Mark's Blog

The Guard

2011-08-16T22:39:00.000-05:00

There are of millions of National Guardsmen in the US, all of whom are in constant training. They are our neighbors, friends, family members. Every one I have met is a red-blooded American, proud to serve.

One whom I recently ran into is a 38-year-old US Army sergeant, here in town undergoing a month of training on upgraded attack and transport helicopter electronics. I didn't know that 'til he said he is from California. North Texas was really hot that day. "It's a lot hotter in Iraq," he said. "We have to work early mornings and early evenings to stay out of 140-degree temperatures. It's not good for the helicopters, either." He's to be deployed next month -- again.

There's the 26-year-old woman I encountered at a convenience store. She's a single mother from Oklahoma, and she's heading to Afghanistan next month. In civilian life, she works for an oil company full-time. She looked fit, and I wondered what she does in the military.

Then there's the 38-year-old woman training on new software. She was pleasant but offered few details. I see her around for a few weeks, then she's gone for many more weeks. Her duties are classified.

These are people just proud to serve their country. They don't like the over-used term, "hero." We civilians have no clue.

There's a calm about them. They don't brag, and they don't talk much to civilians about what they do in the service. You and I see them all the time but don't notice -- at the store, gassing up their cars, jogging -- doing the things we civilians do.

'Til one day you notice that you haven't seen them in a while. And if you knew they were military, and you knew they were to be deployed soon, you realize that "soon" has already happened. They're thousands of miles away, in some God-awful place on the other side of the world. Suddenly it's cold in your gut.

And you are humbled.

STS-135

2011-07-24T20:59:00.001-05:00

The end of the space shuttle program is a bittersweet chapter in America’s space exploration program, but it’s not the end of it, and that’s exciting. Who among us can forget staying up all night to watch Neil Armstrong step off the LEM? Man will take another giant leap – on Mars, if not an asteroid first. You and I may not live to see that day, but our progeny will. Meanwhile, NASA is scheduled to launch a bigger and better Mars rover by year’s end to learn more about our sister planet.

Other spectacular unmanned missions continue. The incredible Hubble Space Telescope has sent back some of the most awe-inspiring photographs of all time since its 1990 launch. And the HST just found a fourth moon orbiting Pluto three billion miles away.

Another telescope -- Chandra, launched and shuttle-deployed twelve years ago -- looks billions of light years into the history of our universe using its X-ray vision (literally) to unveil never-before-seen wonders in that part of the spectrum invisible to us humans.

A NASA probe named Dawn just entered orbit about Vesta, the 3rd largest body in the Asteroid Belt. So what? Vesta may not be an asteroid. It’s huge (330 miles in diameter) and not just a rock like other, much smaller asteroids. It has a crust, a mantle and a core, like Earth and the other interior planets. It could be one of Earth’s cousins. Five percent of the meteorites that fall to Earth come from Vesta.

These are but a fraction of the projects still underway to help explore the eternal question that Ellie Arroway posited in that movie: Why are we here?

Because God put us here? Absolutely. With an insatiable curiosity.

When Police Say

2011-07-14T00:00:00.000-05:00

"Attribution! Attribution! Attribution!" The words of Prof. Phil Bremen have rung in the ears of his Ball State University students for years. If your news story is based upon information from a source -- named or unnamed -- you must attribute the information to that source.

This may explain why you'll often hear a newscaster say something like, "A man is jailed after police say..."

Wait. A man was jailed because a policeman spoke?

"Well," a consultant might argue, "that's better than, 'According to police.' That's old-fashioned newspaper speak, and we don't want to sound old-fashioned ..."

Uh-huh.

Listeners (and viewers) don't have the benefit of seeing the puncuation in the script. Maybe the guy/gal wrote, "A man is jailed after, police say, ..." I'm willing to give 100:1 odds that s/he did not include the offsetting commas in the script because (1) s/he grew up hearing "..after police say" and assumed that it was correct because radio and TV newscasters are supposed to be expert grammarians and set an example, or (2) because s/he didn't comprehend the ambiguity, or (3) was never taught the difference.

