Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "Your little hopes and dreams."
¤ Usage: "Poor fellow, his little hopes and dreams have all be smashed."
¤ Origin: Quipped by a whore, or pre-op transgender man, or a sociopath, or some other lowlife who was engaged in a vicious verbal battle with another lowlife guest on the Jerry Springer show
¤ Notes: While the Jerry Springer show is generally pretty lacking in opportunities for intellectual improvement, you do tend to hear some funny jokes, of the personal insult type.  This was one of the best.  One loser was arguing with another loser, and when one said something about how she'd loved her husband, whom the other lowlife had stolen away, lowlife #1 replied, "Bitch, I don't care about your little hopes and dreams!"

You'll find it applicable to almost every situation in life.  It's the "little" that really makes it work, since that just so perfectly and cruelly diminishes whatever claim to importance the other person might previously have had. -- February 20, 2004

eekend. What weekend?  Malaya and I got out and went shopping on Saturday, stocking up on food, then slept late and stayed in all day Sunday, working on various projects and amusing ourselves by poking at the kitties.  I got through the 400+ photo backlog, and was amazed and appalled to see photos from mom's visit a month ago, dad's visit 3 weeks ago, the trip to Tahoe last weekend, a ton of shots illustrating the super burrito step by step preparation technique, a bunch more shots of the kitties doing various things, and numerous other misc shots I had no memory of taking.

It's so easy with a digicam and a large memory card to snap away madly, plug in the USB and offload them to your computer, and then forget it until later.  You do that 3 or 4 times, and the "later" becomes hours of sorting, cropping, renaming, and saving, and for what?  You're never going to look at the shots again anyway.

Thank god I have a website to post them on and bore you all with it, or I'd probably never bother renaming or sorting or cropping or saving anything; I'd just flip through them, and mass move them to appropriate folders, where they'd sit forever, or until my computer HD crashed. Again.

As it was, I had something like 420 800k images with names like:

PDMR0337.JPG
PDMR0338.JPG
PDMR0339.JPG
PDMR0340.JPG
and so on...

They're all sorted now, and I doubt I saved more than 50 or 60 out of the 400+ shots, which is about my standard burn rate with a digicam.  None today, but I'll do a day's worth of shots about the Tahoe trip, the Muir woods hike with dad, various pet stuff, and more, in the days to come.  If I wanted to devote the time, I could easily go back to a blog a day for a while, I've got so much stuff backed up on my notes page to write about.  Reviews of 4 books, 2 movies, various parental visits, philosophic topics, my novel, and of course the daily news surfing is almost always sure to set me off on a long essay type thing once or twice a week. You'll see evidence of that today, as it happens.

One news item here, and then a blog about the worst bosses ever leads me into semi-extensive reminiscing of my past working days.

¤ Nicely vicious editorial about the life and times of Martha Stewart, a life/career that's come crashing down in ruin with a conviction of insider stock trading that's going to land her actual jail time. The article details her horrible childhood, her early stock rip offs and shady business dealings, her history of tax evasion and cheating, and much more.  Not at all the perfect little homemaker she got so rich pretending to be.

You should note that this article is from the New York Post, a vicious tabloid with numerous axes to grind, so I'd take every factual statement in it with a lot of salt.

When New York state tax examiners sent her a bill for back taxes in 1994, she claimed she didn't owe the money because she hadn't been in New York on the days in question.

In fact, she couldn't convincingly prove where she had been at all because her personal travel records were in chaos, and she had not even bothered to keep a day-planner of her activities. Her own testimony in the case, based on nothing more than scraps of paper and travel vouchers from limousine services, wound up being impeached by articles and photographs in her own magazines, which showed she had indeed been in New York on the very days she had insisted the opposite. A Tax Court judge pronounced her testimony in the case "non-credible" and all but called her a liar.

AFTER fighting with Martha for six years, the New York Division of Taxation won a final appeal in the State Tax Court of Appeals, which ruled against her in 2000, and hit her with a bill of $221,677.

I've never paid much/any attention to Martha Stewart in my life, and really have no opinion on her.  I've heard of her, of course, but just as a sort of ridiculous decoration concept punchline.  I will admit that I'm pleased to see a white collar criminal going to prison for theft, for once.

