On Work Ethic

 I've known for some time that work ethic makes a rather gigantic difference in performance amongst peers.  In fact, one of the things I'm most proud of is my work ethic, and it's a huge part of the reason I've come as far in my career as I have.

Lately, though, my career has taken a turn in the direction of being in charge of other people, and this has really given me a new perspective on work ethic.  It was one thing to look at peers and think about their work ethic and compare it to my own, criticize it, or try to learn from it, etc.  It's a completely different thing to have to manage people of incredibly varying degrees of work ethic.

Earlier this month I had two employees rotate out of my department, and two new ones rotate in.  Both are doing fairly well, but one has gone above and beyond and in less than a month has shown more ability in this position than many of the employees that have been working in this position for years.  The biggest difference between this new employee and others currently working in my department appears to be her optimism and her work ethic, and it's really what got me started on thinking about this topic.

Realistically, I'm here because I need advise.  I've been reading a lot about managing and attitudes and emotional intelligence, but I'm struggling to translate some of that into what has become a fairly hostile environment with one of my employees.  The biggest issue with this employee is a major lack of work ethic.  When asked to step into a different role with more responsibility instead of coasting along in an easy role that allowed a ton of down time, the employee became bitter.  Now, that bitter attitude has ballooned outward from dislike of me and my decision to a general anger at, well, seemingly everyone, and work is being affected in multiple areas as a result.

I can't take back my decision at this point; not only would that negatively affect those others who were moved, but it would show that I'm willing to cave if someone throws a hissy fit long enough, and that's not the example I want to set so early in my tenure as a supervisor.  However, I can't ignore the fact that this is negatively impacting our department, and also spilling over to other departments at this point.  Discipline is difficult because union employees have certain protections in place, and, long story short, I basically have to witness a pretty egregious activity in order to make any headway there.  The employee in question has been savvy enough to ensure that the only time attitudes get out of hand are with other union employees while no supervisors are present, leaving HR in the role of arbitrating a "he-said-she-said" situation, which rarely ends in the appropriate disciplinary actions.

I'm at a loss.  How can I work to motivate my employees, many of whom really are trying their best, to keep going in the face of adversity?  How can I motivate this particular employee to live up to the standards?  I've tried multiple positive reinforcement tactics with no results.

Taking a quick tangent, no talk on work ethic would be complete without a quick glance at the COVID situation.  I'm unsure how other companies are handling it (though my anecdotal evidence makes it seem similar to my employer), but my employer is being incredibly cautious, which is leading to some poor consequences.  A number of employees are willing to call and say that they are potentially exposed because they know that, best case scenario, they'll get up to two weeks off from work without consequence.  Sure, we ask them to get tested and return to work if negative, but they can drag their feet on the testing and ensure they go to a center where results take 3-5 days, and suddenly they're off for two weeks, anyhow, just "waiting for the ability to test," then waiting for results.  I am fully aware of one employee who outright told other employees that they did this because they had no vacation time left and wanted some time off around the holiday.  However, due to company policy being so stringent about ensuring to the best of our ability that no spread occurs under our roof, there are no repercussions for doing this.

I bring this up because it's a huge smack in the face of work ethic.  The only people I would think would be willing to give up two weeks of pay for the chance to sit at home and "wait" for test results would be people without a good work ethic.  Employees get ample vacation time throughout the year, along with extra personal time given for a number of reasons, which should give them the ability to take as much time as is needed away from work to keep themselves healthy and recharge as needed.  In fact, some of the employees that have been with the company the longest have four to six weeks' worth of vacation, plus those extra personal days that are awarded throughout the year.  Behavior like this basically guarantees that the individuals' career will stagnate, but the employees who are willing to participate in this behavior don't seem to care all that much about their careers advancing any farther than they have already.  That is just a foreign concept to me.

This brings me back to: I need help learning how to increase work ethic in people I work with.  Plenty of management books teach of ways to get people to listen and perform, but I have not come across one yet that discusses ways to increase work ethic, including one called Reviving Work Ethic.  I'm at a loss and it's having a serious effect on business at this point.

Too Much

Ok.  I'm going to admit something embarrassing.

I have completely tuned out to the political drama currently ongoing in our country.

I have no idea who will be my senators or representatives come January.  I'm sure I can look it up (and I likely will at some point), but, right now, I just don't care.

More importantly, I don't want to look it up right now, because I'm seeing just enough of the whole drama around the presidential election that I don't want to wade into those waters just yet.

My life has been too busy to care that much about politics.  My kid is at a really fun, but also really needy age.  I love playing with him, but if he's awake I basically don't have any time to myself because he is constantly needing someone to play with or something to eat or drink.  I try to get him to play by himself sometimes, but I also do enjoy playing with him, and sometimes I just have to get up and play when I don't want to because it means he won't be watching YouTube.  (I've got to come back to the YouTube thing at some point because I'm still not sure how I feel about it.  Just not now.)

On top of that, I've been studying for my CPIM Part II exam.  I took that yesterday finally and actually passed so now I don't have to worry about that anymore.  I'm excited about that mostly because, have you ever tried studying for a grueling exam while you have a two year old constantly banging on the door, or coming in and asking for a lollipop, juice, poptarts, or to touch the ceiling?  (By the way, somewhere along the line I held him up to touch the ceiling when he was younger and it's still one of his favorite things to do.  Ceiling was one of his first words.  It's super cute, but he's getting heavy.)

Also, things have been busy at work.  I've been given a lot more responsibility (19 people to be precise), and so I've been working a lot harder and putting in a little extra time every day to try to keep up with all my work.  I haven't been staying as late as I probably need to most days to actually complete all my work, but I have regularly been staying a half an hour longer than I used to, while also going in a few minutes earlier and often cutting my lunch short or not taking one at all.  I'm exhausted most days by the time I get home from work.

Puppy is also still super hyper.  She's also pretty big now, so super hyper is super fun to deal with.  Seventy pound German Shepherd wants to wrestle and run around the yard at top speed.  I'm still working on training her, too, but I've been inconsistent lately (see above), so I'm not making the progress I would like.  We also had to take a month off because she was spayed and then we spent an agonizing week trying to get her to keep a cone on and stop hurting herself.  $75 and four cones later, she ripped out 95% of her stitches by day four after her surgery (most actually on day three), and we had to start using butterfly bandages and wrapping her up with ace bandages.  She had these dangly dewclaws on her back legs we were expecting to fall off that never did.  We were concerned they would get caught on something and rip off, and apparently it's a fairly standard thing to have them removed on Shepherds.  I feel kind of bad about it, but we went ahead and had them removed during her spay surgery.  Since she could get to her back paw even with the cone on for at least two of the cones we tried, she ripped those stitches off first and, frankly, a month later there's still a small wound on her one leg.  It's almost all healed now, but it's been a lot longer to heal than the other leg that she didn't rip the stitches out of for sure.

The biggest surprise about getting her fixed was I was actually expecting her to be fairly mellow for a few days after the surgery.  The night I brought her home I could tell she was in pain and she didn't want to move much, but by the next morning she was right back to her normal, hyper-as-hell self.  On another note, does anyone know a successful way to keep a dog from absolutely destroying the cones?  One of the ones we tried was attached to her collar and somehow she got her collar up into her mouth and chewed it to pieces.  The others were chewed from the outside in, even though they went a whole head past her head so I have no idea how she got to the edges of them.

