| On Political Blogging |
[Jun. 30th, 2004|11:30 am] |
eponymous wrote: Tamerlane,
Good to see you're taking the plunge. Once you get your footing, it would be nice to read your commentaries regarding the MENA region. From reading your stuff on the SDMB, I think you would be able to provide readers invaluable insight - especially since you seem so well versed on the history of the region (as well as Islam).
While I appreciate the sentiment, I will probably not be doing a great deal of this, my apologies to any who were hoping that I would. While I certainly won't rule out the possibility of me occasionally commenting on some aspect or another, I really don't feel well-placed to make a habit out of it. For one thing I am not on the spot nor a fluent speaker of Arabic ( or Farsi, Turkish or any other useful language ) like someone like Collounsbury and thus have no special insight into happenings on the ground. For another I tend to think more with a historian's perspective than a political scientist's - my more usual impulse is not to speculate on what will happen, but rather to wait and see what happens and comment in retrospect. For a third, given my interests I am most comfortable providing background information, which can be found elsewhere.
Also I grow weary at the partisanship of it all.
Frankly I am more inclined to occasionally comment in, say, Col's journal or on the SDMB to correct or point out some salient fact, than I am to make this journal a clearing house on little background essays or my own political analysis. It's not that I don't have opinions, of course. I am nothing if not opinionated :D. But they are just as banal as anyone else's and not unique enough to be of great public service.
That said if someone does have a specific question, I can answer here just as easily as anywhere else. |
|
|
| Cable Rant |
[Jun. 30th, 2004|11:28 am] |
Motherfucking Comcast. My broadband and to a only slightly lesser extent my TV cable has been erratic and unstable for weeks now, while they "upgrade". You know I really don't expect seemless transitions, but this is getting ridiculous. Three weeks for the same neighborhood? My broadband drops out every hour on the hour and I am including the dead of night. Supposedly they will be done by next week, but that is what they told me LAST week. Today I intend to get atypically snarly and call to have my account credited. No way am I going to pay their exhorbitant rates for this kind of service.
THIS WILL NOT STAND! |
|
|
| Work Rant |
[Jun. 30th, 2004|11:26 am] |
So, whining...
As usual I apologize in advance for the snore-inducing complexity of my work rants - the boatload of background required to make even marginal sense inevitably weighs them down.
To not so briefly recap from my last lengthy work rant ( posted, or rather inflicted, elsewhere ), management, in its infinite wisdom, had screwed the pooch within an inch of its poor life when, at the beginning of this year, it had attempted to ham-handedly pinch pennies at the water reclamation facility where I was working. Going on the assumption that budget cuts ( which never actually materialized ) were iminent, they sought to cut our staff of nine, running a 24-7 process, to a skeleton crew of four, running a 24-5 process which would shut down every weekend and re-start every Monday. Of the five displaced bodies, one would be absorbed into the interceptors ( the other half of the Remote Operations sections that includes reclamation ), the other four shunted into the main wastewater treatment plant ( as it happens one of those four resigned and another transferred to water side ). I was the guy who went to the interceptors, as it happens in mid-January, switching to day shift after nearly a decade on graveyard.
Unfortunately in their infinite wisdom management, in six months of planning, had never thought to inform our end-user of these plans. When informed, two days before the first weekend shutdown, that we would be going out every weekend, they ( a very large oil refinery ) went ballistic and threatened to sever all ties if my little municipality did any such thing. Then the State got in the act and threatened to call in a $17 million loan because we were no longer even trying to meet spec on reclamied water delivery. The state further threatened to never laon the district a dime again, since we were obviously unreliable and irresponsible. The district panicked, paid overtime for five solid weekends to staff overtime and keep the place running while they negotiated fruitlessly, then finally caved.
We would now be going to a skeleton crew of six, working 24-7 ( two day shift operators, two swing, two grave ). After a couple weeks of tedious negotiation ( in which I was reluctantly tapped to play a central role ), that is what happened, with our intrepid hero now moving to swing shift ( third shift in two months ) with weekdays off, to cover for the gross incompetence of our management team. It particularly galled because we had been raising all these issues for months and kept getting blown off. Ah, well. Anyway...
*****
A few weeks ago we get the bombshell that the interceptors, a seperate segment for over 20 years, was going to be folded into the main wastewater treatment plant for "more efficient workforce allocations". My little water reclamation facility would now be a stand-alone plant, with its six employees ( plus supervisor ) being all that was left of Remote Ops. The reason for this is pretty obvious - the ten guys on the interceptors work like dogs during the rainy season, when they run three mini-plants to handle storm flows and keep the lift stations clear. But the other eight-nine months out of the year they pretty much fuck-off and do nothing, sitting around with less than two hours of work a day. This has been a looming threat for awhile, but we figured it was still a year or so away ( when the current supervisor of the interceptors was due to retire ). No such luck.