Sometimes, newscasters will use voice inflection to infer puncutation -- e.g., dropping the pitch of his/her voice at the end of a sentence to indicate a period, or inserting a slight pause before and after reading a direct quote.

So I guess that, to avoid unwarranted arrest, we should all try not to be around when police say.

THE END

2011-06-15T22:13:00.000-05:00

The California preacher who got so much attention with his Judgment Day prediction last month says he has recalculated, and that it will happen this Fall. I forget the date. We’ll see. But as his May deadline approached, I got to thinking.

Twenty or thirty years ago, I would have dismissed the man as just another wacko and not given him a second thought. But that was before I lost my father to a rare, fast-moving disease. And my mother to old age. My best friend in high school -- the healthiest, fittest man I knew -- died of a heart attack at age 50. A brother-in-law dropped dead in his 40s, and a colleague died just last month. All, within the last ten years.

While I ignored the preacher's prediction (What can one do, after all?), it reminded me that we are all on this Earth for only a while -- a relatively long while for some, a short while for others. But still just tiny, nearly imperceptible fractions of a second in the galactic clock.

There’s so much yet to do in this life – not the least of which is to appreciate this priceless gift, and the Lord who gave it to us. The economy may be in the tank and so on and so on, but that’s our doing. After all, we are the life-forms in charge.

It’s easy, amid our many woes, to forget that it is a miracle that we are here at all. Whether you view life and this planet from a religious or astrophysical position, our existence is truly a miracle.

So whenever The End comes, I’ll be ready. I’m just not holding my breath.

The Alligator

2011-05-07T17:15:00.000-05:00

Last February, my little Honda and I took a brief spin through the snow and down into a ditch. Last month, driving very late at night, I hit the biggest alligator that I’ve ever seen. An alligator is what truckers call a piece of tire shed on the highway. I was told years ago that the term originated from the real alligators encountered on Florida highways. Highway alligators are usually retreads off 18-wheelers, and most often they fly apart on the road, normally in pieces no bigger than 2 or 3 feet.

This one was a monster. It must have been the whole tire. It had peeled off in a single strip, coiled up and twisted, lying there sideways across the entire lane of the Indian Nation Turnpike, about an hour this side of Tulsa. It was one o’clock in the morning, pitch black outside. I was engrossed in some radio show far away.

Suddenly, there it was in my headlights, dead ahead. In those first fractions of a second, I thought it might be a deer. Or even a human being. Maybe a dead cow. While I was trying to figure out what it was, part of my brain said, “Swerve!!” The other part said, “You don't time! Hit it straight on!!”

I hit it straight on. The built-in recorder in my brain went into slow-motion. First, a sickening crunch, then about 2 or 3 Gs of downforce, the car is launched about 2 feet off the ground, and I’m thinking, ”Aw, ****!!" But the car lands perfectly straight. Not a moment of lost control, unless you count the time in the air. Four of the five senses, already at DefCon One, listen and smell and watch and feel how the car is driving. I detect a tiny rumble in the front end, but drive on for 20 minutes ‘til a state trooper gets me doing 83 in a 75. I told him about the monster alligator. “Someone could get killed,” I said. He left to check it out.

I was happy that the car was undamaged. Only later did I see the impact scar on the front bumper, and notice that some piece of thin metal was rattling under the car, the transmission was shifting oddly and the air conditioner was blowing hot.

Three thousand dollars later, the Moral:

Live alligators bite; highway alligators bite your wallet.

FEWER LESSES

2011-04-24T23:36:00.005-05:00

Being a grammar freak has its good points and its bad points. Good is appreciating the talent and skill it takes to write well. Bad is reading (or hearing) bad grammar.

What has my dander up these days is the misuse of "less." I hear it everywhere:

"Less dollars!"

It's like fingernails on a blackboard, and it seems to have grown exponentially in the past decade.

Even "The New York Times" blogged about it last month.

Being a simple man, I see two possible explanations for the problem: either teachers are not teaching the difference between "less" and "fewer," or students are not learning it.

The former is unlikely; the latter is very likely.

"Fewer," the rule says, "applies to things that are countable."

Therefore, it's fewer dollars and less money.

Fewer gallons. Less water.

So, please -- fewer lesses!

I feel better now...