This is not the point I wanted to make when I started this post.  I'll have to come back and make that point elsewhere.  Guess I just needed to get some stuff off my chest.  The biggest thing is that I planned my test for the week before I have vacation, so after work today I'm off for a whole week and I'm so excited to have some free time to clean my house and relax.  I've been neglecting my chores (like a lot of other things this week actually) while I have been intensely studying, and I'm looking forward to relaxing in a clean house on Monday and Tuesday.  I'm so relieved to have completed that test and passed it that last night I was almost giddy.

I should have some time this weekend to come back and make my original point, which was about politics.

Google Music

 I've been ranting about this to anyone in ear shot for about a month now, so I figure I should take this global and post it on the net.  Maybe someone will find this post that actually cares.  So far my friends and family just give me funny looks and tell me something to the tune of, "too bad" or "that sucks."

In one of my recent posts I discussed feeling powerless.  Well, this is another instance of that, but at least this time I've got a work around that makes me feel a bit better.

I'm a bit of a tech enthusiast, and for years I've been a fan of Google.  I'm currently typing this on Blogger, which is a Google product.  I have multiple Google Home devices in my house, along with Nest products (though I purchased those before Google purchased Nest), and have had multiple Google phones.  I use Gmail and many other Google web applications to go along with my multiple Chromebooks.

I've known for years that Google is not the most customer friendly company.  Their design is good enough, but it's never great.  Their customer service team is friendly, but not always terribly helpful.  Most importantly, Google has a habit of killing products with little notice and little recourse for those who like those products.  Looking back, I've seen it happen plenty of times.  The RSS service was a big one, and I am sure if I did a quick search (using Google of course), I could find plenty more.

This has always been on my periphery, but I've never paid it much mind before because most of those products were things I didn't use or could replace easily.

That changed recently when Google killed Music, a product I've invested a lot in and relied on more than I realized.  In 2011 I uploaded all my music to Google's then fairly new service.  I was given a lot of free storage as I was an avid Google user at the time and the service was new so they were giving storage away to encourage people to join.  For a time I paid for their premium subscription so I could listen to more than just the music I had in my own storage without adds.  I stopped that after a year or two, but I kept all my music stored on that service, and purchased almost all my new music through that service for the past nine years.

Earlier this summer I received an email from Google saying that they were killing Music, and that I would have to move over to their new service, YouTube Music.  I was annoyed, but I was given a way to port my storage so I figured I'd give it a try at the very least.

First issue I discover: I can no longer listen to my music through my Google Home devices by asking the device to play a specific song or artist.  That's no longer supported now that I'm under YouTube Music unless I'm willing to pay for a premium account.  This is huge for me as, like I mentioned above, I have a few of these speakers throughout my house and I would regularly walk into a room and just ask Google to play me a song or a band or an album while I went about my business playing with the kid or doing chores.  Now, I can listen to a mix or a "channel", but I can't just listen to the album I like or the song I want to hear to get the kid hyped up.  Sure, I can find that song on my phone or other device and cast it to the speaker, but that's a much more manual task than just asking for the song to be played.

Second issue I discover: I can no longer listen to my music without ads.  I was playing an album on my phone, which I purchased, from Google, and after literally every song I was given an ad.  Four songs in and I was so frustrated I shut it off.  What is the point in my owning the music if I can't listen to it without ads?

Third issue: While I was listening to the above album on my phone, I also discovered that, since the album is playing from YouTube, I cannot close my phone's screen and continue listening.  I have to keep the screen on the entire time to listen to the music.  This is a problem if I want to put the phone in my pocket, or just not kill the phone's battery ridiculously fast.

But, hey, I can solve all of this by signing up for a YouTube Music premium subscription!  It's only $9.99 a month, and then I can listen to my own music that I already paid for in all the ways that I've been used to getting for free because I already paid for the music.

Livid does not begin to describe how I felt when I learned this.

At some point I learned an economic principal that basically said that a company cannot easily change a service from being a free service to a charge service without facing serious backlash.  I hope Google faces serious backlash for this.  I can't be the only person that's completely blown away by the lack of foresight about how this would piss off a ton of customers.  I honestly feel like the company doesn't care about me or users like me at all.  I recognize that there are more users who prefer to listen to lots of different music and not really own any of it, otherwise services like Pandora or Spotify wouldn't be as big as they are, but I can't rectify Google killing a service that people willing invested time and money into only to replace it with an inferior one that can only reach the same level of access if those people are willing to pay Google more money.

Long story short, I've completely stopped relying on Google for my music.  I've taken everything I owned and backed it up a few different places, including locally on my phone.  I found and paid for a good music playing app to listen to my music on my phone (because android phones don't come with a music player built in any longer due to Google's Music app, which comes built in but is now defunct).  I've also moved a lot of other things away from Google because I no longer consider any of their products a safe place to store my data.  All of my photos are backed up in multiple places now because I'm concerned at some point my Photos data will just vanish or get pushed behind a pay wall.  I'm looking for a new place to move my blog because Google might just kill Blogger.  I'm trying out new web browsers because Chrome might one day cost me money to use even though it's free for years.

What do you think?  I get why Google would want to monetize, but it feels really crappy to be a customer on the other end of that, and because of the way Google made me feel, I don't really want to invest in their products any longer.  Am I the only person that feels this way?

Reflections on Childhood

 If I have any longtime readers (and I hardly have any so I doubt it), they might recall that something like two years ago my wife and I gave birth to our firstborn son.

Lately, I've been spending lots and lots of time playing with him.  I mean, I've always tried to spend time with him and play with him, but he's finally in that toddler stage where play actually is starting to have some structure and meaning and not just "peek-a-boo" and the like.  He loves being outside, which is wonderful because I do, too, and we've been spending a ton of time outdoors together.

When I was a kid, I grew up on College Hill in Beaver Falls.  The house was fairly sized, if a little small for a family of six, but the yard was the real problem.  The lot was mostly taken up by the house, and the spit of yard we had was only about ten feet across and not really any longer than the house.  There wasn't really room for things like a swing set; in fact, the baby pool we had was about as wide as the yard.  Even though our yard was terribly small, all of my fondest memories from childhood were formed in that yard.

I've written about that yard many times, but I haven't thought about it for years.  Yesterday, I saw my son running around our backyard and wished that he had more space to enjoy himself.  Then, completely unexpectedly, images of my own childhood flashed before my mind's eye and I knew that he could enjoy himself in his yard so long as we let him.  I mean, he's got way more space than I ever had.

Then my mind wandered down memory lane, and melded those memories with dreams and images I have in my mind about what I hope my son's childhood will be like.  I saw myself running around playing with sticks, slaying monsters and battling off hoards of enemies.  That slipped into images of my son running around with a sword in his hand beating back the tides of evil now that I've grown too old to do so myself.  I saw images of my sisters and I pushing each other around in our Little Tykes car as I pushed him around in his own, and dreamed of the day when he'd have siblings of his own to push around in that car.

Then I started to think about all the things he has that I never had, and wondered how that would make him different.  He's already got a swing and a slide and a power wheels tractor.  I never had any of those things growing up.  He's got a couple of dogs to run around with him and keep him company, which was another thing I never had as a kid.  My wife and I have plans to make our backyard a fun play area, and already are looking for the next thing to add out there.

