Unemployment Benefits

For a brief time in early 1992 I was unemployed, drawing benefits and the whole works. This was before the internet and there is only so much resume writing and house-cleaning you can do.
Back then web-surfing was not an available option to fill the day, so I ended up spending endless hours never getting very good at a clunky DOS-based videogame called SU-25 Stormovik (now available as a free download here) on the 386SX I had bought my wife for her school term papers.

My wife had gone back to school to become a teacher when sh lost her job after taking an extended maternity leave. When she called about going back to work, her employer had told her no positions were available. This was pre-Family Medical Leave Act and she had no legal recourse. She dropped her teaching courses to get a refund on the tuition and substitute taught while I job-hunted (and played computer games) all day.

I was only out of work for a fairly short six weeks before finding a new job in West Palm Beach. The weeks of inaction were immediately followed by the flurry of activity required to move to a new city, sell a house, find a place to rent, and start a new job. Funny how things even out like that.

I mention this not very tragic vignette, because this weekend the Washington Post Magazine published a very funny and poignant story called “Terminated” by T. M. Shine. In the article he mentions the following piece of folk wisdom:

Nothing happens until it happens to you.

He is referring to what I call the “every car on the road is the same model as the one you just bought” phenomenon. When you have had something happen to you, you notice it everywhere. Shine started a blog (One entry so far. For a writer with a lot of time on his hands, he seems to be a little lackadaisical about the posting pace.) that has gotten over forty comments from people that are or have been laid-off.

Having been there, I know where he is coming from. Unlike him, I have a good education in a steady industry. Shine, despite being a wickedly sharp writer, is a high school graduate in journalism. He might as well be bilge pump operator on the Titanic.

As part of the article he held an online chat where he had this observation as well (archy and mehitabel approach to capitalization his):

someone told me 'being unemployed is a full time job.' no its not. unless king of queens reruns, teaching the cats how to dust with their tails and unraveling 250 ft. of tin foil are part of the job too.

And not having anything to do all day is one of the worst parts (other than wondering how to buy groceries) of being unemployed. In addition to Su-25, there was some other game I played way to much until it was time to cook dinner and play Mr. Mom.

When I was laid off, it was on a Friday afternoon and the boss told gave me my severance check and told me to come back on Saturday for my personal belongings. This was well before office networks or any other good level of IT sabotage could be performed from your desk. Nonetheless, I came by for a single box of whatever trash had been in the desk drawer and all my technical reference books including The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits (I won a lot of office bets using that).

Shine regrets not stockpiling enough office supplies at home to tide him over. The supply cabinet is one of employment’s most under-rated perks. His best idea is that employees should have air-raid drill practices so that they can time how long it takes to pack all their personal mementos into a single box for that long walk down to the HR office. While I don’t have much in my office worth saving, I would make sure I had my Georgia Tech Barbie, my broken HP-41 and the picture of Laura Bush (I can always get more pictures of my wife).

And anytime I hear of people out of a job, I feel their pain.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: If you got The Call, what cubicle litter would you be taking with you?

The Future's So Bright...

My son graduated from high school yesterday. The guest speaker was Vic Carter from WJZ-13. I paraphrase a few of his comments:

The road to success does not lead back home.

There are three things your parents do not want you bringing home: dirty laundry, bills (you make them, you pay them), and children. At least not until much, much later.

Wise words, Mr. Carter.

Mystery Business Trip

I was on a business trip for a few days earlier this week. Since I never blog about work, I don't really want to say where, but I took a lot of great pictures that I want to share. I guess if I just drop some hints, somebody can take guesses in the comments about where I was.

	The entire town was festooned with with heron sculptures. It started years ago with Chicago and the bulls and since then I have seen pandas, fish, crabs, donkeys and elephants, and beehives as different cities do silly mascots.
	This statue was in front of a building that we were told used to be a brewery headquarters. On our way out of town our hotel had a sign welcoming the North Central Propane Association Motorcycle Rally. We expected Hank Hill to show up at any minute, but he would have to ride 963 miles to get there
	The town is too small to have a Hard Rock Cafe, but is does have a Hooters. But that's not much of a clue since this tacky yet unrefined chain is nearly as ubiquitous as Starbucks. We were wined and dined at places with such locale specific names as The Freight House, The Waterfront, and Piggy's.
	If this picture doesn't give it away, I don't know what will.

