The Story Of Citizen-Applicant

A fractured reality.

Citizen-Applicant had business with Government Bureau.

At Government Bureau's office, Citizen-Applicant met Certified-Bureau-Official.

Citizen-Applicant's question was simple. It was general.

Citizen-Applicant sat, then asked.

No.

Citizen-Applicant was instructed to fill out the form. First.

Form?

Name, address, age, date of birth, Government Bureau Identification Number (GBIN), street address, city, state, zip code. Mother's maiden name.

Said Certified-Bureau-Official.

Only a simple, general question applying to any Citizen-Applicant.

Not requiring any personal information.

So how about it?

What if I just ask?

Said Citizen-Applicant.

No. The form. Fill it, Certified-Bureau-Official said. The form must be filled. We have rules. Fill it. The Form. With a Capital. F.

Overruled by Certified-Bureau-Official again and again, Citizen-Applicant complied. Smeared marks onto a plastic card with a thick black marker.

Completion?

No.

Certified-Bureau-Official said Citizen-Applicant's mother was unknown and asked if Citizen-Applicant had been adopted.

No, not even once.

Certified-Bureau-Official was unhappy. Certified-Bureau-Official asked for an updated address.

Address hasn't changed. In 15 years. Said Citizen-Applicant. And not adopted.

Certified-Bureau-Official requested proof.

Citizen-Applicant, bold, asked the question. Anyway.

It was only a simple one. A simple question.

Proof? No proof, said Citizen-Applicant, and I only have a general question.

Ah, simple then, said Certified-Bureau-Official. Come back next month. Come back next month, and we'll give you Letter-A.

But I have Letter-A, said Citizen-Applicant, and I need Letter-B, can I get it now or do I need to wait until my eligibility is no longer a promise but a reality, a fact? What then?

Then?

Yes, said Certified-Bureau-Official. Starting next month, for no particular reason, come again, here, and you can receive Letter-A. If you ask.

I have Letter-A.

I need Letter-B.

Said Citizen-Applicant.

I do not understand said Certified-Bureau-Official. I cannot give you Letter-A until next month.

I have Letter-A.

I need Letter-B.

Said Citizen-Applicant.

Certified-Bureau-Official then assumed a possible martial-arts posture resembling Terrifying Sleeping Dragon. And ceased moving for a bit.

Citizen-Applicant, aware of nearby uniformed guard, did not try crawling.

Under the glass partition.

To strangle.

Certified-Bureau-Official.

For amusement.

Come along then, month after next, when your eligibility is no longer a promise but becomes a monthly fact.

Then we will give you Letter-B, said Senior-Certified-Bureau-Official strolling up to window.

Miraculously.

Letter-B? Said Citizen-Applicant.

You will give Letter-B? To me?

Yes, said Senior-Certified-Bureau-Official.

Letter-B. It will be so. Month after next.

That is what I believed all along, thought Citizen-Applicant, in his car, already blocks away.

It was only a simple question after all.

Coda: So many web sites are like this. How about yours?

More: 8 Ways to Piss Off Your Website Visitors

From: buznutt.

Dreaming Of Socks

This is going to sound strange, but pay attention. There are lessons here.

A few days back I discovered a new web site. Well whoop-de-do, you say. Who hasn’t? At least one a day. Or more. True. One point to you, but who’s keeping score? That wasn’t the main idea anyway, just the intro.

Here’s the deal. This site has a lot going for it, a lot of things everyone can learn from, and it’s worth investigating, especially so if you are a woman or know one. (How universal is that?) So if you want to stop reading here and do your own looking and thinking, go right now to Sock Dreams. Whether or not you come back is your decision, as they all are.

Here’s what I see that makes an impression on me.

First, the site is distinct, unusual. In a good way. You won’t accidentally mistake this site for another, although its basic structure is pretty average. There is a big banner at the top with a navigation bar just under it. Main content is placed vertically along the left side. On the right is access to the shopping cart, to a search option, and a menu listing more specific product categories.

There is nothing unusual about this, but the graphic designer made it look special. The colors on the navigation bar don’t quite “match” in a way we’ve all gotten used to. They aren’t all the same, or shades of one color marching in a steady procession from one end to the other but they work together to make a person curious about where they lead.

The type flows. The home page is full of curves, inviting. There is white space. No crowding. What you see first is “Welcome Sock Lovers & Dreamers!”, and then some clues about what kind of place you have found: “Female owned & operated in Portland Oregon since 2000. We’re not your usual sock shoppe, nor do we intend to be.”