But this raises problems:
1) Said mini-plants are complex and persnickety - not just any untrained monkey can run them. They need smart, trained, superior monkeys - we're talking macaque or baboon-level at least, not some little capuchin monkey that doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. Well, the disgruntled twenty and thirty-year veteran macaques being forced against their will out of the cushy, comfortable interceptors into the smelly, over-crowded main plant are not going to play ball and volunteer to work all hours during the next rainy season and the horde of capuchins and spider monkeys at the main plant aren't going to be able to pick up the slack. We're talking Permit Violation City as un- and overtreated sewage flows into the San Francisco Bay.
2) These very senior macaques, who migrated to the interceptors originally to avoid shift work ( the interceptors are staffed only on day shift in the dry season and by overtime for offshifts in wet weather ), are, by virtue of their seniority, going to bump many a junior capuchin from day shift to graveyard and swing shift in the main plant, thus ratcheting up the tension and general disgruntlement even higher.
3) Meanwhile back at the ranch, the reclamation plant, a bastard step-child divided by the water and wastewater departments ( this is complicated - suffice it to say water pays the operating bills and wastewater runs the day-to-day operation due to vagaries of law - the two departments are very different with both competeing and mutually hostile management and with seperate budgets derived from seperate tax bases ), is going to be isolated and understaffed. Which is a problem, because...
3a) We are being told we will operate with our staff of six. The Remote Operations pool shift operators that provided vacation relief were all based out on the interceptors - they'll now be gone. So we have six guys, all of whom get AT LEAST four weeks of vacation ( some get more ), plus sick leave. We're talking over six months worth of coverage. This will have to be covered internally, which means an assload of overtime at ~$60/hr. Even if we don't cover overlap, that is still in the neighborhood of $50-70k of overtime a year ( otherwise it is over $100k ). The money is nice, but I DON"T NEED IT. I never work overtime, my off-hours are far to valuable to me and I make enough already. The burn out factor, even among the overtime hounds, will be tremendous. But since this is still a little cheaper than adding another pool shift position with benefits, management is inclined to move in this direction. Very bad if they get their wish.
3b) Reclamation runs in the red. It cannot help but do so, the way our shitty contract with Chevron is drawn up. It was designed and built during a seven-year drought when saving drinking water was a priority. We're currently back in an incipient drought, but CA weather is nothing but variable. During wet years the pressure to mothball the plant and save a few dollars is intense. Never mind that it is more environmentally responsible to keep it running, never mind that it too is a tricky place to run and operational skills will atrophy if not kept in use, never mind the plant itself will degrade if left in mothballs and not properly maintained. Money, even small amounts, is a powerful motivator. Which makes employment here precarious and unstable. I doubt I would lose my job, but I could definitely get jerked around hither and yon doing odd jobs for waterside, who are always attempting to seize control from wastewater ( and with Remote Ops now dissolved, this becomes much easier to do ).
*sigh* It is all very annoying. Now I have once again been tapped to help negotiate for the section and must go in early next Tuesday to the first in what will probably several tedious meeting.
I can't wait :(. |
|
|
| Grrrr... |
[Jun. 23rd, 2004|06:28 pm] |
Stupid-ass livejournal. I am unimpressed with its functionality so far. What's this nonsense about screened posts? Why are they unscreened after I respond to them? Why is this thing slow as molasses and dropping out constantly?
Yes, yes - these are rhetorical questions, requiring no response. I realize the answer is that in ten-thumbed way I have somehow made things difficult for myself by not spending enough time pouring over the instructions and/or misunderstanding them and the connectivity issues are probably on my end - part of comcast's long, drawn-out upgrade to fiberoptics in my neighborhood ( aka Operation Let's-Pretend-To-Be-Doing-Some-Line-Work-But-Actually-Just-Screw-With-Tamerlane-Because-We-Hate-Him-So ). Still, it is slightly frustrating. And I dislike being frustrated... ( *cue omninous music* )
I was going to post a whiny work rant ( EVERYBODY loves a whiny work rant :D ), as my administration seems intent on constantly doing something to disrupt my nice, quiet routine ( I just want to be left alone, damnit ). But I think I'm going to put that off and have a glass of soothing wine instead. To quote Homer Simpson, patron deity of my work-site:
To alcohol! The cause of - and solution to - all of life's problems. |
|
|
| Testing |
[Jun. 11th, 2004|10:58 am] |
Test, test...*tap* *tap*...test...*ahem* bloodyyyySQUEEEEEEEE...damnit...bloody, bloody, BLOOODYYYY SLAUGHTERRRR OF INNNOCENTSSSS.
Alright let's see if this thing is functional. |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
timur_i_lang's journal