Incompetence!

So, my Dad forwarded me an e-mail about the horrors of keeping a GPS in your car - i.e., making yourself a target for criminals who can then use said GPS to find your home and steal even more stuff. I think such tales severely over-estimate the intelligence of criminals.

Case in point: I got to my car this morning to find my driver's side door smashed. I had a car charger plugged into my cigarette lighter, but nothing plugged into the charger. The moron who broke in ripped the charger out of the lighter (but left it behind), couldn't figure out how to open my center console and so only found a tire gauge and some AAA batteries in the top layer, didn't even bother looking in the glove compartment as far as I could tell (the GPS wasn't in there, either. Just the mount. It would take someone many, many valuable minutes to find where I hid that thing. It was still where I put it.), and - in hopes of getting something for all his hard work - stole my 15-year-old backpack where I keep my basketball shoes (size 3 1/2) and football gloves (children's small). There was also an X-Files long-sleeve shirt in there, but I have two of those anyway. I'm sure he'll have plenty of use for those things. If he's eight. :P Moron.

Oh, but the fun does not stop there, friends! No, no. I went to the front desk of my apartment and told them what happened. The guy at the desk (who's wearing a badge labeled "Security") just kind of shrugged and blinked at me like "what do you want me to do?" So I called 911, then asked the guy at the desk if there was a vacuum cleaner I could use to clean out my car or if he knew a number I could call to get it fixed. Again, shrug and blink. Frustrated, I went back upstairs to take care of police and insurance reports. When the police officer asked me if there was security at my apartment, I laughed and cried. My insurance put me on a call back list, so I went back downstairs to ask AGAIN for a vacuum cleaner, because surely maintenance has something, right?

The guy at the front desk was not happy to see me. He looked about ready to yell at me, then thought better of it and instead said something about everybody has their job and he's just security. That set me off. "Yes, you're security, and I'm telling you that my car has been broken into but you act like you don't give s#!$." Yes, I said the word. Out loud. With a raised voice. I pay $50 a month to park in a locked garage to prevent just this sort of thing from happening, and I pay a hefty rent that goes toward paying this guy to sit at the front desk. I've worked those sorts of jobs. I know it's not exciting and I don't envy dealing with unhappy customers. But I had been calm up to that point and, it seems to me, reasonable in my expectations of help of SOME kind. Your job, dude, is to help the people who live here. Never mind that the word "Security" on your shirt implies that you should have some interest when a resident experiences a breach of security. You shouldn't hear someone say "my car got broken into" and act like they just said it's cold outside.

Anyway, he disappeared into the back and came out with the head of maintenance, who was considerably more helpful. He even gave me a cushion to sit on so that I could drive my car the short distance required to get within reach of their shop vac. My car is now cleaner than it has been in months. I now have a plastic bag for a window. Hopefully, I can get that taken care of this afternoon and still have time to buy new basketball shoes before practice tonight.

But if you see anyone wearing a small pair of blue and white basketball shoes and carrying an old black backpack, let me know.

Grocery Store Bags

I appreciate grocery stores' efforts to provide customers with reusable bags (even thought they are late to the game, since Ukrop's started doing this over 20 years ago, back when "reduce, reuse, recycle" hadn't been reduced to "recycle"). My apartment quickly fills with plastic bags from various establishments, and I simply do not produce enough waste to use them all up as cheap trash bags. So bags that save me from suffocating in a pile of plastic are fine by me.

The problem, however, is that the baggers seem to think that because the bags are more sturdy than a plastic or paper bag, they must therefore be capable of supporting infinite weight. They stuff edible items, heavy and light, into my bags until there is room for nary a candy bar, with no mind to the strength of either the stitching in the bag or the customer before them.

If one places items that would have taken up three plastic bags that I would have easily carried in one hand, you have saved my fingers from the task of gripping six handles. But if the weight is such that I must use both arms for one bag, aside from the fact that it makes it more obvious that I need to start lifting weights, chances are that my reusable bag will become simply... used. I have already split one seam in a bag all the way. Another has a hole that will grow should I every burden it will more than fruit. A dollar a bag is not a deal if it falls apart after three uses.

So, dear baggers, something to remember. Space capacity is not the same as weight capacity. Also, they're reusable. You don't have to conserve them by minimizing the number used. Have pity on my weak little arms!

No Touching!

All forms of physical contact have been banned at a Fairfax County, VA middle school. Apparently, because some kids don't know the difference between "good" touching and "bad" touching, they should never have the opportunity to learn the difference. In this school, high fives are as bad as punches. A hand on the shoulder as bad as groping. It's sounds to me like the school is too lazy or too scared to make judgment calls on a fuzzy line and figures it would just be easier to ban all physical contact and call it a day.

The school's principal says that she "has seen a poke escalate into a fight and a handshake that is a gang sign." Trash talking can also lead to fights. Will they ban verbal communication next? I'm pretty sure there are some gang signs that don't require physical contact. Will hand signals be banned, too? Or, better yet, all body language. And eye contact. Eye contact can be very intimidating. You know what? Middle school sucked anyway. Let's just ban middle school. The kids can stay home through the better part of puberty and become socially stunted in the comfort of their own living room instead of trudging to school to get that way. They can do distance learning. They can take classes on their impersonal computer which will become their wire mesh mothers, providing socialization only in the form of text messaging, e-mail, and bulletin boards. That will make everything better.