Sometimes I'm concerned I'm spoiling him.  I mean, I did buy him a slide, and though I didn't buy the swing or the power wheels, I did put them together and let him use them whenever he wants.  I do plan on adding to the fun area out back to keep him playing outdoors as much as possible.  My wife's concern is more that she worries over the idea that someone might snatch him up.

What does childhood look like these days?  I guess we'll work on figuring that out together.

Why is This News - A New Segment

 In an effort to produce more content, I'd like to start a new segment called Why is This News.  Thus anytime I hear about something that doesn't deserve media coverage, I have a place to go and add to that white noise, even if it's only to express how nonplussed I am that the topic is even worthy of news coverage.

Today on Why is This New: Nancy Pelosi and the mask debacle.  I recognize that her position in Congress makes her a national public figure, but I fail to see the reason that a local newspaper in Western Pennsylvania thinks it's worth their time to post an article about the congresswoman from California not wearing a mask while visiting a salon in California.  Honestly, I barely get why anyone cares, but I certainly don't understand why anyone outside of California would care.

Here in Western PA, I can't vote for her.  There's a chance that someone I vote for will lead to the Democrats losing the house, and thus Pelosi losing her spot as Speaker, but she'll still be the minority leader unless people in California vote her out.

Mask mandates are not national.  PA has a mask mandate, but I have literally no idea what the regulations are in CA.  I haven't been there in years, and I don't talk to anyone who lives there on a regular enough basis to know what the rules are these days in regards to masks.  Thus, what right do I have to be outraged over something that I know nothing about, and doesn't affect me?

Finally, and most importantly in my opinion, if Congresswoman Pelosi is adult enough to make a decision about whether she wants to wear a mask while getting a haircut (which I've done, and it's actually a giant pain to deal with and one of the reasons I've been avoiding getting another one), and the salon owner is adult enough to decide whether she wants to accept patrons who are not wearing masks, I don't understand how this is anybody else's business.  It's certainly not my business.  If a mask was not worn in California in a salon, the odds of my getting COVID due to that one encounter are zero.  Thus this event has zero bearing on my life, and I'm guessing it has zero bearing on the lives of just about everyone.  So why is this national news?

And, worst of all, why are so many people clicking the articles and paying these so called "news" organizations to read this garbage.  There are more important things we should be focusing on, but we're all so busy being outraged that Nancy Pelosi didn't wear a mask to get her hair cut that we're ignoring everything else.

End rant.

Culture Wars

 In my last post I attempted to come to terms with my frustrations with the seemingly inane culture wars going on currently.  I mentioned I hadn't quite made the point in the way I had intended and that I would return to the topic, and I've spent the past few days continuing to brood over it.  This is a second attempt.

One of the things I've noticed now that I've started paying attention, is that the issue of culture has pervaded more levels of our society than I had originally realized.  I've had a fairly rough year so far, as I'm sure many people have.  My wife and I suffered a heartbreaking setback in mid-March, then literally the very next week the lock downs started.  With the lock downs came the economic consequences, and suddenly I was being required to take mandatory unpaid leave from work multiple times in the second quarter.  Opportunities that I had presented themselves to me fell away, and my attitude at work seemed to fall with them.

It was around this time that I started to notice that my attitude was not the only one adversely affected by recent events.  In fact, I have been taking notes on a series of sweeping culture changes at my place of employment, and none of them have been positive.

I've been listening a lot lately, trying to figure out what the overarching problem(s) is/are.  I've listened to hundreds of hours of podcasts since March, outlining as many different perspectives on the issue of the pandemic as I can bare to listen to.  I've talked to dozens of employees of different levels across my organization.  I've spoken with friends and family.  What I've found is that the culture war going on in the political landscape currently, which I expressed such distaste for in my last post, is likely just a symptom of a much larger culture shift taking place in our society right now.  At the very least, it is interlinked with other concerns that are outside the traditional political landscape.

Life this year has been radically altered by a pandemic.  I am of the belief that many of the changes were long in the making, and that the pandemic has only accelerated them.  Few of them have been positive changes for the vast majority of the people I've listened to.  The biggest change appears to be a gigantic shift in perceived power.  Let me explain the best way I know how: anecdote.

I work for a company that employs roughly three hundred fifty persons at our facility at any time.  The vast majority of these, generally around three hundred, are production employees who work for an hourly wage.  They are represented by a union, and, while this is not the first union shop I've worked for, this is the first time I've paid enough attention to see the animosity that exists between the union employees and the salary employees.  Honestly, it feels as if those who are a part of the union have a different employer than those who are not, even though the same company appears on all the pay stubs.

Now, don't get me wrong, I expect a certain level of adversarial attitudes between employees and their supervisors.  Even I cannot help but disagree with my superiors from time to time and feel put off when I essentially have to do as I'm told even though I don't agree with a particular course of action.  However, this divide goes beyond that.  I am a salary employee, but I have no authority over any of the hourly employees.  There are more salary employees like me who are just there to help facilitate production than there are managers and supervisors, but the hourly employees have a tendency to treat all salary employees as overseers and look upon us with distaste.  It's an attitude I have yet to fully flesh out because I've never been one to look for reasons to hate someone before I even know them.

Lately, though, I've noticed a return of the animosity from the salary employees toward the hourly employees.  You see, as those of us who take a salary were required to take time off without pay, the decision was made to bring hour employees in for overtime and double time to increase production, which only made the jobs of those of us who facilitate that production more difficult.  Blame has not always been placed where it belongs, and I find that many of the support staff like myself are angry with the hourly employees for making extra money while we are making less, all while making extra work for us.

Where does this bring me?  Well, after another opportunity appears to be drying up, I find myself in a position where I, like probably many of the people I work with, feel completely powerless.  This has lead me to complain.  A lot.  I actually hate myself sometimes for how much complaining I do.  I really dislike listening to people complain, but some days literally the only interaction I have with my coworkers is a mutual session of vitriolic bitching.  We're all tired.  We're all overworked.  Most importantly, we're all feeling completely powerless.

Honestly, it's been so negative and my mood has been so adversely effected that I've had to start avoiding people I know are going to complain to me about work.  I've also started trying to avoid conversations that I know will lead to me complaining.  Most importantly, I've tried to start focusing on the things I can control, and forgoing the things I can't as much as possible.

This is the real shift I want to talk about.  I think our entire culture wars are about people who don't feel like they have any control looking for something to make a stand on or complain about.  We're all searching for something we think we have some level of control over, or searching for some feeling of control that we get when we complain or take a side on some political matter or other.  We feel better about ourselves when we can put others down because it feels like we have power over them, and we don't feel like we have power over much these days.

Somewhere in the past week I heard or read "focus on solution, not on the problem."  When people are focusing on the negative and can't see anything but problems, we have a tendency to cast blame and ignore the things we can actually do to solve the problems.  I'm sure everyone here has some experience where all it felt like everyone in a situation was so busy pointing fingers at who was wrong that no one took any time to address how to correct the issue.  It happens every day where I work, and was a regular occurrence at my last company as well.

So, what's the solution? Well, let's stop blaming someone else.  Let's stop worrying about blame at all.  Let's actually look at our lives and find the things in them that we can fix, and start fixing them.  Let's work with others instead of screaming at them.  Pass on best practices so others can learn from what we've already done.  Listen to others when they suggest best practices for something we have no experience with.  Most importantly, we need to stop paying so much attention to the things we have no control over.

