Category Archives: Work

Jobulator

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Pike Place Market Crabs

Pike Place Market Crabs

Anne’s substitute teacher assignment app, Jobulator, has become frustrating. It frequently dings, announcing a new job opportunity, but either when she first opens the app or slightly later, when after she has accepted the assignment, the app responds with “Sorry, there are no jobs available.” Last year, because of Obamacare and the fact that the school district was unwilling to cover the sub’s healthcare, all substitutes were limited to just thirty hours a week and frequently there weren’t enough subs available. This year the district subcontracted out substitute teaching to the temp service, Kelly. Anne will someday get healthcare through them and in the meantime is eligible to work five days a week. Problem solved, except that this year all of the subs from Kelly-covered school districts are able to compete for the plum jobs in our school district. Bottom line, Anne is still only working about as many hours as she was last year. She could always branch out into say, the food services industry, like the crabby subcontractors pictured above, it’s never fun being treated as a resource, instead of as a person, even if your employer says it values its people as its most important resource.

Time to Switch to Decaf

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Time to Switch to Decaf

Time to Switch to Decaf

Not a good week at Spacely Sprockets. We lost a big one. What a downer, because layoffs are now likely. After the bad news, some of the guys went out to the bar to drown their sorrows. Instead, Anne and I went to a retirement seminar. It was being sponsored by UMSL, so I thought that it wouldn’t be just another sales pitch. I was wrong though, but instead of coming right out with a blatant sales pitch, they were more subtle. Instead of financial products or services, they were selling fear and self-doubt. I had already arrived with a belly full of both.

Basically, what tipped me off, other than their insistence that even applying for social security would require their expertise, was the guy sitting next to us. He was a hoot and ran them off script. I hope that he comes back next week, but I doubt that he will. Before the talk began, the speaker told us that this seminar wasn’t designed to elicit personal advice. In the initial Q&A, designed to help set the tone, this one guy asked, “Can my Ex, who’s been divorced three times and married four times and is still married to the last guy still use my social security benefit?” After some hedging, the moderator told him yes, she could still use his social security, but that it wouldn’t affect his benefit. I think that he missed the whole point of the question, which wasn’t financial, but personal.

They opened their talk with two questions:

  • What are the colors of a stop sign?
  • What are the colors of a yield sign?

If you didn’t answer red and white to both questions, then you are showing your age, which was the whole point of this exercise: ‘You are old and decrypted and you need our help.’ Yield signs haven’t been yellow and black for twenty years. Fortunately, for us, Anne got this question right, because she had been working in preschool that day and she remembered that one of the kids had been playing with traffic sign blocks and the yield sign was red and white. I always knew that I had married Mrs. Right, but I hadn’t realize that her middle name was Always.

The other week, Anne had had a dream in which she was 120 years old. In this dream, she was in the kitchen making cookies with God and causes the next big bang. [1] Needless to say, I was not there. I guess that puts her nearer to God than me, but that’s always hard to predict. In a nutshell, this is my tension in this whole retirement thing. As our bread-winner, I want to enjoy our retirement together, while I also want to leave her the financial security that only more money can bring. This impending layoff may act as a forcing function, but I promise, I won’t put my thumb on the scale.

  1. A horrendous cooking accident destroys the known universe, I’m not placing blame here, but I think that Anne gets a pass.

Super Chickens

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This is sort of a Franken-post that has been only crudely stitched together.
There is no telling what sort of creature I will have created until it is finished.
Such is the fate of midweek posts, long on perspiration, but short on inspiration.

Blue Animal Bowl, Ulrica Hydman-Vallien, 1978

Blue Animal Bowl, Ulrica Hydman-Vallien, 1978

We were driving to the Shaw Art Fair on Sunday and NPR’s “TED Radio Hour” was on. Margaret Heffernan was giving her talk, Why it’s time to forget the pecking order at work. She begins her talk by recounting the work of Purdue researcher, William Muir, and his productivity study using chickens. He chose chickens, because it is easy to measure their productivity, you just count the eggs. Muir ran two flocks, one a control flock and the other a flock of super chickens, selected for their superior egg laying capabilities. He ran each flock separately and after six generations, the control flock of regular chickens was doing fine. It had even increased its productivity by 10%, while the flock of super chickens was down to just three survivors, the rest had been pecked to death. Heffernan then draws out the analogies between Muir’s super chickens and our modern human life, where high performers are raised up and rewarded above the rest of us. She concludes that such a model is not as productive as a more collaborative one would be.

I dream of a world where chickens can cross the road,
without having their motives questioned.

The Office Gnome

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White Daisy

White Daisy

I went to yet another retirement celebration today. I really shouldn’t go these affairs. It’s been six month since the last one. Last year’s every old fart must go campaign kind of cleared out the backlog of retirements for a while. Today was the Gas Man’s turn in the barrel and as these coffee and cake, bad jokes and worst speeches affairs go, his was a pretty good one. The jokes were funny and the speeches were blessedly short. So another one bites the dust. Every day at work, I see fewer old faces and more fresh young ones. I am fast approaching the status of the old office gnome. Heck, I’m already there.