There is a large logo under the introductory text. For me this is a little too big and a little too flashy, but it is distinct, and helps establish the site as a non-corporate sort of place.

Overall the site works, and well. It is quirky, unusual, unique even. And that is good. The site is colorful and well organized. There is a good use of Flash, normally the bane of web sites. Usually Flash is applied with a shovel by inexperienced designers gone amok, eager to show cleverness and ignorant of business needs, but here, in one small pane on the home page, it works, simply and unobtrusively. This one little view displays a few rotating product shots without either locking up the whole site or driving visitors away, screaming.

So right up front this site establishes what it is about and what you can expect. It looks simple but isn’t. There nooks and hidey-holes, surprise turns, several ways of getting to products and information about the products. Come in through the main menu and peruse general products. Then click on an image somewhere and pop up inside a whole line of similar products, or a line of products from one manufacturer, or somewhere else again. It’s all good.

Exploring here is like being in a funhouse, a friendly one. You don’t care about getting lost or being abandoned at some dead end, and you aren’t. This is rare.

Images, images everywhere. Though I can’t find it now, I believe I saw a statement that the owner, Niqkita, does most of the photography. Whoever does it, it is stunning. These are not standard catalog shots. They are not socks pinned to the wall. Each image is unique. Each one is interesting. The models and sets vary. Many are outdoors. Each color of a sock has its own image, with the model in a fresh pose. Nothing stale here at all.

I know exactly how a guy sees the product shots, and I can understand why the name of this business was once “Fetishize Me”. I can almost guess how women see them. Almost. It must be fun. But not kinky. This isn’t a sex shop, but more like a playground. Or a party.

There is a lot for young spicy women, but also for every other woman, and for every girl you can imagine. That is made clear. The owners and staff are obsessed with socks and things (anklets, arm warmers, foot care products, footie socks, garter belts, gloves, half socks, knee highs, leg warmers, leggings, midcalves, over the knee, petticoats, scarves, sock garters, t-shirts, thigh highs, toe socks, washing supplies, wrist bands...and more).

The “About” page is personable and interesting. It is clear. It is easy to read. It was not written by a software program, a lawyer, or a corporate drone. The story begins with “Years ago there was a girl whose feet were always cold”, and goes on from there to tell the story of the business and the sock faeries who work there. You end up dead certain that you will be dealing with real people.

Want to know about shipping and payment policies? Just go to the pages that deal with them. There is no need to enter into a transaction just to get to the buried shipping options page, only to find that they can’t deliver to you anyway. Many, many other sites get this wrong. Many of those sites belong to large businesses, and they all deserve to close.

Not Sock Dreams, which also has a simple and interesting FAQ page, with photos, and easy links to more information. Again, it’s all up front, well written, sprightly, and easy to get to.

One feature I stumbled on, one that isn’t openly linked to, is a weblog (the “Sock Journal”). This illustrates two more good aspects of this site. First, it is focused. The blog does not have long rambling stories about vacations, or recipes, or politics, or relatives. It’s about socks, and illustrated. Every post leads back to the store somehow, but with a soft sell. It is all lighthearted and full of photos. Once again, the quality of the photos is fantastic and they help breathe more life into the products.

Second, there is an ongoing dialog between the owner and her customers. They share their experiences and their exuberance for socks. Sounds silly, but the customers go nuts for it. They love socks and the shop. The owner loves socks and loves helping her customers. And it keeps the store thriving.

The overall approach of this site is humble and playful. It represents a business but one with heart. Each part of the site is focused. The owner makes it clear that she does not and will not carry every product, and gives her reasons. You understand. It’s about socks and she wants to keep it that way. And you end up agreeing.

References:

Sock Dreams
Sock Journal

Wirting. Harder then I thouhgt.

Once upon a time I thought it might be nice to write a book.

In fact I thought it would be a lot more than nice. A career, maybe. An ongoing quest. A mission. A calling. Maybe it is. And maybe it is for me. Sometimes ya gotta do what ya gotta do, all else be damned.

After all, I'm the guy who quit his last job after coming to the realization that he'd rather die than keep working there. So far that's been working out for me. Ain't dead, ain't working there.

Haven't been earning any money legally, but three things are amazing: how much I put away when I was working, how little I need to live, and how much a rising stock market can make up for me being flaky and just walking out of a job that paid a lot more than I needed.

Everyone should be so lucky. And so frugal. Or not. It takes a toll. Even I wake up in the middle of the night and say (out loud, to myself) "Man, you are one weird dude, dude."