I always think it's ridiculous when rich white men people pull of various scams and cheats and run banks or insurance companies or other institutions into the ground, or rip off the government with overpriced contracts, and end up getting fined a fraction of the money they stole and sent on their merry way, while the tax payers get the bill for the bail out.  Suit-wearing businessmen steal millions and get community service and a fine, while poor people steal a candy bar or $40 with a hot ATM card and get 20 years in prison. No one with any common sense or objectivity ever really believed that justice was blind.

Another article features the details of her likely punishment.

Stewart's crimes each carry penalties of as much as five years in prison and $250,000 in fines. However, legal experts said that under federal sentencing guidelines, Stewart probably faces 10 to 16 months in prison, half of which could possibly be served in a halfway house or other non-prison setting.

The trial centered on Stewart's Dec. 27, 2001, sale of her 3,928 shares of ImClone Systems Inc., founded by Stewart's friend Samuel D. Waksal. Waksal, a man about town who once dated Stewart's daughter, is serving seven years in prison for insider trading, based on his and his family's attempts to dump their own ImClone holdings that day.

The stock sales by Stewart and the Waksals came one day before the Food and Drug Administration failed to approve ImClone's key cancer drug, a decision that sent the stock plummeting. Stewart's well-timed sale saved her around $50,000, authorities say.

I don't have her actual worth at hand, but I recall hearing it was in the 30 or 40 or 50 million range. Let's go with the upper limit, and say she's worth $50m.  Her insider trade saved her $50k, which is more than most people make in a year... but what's that to her?  Something like 1/10,000th of her net worth.  Imagine you're worth $10k... fancy risking 20 years in prison for $1?

Of course not, that would be insane.  Yet that's essentially what Martha is doing.

According to the article, she grew up very poor and scratched and clawed and screwed people left and right to get where she is today.  So in theory, she's behaved this way for her entire business life, and she's just finally been caught doing it, in a federally-serious way. Also, people who grow up very poor often have a life long obsession with money, saving every penny, spending it very carefully.  That's not a bad thing, so long as it doesn't get out of control and take over their lives. It appears that it might have with Martha, where she couldn't resist cheating, one more time, and ditching a stock the night before it was going to crash and burn.

She could have admitted it, cooperated with the investigation, blamed it all on her broker or other business friends, and salvaged her career. But she couldn't admit she was a crook, she had to keep lying and not stoop to a guilty plea and maybe some community service and fines... and now she's going to federal prison.

Hard to keep the smile off of your face at the thought of the snooty, fur-wearing bitch being stripped down, hosed off, and shoved into an orange jumpsuit, isn't it?

That being said, I wholeheartedly agree with this quote, by H.L. Mencken:

There are no dull subjects.  There are only dull writers.

Of course I have to agree with that to sleep at night.  If I didn't, I'd take one look at 97% of the blogs I post here, and go chop off my fingers. However, I'm so bored with the subject of other people's pain and babies in general that the frequently-brilliantly witty Dooce can only elevate the discussion from "godawful" to "sporadically non-boring" to my taste. YMMV, of course. Malaya eats it up, and yes, that gives me ominous feelings for the future.

At any rate, Dooce's new post is about posted about how stupid her bosses used to be (is there anyone alive who has worked who doesn't share this sentiment?) and asked for people to share their worst boss story ever in comments.  They are what make it worth a look and a read. There's quite a list of comments by now, and most of them are pretty amusing, including Dooce's.

What is the most insane thing your boss has ever said to you?

I’ll go first, and this is totally 100% pure and complete genuine truth:

“You look like a naughty school girl in those black tights. I’d like to spank your bottom.”

Why I didn’t sue that company for the entire $70 million dollars in venture capital it wasted is one of the true mysteries of my life. I think I just ignored the whole thing because my boss was British and had really bad teeth, and I figured that British men with really bad teeth just didn’t know any better.

Perhaps hers set the tone, or maybe there really are that many men who are pigs, because at least half of the reader comments detail behavior that's clearly sexual harassment, or at least wildly inappropriate for the workplace. Number 2 and 3, for instance:

Jess

My old boss once asked what I'd done over the weekend and when I said I'd been refinishing a headboard, he asked if I was going to handcuff my husband to it. Then he told me a variety of handcuffing stories that I didn't want to hear.

He also liked to crouch outside my open office door and then leap in, shrieking, but that was more nonverbal.

 

HRH

Putting on my sweater over a shirt before I'm about to go home my Irish ex-boss says to me "If it looks as good coming off as it looks going on, your boyfriend is a lucky man." Classy.