Ask Not

2011-04-09T11:19:00.014-05:00

We are running out of time, and soon it will be too late. Al Gore’s ecological “tipping point” has an evil twin in Finance, and he is at our door. The U.S. must reduce its debt. Not think about it, just do it. I’m talking about virtually nuking the way we have lived and starting over.

We are in this mess because previous congresses and presidents lacked the political will to solve the problems. Doing so would have cost them re-election, most likely, but they would have served their country in the spirit they so earnestly proclaimed in their election campaigns. Democrats and Republicans share this responsibility equally. More importantly, so do we because we allowed it. It is we who must lead now, not our politicians.

There is only one approach that offers a realistic chance of getting the nation out of its fiscal quagmire: a war. A real, no-holds-barred, financially bloody, scorched-earth war against the political, economic and social sloth that has led us here. Here’s a possible war plan:

First, the children. Stop raising them “easy.” Don’t buy them everything they want. Make them earn it. Better still, make them save up for it. Don’t let them play more than one sport at a time. Make them learn music. Teach charity. Remove the TV from their bedrooms. Restrict their computers and cellphones. Make them read a book a week and write letters to their grandparents or cousins. Give them chores. Take them to church. Teach them how to cook, fight, shoot and ride. Teach them humility and manners. Be tough. Be loving. Be a parent.

Second, you. Lead by example. You and your kids save up for their college or they don’t go unless they win a scholarship. Want a new car? Buy it outright or keep and maintain the one you have. To hell with what your co-workers and the neighbors think. If they ask what’s up, explain that you’re a soldier at war to save our country, then recruit them.

Third, Washington. Outlaw lobbyists. End foreign aid. Make banks be banks and nothing more. Take the exotic out of Wall Street: stocks, bonds and commodities only. Give cheaters and frauds long, long jail time.

Fourth, the tax code. Nuke it and go to a flat tax. No write-offs, no deferreds, no loopholes, no exceptions.

Do at least these things – constitutional amendments as needed -- and maybe we can get our country back.

Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do to save it.

The Gift

2010-09-10T16:55:00.003-05:00

As a young man, I enjoyed a nearly perfect sense of direction. Rain or shine, winter or summer, I could tell within ten degrees on a compass which direction I was facing. Not everyone my age had this gift. Its display was even met with envy at times. I wasn’t much good at anything else, so it was nice to be good at something.

The gods, however, award such gifts grudgingly. My internal compass began to fade in my 30s, and has long since shut down entirely. Built-in obsolescence, I suppose.

Without that factory-installed compass, I am lost. This is wholly unfair. Mature men need it more than young men, for the young are much more adept at faking it.

My wife has watched this erosion (and happily complained about it) for years. It used to be that I knew which way to turn and she didn’t. This was immensely satisfying. Men, you see, must be acutely aware of their surroundings at all times so as to pounce on any approaching threat.

Naturally, the angst of the missus grew inversely proportionate to my fading sense of direction. The worse it got, the more she dutifully pointed it out. Thanks, babe.

For awhile, I could blame cloudy skies or nighttime for obscuring the sun by which I navigated. That argument survived for about three days.

At length, one of my sons – acutely aware of the crisis – bought me one of those GPS things. Voila! I installed it at once, carefully licking the suction cup on the windshield mount and planting it, just so. It had a for-real compass built in! Screw the cloudy skies! Screw the dark of night! Problem solved!

The gods must have been amused by this. For sport, they inflicted near-record heat on Texas summers. The defenseless GPS began falling off the windshield, clanging right onto the steering column and scaring the crap out of me and the missus.

There are some things one absolutely should not attempt while driving, such as grabbing one’s crotch to protect the boys from incoming.

Only slightly less dangerous is driving while attempting to affix a GPS mount to the inside of a windshield. While steering with both knees to keep the hands free for the task. And at night. And (naturally), while trying to remember directions to an unfamiliar address which you expected to find easily because you had this GPS but which from this moment forward stands not for Global Position System but instead for ***-damned Piece of ****.

I wonder what we did with that old street map . . .

THE TEST

2010-08-14T21:07:00.006-05:00

She stood outside the office building, trying to light her one cigarette of the day. She used to smoke a pack a day, but for the past three years she has been cutting down. "Almost there!" she said.