So who isn't?

Something I realized a long time ago. Everyone is crazy. Twitchy, jumpy, hopping up and down, bug-eyed mouth-foaming wild-eyed, perversely crazy. It just depends on what you like, personally speaking.

Just cuz you like it don't mean it's right. It means you feel OK with it going off in your pocket. That and not a whisker more. That and nothing else. That is how everyone is. They may be better or worse than you in some subjective or objective sense or some other sense, but it don't make no never mind. Basically we all run on the same rails. Period.

So where was I then? Writing, yes I was.

I wrote a book. A pretty good one, for a faker. I put things together and the words didn't fight except where I wanted them to, and looked pretty in the other places, and the book she was a good one. Not great literature, not scary, not something that would knock you right flat on your whodunit under any circumstances, but it was good, and still is.

Modern publishing made it possible. Because I knew I had a way to make it available, even if no one ever bought it. I could do this without spending a year writing and six months editing and three months making photographs and one month designing the cover and then still have to spend $10,000 at a vanity press because no publisher would touch it with any number of 10-foot poles taped together, even if allowed to wear a gas mask and rubber gloves.

I did it.

And then I had to format it and upload it to Lulu.com.

Now the next part is not going to be any more interesting than what you've just read. I'm not going to uncover any seamy creepy stories of hair pulling and corporate malfeasance. Nothing interesting happened at all, in fact, and there is no plot to what I will next write, so be warned.

But it was still ugly.

Luckily I have OpenOffice. I mostly don't have any complaint, except that there is so much there, and so little documentation. I know I could do more with it, it I could figure out how, but slowly, I can, mostly (though the table of contents and indexing features are still mostly opaque).

OpenOffice is actually a joy, compared to Microsoft Office. One of the neatest things is that you can export a document as an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) document. This is so cool. Just do it, and it happens, and it works.

That was the big half. The little half, the part that took 90% of my time for weeks on end, was laying in my text and getting it formatted right. I started out a little wrong and had to keep correcting things I thought I'd already done. Yeah, OK, the learning curve thing, and I kept bending it in ways it didn't want to be bent. I should have learned first how to make styles and a template, and then laid things into that, and the whole process would have gone so much easier.

But of course I didn't, and maybe no one does, so it went on nearly forever, over and over and over again.

This was the hard part, really. For every day I spent formatting my book I probably lost two or three days of writing time. Days I could have used to start on the next book, or to market the first one. I'm a slow learner.

But eventually that got done. Eventually.

Then later I decided I maybe really should buy a distribution plan so that outfits like Amazon could list my book and maybe the first book would then (slowly) generate some (moderate) buzz and I could materialize on the world's radar (a bit at at time).

Except that for some reason OpenOffice isn't good enough to generate PDF files for this. You have to produce them from Adobe Acrobat, which costs something just shy of $1000. And accepts only Microsoft Word documents, not OpenOffice documents. Lucky me.

But Lulu.com accepts Microsoft Word documents, and will generate PDFs on their end, and OpenOffice can output Microsoft Word documents, so I'm OK, right? Yeah, right, as they say.

Several more months of work.

First, I had to learn Google Sketchup, which is a great little program. I wanted to enhance some of the illustrations while I was at it, and Sketchup's 3-D images were great. But this took a while.

So OK, done.

Next, getting OpenOffice to properly output Microsoft Word documents which it does pretty well, but there are limitations. Two areas specifically, images and web links.

I didn't want to embed any links in the text, but I do have some that I wish to display as text. Hard. Very hard. OpenOffice wants to make them blue, with underlines, if exporting as Microsoft Word documents. Pure hell to get this right. Finally gave up and then tried to get all of them blue and underlined, which was also pure hell undoing behind the scenes confusion inside the document. In the end it all sort of worked, sort of.

But images. Never did get that quite working. They do fine in OpenOffice but not in Microsoft Word documents. For some reason the latter format encourages image to move around inside the document pretty much willy nilly. Captions, too.

I eventually learned that you can put a border on all four sides of an image (no just on one, two, three or all four sides as with pure OpenOffice), and then lock the image in place and then click on the "caption" option which will link the caption to the document, sort of generating a box something like a siamese twin of the image into which you can put text for a caption, keeping them bound together.

And after weeks and weeks of screwing around I got that to work well enough.

Done, save for one last indignity.

