J.T. vs. Corporate Stupid

I guess this should really be called "Recession vs. Corporate Stupid."

Let me recount a little tale to you. It's 2008. The economy is not yet chest-deep in crippling recession, our collective delusions of stability and prosperity remain in place, and I am hungry. Unfortunately, a thunderstorm has just rolled in knocked out the power to many of the businesses near me. The area right I'm in, though, seems unaffected. Pizza. That's what I want now. I'm prepared for the possibility that the power might be out and the places near me, but I call one large chain nearby to order a pizza.

"Hello, this is Large Pizza Chain"
"Hey, do you guys still have power?"
"Yeah, our whole block is still on."
"Great. I'd like to order a large pepperoni pizza."
"I'm sorry, sir, but we're not taking orders right now."
"Wait... what?"
"Our computer system is down, so we can't take orders."
"Well, you know how much the pizza costs, right? And you know how much you need in tax? I'll pay in cash. Why can't you take my order?"
"Sorry, sir, we're not allowed to take orders right now."

This is just a typical example of Corporate Stupid. Corporate Stupid is rampant in businesses, and it's most rampant during prosperous times. I had a similar issue with one of my previous employers. I worked the night shift there, and had seasonally for a few years. Sadly, as I got older, night shift just didn't suit me anymore. There was an opening on the day shift, and I asked to be moved. Unfortunately, there was a policy saying that new employees (I counted since I worked seasonally) had to remain in the shift for which they were hired for at least 100 days. Since I'd be back in college by there, that wasn't an option. I told them, flat out, third shift was too much for me and I'd be quitting if I couldn't get on a different shift. They said they understood, but that was the policy. Boiled down, here was their option:

-Move me to first shift, and have to hire another guy for third shift
-Don't move me, and have to hire another guy for third AND first shift

Now, training people costs money. I was already trained. Plus, I was really good at that job, as noted by the numerous sales competitions I'd won. They didn't move me, and I quit. I can't imagine how that was financially sensible for them.

Oh, but to get back to my point. Today, I'm home sick from work. I decided to call another Large Pizza Chain for lunch. I know quite well that I'm outside of their delivery radius, but I was hoping maybe it had changed since the last time I'd called a while ago. It went like this:

"Hey, I'd like to order lunch, but can I check first to see if I'm in your delivery area?"
"Sure, what's your address?"
Address.
"Hmmm... lemme check something."
...
"Hey, I talked to my manager. You're not normally outside of our radius, but we'll deliver to you anyways."

No doubt business is a little light for a Wednesday lunch of pizza these days, and the manager wisely decided to ignore B.S. corporate borders and just make some money. Yes, the recession is helping to kill Corporate Stupid, and I'm going to enjoy it now, because I know most of it will be back when the economy recovers. Until then: Pizza.

J.T. vs AT&T/Apple

Wow, it's been a really long time since I posted. However, and unfortunate new circumstance has arisen, and I didn't feel like I could be silent on it.

First of all, how've you been? It's been a while, I know. How are the wife and kids? Me? I've been fine. Thanks for asking.

Okay, now that we're caught up...

I recently bought an iPhone. It arrived July 13th with all the pomp and circumstance I would expect of an Apple product. Now, I typically hate Apple as a company; their locked down development process and authoritarian control principles are legendary, and they've somehow managed to downright lie their way into exactly the opposite public image. However, I was impressed with the iPhone, and I felt like it made sound financial sense to purchase one. I have never said that about an Apple product before. One of the things I was most excited about, however, was using Google Voice on the phone.

As it turns out, the AT&T/Apple two-assed monster didn't see this as a good thing. Google submitted such an app, and it was rejected. While that was ridiculous enough to begin with, they then pulled several apps that had already been approved and available for months. Many people are blaming AT&T solely for this, but that doesn't seem like a very likely scenario; to use your Google Voice phone number you still have to make a call, so you still use AT&T minutes. There may have been an increase of data that goes along with it, but not much. There are free texts to be considered, and that is no small source of income for wireless carriers (though it should be). No, this move was as much an Apple shutdown as AT&T. Google is the anti-Apple, you see; they have one of the most open and communicative relationships with their users of any company their size. It is a direct threat to Apple's process, and having Google in their phone was simply unacceptable for Apple. The reason they gave developers for pulling their apps was "duplicating features that the iPhone comes with." This is about as honest as you're ever going to get from Apple, but it needs to be combed just a bit more for the truth. It wasn't just for duplicating features, as there are many apps that already do so and remain available, it was for improving on iPhone features. Apple decided to shutdown the competition when it realized that it might simply not be good enough to compete on it's own product. This is within their rights, I suppose, but I'm a little pissed about it since I now have this two-year contract tying me to this device when I knew better than to deal with Apple in the first place.

