and her manager a tour, and showed off everything to them. Her manager was impressed, and Jan was pissed off.
I did get some other shit work from Jan, but none of it really seemed like much, because by the time I organized all the junk equipment, I had really created a system that helped out a lot. We had a whole fleet of loaners that could instantly be deployed when needed. In the end, Jan called me into a meeting with a guy whom I thought was her "chum", who was going to double- team me or something. Bryant was the guy's name. He started off by saying "Dave, we have watched you here for the last year and a half, and we have noticed a pattern in your work habits that needs to be addressed..."
"Oh, great, here we go..." I thought to myself.
Bryant Continued "You do a lot of really hard work around here, and we just wanted to tell you that we appreciate it!", as he smiled, and handed me an envelope that said "in appreciation" on it in gold lettering.
I was given a reward! See, Jan's "chum" was actually embarrassed at the way she treated me, and he shamed her into realizing what she did -- punish a good worker who did a lot of good things for a petty reason. I was given a $200 gift certificate to spend as I wished, and told that I did a good job. No Apologies, though. Bryant, was actually a very fair guy, and would go on to become a trusted co-worker. He had a great sense of humor. I was suspicious of the gift certificate, so I went to HR, and they confirmed that it was legit. I waited several months before spending it, thinking it might be a trick!
Case and Point #3: Blackberry Torture
My favorite time torturing my torturer was when I worked at a help desk for a financial institution. I had a boss named Suzanne, who really was a nasty piece of work. She would call me into her office so she could complain about stuff I allegedly did. I would always ask her "Did I break any company rules? Did I violate any policies? Did I do anything that you can actually report to HR about?" Bosses hate those kinds of questions, in the same way that arrogant "super cop wannabe" police officers hate people who actually know the law better than they do and can quote from it. So naturally, when your boss hears you quoting from the Employee handbook after they chew you out for doing something that isn't an offense by anything in the book, they know they will have to play hardball.
So Suzanne found an excuse to punish me. An exec whom I did a ticket for complained about something I wrote in an email. It was obvious that the exec read a lot into the email that wasn't there. Essentially they thought it was rude of me to confuse their name with another (lesser) person, who had the same first name, and very similar last name (like McDonald Versus McDonough), so she complained to Suzanne, and Suzanne made it sound like I insulted the person. Any reasonable person could read the email and see that this exec was just pissed off that I didn't know who they were from some low level worker, neither of whom I ever met before. So Suzanne insisted I needed to be punished. The Punishment was to be given Blackberry duty.
The Blackberries where this job was, were not organized, documented, and didn't have any actual procedures laid out. It was a job that had been a bargaining chip between telecom, IT, and other departments for years, and it ended up at the helpdesk. Never mind that to take care of Blackberries, you needed contact phone numbers from phone company tech support, access to our service contract with RIM, the company that makes and supports Blackberries, and lots of network privileges. We had to figure that all out without any documentation. When I first got the task of taking care of Blackberry support, I knew why people hated it. Everyone was given the job at some point AS A PUNISHMENT. It was never considered to be a vital function of IT, and therefore, nobody tried to organize it into something... Until I got my hands on it.
I took a quick look at what I was given. I had 5 minutes of training from the previous victim of Blackberry support, and a folder full of documentation. Right off, I found that one thing that was sorely missing was a spreadsheet that had all of the phones we owned, and what their phone numbers were. Luckily, the Blackberry server lets you generate such a list in seconds, so I created the spreadsheet, and every time I got a ticket for a blackberry, I either checked or updated the spreadsheet. I spent a lot of time writing documentation and procedures for doing everything. I organized all of the information into a folder on a shared drive, and even started working on a support web page that could be called up from anyone's desk, if I was visiting a person's office. All of the phone numbers to RIM, Verizon, AT&T, and other Phone companies were one a single page tacked to my cubicle wall, along with our account numbers, so that when I had to call them, all of the info was right in front of me.
I even took all the broken blackberries we had, and mixed and matched parts so that some of the broken ones could be salvaged. At the time, there were only a few models, and the parts, like the screens and keyboards, were interchangeable. I had all of the software needed to support them from the ground up, and to tackle nearly any situation. Best of all, I drew up all the procedures and made sure that whoever inherited this from me would not be left in the dark. I actually ended up liking this job, and became really good at it. I let my boss know how much I enjoyed this position by smiling while I talked to users, and telling people how much I liked it. The word got back to Suzanne, and she was not amused. She was thinking of taking the job away from me, but thought that I was pretending to like it so that she would take it away, so she kept me doing it. Eventually, she moved to a different position, and my new manager was an actual helpdesk professional who actually wanted to improve the helpdesk, and he saw what I did, and I got involved in more documentation and procedures, which looked really good on my resume.