And that was that since uploading, I would have to forgo any exotic typefaces that I have installed, and instead use the generic few that Lulu.com has. Which means that I had to drop all my chapter titles and story titles and subheadings and drop caps in Pupcat and use plain old mush, which made the book visually boring.

All this, and Lulu.com was able to print my book just fine the old way, when I generated the PDF from OpenOffice and uploaded that. But there seems to be some secret arcane witchcraft involved when they make the book available to everyone that they say prevents doing just this very same thing. So they say you have to do the other thing, which is where I lost weeks and weeks of my life.

Dang.

But I got it done.

Had to upload the nine meg document about a dozen times because it just wouldn't format correctly when converted to PDF. That, and then download a 22meg PDF to view it. Around in circles, tail, chasing the.

So finally, done. And then I began playing with Scribus, the desktop publishing program, which looks really good but is about halfway there. Will be magnificent when they get it complete. Pretty solid now, but you have to push hard to make it go. Supposedly it is one of the very best in the world at outputting PDF documents.

I used it on my second book, which is an excerpt of the first, just the few technical chapters at the end. Anyway, it allows me to use Pupcat and solidly place images and precisely align text, and it all stays just where I put it though I have to manually format each and every single paragraph and heading and caption, and that is maddening and maddening and error prone. And it doesn't do automatic hyphenation. If you turn on hyphenation it will ask you three or four questions about each word as it lays them in, and you can't see even a whole line while it's doing this, so hyphenation is almost useless. Or unimaginably error-prone if you decide to continue because it will make you crosseyed and then make you howl.

Yeeg.

The story of my life. But at least I finished the second book. It is 83 pages compared to the original book which is 320 pages (after I removed a lot of nice white space -- originally 372 pages).

Then I found a couple of errors in the main book, which I had spent weeks formatting just to make it ugly and acceptable to Microsoft Word format.

So now I don't know what I'm going to do.

I want to get back to writing, but I still have an unformatted book. It would be a huge amount of work to reformat it using Scribus and I don't know if that would ultimately work or not (who knows who these prickly unforgiving printers are anyway). So I may eventually reformat in Scribus and if that doesn't work, drop back to what I have now in Word format (after correcting the typos).

And then again I wonder if I just shouldn't stay with what I have, use OpenOffice, generate PDFs the easy way, sell exclusively through Lulu.com, and put my real effort into marketing.

I keep trying to figure out what I would do if I was smart, and that ain't easy.

References:
Dave's Guides
OpenOffice
Scribus
Sketchup

This is pay, sort of...

In a Spanish proverb, "God says, 'Choose what you will and pay for it.'" And things generally work that way. Pay isn't always good, or a benefit, but when we think of work we think of money coming in, and generally see it as a benefit. I work. I get paid. Money. I have salary, insurance benefits, vacation time, and sick leave. Not all money, exactly, but still pay. It's all pay. All coming in. To me. It's good.

Normally we don't include medical and dental insurance, vacation time or sick leave in our thinking of "pay". But consider taking a job that doesn't offer any of these, if you can. Then think of an identical job that does offer them all and tell me which one you'd actually take.

Exactly. Because one pays more. No doubt about which hook to bite. Glad we got that out of the way.

Don't complain when you start seeing your two weeks off show up on your income tax statement as it will one day. I once worked at a place where you were entitled, after one year, to one week off without pay. You could wander off for a week and rest up, and they wouldn't replace you while you were gone. If you could afford to be gone. That was your vacation time. Being down there right at ground level puts things into perspective. No fooling.

Besides the basics some people get stock options, a company car, bonuses, and some non-monetary things like prizes or other material goods, framed certificates, or praise such as being named employee of the (fill-in-the-blank).

So that about wraps it up then, eh?

Nope, and you knew it didn't.

Even if you've never had "a job" you know better. Work is what someone else tells you to do. You have a boss. Usually several. In most places I've worked, we might have 50 people in the office, and five or six levels of supervisors. Talk about your wonderful life there.

"Supervisor" literally means one who views from above. "Overseer" is a direct synonym. Supervisors came into their own in 19th-century factories where the supervisor was actually a person who sat in a high chair and watched everyone work. Made sure that they worked. Oversaw the workers. You could tell that they were workers because they didn't speak, had their heads down, and kept their hands moving. Anyone who spoke, or looked up, or slowed down got clipped by the supervisor.

Which is a little like being told you're unprofessional because you haven't chosen to wear a suit to work. Professionals being the ones wearing the antique, expensive, and painful clothes. Like supervisors wear. Professional supervisors.