If you need more hints, check out this Flickr set. The city name is pretty prominent in one of the photos. If you're a boodler and you remember me telling where I went, don't spill the beans but feel free to drop hints.

BlatantCommentWhoring®: Where was I? And even better, have you been there? I'm guessing that some of my readers have been.

Portfolio Pride

If you get bored about me bragging about my son, definitely skip this post. It is about as syrupy as I’m going to get. May is just a whirlwind of activity centering around him and I have to get in some sappy stuff while I can. Besides, I have to write as much about him on my blog as I can before his grandparents show up and spill the beans about how much I’ve been talking about him. They are notoriously indiscreet.

For his intern mentorship, instead of having a final exam he had to put together a portfolio. Portfolios are the latest trend in education as a touchy-feely way of showing work. Like most things, he didn’t take the assignment very seriously. He claims that most of the effort was in spelling out “PORTFOLIO” in duct tape on the cover. I found the artifacts he place in it very interesting. It has a lot of paper documentation for the things he had done either in school or as an extracurricular activities. There are certificates from his Rocketry Club and Math League competitions. His rather mono-alphabetic transcript is included. He has some graphs and pictures from the nanotube research. But one item struck me as more representative than any of the others.

His internship took him down to JHU APL four days a week. He kept Wednesdays free because that was when most of his afterschool activities happened. This gave him an empty part of his schedule from about 11 until 3. School rules prevent him from hanging around campus, so he had to go do something else.

At the elementary school level, sometimes kids get pushed into the advanced math courses ahead of their grade. It doesn’t happen often, but it eventually causes problems. When the kid hits fifth grade, he runs out of math because he has already taken the fifth grade GT class and the middle school program refuses to touch the kids ahead of schedule. The math teacher has to keep these kid busy for that year without getting too far ahead. There’s never more than one of these in any school at a given time and there isn’t one every year. It just happens whenever one of these advanced students comes along. It always causes problems with the teachers because they have regular classes to teach and with the parents that want to make sure their kid stays challenged.

This happened to my son and it worked out fine mostly because my wife was his math teacher and was able to keep him actively learning. This year my wife knew of another kid in that situation at her old school and suggested that my son might want to help him out. And then in her new school there was yet another fifth grader in the same boat. So every Wednesday he alternated visiting these two kids and working with them for about an hour on the independent study assignments they were doing.

This wasn’t anything he got any sort of recognition for. It wasn’t part of any formal program, and it wasn’t anything he had to do. He didn’t get paid or earn course credit or even accumulate community service hours. Probably the only people that knew this was even happening were us, my son, the kids and their parents, and the math teacher.

It was just him relating to a kid that was going through what he had gone through back when he was in fifth grade. It made the kids realize that they aren’t alone. It gave them a role model, something my son isn’t often accused of being. One of the kids gave my son this picture of the two of them with a Thank You card. The card said:

Thank you for taking time to come and help me with my math! Good luck in college! It was a lot of fun working with you.

Of all the scraps of paper in that portfolio, I think that thank-you note says the most about what my son accomplished his senior year.

Taco Truck

About once a week, my job takes me to a construction site (and that is about all I will ever blog about my job. There are too many cautionary tales to do otherwise). In case you are not aware, many construction industry workers, particularly in the “unskilled” trades such as blocklaying, drywall hanging, roofing, and especially asbestos abatement work, are Hispanic. I saw this not to start a discussion about immigration policy and the lack thereof. I have plenty of friends and family who make Lou Dobbs look like Cesar Chavez and I spend a great deal of time biting my tongue around them. I mention it because the employment trend has made my lunch hour on the jobsite much more delicious.

Everyday there are two taco trucks that visit the job site. You can get a burger or a ham sandwich, but more importantly, you can get a variety of traditional Mexican dishes. The tacos are the flour soft tortillas with cilantro and peppers instead of cheese and sour cream. But I like the quesadillas. For five bucks I can get two chicken quesadillas and a soda. That doesn’t even pay for the gas it takes me to drive to any nearby fast-food places.