At Spacely Sprockets there is only one day a month that you can be hired and only one day a month that you can retire. The bean counters have decreed this to be and so it is, so I don’t know which day will be my last one yet, but I’ve narrowed the month down to one or two. I will likely go out on my birthday month or I might go out on the month after, we’ll see when the time comes. Financially, I think that I’m ready now and I’m still kicking myself for not taking Mr. Spacely up on last year’s free get out of jail early offer. The question is, am I ready psychologically? I’m ready to leave work in my rearview mirror and don’t even plan on looking back, but what to do next is the question?

We’ve got our bicycling together and I’ve got this blog. I know that that doesn’t sound like much, but both are powerful motivators to getting out of the house every day. There is also traveling and fixing up the house and make inane comments on Facebook to all of other retired friends. What else is there in life? The important thing is to get out of the house every day. I’ve read that it takes two years to adjust fully to retirement. I’ll worry about what to do next, when I’m no longer going to work, but until then, I still have to go to work tomorrow.

[High] Stepping [Up | Out]

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Dave's Undersea Forest

Dave’s Undersea Forest

We got our new air conditioner installed yesterday and I love it. The outside unit is almost twice the size of the old machine. The new AC is rated 50% more efficient than the old one was rated and since the old one was old, there was probably closer to a 2-to-1 ratio in relative efficiencies. The whole system is much quieter than the old system too. We should be able to sit outside on our back porch on summer nights and not have to hear it, especially over the noise of our neighbor’s AC. It wasn’t warm enough yesterday to run it, but today it was just barely warm enough. Normally, I wouldn’t have run the old machine. Now I’m feeling too cold. Some people are never satisfied.

Anne’s central hallway painting project is progressing well. It really looks nice. Maybe we should think about selling the house? My parents always put a lot of sweat equity into their homes and when the place was really starting to look nice, it was time to move. I’m just saying that that is the way that I was raised. All that she has left to do is the trim. She estimated that 90% of her time was spent on prep work and only 10% on actual painting. When I asked her about cleanup, she said that that was extra. Included with painting the central hallway, she also cleaned out and painted the central hallway closet. This makes for a very efficient way to pitch stuff. Maybe, she would be interested in painting the front hallway closet too?

My big news is that I have survived the first week of Spacely Sprocket’s annual ‘On the Move’ campaign. More than a few of my colleagues were feeling this week’s exertions today. This campaign is designed to get all of us old and sedentary Spacely Sprocket’s engineers up, out and moving on their feet. The campaign runs eight weeks and I am shooting for the highest bar, 13K steps per day, which is about six miles of walking. Steps are the Franca lira of this campaign, but there are conversion algorithms that allow one to convert almost any physical activity into steps, say bicycling for example. About the only physical activity that is not translatable is sex. There is no entry in the conversion table for sex. I suppose you could wear your pedometer to bed, but that seems a little kinky. Besides how would you attach it? I assume that Mr. Spacely has disallowed sex in his fitness campaign, because unlike most other physical activities that activity actually increases Sprocket’s healthcare cost. After all that’s how babies are made.

I’ll Bite Your Head Off

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Praying Mantis - Objects in the Mirror are Closer than They Appear

Praying Mantis – Objects in the Mirror are Closer than They Appear

Today’s main accomplishment was finally getting the grass cut. This might not sound like much of an accomplishment, considering the postage stamp size of our city lot, but it still took several hours to finish and I was pretty tired afterwards. In addition to the usual mowing and trimming, there was a fair amount of bushwhacking to be done. I hacked at the ivy, honeysuckle and weeds until a large roller trashcan and two paper leaf bags were chock full of branches and there was even more vegetative matter leftover for next time.

Part of the reason for all of this bushwhacking is that our air conditioner broke on Saturday. This is the third summer in a row that it has required repair work. We’ve got a guy coming out to look at it tomorrow morning, so I figured I better cut back the bushes enough so that he could work on the outdoor unit. If the repair cost is not too much then that would be nice. The unit is over twenty years old, and besides the stove that we seldom use now, it is our oldest appliance left. So, we could be looking at buying a new air conditioner this week. Fortunately, it is unusually cool here now, so we have at least a few days before we have to decide and act.

Anne has been working all week around the house, by painting the central hallway. This is a continuation of the living room and dining room painting that we had done earlier this year. This hallway is a small square room, in the back half of the house that has seven doorways in-and-out of it. When I come home from work, with arms full of groceries, it is somewhat comical to watch me try to navigate through her workspace. She is usually on the ladder in the middle of the room. There is a heck of a lot of trim in this little room.

The praying mantis photo is another picture that I have mined from Dave’s old iPhone. It is riding on the driver side mirror of a car. I’m wondering if it is planning on biting the head off of its reflection and then I’m wondering how that would work. Maybe it is afraid that its reflection will bite its head off?