Click images for desktop size: "Happy Morning" by Anonymous It was a quiet weekend for me.
I spent most of it fighting the ice storms and playing with the puppies. Smells almost like good times.
With all my wild ice and snow fighting I never even fell once. I slipped a few times but I never fell.
For the first weekend with no football and waiting for Spring Training to start, those nebulous weekends, it was pretty good.
For me, at least.
For my friends it appears that their jobs have ended in the pit of "office politics". Not the everyday kind but the venal.
For one its a matter of coping with rude people who don't relate to any one else's humanity, only their own. Of course they demand you recognize their rights as they blithely amble along ignoring everyone else's.
An intelligent manager starts to prune these sorts well. It looks like they may have by moving them out of one branch and dumping them all in my friends.
She is dreading going in to work.
I empathize. Once on a climbing surfari my buddy Mark and I got jobs repairing glass houses for a huge indoor nursery.
Of course neither us imagined or had a vague clue as to what this job entailed.
It appeared that you had to find broken panes of glass and replace them. Your about 3 stories above the ground and you had to clamber up the glass roof using a series of "ladders". These wooden things were a two by one and had six inch slats nailed crossways on the single support for you to clamber up on.
If you put a foot or, worse, a hand wrong you punched it strait through a hunk of glass.
They gave us a weird tool belt harness that carried a putty knife, putty and a glass cutter. We had to cut the panes of glass to fit while we balanced on the perch.
We cut our hands constantly on slivers of glass. You couldn't wear gloves well as they just slipped as you tried to climb. We watched two guys fall through the rook and one slide down to the bottom.

Click images for desktop size: "Creating The War Shield" by Unknown This was all done in the heat and the glare of a glass desert that left your eyes tearing and your skin baking.
There was no question why they hired day labor for this and no question why they paid a whole dime more than minimum wage.
Four hours into it I dropped one of my finely cut panes of glass and watched it fall to the floor. I watched it break in half on a taut wire and then take what seemed a half day as it bounced around of different obstructions before finally disintegrating when it finally struck the pipes and concrete on the bottom.
It wasn't a big stretch to imagine that being my body.
When the lunch whistle finally blew Mark and I didn't even discuss it. We quit.
I was glad Mark was more persistent than me. He actually got our money for the half day. Cleared nearly thirty bucks. Enough for a tank of gas and a sandwich.
I imagine my friend sees her job the same way Mark and I saw climbing up on that glass roof when we had a chance to escape. I'm sad she feels that way. Sadder that I don't have a quick solution.
We only needed a meal and some gas so it was easy to walk away.
Another friend works for a store that sells coffee. That big international one that keeps building and competing with itself.
It pretends to be a bit hip and a bit aware. But like Nike using child labor and Apple using Chinese camps the hipness fades away when making even more money is most important than anything else.
She's held the job for three years. Struggles to keep it because the money is poor but they offer Health Insurance.
To stay alive in the new America you have to do that too often.
She's had the job three years and watched the young and old move around. Like McDonalds this company preys on the young and aged.
In three years she seen a lot of managers and a lot of District Managers (the Simon Legree role I'd guess) come and go. Not to promotions but to out the door.
Her last manager had some issues. She had a lot of rage but she was the tight buddy of the new district manager who it appears like the grandesse of passing out jobs.
This manager lasted two months. She was incompetent. She did a faux pax that cost my friend her insurance.
Maybe it wasn't an error. For her final official act she decided to give my friend her performance review. Now the shock is all there.
What idiot lets a short term employee who is quitting in an incompetent huff give a performance review to a long term employee of good standing?
There's a quick and dirty answer to that but no quick and easy solution.

Click images for desktop size: "Jo In Wyoming" by Edward Hopper That saddens me too.
And as an American when confronted with that special feeling of helplessness I let my mind wander tot he Oscars.
The Oscars are rapidly becoming irrelevant. I guess they always have been as a fair measure of quality. I think their biggest appeal was that moment of standing up there in front of the world and getting to say, "Hey Mom!"
I think the nominees this year are sad. I mean Johnny Depp for that piece of garbage ultra flop Sweeny Todd? Juno? A pretty dull slightly progressive teen comedy that clubs its final message home with a bric a brat bat?
And the foreign nominees are worse. No Chinese films, no Korean and no Asian! Unless you want to include that mind numbing Russian mess as Asian. Mind numbing must mean good. Like "The Blair Witch Project" and "Cloverfield" clever is passing for talent and being depressing and boring is passing for art.
This is why playing with puppies and fighting ice storms is a good weekend.