She was nervous, anxious and near tears. She said that she had just come out of her nursing exam and she wasn't sure that she passed. For three years she had read and studied hard and prepared for this day. The hours-long test was over, and in a few days she would know her fate. She would not be able to sleep until then.

So here she stood, trembling a bit but trying to hide it from the others trickling out the door and heading to their cars. She had been so nervous on this day that she asked a friend to drive her to the test site. Now, she waited for her ride to take her back the nearly one hundred miles to the small town where she lived and had studied and crammed for months and months.

She said that she's wanted to be a nurse for years. She couldn't recall when she decided that. She likes helping people, she said. It gives her great satisfaction to help ease another person's discomfort or pain. There's nothing like it, she smiled.

She worries most about the medications part of the rest. See, all candidates must answer at least 75 questions. The student can opt for more, up to two hundred and something, she said. The test-givers randomly assign a few in the class to submit to the whole test. She had opted for the whole battery, and she believes that she did okay except for the very last question. Now she worries. Maybe her whole future in medicine lies in that one, lousy test answer written on a piece of paper in a large room in a tall building in a big city.

She is among hundreds of thousands of nursing students attempting to enter a profession that is begging for qualified practitioners. This woman -- a single mother of three -- may someday tend to your mother or father, or maybe even to you, or your spouse.

If she passes today's exam.

Wish her well. Tell her will that it is an important calling that she has answered. Ask any doctor: a good RN is worth his or her weight in gold.

We need everyone to be really good at what he or she does, actually. We are Americans, after all.

We are family.

We are the American family.

Obama's Oil

2010-06-09T10:47:00.004-05:00

That's the message being broadcast everywhere. It's the President's fault. Well, okay, he didn't actually cause the spill, but he hasn't done enough and quickly enough to fix it. Yeah, that's it.

"Why has the Bush Administration been so slow to intervene into what was from the first day obviously a major environmental crisis?"
--The Los Angeles Times
March 30, 1989
(six days after the Exxon Valdez disaster)

Back then, there was public debate about whether to allow oil and gas exploration in ANWR -- the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Bush administration -- barely two months into its first term -- was for it, but the Exxon Valdez disaster killed the idea. The Obama administration recently proposed allowing it 50 miles off the East Coast. The BP disaster has now killed that idea, too.

The fact is: we Americans demand fossil fuels and oil companies meet that demand. Government is supposed to protect us from shoddy practices but it cannot. Whistle-blowers go unheard until there's a disaster (think Countrywide, undertrained pilots, ignored intelligence).

That's SOP unless and until we change it.

THE GREEN ROOM

2010-03-16T22:47:00.010-05:00

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden. –The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

It wasn’t a 30-yard fence, but a patio we had enclosed to create an additional room. Never mind that we never used the darned thing. For one thing, it’s ugly, with siding all ‘round, and emerald green indoor/outdoor carpeting laid by the previous owner. For another, we’re just not “outside” people: we don’t go camping, hiking, picnicking or any such thing. At most, once a year we drive to a remote spot to watch the 4th-of-July fireworks over downtown. We’re pasty-white indoor folk.

So there it was, an outdoor-indoor room that needed painting. I knew how to paint a wall, but it had been awhile. “Preparation,” a housepainter once told me, “is the thing. Get all your gear on-site, ready.” So I prepared exactly nothing. How hard can it be? I thought. Just paint the damned thing.

The wall that we created to enclose the room was made of fence wood, board-on-board. At the time, we thought it was a good choice. It was not. It soaked up the paint like a sponge. An hour into the task, I had completed one wall when the phone rang. A friend and I talked for half an hour. By then, the paint roller had stiffened a bit. *sigh*

And what’s that on the floor?? A big drop of paint that went unnoticed ‘til now. And another over there! Jeez.

Thus it went for the next three hours until I’d had enough. Clean-up took another 45 minutes because paint rollers hold a lot of paint.

Tonight I sit here, achy and hungry. My arms and shoulders are threatening legal action against my brain, and my jeans are sporting new designs that suspiciously resemble painted finger wipes.

Tomorrow, the remaining two walls.