Sadly, I don't have any work stories (real life or online) about stupid bosses of the sexually inappropriate nature.  And if they did, they'd probably be about sexually inappropriate underlings, and they'd star me.

I do have dozens (or possibly hundreds) of stupid boss stories that star bosses who are idiots, or just plain incompetent by the bosses. At the stadium especially, it was just painful.  To be fair, the boss job there was awful; nearly full time, crappy pay, and mostly comprised of calling stoned 19 y/o's to try and get them to come to work and not fuck off the whole time they were at work.  It was a shit job, and anyone who ever happened into it who had a decent disposition and some intelligence soon realized that it was a shit job and quit or transferred, or else became bitter and vengeful as life ceased to hold any hope or meaning for them.

If the stadium could have somehow magically turned all of the incompetent and lazy employees (at least 85% of them) in the food service sector into just average workers, and started doing things intelligently, I'd say they could have easily doubled their profits and productivity.  I routinely sold 3 or 4x more than other people selling the same food item I was selling, and I did it almost entirely by just keeping my eyes open and not being lazy.  And at least 75% of the events I worked, I could have sold a little to a lot more if the stand managers had kept their product stocked, had more/better people to get it out to the vendors, counted money faster to cut down on the waiting we had to do to get more stuff to sell, etc. And that's not even counting the time there was nothing to sell at all since the warehouse screwed up on stock, or that we were wasting time trying to sell something no one wanted since no one in management had any idea what the actual fans were interested in buying, and no interest in asking vendors for their advice on what would be the best things to vend.

Stupid as it sounds, cotton candy color is an easy example.  Blue always sold best, followed by pink.  No one ever asked for yellow, or orange, yet the managers would constantly order more of it, and then ask why we weren't making it or selling it.  One especially incompetent manager named Carmen, who had his job solely because his dad owned the Nestle distributorship in Southern California (or something like that; it was blatant nepotism at any rate) had a girlfriend at one point who liked orange cotton candy.  So based on that extensive market research, he ordered a case of orange coloring (A case makes like 10,000 cotton candies.  Enough to last for weeks.) despite the fact that no one liked it and no one wanted to buy it.  We'd go out with a board that had 16 orange and 16 blue, and sell all 16 blue and have 14 orange left, and then have to hustle the remaining 14 of those to people who wanted blue, or pink, but settled for orange because that's all we had.

Carmen would then waddle around the stadium in his Nestle black leather jacket his daddy got for him, eating ice cream or pizza (which he never offered to get any more of for anyone else, of course) and he'd occasionally pop into the cotton candy stand to see if we were making orange, since after all, his girlfriend liked it. (I suspect the GF mostly liked daddy's money, but that's just speculation.) Numerous times I pointed out to him that no one liked orange and that it didn't sell for shit.  I'd say that we sold all the blue, and then had to force the orange onto people who didn't want it and only bought it since that's all we had.  And he'd say, "Oh it'll catch on once they try it." or "Well, at least it sells out eventually."

This from a boss who often told us how important it was to be sure we had just what the customer wanted, and who bitched out stands that ran low on Cracker Jacks, or hot dogs, or chocolate malts, or whatever.  Hypocrisy, thy name is "supervisor."

The sad thing is that out of the 8 or 10 supervisors I had in my years working at the stadium, I remember Carmen fondly, since they were all incompetent, but at least Carmen was jovial and friendly. And he mostly stayed out of the way. Better he was perched up in a luxury box on the loge level eating pizza and ice cream (things I saw him doing numerous times) than walking from stand to stand, sticking his nose into other peoples' work and causing problems.

The saddest boss thing was when they tried to show that they were real employees too, and that they could still pitch in and help get things done. They never did this when we actually were short staffed (which happened on virtually every big event and most of the medium-sized ones also), of course.  They only did it on nights when we had plenty of workers and no need for their "help," since those were the nights when they weren't busy with anything else.  Bill was the worst offender, (he's the one who tried to fire me for smacking a wall in anger at another employee's incompetence, after my 12 years of exemplary service) and he'd once, years ago, known how to make cotton candy.