In Other News, the Rest of the World Still Exists

Boycotting the news media and sponsors for appalling behavior ~ NanoThoughts 1.0

Roger links to a blog that proposes boycotting the news media for airing the photos and videos from the mass murdered at Tech. I've been working long days all week, but even in the rare moments I could get access to news I only watched a few moments or read only headlines. So, essentially, I’ve already been doing that. I knew media coverage would be both heartbreaking (the Hokie stone as a back drop for swarming police cars was all I had to see in an airport bar before I walked out) and excessive. Even if they hadn't shown the videos and pictures, it would have been too much. They always do this. They shove microphones and cameras into the faces of the mourning. They try to blame anyone and anything but the person who was directly responsible. They bring fame to those whose punishment should be the anonymity they sought to escape by slaughtering innocents. They have no concept of the consequences of their own actions. They’re perfectly willing to blame their media siblings in the movie, television, music, and video game industries for these tragedies. But they think themselves blameless. They bring information to the public. But they cannot distinguish between good and bad, helpful and harmful. They just spew it at you as it comes to them, so busy standing in front of a camera they don’t have time to actually investigate, delve deeper, or even verify what they have. If nothing new comes, they just give you the same five minutes of information for hours on end. They’ve got air time to fill, after all. And they can’t cover something else because viewers might change the channel to someone else who is covering it from a slightly different camera angle. And we can't have that.

Perhaps Lionel Shriver should join the boycott, too.

Group Think and Meetings

A recent study suggests that group think in meetings can result in poor decision making. Essentially, once people hear ideas from others, they have trouble coming up with ideas that differ from what has already been mentioned. So if you want people to come up with truly diverse ideas, you need to have them brainstorm individually, then come to a meeting with their ideas written down. Use the meeting to organize the ideas everyone has come up with on their own, discuss them, then take a break to allow everyone to process the ideas presented on their own. This gives everyone a chance to break out of group think again before a final decision is made.

Group think in meetings can also be used to great benefit when the purpose of a meeting is not to make a decision, but to get everybody on the same page. If working relatively independently has caused a group to lose focus on the goal they all are working toward, a meeting can serve to quickly refocus everyone's efforts on the task at hand.

Of course, group think in meetings can be taken advantage of in a negative way. If you want people to be incapable of thinking of any solution other than the one that you offer, even if they hate your solution to their deepest core, just force them to go to as many meetings as you can fit into a day, leaving them mentally exhausted and incapable of coming up with a better idea. Be careful to schedule meetings "before" and "after" lunch, but not during, so that you are not obligated to provide food even though it is obvious that no one will have time to eat between meetings. If people try to skip meetings to acquire sustenance, "forget" to tell them what (if anything) was decided in the meetings they skipped. This way, the rebels who are most likely to come up with ideas that differ from the desired group think will be left out of the loop and rendered incapable of contributing.

Meetings aren't the only place this is a problem. Any time someone wants to sell you something, they flood your brain with the wonders of their product, making it difficult for you to think of reasons why you shouldn't buy their product (other than not trusting salesmen). Politicians and pundits, too, do their best to fill your head with their ideas so that you have trouble coming up with your own. But meetings are particularly bad because they involve so many people trapped in a room together, unable to escape. Meetings have their uses and can be very productive when administered properly. But they can also be horribly unproductive if factors like group think aren't taken into account.

Pockets

Guys, when was the last time you bought a pair of pants, only to find it had no pockets or just one pocket? I didn't think so. You make me sick.

I bought a new pair of pants recently, being careful to select a pair with a back pocket that could hold my wallet. I wore them a couple of days ago only to find there were no front pockets at all. Ugh! I hate women's clothing.

The fashion industry seems to be assuming that women are perfectly willing to put everything they carry with them in a purse. Personally, I'm too forgetful to want to leave my wallet and keys in anything that I could possibly leave behind. If I put them in my pant's pocket, unless someone takes my pants (in which case I probably have bigger problems), I minimize my risk of losing them. I do carry a purse, but I put larger and/or less essential items in it. If I'm not going to work, I could leave my purse at home and not miss it. But that's only because I spend most of my shopping hours looking for women's pants with pockets (oh, and women's shirts that aren't revealing or form fitting and don't have messed up sleeves, but that's another rant). Yes, casual clothing such as jeans regularly have pockets. But more professional clothing, even a step above jeans to khakis, are hard to find with functional pockets. Dockers used to have a style with decent pockets, but I can't even find those anymore. I simply do not understand why this is the case.

For the guys out there who don't understand why I say "functional pocket", let me explain. Women's clothes often have false pockets or small pockets just large enough to hold a business card. To me, these are more frustrating than not having a pocket because the clothing designer obviously acknowledges that a pocket should be there and looks just fine being there, but they don't seem to think that pockets should be used. What the &*#$ are pockets for? Decoration? If the pocket is going to be useless, just don't bother with it. Please. It fools those of us who want pockets and are too tired check closely into thinking one is there (false pockets can often seem like true pockets that have been sewn shut).

Isn't anyone else frustrated by this? No? Just me? Okay then.