Don’t say a word; two walls in one afternoon ain’t bad. But if you spot Huckleberry Finn, tell him I'd like a word with him.

BROKEN DOWN

2010-01-16T22:58:00.004-06:00

I've been a Triple-A member for years, and until recently it has served me well. Mind you, I don't call upon them for anything but a tow or a boost. Twice a year at most, and the driver always gets a tip. Lately, though, the service has deteriorated. The drivers are universally courteous and professional. It's the folks in between the driver and me who have become the problem.

The process is simple enough. The call to the Roadside Assistance number gets you a customer service rep who takes your information, schedules the truck and gives you the driver's Estimated Time of Arrival. Once he's on the way, you get an automated call confirming (or slightly adjusting) that ETA. The driver arrives, does his job and -- in my case, at least -- always gets a tip. That's the way it's supposed to work.

Tonight, my car died right at the fast-food pick-up window. Three young men at the store hustled right out and pushed me to a safe area nearby. (Who says today's kids are going to hell in a hand basket?)

I called Triple-A's Houston headquarters and was promised a tow truck driver within 45 minutes. Houston always promises 45 minutes. Thirty minutes later comes the automated call, estimating the driver's ETA 20 minutes later than first promised. After a half-hour, I call. "Uh, I'll contact Dispatch, find out what the problem is and get back to you." Twenty minutes go by with no call-back, so I call again. "He's on his way and will be there in 30 minutes." Thirty-five minutes later I call again. "He's 8-10 minutes out," which proved true. The driver was courteous and professional, and he apologized: he's the only guy covering Plano, Allen, Frisco, Richardson and West Garland, and he's got 4 more calls after me. I've heard nearly-identical excuses the past two years. Tonight, this driver did his job well and got the tip. Houston is lucky that my car wasn't down a ditch in BFE tonight and that the weather was tolerable and that there happened to be a Starbucks within walking distance while I waited three hours for Triple-A's tow truck driver.

Footnote: The disabled car was our "nice car," which has about 100,000 miles on it. The car that my wife drove to the scene was our "everyday car," which has more than 150,000 miles on it and has been far less trouble.

THE BOOK

2009-10-02T15:16:00.005-05:00

At around the time of Barack Obama's inauguration as President, Doris Kearns Goodwin was a guest on NBC's "Meet the Press." Since the new President had studied Abraham Lincoln, she was asked to compare the two. By my count, the presidential historian has written five books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning "No Ordinary Time," about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's gallantry during World War II. She not only knows her stuff (duh!), but she also is wonderfully articulate.

On this occasion, Kearns Goodwin was asked about her 2006 treatise on Abraham Lincoln, "Team of Rivals." She described how Lincoln managed to pull together a first-term cabinet that included bitter political rivals, virtually all of whom grew to respect and love the rail-splitter. The suggestion of the interview was that perhaps Barack Obama would capitalize on the lessons he learned from Lincoln and meet with equal success.

Based on that interview, I went out and bought the book. For me, it was a heavy read:

Text: 749 pages, including the Introduction, photos, maps and illustrations
Epilogue: 4 pages
Acknowledgements: 2-1/2 pages
Notes: 121 pages of tiny print
Illustration credits: 1 page
Index: 33 pages

I plowed into the book head-on, soon realizing that this would take a while. So as I have done in the past, I removed the jacket and whenever leaving the house I took it with me and tossed it onto the back seat of the car. One never knows when opportunity arises: waiting at the car wash, the doctor's office, the barber shop and -- my favorite -- those weekends when my wife and I both read our books together. Except, she's a faster reader. Once we went to the library together. She checked out three books and I pulled two. She easily read her three that weekend and I barely finished my two. More about that weekend in another post.

One reason that my wife reads faster than I do is how I read. It must be hard-wired in my DNA, for I note sentence structure, voice, grammar, etc. If all is well at first, the read flows well. If not, I watch for things. Doris Kearns Goodwin reads very, very well.