And when I say ‘soda’ I mean not just Coke or Mountain Dew, I can get the obscure fruit sodas that are usually only found in specialty grocery stores. Champagne cola has little in common with standard American colas except for the carbonation. These are lighter, sweeter, and nearly clear. And we all know I love obscure soda flavors.

The way the taco truck works is that you order at the window to the two ladies working the grille. Then you go pay a guy that is standing at a small TV tray sized folding table. In just a few minutes, a piping hot fresh quesadilla is waiting.

One day as I was walking over to pay with my food, a rather redneck looking construction worker noticed my food and asked how it was. I said “delicious”.

He walked up to the window and said “Uno case-a-diya poy-yo” in a thick southern accent.

The money-taking guy kind of chuckled and asked me “He did say ‘pollo’ didn’t he?”

I smiled back and said “He sure did.”

And this is how cross-cultural understanding operates. Over food. Besides, quesadillas de pollo SON deliciosas.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Place all tirades about how this little vignette is emblematic of how the country is destroying itself here.

Sharp Dressed Man

He cleans up nice, doesn't he?

National Get Lucky Night

(Click on images for direct link)

I try to stay out of my son’s personal non-academic life. Particularly his romantic life. For the parents of a teenager a certain amount of willful ignorance and plausible deniability is bliss. But as certain rites of passage roll around, it’s hard not to engage in a certain level of vicarious voyeurism.

One of the biggest milestones is prom. For months we would discretely inquire if he had made prom arrangements, particularly whether or not he had a date yet. After weeks of vague replies it became apparent that he was going to end up going stag. As regular readers will know, my son has a lot more going for him than I did at that age. But he still wasn’t able to close the deal for this year. Part of his reluctance may because he is gun shy. His date to last year’s prom ended up passing out on the dance floor from exhaustion (My son had fed her a full dinner beforehand and no alcohol had been consumed) and had to be rushed to the emergency room. That made the rest of the evening rather awkward.

This year, he blames his condition on his own choosiness and the protectiveness of the parents of the girls he knows. His school is nearly one-quarter Asian and the level of the classes he takes tends to skew that percentage even higher. In his Calculus BC class last year, there were only a couple of kids of entirely European heritage. Many of his fellow students are Generation 1 or 1.5 immigrants, meaning they were either born in the US or moved here as small children. They have been raised as Americans with all the cultural adaptations thereunto, but their parents were born and educated abroad and have brought with them a lot of old world attitudes. They are very protective of their daughters, which troubles me with what it reveals of how women are treated in their native culture. Keeping your little girl from going to prom with a guy is unnecessarily strict and in complete defiance of decades of American tradition.

But American mass-media bears some responsibility for enhancing these parents’ paranoia. Teen movies before and since John Hughes have focused on prom as the centerpiece of the high school experience. This is the night where all the drama, conflict, and romance of the school year culminate. At movie proms, if there is not a catfight, a romantic clinch, or a baby being delivered, it just hasn’t been a real party.

A recent Washington Post article noted the disturbing trend that girls’ expectations for prom invitation have come to exceed the effort most guys put into a marriage proposal. Fueled by silly MTV shows, guys are now expected to come up with unique and romantic methods of asking for a date which puts a lot on the line. If the approach crashes and burns, the guy is now totally exposed and out of the running for discretely moving onto his second choice. No girl wants to be somebody’s back-up plan. It becomes an all-or-nothing proposition.

Likewise, guys’ expectations for prom night have also been raised to traditional wedding night levels. Prom has become National Get Lucky Night. Even back in my day there were always rumors of rented motel rooms and all night beach parties where clothes and inhibitions were bound to be abandoned. But today that expectation has risen to ridiculous levels. Since girls don’t even pretend to wait until the wedding night anymore, prom has now become the focal point for even the most demure girls that haven’t crossed the bridge into sexual activity already.

In order to fight the perceived perils of prom night many schools are now organizing very elaborate after-prom parties to keep these hormonally charged kids busy until daylight when presumably the risk of procreative activity subsides. I know of one private school that gives away a sports car as a door prize. Never mind that the winner usually has something as good or better in his garage already.