Well, that's how it goes, I suppose. But Apple and AT&T are in this together, so I have a simple proposition: punish them. There's not much I can do to Apple, as I already dislike the company and they seem to have ruined the only chance they had at getting into my good graces. AT&T, though...

As I mentioned before, I've had my iPhone since July 13th. That's 18 days. In those 18 days, I've used 202.4 MB on Cellular Network Data, according to my iPhone stats. I imagine that's rather typical of most users. AT&T, however, is very sensitive about the amount of data that is transferred over it's data connection. It's a poorly-kept secret that AT&T allows up to 5 GB of data a month before it starts getting upset, so I will now using my full capacity. Every day, I will make sure to download at least 150 MB of data over my iPhone. While it normally takes me about a week and half to do so, it'll now happen every single day. I'll make sure to do it during the day, too, during peak hours. Why check email on my computer when I can use my phone? Why listen to Pandora on my computer, when I can use my phone? I will do my little part to drown them in their own greed until they relent. I'd like to suggest you do the same.

For those of you wanting to participate, might I interest you in this 2 MB Bitmap of an iPhone: http://bit.ly/11Vogh . I remind you that the little round arrow in your browser is the refresh button...

J.T. vs. Loy Krathong

Okay, so I guess I have a few things to cover before I get started on my next blog entry. Between my last blog entry and this one, I've visited Taiwan, Vietnam and Japan. All very cool, though the Vietnamese trip was more of an adventure than a vacation. Upon returning home, I got a job at the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Now I teach Environmental Science to school groups. The hours are long, but the job is fun and the people are great. And this is where our story begins...

Most of the time, I spend my workday at the park teaching middle school or elementary kids. However, every once an a while, there are special programs the administration decides to hold. Sometimes these are fundraisers where rich folks get together to be rich, while we hope that some of that rubs off onto us. Other times, it's primarily for some simple, old-fashioned community outreach. This was one of those times. It was called the "Festival of Lights," and although I believe the original intent was bringing holiday joy to children, more adults signed up than anybody.

We signed up for what stations we would work months before. I signed up for a holiday called Loy Krathong. I would later learn that it is a Thai holiday held near the end of the lunar calendar. I knew very little about the holiday at first, and that's what attracted me to it. I felt it would be a good opportunity to learn about a tradition I didn't know anything about. However, as it turns out, preparing for a holiday that nobody around you even knew existed until that week is not the easiest thing there is to do.

Preparations began soon after sign up. During the rare periods that we're not teaching during the day, we are assigned "projects" to work on. One of the projects was to build the krathongs. Krathongs are floating rafts made of banana tree trunk (traditionally)that are decorated with flowers, leaves, candles, incense, etc. The candles and incense will be lit, and they'll all be floated down the river. It's an act symbolic of letting your anger and suffering from the current year go, allowing you to begin the new year unburdened by the problems of the old one. People will even cut off pieces of their hair and fingernails and add them to a raft, thus sending "bad" parts of themselves away. The krathongs themselves are quite beautiful, and I can imagine a river filled with them must be awe-inspiring.

Anyways, that was what the people who were working on this specific project had to replicate. I, sadly, was not involved in this process. I'm told some testing took place, but I'm left to my conjecturing as to what form it took. When I saw the krathongs that had been built for the events that night, I instantly knew there was a problem. Most of the "rafts" were made of the sort of thin, laminated cardboard you'd find snack boxes made from. There were two made from a single sheet of corrugated cardboard. I was told that they had tested a prototype to make sure it works. I can only assume that they tested it with one piece of thick, corrugated cardboard, saw that it floated, and assumed that any cardboard would float. I put one of the corrugated and non-corrugated krathongs in a sink full of water. Sure enough, the granola bar box krathong sank instantly. The other one stayed afloat a while, but a little splashing and it sank, too. There was disaster looming.