Reading a good book is a treat. It's visiting with someone who has a tale to tell, yet whose only presence in the room is the story unfolding before your eyes. Years ago I signed up for one of those book clubs that send you a new book every few weeks and automatically hit your credit card. I was working 12-hour days then, which begs the question, "If you have no time to read, why buy books?" My answer was, "Well, I should be reading more and one of these days I'll get to it." After a couple of years, I cancelled my account and the books sat on the shelves of my library, staring at me.

My boys were young then and playing soccer. I'd go to practice with them, but found that I actually enjoyed solitude more than sitting in the bleachers and listening to other parents yell the darndest things at their kids, the coaches, the referees and occasionally each other. My boys weren't that good at soccer and didn't play much anyway, so one afternoon I grabbed one of those dusty books and took it with me to practice. They consented to me sitting in the car, reading.

I'd never heard of this particular author and had forgotten most of what I learned in school about the dawn of civiization. In brief, it was a wonderful book. It was about 325 pages covering the the dawn of man through the Early Renaissance. To me, the most striking attribute was the writing: crisp, thoughtful, wonderfully descriptive and -- well, informative. I so admired the writing that I have read it three times. Since then, I have nearly always been working on a book of some kind. Some, like "Team of Rivals," take time. Others go more quickly.

As I said, reading a good book is a treat for me. Occasionally, I'd leave the house without the book and be immediately disappointed. But there's always the weekend. Or an evening. Or a doctor's office. And nearby, the book.

HOPE

2009-09-10T21:19:00.003-05:00

I've always liked John McCain, but I voted for the other guy and I'm standing by him. Aside from being legendary drunks and sourpusses, once we Welsh make up our minds, that's it. Besides, W and the Republicans really, really messed things up.

Our new President (which, by the way, is ALWAYS capitalized) is young and inexperienced, that's true. And it's all a very serious business and he's already made some mistakes and he's probably going to make more mistakes and the economy sucks and the deficit is now bigger than the Sun and his poll numbers are tanking and people are yelling at each other about health insurance and .. and .. OMG!

Calm yourself. We have far more pressing matters:

Ellen is the new judge on "Idol"!
Diane is replacing Charlie!
Microsoft is now actually advertising Windows 7!
Hallowe'en is just around the corner!
Leno's new show starts next week!
My BFF just posted on FaceBook that he's had a long day!

See? None of that other stuff really matters to us average Americans. We have our broadband, BlackBerrys, Starbucks and trucks. We're fine.

We have hope.

TO A DEGREE

2009-09-04T09:52:00.016-05:00

Finance-311 wasn't really such a bad course; it's just that I was 23 and cruelly distracted. You've heard the saying, "Life is what happens while you're making other plans." So it was with me.

I was pursing a degree in business administration and English. I needed gas and food money, so I took a part-time job. It turned out to be an exciting job and I was getting good at it, or so they told me. I got hired full-time. So there I was, going to school and working. I kept telling myself that even though the job was fun, school must take priority.

Then one day I decided to skip Finance-311. I hadn't studied for that day's class and, feeling guilty, sought solace in the student union building. I spotted a classmate at a table with a foursome playing pinochle.

"Glad to see you," he said. "You ready for class?"
"Nah," I said. "I'm gonna skip."
"Good," he said. "You can take my place here." He introduced me to his pinochle partner and the other 2 players and left.

I sat down across from a wild-eyed platinum blonde with dilated pupils. Great, I thought. I'm about to play a card game I've never played before, and my partner is high on marijuana. She looked me up and down and said, "Follow my lead and don't **** up." We won. And we won all day.

Apparently I was clueless even then, because my classmate from Finance-311 told me the next day that the blonde likes me. I took her out for a Coke.

"First," I said, "why are your pupils dilated? Are you high?"
"It's a hereditary condition," she said. "I don't use drugs."
"Listen," I told her. "I'm trying to finish my degree and working at a new job and you're a nice girl and all that but I don't have time for a relationship."
"I understand," she said. "No problem."

We were married six weeks later and I dropped out of college. That was many years ago and we're still married.

The career has had its ups and downs, and right now it's down. The recession recently ate my job. There are a lot of us searching for work these days and boomers in particular are having a hard time.