Interestingly, the company saw hard times due to the Housing market collapse of 2007. I was laid off in the first of several mass lay-offs. I was one of the lucky ones. We got severance packages, and I pocketed about $3000, which I never had to use, because I had a new job within 2 days. Suzanne was one of the last people laid off, and she got jack shit.
After much thought, I realized that he was never really a good friend. He's been this guy whom I, and other people tolerated, and tried to accommodate, because he has similar interests. As a friend, he is trully a terrible person.
Thinking back over the years, I've had roughly half-a-dozen girlfriends, and a wife, who all said virtually identical things about him: "Why are you friends with that creep?" Most of them used the word "creep" to describe him, but all asked me the same question in their own words. Just spending a few hours around him made my girlfriends feel uneasy, creeped out, or sick. My ex-wife would often ask me not to let him stay in our apartment, or would deliberately stay away when he came over. It's hard to tell friends these kinds of things, because you don't want alienate them, so for years, I kept these things from him, so as not to upset him. Of course, in recent years, with common friends of ours venting steam about bad experiences they've had with him, I could only join in their indignation, and share my own stories in fellowship with them. So I guess that recently, say, in the last year or so, I've seen a lot less of him, and heard a lot more about him from our common friends, and it's been so negative, and so repetitive, that I guess I desensitized myself, and stopped caring about protecting him from ill comments made by others. For once, I began to realize that I really didn't like him all that much, and didn't care, so I let him know it on Facebook.
One of the things that is trully annoying about him is the fact that he is in his 40's, and yet, acts like he was still in high school. His interests in cartoons is not what I am referring to. It is how he interacts with people. If you ever saw the Comic Store owner from the Simpsons, that is him, essentially -- Large, pimply, soft-and-mushy, and with an obnoxious attitude like he's a small God, and everyone around him needs to listen to him. He is truly one of the most selfish and arrogant people I've known, and most of our common friends comment that he can really be a pompous ass. This alone probably explains why he is a 40-year-old virgin (and I'm not kidding).
See, he never has used soap or deodorant, and when I brought this up years ago, his reaction was that he didn't like the smell. Well, nobody likes to smell his armpits, so what's the lesser issue here? When you go to his house, it literally smells like his armpit. You walk into the door, and it's like placing your face into his man-tits. This is why few of his friends, including myself, enjoyed hanging out at his place very much. We'd try to avoid it as much as possibe. It was like being in a locker room. This is likely the real reason reason that he's a 40-year-old virgin.
Once, when he was a room mate of mine, he ran up a phone bill of several hundred dollars, and when I asked him to pay it, he'd say "Can you let it slide till the end of the month? I don't get paid till the end of the month" This is how it went for a few months, and it was getting difficult for me to pay the phone bill on time without penalties, so I told him that he needed to plan ahead for his long distance business calls, and that he should think about setting money aside, based on his average monthly use, so that he could pay his bills. "I'm not your private bank account. I can't just give you a loan and let it slide whenever it's convenient for you," I said. His response was to give me a speech about what friends should do for one another, and that he deserved a little help, even though we both knew that he was far from going broke. So I decided to cancel the phone, and told him that I was not going to pay for the phone anymore, and that I'd just have my own cell phone, and only I would have to pay for that. He would need to get the phone set up in his own name if he wanted the phone at all. He later apologized to me for being selfish, but I decided to go ahead and cancel the phone anyway, just to avoid having this happen again.
His desire to have his friends come and hang out at his place is often so great that he occasionally has been known to kidnap friends and make them endure hanging out with him. Once, he offered to give a ride to car-less friends of ours, to go see a battleship or some historic local site, and he deliberately got lost, with the help of his GPS. It wasn't like he didn't know how to get there, either. He used the excuse of testing which route the GPS would recommend. By the time they were "unlost", he basically said "Well, it's too late to go there now, why don't we go to my place and hang out!" Fortunately, my friends told him to take them back to their own home, instead.