On the plus side, the paper flowers made for the krathongs were quite beautiful. So, after grabbing a bite to eat for dinner, I headed back to the November Lodge to rebuild the krathongs less than an hour before the event began. My partner in crime, Sarah Edwards, soon joined. I had, at that point, immersed myself in the recycled art supplies, desperately looking for all the useable cardboard I could find. When I found some, it was cut savagely in a manner that Sarah described as "The Guillotine." After a lot of frantic destruction of old krathongs and nimble rebuilding (indeed, we felt like the little-acknowledged "krathong elves" of legends past), we had a fleet of seaworthy krathongs.

By the time we got the krathongs to Cattail pond for the demonstration, we realized that there was still a great opportunity for disaster there. I lit one of the krathongs and put it in the pond. The first thing we noticed was there was absolutely no wind or current; the krathongs simply sat there, about a foot "offshore." I found a stick that I used to push them upwards of 5 feet away, but it was hardly the effect we were going for. On top of that, the candleholders, constructed of yogurt cups hot glued to cardboard with a cross-shaped slit cut in them, were not the most sturdy device imaginable. The candle of my krathong fell over almost immediately, putting the flame directly into the paper flower. I suddenly had a display much more suited to discussing the history of the "Viking funeral" than anything holiday related. Once again, disaster loomed.

Fortunately, Sarah and I pulled it off. We had a lovely demonstration and discussion of the holiday. Sarah kept referring to the King Consort who started the tradition of the krathong as the King's "special friend." Everybody enjoyed the idea of the secret beauty contest we were holding. The krathongs mostly stayed afloat. The only one that sank was the one with only one sheet of cardboard to which we had forgotten to add another sheet. We were definitely glad that we had taken the time to rebuild all the other ones with two sheets of cardboard, at that point. Also, the krathongs kindly decided not to combust entirely until near the last groups to visit. I also went to the other side of the pond and put a few in there, giving the illusion of some that had floated away. For a while there, it was actually quite a beautiful display. At the end, about half of them caught fire at about the same time and spilled wax and who-knows-what-else into the pond, but I'm going to gloss over that part due to the great success Sarah and I pulled off against all odds.

And now, with my victory over Loy Krathong, I have returned to Grove City to enjoy a holiday that I am somewhat more familiar with: Christmas. With my two weeks off of work, I should have just enough time to recover. Happy Holidays to all of you and yours out there, and I hope to see you all soon!

J.T. vs. Tom Clancy

Just a little trivia question for the web world out there:
In "Clear and Present Danger," what is the name on the CIA officer's passport?

J.T. vs. World Cup

I must rant, I can't help it. Before I start, let me state that I recognize that the U.S. didn't play as well as they should have.

That said, the U.S. had to play against the refs as much as the other team. I cannot believe the complete failure that was FIFA (F***ing Idiot Football Association). In my opinion, the U.S. won the Italy game- Period. An absolutely defenseless red card in the first half and an arguable 2nd yellow at the beginning of the second half. Even after the unbelievable ejection of two U.S. players, the U.S. scores a goal. The ref calls it offsides and pulls it back, despite the fact that McBride (the supposedly offside player) didn't touch the ball. People who argue that he blocked the view of the keeper deserve to have their eyes gouged out and donated to people who will actually use them. So, down two men for highly questionable reasons and a gift offsides call to Italy, and we still earned a tie.

The Ghana game wasn't quite as terrible. Claudia Reyna made a mistake and lost the ball, leading to a goal. Ouch. But the U.S. turned it around on Ghana right before the half. Boom - tie. In stoppage time, an indisputably wrong penalty kick was given to Ghana. Absolutely wrong. There is not one human being, probably not even the ref who made the call, who believes that was the right call now. All of that momentum was immediately sucked out of the U.S. team. Ghana sat back and defended the lead for most of the rest of the game. U.S. loses.

There is now a rather sizable break in the door of my bathroom. Oops... I thought the wood was stronger than that.