Being a supervisor hurts because it's so hard, and so godlike. A supervisor has to be all-knowing, and that is very difficult. Someone who evaluates the work of everyone else has to be all-knowing and infallible, and the wearing of painful clothing shrivels into absolute insignificance other than as a way of making it obvious who's boss. It's a way of intimidating others by proving that nothing, not even a noose around your neck all day, can intrude upon your consciousness, even a tiny bit.

And we all need a boss. Because if we didn't have bosses we wouldn't have people telling us what to do and how and when and how hard and how long. We would run wild in the streets, or maybe nap all day. Because we are not professionals and we do not have all-seeing knowledge and we are lazy and cannot possibly control ourselves.

The boss is not like that, wild in the streets and fun, but no one has ever been able to explain just why it is that the boss does not need supervision by another boss who is supervised by an infinite chain leading right up to, through, and infinitely beyond God. No one has ever explained why it's not supervisors all the way up. They just stop somewhere, and its them versus us. And we are seen as interchangeable and expendable parts and they are not, so limited in their numbers as they are. And to get us to do anything at all they have in one hand a stick, and in the other hand a carrot or a donut or maybe a dime.

Sticks have lately been deprecated in a public relations sort of way, so we hear a lot more about carrots, even from dictators. They've all got the PR religion now. It's always the "Democratic Republic" of somewhere and never Generalissimo Bob's Evil Hell Hole and Rotting Torture Cesspool, even if that's what it is.

And this attitude has infected business and the world of work.

They (the chain of bosses) have decided that a salary (including a few side benefits) is an unavoidable and necessary evil, but only a minimum. If you, Mr/Ms Expendable, want to make it on the job you have to show some flash and be able to snag a bonus. If you do you earn more but also avoid sinking into the bottom ten percent. You know, the ones who just get fired every year to keep the basement nice and clean, and because it's fun to fire people. Whoops! Looks like there's still a stick around after all.

But mostly it's reward time. Some kind of reward. Incentive pay. Gold stars to display at evaluation time. Real pay. Stuff you can use to keep your job.

And oddly enough, rewards don't work. They aren't real pay after all. We'll get to real pay next time, but right now let's talk about the kind of pay that rots your teeth and makes you hate your life and think longingly of how good that smooth, round, cold gun barrel would feel sliding in between your lips as your finger tightens on the trigger.

Hey, how crazy am I? Everyone knows that goosing someone with performance-based pay gets the juices flowing and turns a warehouse stuffed full of slackers into a lean, mean fighting machine. 'Cep'n 'taint so, love. 'Taint so.

To the best of my knowledge, no controlled scientific study has ever found a long-term enhancement of the quality of work as a result of any incentive system. In fact, numerous studies have confirmed that performance on tasks, particularly complex tasks, is generally lower when people are promised a reward for doing them, or for doing them well. As a rule, the more prominent or enticing the reward, the more destructive its effects. (Alfie Kohn, Education Week, September 17, 2003)

He has a good web site (www.alfiekohn.org/) and he's been at it a long time. His book "Punished by Rewards" is also good.

Kohn has found that

1. Rewards punish. It turns out that rewards and punishment are two sides of the same coin, and that both are naked attempts at manipulation. Rewards don't usually hurt quite as much, though they can be just as humiliating as punishment can be.
   
   
2. Rewards disrupt relationships. Rewards create winners and losers (usually one winner and a roomful of happy losers). Rewards foster enmity. Rewards discourage those who do well but not exactly quite well enough, according to some standard or other, which may be arbitrary. Rewards create pettiness. Rewards encourage people to work separately and not as a team. After all, why in hell should I help you when you're just going to screw me by winning?
   
   Some say that none of us alone is as stupid as all of us together, but unless you're the boss, or wearing a suit today, none of us alone is as smart as all of us. Can't be. So rewards make the business more stupid. And less competitive. (Irony alert!)
   
   
3. Rewards ignore root causes. Got someone who's not quite doing well enough lately? Whack him with a stick, or if you're feeling really ornery, dangle a shiny trinket in front of his nose.
   
   Don't ask if his mother died, his kid is now a crack addict, or his wife just ran off with the babysitter. That shiny, twirling thingy will do the trick. And if it doesn't you can always fire his sorry ass. Who cares if he's done a great job for the past 10 years and knows the business better than you ever will?
   
   Rewards are blunt instruments, do not analyze causes or other messy things, and are simpleminded, and that's what we want, right?
   