Coffee and Beer - A Story on Tolerance

 Well, it's taken me a while, but I'm finally back here.  I'm blaming the kid.  Last night he stayed with his Yaya, and the wife and I didn't go anywhere, so I finally have time to sit and write (well, type).  So, here I am drinking my third cup of coffee and trying to figure out how I want to go about putting this important topic out there.

I have been wanting to write about this for a long...long time.  It's been so long now and I've thought about it so much that it's really become a bit of an albatross around my neck.

Like most of you, I'm tired.  I am terribly tired of the internet these days, and I've been avoiding it.  I don't do the Facebook much at all anymore.  Twitter is barely a second thought.  Linkedin sends me too many notifications in my inbox, otherwise I'd have probably forgotten about it.  I don't know what other socials are out there that the kids are using these days, but I certainly don't want to be a part of them.

Even podcasts have become annoying.  I've switched to listening to podcasts that are not supposed to be political, like parenting podcasts, history podcasts, self help podcasts, etc, but many of them have devolved lately and I don't want to listen anymore.

I can't get a break at work because COVID and the election are basically all anyone wants to talk about.  I'd much rather talk about my son, the family of the person I'm speaking with, etc, but conversations inevitably come back to COVID and Trump.

I'm tired.

I'm tired of listening to arguments.  I've long since given up on participating in them.  It's not a productive use of my time.  When I get on social media or chat with friends, family, and coworkers, I don't want to talk about Black Lives Matter or the efficacy of wearing a mask.  I understand the importance of these topics, but we've reached a point where lines have been drawn and no one is really going to change their minds, so I'm unsure the point in discussing them anymore.

Let me do what I do best and illustrate what I'm trying to say with a quick anecdote.  My wife has not quite given up on politics, so a few weeks ago she posted a fairly innocent comment on Facebook that R and D aren't the only options on the ballot and people who are unsatisfied with the current options presented by the R's and D's might consider researching some of the many third party candidates.  No specific race, or person, was referenced in the post.  The vitriol of the response was staggering.  The first comment was something along the line of "This is not the time to make a political stand.  We have to get Trump out of office."  Which of course led to an argument between that person and another who was an avid supporter of Trump.  Which inevitably led to the original poster blocking both my wife and the person who was arguing with her.  What I don't understand is why.  Both of these people are known to each other and have been friendly with each other in the past, but suddenly the topic of a presidential election comes up and people can't be associated any longer because they disagree with which bumbling old white man will be sitting on the throne our next president?

I've listened to plenty of podcasts about how the nation has always been divided like this.  Whether I agree with that or not, I don't agree that this is acceptable.  Why should something that affects our lives so little make such a big difference to who we can associate with?

Let's start with the thing no one wants to admit: Who is sitting in the oval office has made very little difference in our lives in the past twenty years.  Does anyone really think Al Gore or John Kerry would have done any differently than George W Bush?  Was Obama really that different?  Have things really changed since Trump has been in office?  I can think of maybe two or three major things in my life that the national politics have affected in the last twenty years, and, honestly, I'm unconvinced they would have gone a different way if a different person had been in office.  I know we call it Obama-Care, but if it had been Hillary Clinton in office instead of Obama, we'd have the same program, we'd just call it Hillary-Care or Clinton-Care.  Even if by some miracle John McCain had managed to beat Obama in 2008, I still think we'd have had a major overhaul to the healthcare industry.  The support was there.  The pieces were in place.  It was going to happen.  Same with everything that happened under Bush; the attacks in 2001 would have happened and we would have gone to war and passed all the Patriot Act legislation whether Bush was in office or Gore was in office.

None of these people are any different.  Trump is more repugnant on TV, but that doesn't mean the federal government is running any differently than it was running under Obama, or Bush.  Why do we have to follow his Twitter comments with such fervor?

When I go to the coffee shop, I usually order an Americano.  I like black coffee, and the Americano gives me a good espresso flavor and jolt and has a tendency to be fresher than the drip coffee.  The people I go with get other drinks, but I don't hate them because they ordered a Pink Drink.  I don't make fun of my friends because they order a cappuccino or because they put cream and sugar in their coffee.  When my in-laws come over, I provide cream and sugar for coffee, even though I don't use it.  They don't think I'm a psychopath for drinking my coffee black, and I don't give them a hard time for using the sugar that's usually reserved for baking.

When I go to the bar (well, when I used to go to the bar), I don't yell at people who drink IPA's even though I think they're terrible.  I sip my brown ale or porter and have a good time.  We chat and drink together, even with people who, gasp, order a hard seltzer or a fruit flavored cocktail.  Even though lately it seems like all the restaurants stock is IPA and domestics, I don't get angry with the people who prefer IPA's even though all their demand is the reason I can't get a good brown ale with my meal.

I know politics are a bit more high risk than coffee and beer, but the point remains the same.  We're all humans.  We are all individuals with different ideas, opinions, and tastes.  I have no expectation that we will all "get along" all the time, but do we really need to demonize each other just because we disagree on something?  Voting for one person or another doesn't make anyone a bad person.  Disagreeing with a political movement doesn't make someone evil.  Hating someone who doesn't believe exactly what you believe isn't the path toward anything but pain.

This didn't go exactly how I wanted it to.  I might come back to it later.  In the meantime, maybe stop and think what you're saying before "slamming that lefty" or "sticking it to that racist POS" on Facebook/Twitter/whatever.  Try to remember that there is a human being about to read whatever horrendous comment you're about to post, and maybe consider what it would feel like if someone said something like that to you.  I don't think we need to stop talking about politics, but I do think we need to stop screaming at each other about it.  It's not healthy, and we're all tired of it.

My Take on the Police Debate

OK, so, as most of you know if you've read any of my previous posts, I don't have the most positive opinion on laws and police.  Also, unless you've been living under a rock, you likely know that there's been serious civil unrest following the murder of three black individuals in the past few months by police and a civilian "watch group."  I've been staying quiet, reading, listening, and otherwise trying to come to a cogent understanding of the situation and the feelings surrounding it.

Today, though, I spent a few minutes on Facebook (and I do mean seriously less than five minutes), and I saw probably 30 posts about Black Lives Matter, or all lives matter, or defund the police, or support our cops, blah, blah, blah, and I can't stay quiet any longer.

Here's the thing: all of these movements (with maybe the exception of the original intention behind Black Lives Matter) are designed specifically to divide us and make us argue on social media.  All of us want the same thing: to feel safe in our own home area and to not be harassed, beaten, or killed by any violent person, including a police officer.

I'm a white male.  Relatively young, somewhat attractive, and easy going most of the time.  For those reasons, I have only had to deal with police harassment once in my life.

That's actually a good story to illustrate a few of my points, though, so I think I should tell it now.

I lived a few years in California, and at the end of that adventure, I paid for my sister and mother-in-law to fly out to help us pack and drive back.  My wife and mother-in-law tag-teamed the driving in one of our vehicles, and I drove the other with my sister playing navigator and otherwise being there to keep me awake with conversation as she didn't have her license at the time.  I'm a fairly unlucky person, and so I spend a lot of time worrying about being pulled over for speeding.  Thus, I don't speed much at all, especially in areas that I'm unfamiliar with.  Most especially in Oklahoma because when I was younger my father told me a story of how he almost spent a night in jail after being pulled over for speeding in Oklahoma.