It's a semi-difficult trick; putting in the paper cone and catching the super-heated sugar as it comes out and moving the cone around the bowl to build it up on the cone, lightly, but in a nice shape to stand tall and stick to the cone and fit into the bag. Takes an hour or two to get good at it, and a few work shifts to really become proficient and speedy and learn to make them look as big as possible while actually using as little ingredient (99.4% sugar, .6% artificial color/flavor) as possible, thus producing more in the same amount of time, since the speed of cotton candy production was always limited by the speed at which the constantly-breaking machines spit it out.  I.E. an expert could make a serviceably-large cotton candy from two quick spins around the bowl, by making it very light and fluffy, while a novice would need 5 or 6 spins around, each one packing down the sugar as he/she tried to get it into the proper shape and form. And then you need to learn to poke the bottom of the pointy cone through the plastic bag twice, once on each side, and stick the stick into the holes in the wooden selling board quickly enough to grab out another stick and spin another cotton candy on it before the machine spit out so much stuff that there was a huge buildup in the bowl and it became too heavy or clumpy to be used.

That digression aside, making cotton candy requires some skill.  Making it well requires more skill and practice, and no one is of any use at it their first couple of hours at it, and lots of people never got good enough at it to be of any real use at all.  Though I always suspected this was more along the lines of the husband who constantly breaks dishes or washes the colors together, thus forcing his wife to just do it all herself. After all, it's easier to put lids on soda every now and then, or cook pretzels and sit down for 20 minutes between loads, than it is to stand in front of a hot, noisy cotton candy machine for hours on end.

So the boss, Bill in this case, would come down once in a while and for no discernable reason (probably because upper bosses were in the stadium and he wanted to look capable and busy) decide that he'd revisit his brief stand help days of a decade before, and spin up some cotton candy.  And since we never had more than 1 or 2 good machines at a time, while we always had 4 or 5 sitting broken with repair orders on them for months and months, he'd give one of the talented spinners a break, or tell him to go make soda we didn't need made, while he spent some time spinning. And in the time a real employee would have produced 50 good cotton candies with no waste, Bill would turn out half a dozen lumpy, malformed things, fill half a trash can with wasted sugar, and basically throw a huge, damp blanket of a pall over the usually fun and joke-filled workplace.

Finally he'd leave, satisfied that he'd inspired us all and improved morale and proven his worth, and once he was gone we'd all laugh hysterically and while talking about what a dick and an idiot he was we'd throw away the unsalable cotton candy he'd produced, turn the gangster rap back on the tape deck, and work harder for half an hour to make up for the time we'd lost humoring him.

At the time, I always wondered what it would be like if someone could have explained it to him.  That he was just annoying everyone, that it was painfully obvious what he was trying to do, that it was failing miserably, and that our already non-existent respect for him was sinking even lower every time we saw him. And say he heard that and believed it, rather than just getting pissed or going into denial. What would he have done?  In his case, I can't conceive of this, since he was not an intelligent person, and I don't think his brain could have dealt with the information or concept. But what would a smart boss do in that situation, once the error of his ways became obvious to him?  I'd like to think that a really smart boss wouldn't be in that situation in the first place, since he/she would have enough intelligence to evaluate things and look at it objectively and realize what they were doing. But assuming they weren't that bright, but were bright enough to accept the unpleasant truth, what would that be like?

It's a pretty sad judgment on the relative merits of bosses that I honestly can't imagine one who would fit into this hypothetical situation.  My experience with bosses, 95% of the time, was basically Dilbert's. That they're people who are in charge of things, for reasons you can't imagine or explain, and 50% of your work is work, and the other 50% is trying to figure a way to get around the obstacles your bosses put in your path as they try to get involved or put their personal stamp on things.

It's enough to make me question the entire nature of employment hierarchy and job organization.

And yes, it's lovely to not have to even consider the possibility of returning to those jobs, and therefore having the total freedom to write whatever I want to about the incompetence and idiocy of the bosses (and co-workers) I was inflicted with at that time.

(By the way, I make no claims to being any less of an inflicted trial upon my co-workers and bosses there. I was smug, arrogant, cruel, mutinous, thought the rules didn't apply to me, and disliked my job intensely, only staying with it for the money, which was never enough, even when I was earning the equivalent of $50 or $60 an hour for selling sugar on a stick to children.  Of course I was also by far the best at doing it for most of the time I was there, thus earning the company far money than anyone else did, thus making me feel perfectly justified in feeling above the rules and regulations that the other, lesser vendors were subject to.)

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