There's a lot for me to talk about regarding Korea, but I'm just too mad right now. A crucial bad call in the Ghana game and a ref who thought he was the star of the second game are just too much for me to handle. I give massive credit to Ghana, though; they've played great soccer. Group E = group of death, no doubt. Four strong teams; everybody was at risk all the way to the last game. I don't mind losing in such a massively difficult situation, but I would at least like to see the game based on the actual ability of the players. I am certain that this set back the American soccer program deeply. This isn't because of the game play; the players played some good soccer. It's the feeling that, playing on the biggest stage of the world, FIFA can't be bothered to find refs that have seen a game of soccer before. If they can't organize a game worth playing, the U.S. fans won't want to see it. The U.S. team could have played harder, I disagree with some of coach Bruce Arena's calls, but the real failure of these games has been FIFA. Pathetic.

Okay, I'm done complaining now. Also, on the World Cup theme, look at this statement by Rush Limbaugh. I cannot believe that he, Anne Coulter and Bill O'Reilly are the cheerleaders for the Republican party. Actually, that doesn't surprise me. What does surprise me is that people actually defend what these obvious racist, lying idiots say just because they are vocal Republicans. These three people are a huge part of the potential collapse of America we will see if things don't change soon. I honestly believe that the incarceration and isolation of these three people would do more to benefit America than any group of three terrorists you could find.

[edit] As it turns out, the Rush Limbaugh link I posted was just "satire." After I posted it, the author had this to say:
"FP, are you the only one with a brain around here???
To all the knuckleheads who think Rush *actually* said these things, and even funnier, that it was *actually* Al Franken reporting it...wow, I am speechless.
It is *satire*, folks. A piece that pokes fun at all kinds of idiots. I won't spell it all out for you, as some of you are the butt of the joke and need to get it for yourselves, but one target was racists. I used a few of the racist, or at least *perceived* racist sports comments from past years to try to create a funny yet pointed piece.
And to the clueless: Rush is in no way racist. This isn't even debatable."

I would like to point out that, if you want to write some oh-so clever "satire," you need to actually say something that isn't believable. Otherwise, it's just libel. The man was fired from ESPN for racist statements, not to mention a host of other famous racist comments he's made. He tells a black caller to "Take that bone out of your nose and call me back," plays "Movin' on up" when he talks about the first black Senator in the U.S., and says, "The NAACP should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies." Yet, this blogger doesn't understand why people believed his statement and, further, he actually says that Rush is "in no way racist." Ignorance at this level would be hilarious if it weren't supporting such dangerous Republican demigods. I suppose Anne Coulter isn't racist, either. (Here's the Wikipedia article on her. There's not enough Internet for me to even begin listing her blatant racism.)

J.T. vs. Valentine's Day

Hi all,
Actually, I have very little to post today. I didn't even remember it was Valentine's Day until somebody mentioned it to me around 8 p.m. tonight. Oops. A bunch of my students were giving various snacks to the teachers and such, but it went completely over my head. Oh well. Obviously, Valentine's Day means next-to-nothing to me at the moment. However, if I were giving out Valentines this year, these would definitely be the ones I'd be using:

http://www.brandonbird.com/svutines.html

I spotted these a few weeks ago. They are truly awesome. I thought about buying some just for the novelty, but I figured they weren't really worth getting if I didn't have the opportunity to give them away.

Anyways, that's it. I hope every one else had a nice Valentines day. I know there are some paranoid people out there who bemoan Valentine's Day as another corporate holiday, but I think any that any day that reminds you to be a little more special to your loved one is a good one. Much like Christmas, it's as commercial or as personal as you want it to be. So do something nice for you lady/guy tonight. Something cool, like an SVU Valentine's Day card. Don't be lame.

That's about it. Catch all you peeps later!

J.T. vs. Literature

J.T. vs. Literature

This post has little to do with Korea, but it is what is on my mind, at the moment.

I have decided that the very most accurate form of literature today is the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. These books have a very special place in the childhood memories of many of us, but most of us have failed to truly understand the implications of what these brilliant authors were trying to teach us. This is mostly a cultural fault. Our modern culture has us studying Vladimir Nabokov and Iris Murdoch in our collegiate English classes. Of course the aesthetics of such works are far more pleasurable, but how many of us need to be warned about becoming creepy, self-delusional pedophiles or semi-evil ex-theater directors with magical cousins and an obsession with the sea? Very few, that’s who. However, the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books teach us some things that are very important about life. In the absence of any easily-found academic material, I will attempt to begin the educating.