That sets the stage.  Here's the story.  I was driving through Oklahoma with my cruise control set to the speed limit because I was super concerned about getting pulled over.  It was sometime between 8:00 and 10:00 at night, so it was dark in January and traffic was fairly light, but not really late and there were still plenty of other vehicles on the highway.  I was driving a four year old white Ford Focus that hadn't been washed in a while (CA was in a drought and I could get fined for washing my car in my driveway) that was packed full of crap since I was moving cross country.  I mean completely full.  My back seat and hatch space were filled from floor to ceiling.  Suddenly I see flashing lights in my mirrors, and I pulled over.

I sat there with my hands on the wheel, watching the driver side mirror for the officer to approach my window.  Just as I was starting to think he wasn't coming, he appeared in the passenger side window and shined his light directly into my face.  That scared me pretty bad and I jumped, and shook for basically the remainder of the encounter.  I slowly moved my hand to the window control, his flashlight following my movement, and rolled down the passenger window.  He asked me to exit the vehicle, and at this point I didn't even know why I had been pulled over.  I opened my door as he was coming around the front the car, hand on his hip, and I shut the door, leaving my sister alone in the vehicle.  He asked for my license and registration, so I had to ask my sister to get the registration card out of the glove compartment.  She handed it to him shortly after I handed him my license.  He took them both, then asked me to come back to his cruiser.

So I'm loaded into the cruiser, still completely unsure why I've been pulled over.  I know I wasn't speeding, and my car was still running so I could see from the cruiser that I didn't have a tail light out.  I was at a loss.  He started punching my information into his computer, then asked if I knew why he pulled me over.  I could hardly speak, but I mumbled a halfhearted, "No."  He told me, and I quote, "A few miles back I saw your tire drive over the white line on the right side of the road.  It's dangerous to drift into the shoulder; there could be parked cars or other hazards."  I was literally speechless.  He then started asking me where I was coming from, and where I was going, and why I was out so late at night so far from home, and a ton of other questions that, in retrospect, were interrogation questions.  At the time I was too scared to do anything but answer as much as I could even though I was scared out of my mind that I was going to be put in jail for driving over a white line. After interrogating me for about ten to fifteen minutes, I guess he figured there was nothing he could charge me for, so he wrote me a warning for unsafe driving, then opened the door and let me leave his cruiser.  He drove off before I was back in my car.

The entire time I knew that what was happening was illegal.  He had no cause to stop me, no cause to have me exit the vehicle, and absolutely no cause to load me into his cruiser and interrogate me, but I was too scared to speak up because my wife was somewhere ahead of me on the highway expecting to meet me shortly at a motel, and my sister was in the front seat of my car unable to drive herself anywhere if I got arrested.  To top things off, when the officer put his hand on his hip as I was exiting my vehicle, I was a bit afraid for my life.

Once he left, I was angry.  I didn't get his name, or his badge number, or anything, so I couldn't report him.  He only pulled me over to harass me because I had a California plate on my car and it was loaded top to bottom.  He was fishing for drugs or cash and I'm honestly surprised he didn't ask to search my vehicle; maybe the dog sitting on top of the pile in the back seat dissuaded him.  All I know is that the entire encounter was completely unwarranted and I spent twenty minutes in fear for no reason other than a cop who was trying to make some cash by busting me for drugs.

So, what's the point of my story?  First, this may be my only encounter like this with the police, but it's not an uncommon encounter for some people.  There are whole communities that are so heavily policed that the people living there are regularly harassed by the police in ways similar to what happened to me, or worse.  I can only imagine what it must feel like to regularly be stopped by police and have to fear for one's life every time an encounter like that occurs, but there are entire segments of our population that deal with that as just another part of their life.  It's horrendous to think about, and I wanted to share my story because it was a major reason for a large change of my perspectives between 2014 and now, and I hope others can relate to my experience and rethink their positions as well.

More importantly, I wanted to share this story to deal with the defunding the police non-sense that I keep hearing about.  If you didn't get it from the above, or any of my prior posts railing against police brutality, I'm not a fan of bad policing.  That being said, I think defunding the police is a terrible idea.  That cop pulled me over because he thought he could bust me for drugs, maybe get a bit of cash from me in a civil asset forfeiture.  I was extremely lucky because he only wrote me a warning, which I mostly attribute to the fact that I was a young white male and completely scared into absolute compliance.  Most people in that situation would have been written a citation and charged a fine.  Had that happened, I would have had no recourse but to pay the fine, because I certainly would not be driving back to Oklahoma from Pennsylvania a month later to attend court, and the officer knew I was an easy target for a quick buck when he pulled me over.  Plenty of people get pulled over every day because their government mandated stickers aren't showing the right date, or because they have a light out that they didn't know about, or because they were driving slightly faster than some arbitrary speed limit, etc., and they are given absurd citations that they are required to pay on threat of jail time if they don't.  If we "defund" the police, I am certain that this kind of harassment for money will only increase, and the country will see a massive spike in minor citations to pay for the police departments that will not be disbanded.

That doesn't even bring civil asset forfeiture into the equation, which would likely also increase.

Some people say that defunding the police would mean disbanding them, like in Minneapolis, and hiring private police.  In the short term, that would probably be great, but, in a matter of only a few years, those private police will just take the place of the current police and it'll be like nothing changed at all.  That doesn't solve the problem, it just pushes it back a few years.

I think that most people don't want complete anarchy, so completely eliminating police and security isn't really on the table for most people, so I'm not even going to talk about it.

That leaves fixing the situation we have now, not burning it down and thinking that it won't rise back up stronger than before.  To that, I don't by any stretch have all the answers, but I do have some suggestions.

First, police unions need to either be completely disbanded, or they need to have a few teeth removed.  I heard on a podcast last week that 25-30% of all police complaints are filed against 1% of all officers.  If an officer is getting multiple complaints of brutality, harassment, etc., filed against him/her, I don't see any reason that officer should be able to remain on the force.  Unions, though, protect exactly this type of officer.  If those officers were able to be fired, I believe we'd see a significant reduction in police brutality.  Hopefully it would also reduce the likelihood of other officers committing offences as well as they'd fear for losing their jobs.  I have another quick story to illustrate this point.  Someone I worked with in California told me about a cop he knew that was involved in one too many shooting incidents, so they had to pull him from street duty.  He didn't lose his job; he was just put on the chopper.  The guy apparently decided during one chase to open the chopper door, draw his weapon, and shoot at the vehicle from the air, endangering countless innocent civilians as he was firing his weapon into traffic.  He was put at a desk after that, but still didn't lose his job, let alone spend any time in prison for reckless endangerment.  I don't need to tell you that if I randomly fired my gun in Southern California, I'd spend years in prison.

Second, we need to consider that not all police officers need to carry guns.  I don't know exactly how this would look, but I really don't think there's a ton of reason for all officers to carry deadly force.  Police should be taught more how to de-escalate situations to reduce the likelihood of needing to use deadly force.