   
4. Rewards discourage taking risks. No one wants to screw up the possibility of getting that reward.
   
   So people will wait to hear what the ground rules are. They will want to be told what to do. And exactly no one will do something completely unexpected. You know, the kind of thing that could move their company into the next century like, oh, 50 years ahead of everyone else.
   
   Short-term goals, that's the ticket. And with a reward system in place, every activity becomes only another obstacle. There are no longer any opportunities, only hurdles to kick out of the way while you shove your way to the front.
   
   
5. Rewards kill enthusiasm, even for things that people would do just for the fun of it.
   
   One group of children, told that they had to play with chalk before they could get to the felt markers began to hate drawing with chalk. The other group, told the opposite, began to hate felt markers. Children told nothing at all go nuts having fun with either one, or both at once.
   
   Any activity seen as a means to a reward becomes distasteful, strange as it sounds. Researchers keep finding this result over and over again, no matter how hard they try to find that rewards work.
   
   Rewards come to be seen as controlling, and everyone hates being controlled. People feel threatened, watched, constantly judged. As though they're forced to work only to meet deadlines, to be ordered around, and to be competitive toward others when really they want the opposite.

So

The best amount of competition in your company is none at all...competition itself -- which simply means requiring one person or group to fail in order that another can succeed -- is inherently counterproductive. Similarly, I’m not offering a 'soft' argument against competition, basing my objection solely on its destructiveness to us as human beings. I'm saying that competition also makes no sense from the perspective of the bottom line. It holds people back from doing their best. (Alfie Kohn www.alfiekohn.org/managing/nocontest.htm)

Yikes.

Money and goods are only one form of pay. Call it "official" or "external" pay. This is a baseline, a minimum-level compensation that comes with a job. Money is compensation for giving up part of your life and doing what you don't especially want to, what isn't inherently meaningful to you, or for doing things that aren't intrinsically rewarding, or for what is too hard or too frustrating to bother with otherwise.

When people are asked what's most important to them, financial concerns show up well behind such factors as interesting work or good people to work with. For example, in a large survey conducted by the Families and Work Institute, "salary/wage" ranked 16th on a list of 20 reasons for taking a job. (Alfie Kohn www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/edweek/meritpay.htm)

But there is another form of pay. Call it "unofficial" or "internal" pay. We'll look at this next time. This kind of pay is what you get for doing what is worthwhile. To you. As a real person. And not as an office machine.

Work, part 2: What is pay?

Do you do it for money?

Some say that if you do, that makes you a pro. Some say that being a pro means you do things that are right, even if doing them costs you money. In other words, it's your integrity that's important, not your bank account.

But what is integrity good for? It gets you more business and a higher rate of return. Customers will come to you because they know that they can trust you, and that you will do for them what they can't do for themselves. And they will pay more for your goods or services than for those from someone else because they have a sort of guarantee.

Your integrity removes one more variable from the process. You provide dependability and that can be important, because it means preventing a whole bunch of things.

It means preventing a whole bunch of things from suddenly rising out of the ground like the evil spirits of the dead in one of those horror films. The ones where a nice suburban house has been built on a graveyard by unethical developers. And then the dead get irritated. And then get even. Customers don't like it when they have to deal with armies of the angry dead.

So, because you provide dependability, you also provide simplicity.

Your extra thought, and work, and integrity heads off a lot of bad things and removes the possibility that they can happen. This removes you from competing as a commodity provider. You are no longer working on the basis of providing the lowest price.

Thinking about professionalism just brings us back to pay. But no matter what, pro or no pro, you need to be paid. Money in the business world is like food for an organism. No food, no life. No income, no business.

A business needs to eat, and so do the people who make up the business. You can say that there are two levels of need here, one for the business, which has to make a profit, and one for the employees, each of whom has to earn a living. Profit goes to the business owners, and pay goes to the staff.

Thinking a little deeper you can see it involving three entities: the business, the staff, and the owners of the business, each with their own needs. And customers on the outside looking in.

But it's even a bit more complicated than that.

There is really no business. A business is an abstraction. If we stop thinking about it, it goes away, because a business exists only in our minds.

The reality is that there are just people, and the business is an idea that all of them agree to hold in their minds. The reality is that there are just lots of people linked by relationships to one another, and all of them want something from the relationships that they are in.

A person I once worked with told me that the purpose of business was to provide jobs for people. Not everyone would agree with that. I didn't, at the time. There is a common understanding that the purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder value, and there have been many legal rulings that poked at this issue. *

But the more I've thought about what my colleague said the more I agree with it. Not fully, since there are more people involved in any business than just the employees, but taking a broader view, it makes more sense.