• You start with basically no information.

Well, that’s just the reality of life. When you start are “Choose Your Own Adventure” story, you are given a little bit of background, a description of where you are, and then you start. In life you’re first decisions are all basically random as you learn from them, make mistakes and move on. Some of what you learn will be useful later, but much of it won’t. After all, how many times have you needed to remember how to play “Four Square” or recall those ultra-successful “Freeze Tag” strategies you had. I’m getting a little off track here. The point is you start off with almost no information, and that little information you have can quickly become useless or misleading (Girls have cooties? If only it were that simple.)

• Small decisions can have dire effects.

“You are standing in front of a door. On a nearby table is a piece of glass and a cigarette butt. Before going into the door, you take:

-The Glass (pg. 18)

-The Cigarette Butt (pg. 214)

-Nothing (pg. 54)

On page 54: “In the next room you encounter a crazed and bitter hobo. Perhaps if you had a cigarette butt you could offer it to him to help him calm down, or maybe you could use a glass shard to fend him off while you escape. Sadly, you have neither of those things. He disembowels you with his bare hands and offers your intestines to the Hobo gods. They bless him with copious amounts of “Wild Turkey” and some loose change they had in their godly ashtray.”

That was, of course, just to illustrate a point. Just like in life, you often find yourself making what seem to be nearly pointless decisions that will, in hindsight, be some of the most important of your life. This, of course, works both ways, as you’ll find that you may fret over a major decisions for weeks just to learn that, no matter what you do, it won’t make a bit of difference.

• There are far more ways for things to go wrong than to go right.

Here the parallels begin to become extremely obvious. For anybody who has gone back and done the same “Choose Your Own Adventure” book a dozen times, it becomes obvious that getting someplace your satisfied with is darn near impossible, but completely destroying your life through a few hopeless choices is incredibly easy! In fact, within this lesson is two sub-lessons that are also very much worth remembering.

1). “Don’t wish you had your life to do over again, because you’d just screw it up in some different way.” And then, seriously, what kind of excuse would you have? A whole lifetime of experience and you still couldn’t get to second base with that girl from high school? That’s sad, man.

2). “The only way to ensure a happy ending is to start there and work backwards.” Everybody’s done it: looked through the whole book for a good ending, then tried to trace the steps back to get there. It’s definitely too bad this doesn’t work in real life. “Where’s the mystery?” you ask. The mystery can be found as you ponder how you were supposed to know that the toe nail clippers you left behind on page 87 could be used to repair a broken supercomputer that contained the key to everlasting life.

• Good choices don’t lead to rewards, they lead to more choices.

This is, perhaps, the very deepest lesson we all should learn from the “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. Just like in life, you are given many different decisions to make. Every time you make a decision is a chance to fail. If you don’t fail, it doesn’t mean you’ve succeeded; you simply get to make another decision, which is also a chance to fail. The odds don’t seem so good, eh? But that’s life. Think of all the good decisions you’ve made in your life. Probably a lot, in all reality. Now remember how some really great thing in your life, which you probably made hundreds of good decisions to create, was quickly obliterated with one or two mistakes you couldn’t have avoided without “reading backwards.” It doesn’t really seem fair. There is a great deal of unfairness in the unfair book, but this particular variation probably makes it into the opening pages. It’s very important to remember that, barring making it all the way to the end, there is no number of good decisions you can make that cannot quickly lead to your falling down a trap door into a pit full of brain-starved goat zombies.

What does this teach us about life, in general?

• Luck is the key to opportunity, but not to Success

That’s most of what there is to it. Luck is such a big part of the game of life. That 47 year old man mopping floors at McDonald’s could have just lost his very noble career due to downsizing. That mega-millionaire was probably just born to the right parents, or happened to meet the right people. Certainly the millionaire had to act on his advantages and the mop-master has a responsibility to himself to rebuild his life (which, if you hadn’t realized it, he is actually doing by working for a living instead of just giving up), so there is some control to be had. Just like the books teach us, you’ll probably fail before you succeed. Your choices are clear: give up or try again. And, no matter how many haunted houses and abandoned funhouses there are between you and a 500 year old pirate treasure, you’ve got to try again.