Among the skills I have honed over the years is writing, rewriting and editing -- vital to my industry but increasingly ignored everywhere. I've applied for various positions that rely on such skills, confident that I could perform well, but there have been no takers. A friend the other day explained: You don't have a degree. Resumes are scanned for certain keywords, and those without degrees get tossed immediately. Pressed about it, HR people say it's policy: no degree, no follow-up, no job.

That's misguided. Well, okay: dumb.

Happy Trails

2009-08-07T22:46:00.004-05:00

This week I joined the millions of other Americans who have lost their jobs thanks to the folly and greed that led to the recession. Far brighter people and better writers have addressed that elsewhere, so I will not do so here. Bitching gets tiresome after a while, regardless of its merits.

Here I will speak of the man who terminated me -- a sort-of Everyman in the Corner Office.

He is a good man and it pained him to pull the trigger on employees he had known for years and liked. Most of his day was spent in such closed-door, one-on-one meetings, all unhappy and woeful. He is paid well for the position he holds, but on this day it didn't feel worth the anguish he inflicted on talented, skilled and valued employees.

He said all the right things befitting his position: he professed his care and vowed to do anything he could. He listened attentively to every plea, curse word and rage, as if he were a preacher consoling a confessor.

Virtually no one else knew in advance of the coming tragedy. His second- and third-in-commands had not been briefed, the decision was so quick. It was evident to those he terminated that the order had come from On High: "Cut, cut deep and cut now." It's brutal out there, said the sacker to the sackees. And on this day, Brutality slung its scythe with deadly aim.

Card keys and other such company property were collected then and there and forms were signed and witnessed by the only other being in the death-house meetings: the HR person, charged with detailing how the condemned would be executed and how long it would take to exhaust the last, pathetic breath of life in the now-former employees.

The slain carried themselves from the gallows to their lockers and desks to perform the sad ritual of removing all possible evidence of their existence. Some of them appeared to colleagues to be visibly wounded; others were just unusually quiet. All left the premises quietly as their co-workers watched, speechless, at dead men walking.

The executioner went home at the end of the day with a knot in his stomach and a foul taste in his mouth. The business that he once loved so passionately had become -- much more so in recent years -- a spiteful and foul thing, virtually unrecognizable now.

What lies before him in the days ahead is a company of edgy and frightened employees. Today was a repeat of previous restructurings. His employees, already spread thin, must take on even more. Hell, he's laden with additional responsibilities and no additional compensation.

But he must carry on, leading and encouraging, remolding and pushing. He is the face of the company. To all his shaken flock who so earnestly seek reassurance and hope, he must appear steadfast and confident in the future. He must make omelets. And chicken salad. And lipsticked pigs.

At least he has a job. I don't.

Happy trails.

Old Friends

2009-07-19T21:48:00.001-05:00

When he was in his prime, he was one of the most gifted there was: imaginative, daring and admired by his co-workers. He was one of those guys who thought "outside the box" before the term became fashionable. He and I worked in the same place, although our hours weren't quite the same. We were both young then; bullet-proof. We had a great time and became lifelong friends, as did our wives. After that gig, our jobs took us to other markets. We kept in touch but seldom visited each other. Bob, I'll call him, was more successful than I, but that never mattered.

Tonight, we talked on the phone for nearly an hour, the four of us. My wife and I had recently vacationed in the Northern Rockies and the Mrs. and I loved it. We took pictures and shared details of our trip with friends and colleagues. Bob and his wife decided to vacation there too, at the end of the month.

The more we talked, the more we realized that we had never fulfilled a decades-old promise: to vacation together at a favorite spot. Tonight, we swore that we will do it, by God, next year.

I'm sure this is not a unique tale. Long-separated friends promising to get together some day, and never doing so. It's one of those things that many live to regret. Eventually, either they can no longer travel, or no longer care to travel, or -- worse -- one of them dies.

That happened to me. My high school hero -- a genius, actually, who went on to found and lead a successful software firm -- died unexpectedly before he and I could reconnect in person. It has pained me ever since.

2009-07-16T23:03:00.000-05:00

So, here I go a-blogging. It's a new world, they tell me, and one should not miss out on such as this. Nevertheless, the notion of putting one's thoughts to paper -- er, the Web -- is both exciting and scary. Some things I will share with you, but not all. For now, though, it is enough just to start.