The two fundamental ideas to keep in mind are that any business is solely human relationships, and that no one ever makes a profit.

Human relationships: Without humans, there is no business. Of any kind, by any name. The sole value of any business lies in the people who work at it (not just those who "own" it, not just those who "run" it, and not just those who are "employed by" it).

Remove the people and there is nothing left whatsoever. Don't think that you can fire all the staff and keep it going with different "hires". We're talking about permanently removing all the people. It is much clearer when you think of it that way. Remove the people and there is no residue. Only emptiness.

Profit: (A) Everyone dies. (B) You can't take it with you. (C) End of story.

Passing along wealth to others, again, does not count because you no longer exist, therefore you have no profit. Inherit money or other property, or just find a box of hundred dollar bills in an alley, and it may be fun, interesting, confusing or something else entirely, but you still make no profit. As Homer Simpson once said about beer, you can only rent it.

Everything is temporary. This means your profit too.

And this means you.

So that kind of makes money or other property look a little strange. And business as well.

What is pay, after all, then?


* See "The cyclical transformations of the corporate form: A historical perspective on corporate social responsibility" for some background http://www.law.umich.edu/centersandprograms/olin/abstracts/discussionpapers/2005/05-003aviyonah.pdf

Work, part 1: What is it?

What is work?

It seemed so easy in physics class. Maybe that's one reason that I majored in physics, after assuming that my first, English degree was not quite the right thing.

"Work: a transfer of energy from one object to another by applying a force over a distance."

Oh, so sweet and simple. And understandable. And quantifiable. Even amenable to use on multiple-choice tests, or to probing by means of electronic calculator. Define the problem using a couple of variables, enter the numbers and get a result. Check your work, and then write down the answer. Problem solved.

There is a lot of discussion every day about what work actually is, for the rest of us, we who have moved outside the classroom and have had it hit us in the face. Some say things like "All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind." (Aristotle)

That's one point of view, perennially espoused, sagely followed up by another thought: "When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him: 'Whose?'". (Don Marquis) We've barely gotten started here and we can already cut the cynicism with a knife. Even worse, we have to carry that knife in self-defense.

But soon we begin to drift, if we keep listening, keep thinking, toward sentiments like "Getting fired is nature's way to telling you that you had the wrong job in the first place". (Hal Lancaster, in The Wall Street Journal) Then this: "Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else". (James M. Barrie) Both of these sentiments are also familiar to everyone.

But it goes beyond that.

"Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it". (Henry David Thoreau)

"The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work". (Richard Bach)

And one more, out of another famous life: "Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing". (Theodore Roosevelt)

And summed up by "Whenever it is in any way possible, every boy and girl should choose as his life work some occupation which he should like to do anyhow, even if he did not need the money". (William Lyon Phelps)

So what is work? We still don't agree. It can be agreeable or not, for pay or not, long, short or in between. It's something or other, but seems to divisible into two entities, sort of related, like second cousins who barely know each other.

One kind of work is forced onto a person's life and the other kind grows out of it. Let's assume that both types are compensated in some way. We can assume that all work is compensated in some way, even if it's only a payment in food and shelter and a cessation of the beatings.

Let's also assume that work is a more or less directed activity that has a tangible result.

Hammer a horseshoe out of a lump of red hot iron and you have a horseshoe. No disagreement there, it's tangible.

But so is a poem, even if unwritten. You know it's been produced because you can encounter it: it's either written or recited.

So work is more than just thought, more than daydreaming, more than idle planning. Albert Einstein produced magnificent thought experiments but they weren't done until he had shared them, and at that point they joined the body of his life's work.

So work has a result, and it generates some kind of compensation.

(Quotations found at http://www.quotationspage.com/subjects/work/)

Cold geezer sweats

Here I am, sitting unemployed by choice, wondering what to do next, and watching things get weird.

I often awake in the middle of the night and wonder just what in hell I think I'm doing. I'm not young anymore. And though I've passed most of my life for someone 10 or 20 or more years younger than I actually am, and still sort of can do that, now my younger self is still an old guy. As defined by our culture.

It's worse if you're a woman. To be a woman and over 25 is to be old. Guys get character with age, and are admired. Women are discarded. Like Halloween pumpkins forgotten on the back porch. Women over 25 are moved into the hag column. Personally speaking, I classify any woman without wrinkles as a girl, but even my sister says I'm weird. No one is beautiful, though, up close, unless you can see the soul.