Last week we got a mass e-mail from the principal asking parents to not host private after-prom parties since the PTA goes to a lot of trouble and expense to rent out a local mega-fitness center. That’s not my son’s idea of a good time. Instead, he is having a half-dozen (or maybe more) of his equally unlucky in love friends over for a massive video game extravaganza. We are temporarily moving all the available audio-visual outlets to the living room so we can have multiple rounds of Smash Brothers running at once.

And isn’t having a good time with your friends to mark a milestone in your high school career what prom night should really be about?

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Is prom completely out of control, or am I a victim of fuddy-duddiness? How did your prom compare to the modern version?

Shaking Hands With George

My post a while back about stalking Maureen Dowd was anti-climactic because I never actually met MoDo. At best I got a curious and/or nervous look from here as to why I was taking a pictures. The person I did manage to meet was George Stephanopoulos. Like any celebrity, he is smaller than he appears in television, which is mighty small indeed. Despite his bushy eyebrows, he has never lost that boyish whiz-kid look he had as one of Bill Clinton’s inner circle.

Producing his Sunday morning show requires a fair amount of physical energy. The show is recorded in the smaller of the third floor studios of the brand new Newseum right next to a large staircase the runs up and down the height of the building. Right after the Roundtable segment, while the panelists are moseying over to the green room for the web post-interview, George and an assistant race up the stairwell to get to sixth floor for the Weekly Funnies segment.

I had been standing outside watching all the guests go by when he came out for the next segment. As he went past, to break the awkwardness of me staring at him, I said, “I really love the show.” I felt like a groupie hanging around the back door of a Hannah Montana concert.

He stopped and said “thanks” and continued on up the stairs. Once he gets up to the roof terrace (and these are tall floors), he sets up overlooking the Mall of DC. From there he points out a landmark and introduces the late show comic clips. After that, he does the closing remarks and the show wraps.

But that doesn’t mean he is done. I wandered back through the museum looking at some of the exhibits and when I got back down to the third floor I noticed a group hanging outside the door to the studio. I glanced into the studio and saw George sitting at the desk talking to the camera.

I wandered over to see what the crowd was for. Before I could find out, the door opened and a guy wearing tons of badges ushered them in and I wagon-trained along. I don’t like looking like a tourist even when I am being one. Even though I had a camera case over my shoulder, I had dressed for the day in pleated khakis and a nice earth-tone button down shirt. I looked positively Al Gore-ish.

This group that was on a private tour was also dressed pretty nicely for a Sunday morning in Washington. They turned out to be a group of VIPs from a company that owned several network affiliates. Everybody tip-toed back into the electronics filled back of the studio with all the cables and cameras. In addition to Snuffleupagus (as cruel bloggers call him), there was the guest wrangler and three or four production people.

George was doing drop-in interviews with local stations. The producer was on the phone and would tell George who they were going to talk to next. George would then sit there repeating the name and city of the local anchor he was about to talk to. The camera man would count down the feed and then George would turn on the charm. He’d make news-show happy chat with the local newscaster and pimp the panelists and topic for the day’s show which obviously hadn’t aired yet in that market. While I was in there, he talked to LA, Atlanta, and Miami.

Between the drop-ins, he would walk out from behind the desk and schmooze with the big wigs. The topic of the day was (and still is) when will Hillary throw in the towel. He would just shrug and reply to the effect of “when she is good and ready.”

I tried to stay as inconspicuous as possible. As he came around shaking hands and being introduced to everyone, it became inevitable that he would reach me. I just stuck out my hand and introduced myself. He said, “That’s right, we met outside.” He had remembered me from the hallway.

Once all the on-air promotions were done, the tour continued on over to the master control room, but I ducked out the other direction before anyone could notice me and call security.

The whole time I was there, George was nothing but polite and professional to everyone. That included senators, news columnists, corporate guests, and me, a nosey blogger that had wandered in off the street. Say what you want, but I say George Stephanopolous is a class act.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: When have you wandered into someplace you didn’t belong and were you caught?