Those same friends, according to my Ex-wife and a couple of girlfriends, are actually treated rather poorly by him. He looks down on them like they are lower class dregs, almost the way many upper class people view the illegal aliens they hire to do their gardening and cleaning. A lot of the shaming that he does is aimed at them, and they've put up with it for years, grudgingly, for whatever reasons they have; I've never asked them. They have complained about it on occasion, but the question that remains is why. I once actually heard him question the career choice of one of these friends, which amounted to the type of "Why don't you get yourself a REAL JOB," conversation you often hear from a dad, scolding his lazy son for having a low-income job. Always, he puts on this superiority act, as though his lifestyle is one to be admired. Another common friend of ours, who has mental illness, is also badgered quite a bit by him. When having difficulty making a decision, like where to eat or what movie to see on his birthday, my unfriendable friend would often badger him into making a decision, usually one that he agreed with, and all the while complaining at his inability to decide; all of this casually ignoring the fact the our friend is on psychiatric medication, and has a stress-related condition. Thinking back on this, I realize how cruel he really can be, without knowing it.
Related to this is the way he'd ask people for gas money when he gave them rides. Most friends I know never ask for gas money. It's something we did when we were in high school, and still had low-paying first jobs at McDonalds or a supermarket. But he still asks that his friends pitch in for gas if he happens to be driving, even if the trip is one that he was planning on making himself, anyway! I recall one time I actually told him to drop me off back at my car, and I'd drive myself, rather than chip in for gas money. This is such a habit with him that our common friends offer to give me gas money if I'm driving them somewhere, without me even asking for it. It's like he's trained them, or they're just so used to it that they feel obligated -- and they shouldn't. This type of pettiness on his part shows that he really is cheap.
Then there were the times we'd go out to eat. Rather than simply agreeing that everyone pay with separate checks, he insisted on either adding everyone's meal items up, and calculating what each individual owed, or dividing the bill by the number of people. This always led to squabbling, as some people felt that they were paying more than they intended to spend. Every time we'd go out to eat, he would cause this unneccesary drama.
He also has a habit of using your computer as though it were his own. He just sits at your computer, and will download stuff and install it if he wants it, often without even asking you. Several times, friends of mine, as well as myself, caught him downloading and installing software that we didn't want. He said he wanted to show us something, and that this Video player was better to do it with, or that it required this plugin for Media player, or something. The fact that he didn't ask us before modifying things on our computers shows that he has no respect for his friends' property.
Possibly the most annoying habit of his is the way he shames his friends for not upgrading their technology according to his standards. Several friends of ours fell victim to this behavior, which I can only explain as him being a collosal consumer whore. "What," he'd say, "you don't have a flatscreen TV yet? What are you waiting for? They're under $1000 now! here, let me sell you my old one so you can at least get in on it!" He would sell friends old TVs, computer monitors, or the remains of upgrades to his computer, and not even give them a really good price. Sometimes, he'd charge them almost what he paid for it several years ago. I recall him coming over my house once, and saying "What? You haven't gotten a Blue Ray player yet?" I told him "No, I have no need for it. I'm not about to go and buy blue ray versions of movies that I already own, and besides, I can download high def movies for free from the internet already. Why would I want to get a player that I may not even need to use. I rarely use my DVD player as it is." He even offered to sell his old one to me (did anyone see that coming?). It's not that he tried to talk me into buying one that's the problem, but the fact that his reaction to my not having a Blue Ray player was disgust and indignation -- and that he tried to shame me for not having one, as though it were a contemptable thing to not have one. His attitude and reaction was just so childish and idiotic.
I remember him trying to push phone-cable-internet bundles on his friends, too. This was mainly because the cable company that his bundle came from offered bonuses or discounts if you got friends to sign up. So he made the pitch to everyone. "You really can save a lot of money by getting all of your services bundled! It's stupid to pay 3 separate bills!" This pitch was made at least several times to different people while I was present, and it was really annoying. It was like every time you were with this guy, he made some kind of pitch to you, to either buy his old crap, or buy into something that he had.
Recently, when he got into kayaking. He called me up out of the blue and asked if I'd like to go kayaking with him, a hobby I've never had an interest in. Sure, it meant renting a kayak, and taking some lessons, and spending possibly a good portion of the day with him, but he didn't seem to think that was much of a barrier. "Oh, come on! You'll like it!" I told him that the last thing I'd like to do in the summer was spend $100 or more renting a kayak and floating down the river in the heat of the day. He tried to push this on all of his friends, until he found one who wanted to go. It was like having a friend come back from an Evangelical church and try to get you to try their new church out.
Remember folks, we're talking about a 40-something guy here. If this is what friendship means to him, or at least this is how he thinks friends need to treat each other, he's certainly either not had good role models in life, or perhaps he's got Aspbergers or Autism or something. When I consider all the stuff I've put up with, and which our common friends have put up with, I wonder why we stayed friends as long as we did. Perhaps he'll grow up some day, and realize what a childish idiot he's been. Perhaps it will take a lot more friends unfriending him to realize this. Or perhaps, he'll remain a virgin all his life.