Bodies are just packages of meat. I don't care who you are, you're still a piece of meat. Without animation of the life force, or whatever you want to call it, without personality, without dignity and goodness and integrity, you're just meat. You stink, you sweat, you have blotchy skin. Your hair is too thin or too thick, or the wrong color, or too thick in some places and too thick elsewhere. Your feet are flat. You have hangnails and veins running in the whites of your eyes.

The beautiful people are beautiful at a distance, after a good going over by professional hands. In the days before Photoshop. With Photoshop, beauty grows exponentially, and anyone who is not actually dead and well along the road to obvious decomposition can still be made achingly gorgeous. Lust keeps apace. We desire them without regret or reflection.

There is no limit to this process, except the old one. Getting up close, face to face, and spending time with a person. No one is beautiful up close. Unless they're also good and kind and fun, and when you can get close enough to see those in a person, you overlook most of the physical things. You just don't care anymore. You know better. Your old lizard brain kicks in. The one that had to evolve the hard way. The lizard knows. You know.

So I still look a lot younger than I really am, but am not beautiful, and never will be. I try to be good but know so few people that it really doesn't matter. I am all alone in my wallowing unemployed ugliness.

I quit my job about a year and a half ago and still have no idea in hell what I'm going to do for money. If nothing changes, I should be able to keep going for eight to 10 years, at best. That ain't bad. I don't have to sweat it, but I still do. Credit that one to my upbringing, or my incorrigible, unchanging wimpish nature. I fear, and therefore I am fearful. Fearocious. I fear, and desire an income. But I'm not desperate. Yet. Except quite often in the dark of night

Still, I should be looking. I finally decided yesterday to post my resume in a few places, let it sit, and see what happens. Dang. I should have known. Within minutes I had the first hit. And it was totally inappropriate. A guy looking for a body to stuff into a hole that an employer had. Didn't even read my resume. The job would have been exactly what I was not interested in. He must have just spotted my skills list, my location, and then scared the snot out of everyone around him when all the bells went off in his head.

He had nothing else to fill the vacuum there. Just bells, poor boy.

So I had to respond to him and apologize (since I try to be good), saying that I should have known, and I should, that I had no interest in becoming a piece of meat to be slung around to one job interview after another until something happened, and I got placed and he got his commission. And there I would be, in hell again, but living somewhere else, stuck, and paying three times the rent I am here, and not able to be walking in the woods within 10 minutes of leaving my place the way I am now.

Some things about my life are OK. Screaming awake in the dark of night is an experience, but so is getting out at six in the dark, and just walking in cold rain, alone with the sky, free and untethered. Unlicensed. Unregulated. With hair on my face and breath in my throat.

So I replied. Maybe that took care of him, but then this morning there were more messages. Within the first 12 hours or so my resume had been read 23 times. Another contact came, from a contracting agency. Damn.

When I told him I wasn't interested in working through third parties, he replied that his company wasn't a third party, that I'd be working for them, for uh, someone else, while working for someone else, but really them, or something. He didn't get it. Nor did the people at Allstate insurance who just flat out spammed me with a form letter in case I wanted to take wing and sell insurance for the sheer joy of it.

One of my cousins became an accountant. Back in the days before accountants could bring down companies like Enron. When accountants were accountants, whatever accountants were. But not hunters, not pillagers, not warriors. The joke among accountants back then, way back then, was to say "I always wanted to be an accountant when I grew up". Instead of a fireman, or a cowboy. Long dead accountant humor. Insurance salesmen might be different. I think they don't feel embarrassed because they lack a sense of humor. They may never feel at all, navigating solely on instinct and blood lust. I wouldn't fit in without the instincts of a horsefly.

So right now I'm back to the books, back on the learning curve with "Ruby on Rails: Up and running", trying to relearn most of what I forgot over the summer, and wondering just what the hell I'm up to anyway. Phil Hughes, publisher of Linux Journal, has settled in Nicaragua. Been there 10 years for some reason. I could take my money and move there, and I would run out before the money does, I think, though I'm nowhere near either rich or even comfortably well off. Is that what it takes to get by in America these days?

At least I'm male. Ugly and unloved, but maybe not expected to be lovely or cuddly because I'm not a woman, and can get as old as I want and not get any uglier, even if I am over 25.

I did sleep well last night though. After all, several people contacted me yesterday about jobs. They think they still want something from me. I still have a hot bod.