Third, we need to remove all the excess military gear from local police municipalities.  When I lived across the river from where I live now, my local police department had an armored personnel carrier.  I can't describe how boring my county is adequately in words, but I can say that there is absolutely no reason any police force in this county needs an armored vehicle.  I can't even believe I have to articulate that; that's how absurd it is to me.  Frankly, I don't believe any police force needs any kind of armored vehicle.  We're not in a war zone, and having weapons of war increases the likelihood that those on the force might think we are.

Fourth, we need to eliminate qualified immunity.  People should be able to sue police officers who harass them or injure them unjustly.  Yesterday one of my coworkers told me a story about how she had just picked up her vehicle from a police station as it had been stolen, and on her way home was pulled over because she was driving a stolen vehicle.  I can understand getting pulled over in that case; what I can't understand is that her elderly father was ripped from the vehicle and cuffed after she had shown proof that the vehicle was hers.  When the four responding vehicles finally left and the officer that cuffed her father released him from the handcuffs, he casually remarked that they should, "be glad I didn't shoot you in the face for mouthing off."  She reported him to his superiors, and he had to take, get this, three days off.  Of course, as soon as he came back from his leave, he started following her around and pulled her over, just to yell at her for having him suspended for three days.  She couldn't sue him for harassing her, though, because he always made sure to right her a ticket, thus qualifying for immunity because he had "reason" to pull her over.  This kind of behavior needs to stop, and the only way to do that is to hold the officers personally accountable by opening up the ability to sue them for harassment like this.

The last one I feel strongly enough about to mention here is the complete elimination of "no-knock" raids.  Any person involved in such a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment needs to be put in prison.  That goes double if they kill someone in the raid, and triple if the person killed was completely innocent.  I don't need to elaborate on this further; there are too many examples to cite.

I hope I didn't bore everyone, and I hope my stories were illustrative.  Thank you for reading this far if you made it.

Quarantine Talks: Opening Up

Well, this month we've seen most of the country reopen...mostly.

This has been year, hasn't it?

Two weeks ago we had our first meal in a restaurant since March.  It was, well, strange to say the least.  On the one hand, it felt so banal and at the same time so profound.  It was normal, but also not, and the clashing of those two feelings made me really question the whole idea of what normal is anymore.

Let's start with the weird:

We had to wait outside until our table was ready.  It was fine on that particular day because the weather was phenomenal, but that is often not the case in this area, so I don't see that being a great permanent solution.  I've heard some places are setting up so people can wait in their cars and get a text when their tables are ready, but I don't necessarily see how that's ideal, either.  I suppose it's better than sitting in the rain, but it just seems strange that these are the things we have to consider now.

Once inside, we had to wear our masks until we were at our table.  Seems pointless to me, since the most likely place for someone to catch the virus is in close quarters over a longer period of time, so wearing the mask while I walk past two or three occupied tables seemed unnecessary.  What's worse, once at the table, we are quickly given drinks, then food not long after, so the masks came off fairly quickly once we sat down and didn't go back on until we were ready to leave.

I guess to mitigate the risk of the fact that there's a long period of time where people are sitting at a table without masks on, the restaurant has closed more than half of their tables and there were no groups sitting directly beside each other.  I get the point, but, given this social distancing, and the fact that I'm taking the mask off as soon as I get to my table, I'm confused as to why bother forcing us to wear the masks at all.  I could go on and on about masks, but I already did that in my last post.  I'll probably add more on that later, because my feelings on masks continue to evolve as time goes on, but I don't want to get lost there just now.

As a quick aside, the service staff was fully masked.  I could tell our server was uncomfortable in the mask, but he was also genuinely happy just to be back to work.

One more bit of weirdness: The service was fantastically fast.  I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but I don't believe we were in our seats for fifteen minutes before food was in front of us.  I'm sure there's a multitude of reasons, including the less than 50% capacity of the restaurant, and the fact that we were getting breakfast, which is generally fairly quick and easy to cook, but it was odd to be done eating within a half an hour of sitting down.  Usually we're just getting food around the point that we were finishing our meals.  We experienced this a week later when we went out for dinner.

That reminds me, when we went out for dinner a week later, the strangest thing was that the entire restaurant was empty.  We went on a Saturday night, right at dinner time.  Prior to the lock down, this restaurant would be full and we'd have had to wait, but when we went this time we were literally the only people in the restaurant.  It was quite disconcerting.

Now to the normal:

At least at breakfast, there were other families at the restaurant, and it was nice to be out and see other people, even if from a distance of at least six feet away at all times.

The entire experience, sans masks and social distancing, was exactly like it always has been.  It felt good to have a part of my life back that I lost in the previous three months.

Here's the thing, though, by the end of the lock down, I kind of stopped missing things like going out and eating at a restaurant.  Maybe if we had gone somewhere and had food that I can't easily cook myself I would have felt differently, but there was nothing I ate that morning for breakfast that I couldn't have cooked at home.  Yeah, I saved the 15 minutes of effort to cook and the 15 minutes later to clean up, but I didn't really gain much in the trade.  It was weird for me and I don't honestly know if I liked it.

We've done a few different "normal" things since our county opened up earlier this month.  We've eaten out (just those two times), gone to the mall (well, to JC Penny because it's closing), gone shopping at various other stores that were closed, etc.  All of these feel somewhat hollow now.  Money is tighter lately because I've been furloughed a few times, so spending money is physically painful to me right now and I haven't felt this way since we lived in California.  I hate wearing this mask everywhere I go.  So many places I've known for years are closing or just failed to reopen.  Most importantly, I've been enjoying just being outside in my own yard with my kid and my dogs.  I don't know.  This COVID thing has really changed the world in more ways than I can wrap my head around.  I think I'll be struggling with it for a long time.

Quarantine Talks: Working with a Mask

This month marks the start of my official full time back to work in the facility.  I haven't had a work from home day since May 28, and it seems like it will be a long time before I will be allowed one again.

First, let's talk about that.  Most people believe that this pandemic will lead to a revolution in remote work.  That may be true for large office-centered businesses, but my business has actually gone in the opposite direction since the end of the lock down.  I know I talked about this in my last post, but it bears repeating here because rules have become even more stringent since my last post and now I can't even work from home once a week like I could before the pandemic began.  My mother's business is allowing her to continue working from home, but on an exemption because she has underlying conditions, not as part of the rule.  They wanted her to come back to the office once it reopened, and most of their employees did return to the office.  I think there are many organizations that are still stuck in a very late 20th Century mindset.  I've certainly worked for a few, and I know plenty of others who have as well.  Maybe it's because I live in Western Pennsylvania, but I think it likely has more to do with the fact that most companies are run by people who were in their prime in the late 20th Century and aren't well adapted to change to our current environment.  Long story short, though, I don't believe the work from home revolution will be as large as originally expected.

Now, on to the actual reason I wanted to write today: wearing a mask.

It's no longer required by law that I wear a mask anywhere, so this is not an indictment on any government action or official.  I could certainly get into that, but it's a side issue compared to my main point.

I do not have asthma.  I am a fairly healthy person.  I am capable of doing things like running 8-12 miles at a time, and even ran with a mask on my face earlier this year when the weather was much colder.  I say all this to build up some context, because I should be more than capable of wearing a mask all day, or at least more capable than someone who has some underlying health issue like asthma.

My company is requiring every person in the facility to wear a mask at all times, unless they are in an office alone with a closed door.  There's two huge caveats: only those in management have access to an office to themselves with a door that closes, and some of us actually work on the production floor without air conditioning where the temperatures have more than once topped ninety degrees Fahrenheit in the past week.  I am one of those people, along with about twenty other salary employees and roughly three hundred hourly production employees.

Wearing the mask for eight to nine hours a day is really starting to get to me.  First, the obvious: it's incredibly hot.  I've been considering shaving my facial hair because it's disgustingly wet a lot of the time from my hot breath and my face sweating.  I've felt less comfortable with the warmth because I can't feel the fan on my face because of the mask.  It's just unpleasant physically to wear the mask in the heat.

The discomfort alone I could probably deal with and not have to write an whole blog post about it.  The bigger issues are the increased feelings of isolation and anxiety.  I'm not sure exactly why, but wearing the mask increases my heart rate.  It may have something to do with the increase in the amount of carbon dioxide I'm inhaling, or the increased attention I have on my breathing, but, I'm not entirely sure of the full cause.  The point is, wearing the mask increases my heart rate, and anytime my heart rate increases without what my brain considers a reasonable cause (exercise or the like), my sympathetic nervous system activates and tells my brain I'm scared of something.  I spend the day feeling anxious because the mask is making me breathe faster and thus increasing my heart rate.  Then the anxiety increases my heart rate more, and I feel like it's a vicious cycle.  Sometimes I have to go somewhere secluded and just sit for a few minutes with the mask off and breathe the fresh air so I can get myself under control.  It's really debilitating, and it makes me not want to go into work everyday.

The other issue I mentioned in the increase in feelings of isolation.  It would seem odd to say that I feel more isolated now that I'm back to work full time and sitting in a facility with at least three hundred and fifty other people within the same building with me, but that's what I've been feeling.  I think it's related to not spending as much time in anyone's presence, and not seeing their faces.  Everyone is wearing a mask, so I can't see when people are smiling.  I forget and smile at people as I walk past and wave, but remember as I'm doing it that they can't see my smile.  It's funny how something as small as a smile and a wave really make a difference in my day.  On top of that, when I do have to talk to people, the communication is more difficult because I can't see their mouth so it's harder to understand what they're saying.  The masks also make it more difficult to talk because if you move your mouth too much they shift out of place.  The production floor has a lot of machinery operating all of the time, so it's fairly loud all the time, which only adds to the difficulties because people are talking quieter because they're wearing a mask and I can't see their lips moving.  It's frustrating.

I've been feeling more and more depressed about it lately, which is why I wanted to come here and share my feelings.  Working with a mask on is just not pleasant and I'm struggling with it.  On top of all the other hardships at work going on right now because we're in the middle of a pandemic and it's wreaking havoc on our company's financial situation, I also have to deal with wearing a mask, and it's making me not want to go into work anymore.  Every day I feel beat down within minutes of entering the facility, and I just hate feeling this way.  I don't really have a good coping mechanism, so I'm hoping that putting this into words will help somewhat.

Quarantine talks: Feeling all my Feelings

I really want to write a scathing blog about the petty tyrant known as the PA state governor.  I may still do so at some point, but today, I've decided that's not the best use of my time.

I live in Beaver County, PA.  We have been on state mandated "stay-at-home" orders since since 3/19.  That night, the company I work for shut its doors due to orders from the governor, and my wife's office did the same.  Since, the two of us have been home a lot more than usual, probably like the rest of the world right now.

Luckily for me, my company was shortly thereafter deemed as "essential" (whatever that means), and I have been able to keep working, in and out of the facility.  My wife is also essential, but her work can be done entirely at home, so she has not been allowed to return to her office.  Thus, our income has not been radically effected.

I say all this to qualify what comes next.  I'm feeling...all sorts of feelings throughout this.  I'm sure that I am not the only person with a great deal of feelings throughout this experience.  First, and most importantly, my entire routine has been disrupted.  Like many people, disruption in my routine makes me cranky.  I'm likely a bit more tied to my routines than most people, and I have trouble with crankiness to begin with, so this has been my number one issue so far.  I'm angry a lot, partially because of the crankiness, and partially because of the depression and anxiety of going through a life changing event like this and not having much, if any, control over the outcome.  I struggle with this a lot, because anger is something I've been dealing with most of my life, and it's not something I have found an effective remedy for.  Lately I have been quick to anger with my puppy, who, after all, is just a puppy.  Then I feel bad about being angry with her, and it's really a downward cycle.

Anger isn't the only feeling, though it may be the most prevalent.  I've been exhausted lately.  That does tend to contribute to the anger, but it also contributes to other things.  I had been upkeeping a strong training schedule for a half marathon I was planning on running this summer (on a side note here, I think it's been cancelled, so probably not going to happen this summer), but through this process I've let that schedule slide and my progress has slowed.  My motivation has slipped tremendously.  Running isn't the only thing affected.  Most people I know, since they've been home so much and had so much extra free time, have cleaned their houses top to bottom.  My chores are further behind than usual.  I've slacked on training the puppy, especially with her leash training because I just have no desire to take her for a walk most days.  I've been spending less real quality time with my son; most of the time I just set him in front of the TV so I can go do something else.  Again, all of this is frustrating to me and makes me feel worse about myself, continuing the downward cycle.

Money has been about the only thing that really causes stress in my relationship with my wife.  I won't lie: we do argue about other things on a regular basis, but if we're not having money trouble, we're almost always just having a bit of a disagreement.  Money struggles really test our relationship in ways that not much else can.  I bring this up because, even though neither of us has lost our jobs, I have been forced to take unpaid leave.  I already lost a week, and was just required to take another week in June.  Since mine is the main income in the house (being roughly double what she makes), losing two weeks of work out of six, and the pay associated with those two weeks, is really causing a bit of a struggle.  When the second mandatory leave was announced, I walked away from my computer and failed to return to work for the day because I was just too distraught to focus.

The weirdest thing about it all, though, is that most of the time, once I've had my coffee and breakfast and I'm chugging along on some good focused work, I'm actually quite cheerful.  It doesn't make any sense to me.  I otherwise appear to be exhibiting all the classic symptoms of depression, but there I am, walking around my facility with a mask on, singing as I go.  I don't understand the cheerfulness, and I don't really know how to replicate it at times when I want to be cheerful.  It's something I'm trying desperately to reverse engineer so I can have it when I want it, and maybe work toward putting aside some of my anger and bitterness that I feel so often.

The reason the cheerfulness is weird is because I don't really have an optimistic view of this pandemic like some people do.  My employer has already proven to me that the working from home thing was just a gimmick to get us through the worst of the time when the facility was closed.  Within a week of the facility reopening, management required all employees to return to the facility and stop working from home.  I am sure my employer is not the only employer who feels that employees working remotely are not capable of keeping up with the changing dynamics of a manufacturing floor during regular business hours if they are not in the facility.  Thus, I do not believe the work from home revolution with be as big as other expect once this is all over.

Many companies have also proven that our economy is really just a lot of smoke and mirrors.  Companies do not appear to have long term plans anymore, and certainly no one had any idea how to respond to a pandemic.  Case in point: our facility was closed for two full weeks.  The entire salary staff was kept employed during that shut down, and our pay was not interrupted even though there was zero production.  At the time, I was grateful to my company for continuing to pay me even though the amount of work I was able to do was significantly reduced.  Now, seeing as I've been required to take two unpaid weeks since the plant has reopened, I have other ideas.  Had I just been unemployed for two weeks like our production employees, I could have collected unemployment benefits and come back to work with the rest of the staff and focused on ramping our activities back up to pre-shutdown levels.  Now, with every member of our salary staff required to take two weeks off in Q2, we are facing serious staffing concerns and having major issues meeting our goals, which will only lead to further shortfalls, which will in turn lead the company to require more unpaid leave during Q3.  It's another downward spiral.

Other companies are worse.  No business is really capable of taking a month or two off and remaining profitable, but the number of businesses that are going bankrupt after two months of reduced sales is staggering.  I heard the other day that if the economy continues at this pace for the foreseeable future, 50% of small businesses in the US will not make it to 2021.  Small businesses aren't the only ones struggling.  Disney took a huge loan out during this pandemic to keep their business afloat.  Auto companies are once again on the brink of bankruptcy.  Businesses just don't seem to prepare for hard economic times even though the "business cycle" is a known quantity and the odds of a recession happening at least once a decade are fairly high.

The economy, though, is just the least of my worries.  I'm going to do a whole post at some point about the governmental response to this crisis, but, honestly, that's what has me most concerned.  Being required by my government to stay home and only go out for essential purposes, then wear a mask when I do go out, is really concerning to me.

To wrap up, though, I'm just tired of this pandemic.  I hate wearing a mask everywhere I go.  I hate that my son hasn't seen been able to spend time with his grandparents in months.  I have tried to be informed and make intelligent decisions, but every news outlet has conflicting information and the government contradicts itself from one week to the next.  I hate feeling alone and afraid all the time.  I don't know what's appropriate anymore, and that is what's worst of all.

If things have to change, then so be it, but I'm tired of not knowing if this virus is going to kill two million people in the US, or if it's basically no worse than the flu.  I've heard so many contradicting "facts" that I don't hardly know which way is up anymore.  I guess until I have reasonable evidence to change my mind I'm going to continue living like I always have...but with a mask on until such a time as I won't get arrested for taking it off.

A New Year: Reading and Writing

Well, after essentially a year-long hiatus, I have finally started reading regularly again.  I finished the book, Now the Drum of War, after having started it over a year previously, in early January.  That book was an albatross that was hanging around my neck in 2019, not allowing me to read anything else, but not interesting enough for me to read for any length of time substantial enough to make progress.

I should be clear: I have a particular aversion to stopping a book without finishing it, even a non-fiction one like Now the Drum of War. Though I know that non-fiction can be, and probably should be, read in ways other than cover to cover like a novel, I have never been able to appreciate this style of reading, and thus read all books, fiction and non-fiction alike, cover to cover.  I don't much care for trying to read two books at once, especially if one is particularly difficult to focus on, because it hampers my progress and makes me slide back to the easy read instead of pressing forward on the difficult work.  I like to read easy books, but I look at them like dessert after having my vegetables on a more difficult book or series of books.

That being said, I finally finished the book, which I can't say I enjoyed, but which had some interesting points in it, and moved on to another book I've been meaning to read for a while, C.S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet.  Again, a bit of background, but I absolutely love science fiction.  My favorite author is probably Neal Stephenson (or, at the very least, my favorite book, Anathem, was written by him).  Years ago I started reading The Screwtape Letters, which I had borrowed from a library and was asked to return before I had finished it as someone else wanted to read it and my initial two weeks was up, but otherwise I had never read anything by C.S. Lewis.  I have, of course, heard of the Narnia books and seen the first two movies (maybe there's a third...I can't remember, but if there is I've probably seen it...must not have been very memorable), but other than The Screwtape Letters, I had no real notion of what kind of author Lewis was.  Thus, when I saw Perelandra at a used book store in what appeared to be perfect condition on sale for only fifty cents, I couldn't pass it up based on the author's name alone, let alone the fact that it was in the science fiction genre.  I didn't realize at first that it was the second in a trilogy, so I had to go and find the other two books on future journeys.  I did find the third for a quarter, though in much worse condition than the copy of Perelandra I had, but I ended up having to buy Out of the Silent Planet online as I was unable to secure a copy in person.

That's the long story about how I came to want to read Out of the Silent Planet.  It's a seemingly science fiction book written by an author whom I know to be well regarded and whose work has been translated in at least one instance into agreeable movies.  The book itself was fairly good, though I struggle to call it science fiction.  In most ways, it's exactly the opposite of science fiction, except it's set on Mars.  Still, it was a nice easy read after my year long struggle with my last book, and I decided to continue the trilogy since I already own all three books.  I opened Perelandra (upon doing so I knew I was the first to read this copy as I could feel the binding breaking as I was reading it...it's nice to be the one to break in a book...), and finished that fairly quickly as well.  This one, though set again in outer space (this time on Venus), was even more anti-science fiction.  I knew from The Screwtape Letters that Lewis was a Christian author, but he really smacks you in the face with it in Perelandra.  The book, though relatively easy to read, was not terribly enjoyable.  The pacing was difficult, and the plot basically could have proceeded almost exactly the way it did if the main character were not in the plot at all, save for one very questionable act that led to what I can only describe as the most boring action sequence I've ever read.  The third book was staring at me from the shelf when I returned Perelandra, but I almost didn't want to read it.

After a day of waffling, I decided that not finishing a book series is fairly similar to not finishing a book, so I picked up That Hideous Strength and got on with it.  I can say two things about this book: one, it is without a doubt not science fiction; two, I would have probably liked it more if it wasn't the conclusion of the first two books.  Lewis is, beyond a doubt, an excellent author, and I'll likely have to read this third installment again sometime to fully understand some parts of it, as many passages went over my head.  Some parts, though, were just unintelligible, and others were unnecessarily verbose.  I "got the message" well before the book was over.  The end of the book was...well, not really a climax to say the least.  There were more than a few entirely useless characters whose sole existence in the book seems to have been there for the purpose of annoying the hell out of me.  There was a random bear character with no good reason for existing in the plot.  There was also an incredibly misogynist feel to most of the book, and it repulsed me every time it became explicit.  I recognize that it was written in a different time and I understand the Christian values that Lewis was trying to portray, but I have six sisters and an incredibly independent wife, and hope to have an intelligent and independent daughter someday, and this book really craps all over the idea of gender equality in no uncertain terms.

At any rate, I did not start this post with the intention of reviewing these books.  I had only wanted to say that I've been trying to be more myself again in 2020.  I've been running regularly, and have already covered 130 miles this year.  January was by far the best single month of running I've ever had, covering nearly 100 miles in that month alone.  I've been reading again, finishing three books so far this year, and so averaging a book every two weeks (even though it was a week each for the first two and then four for the third).  I hope to keep up with both of those trends.  My ambition has returned, but, more on that in a later post.  Finally, all of this reading has brought back in me a desire to write.

I'm not ready to start writing fiction yet, so I figured I could start with blogging.  As any glance at my posting schedule will show, I have no ability to make regular posts, and I will not promise to do so as it will feel too much like homework and I'll avoid it even if I want to do it.  However, I hope to post more regularly than I have in the past year.  We'll see how that works out, but just sitting down with the intention to write allowed me to pump out this long rambling post, so hopefully I'll have some luck.