Stop Light Validation (rebooted)

Employment posts to the contrary, I am not a negative guy.

I mean, come on. I like the New Beetle. And what kind of curmudgeon would embrace such an effervescent design, anyway? Just because I choose not to self-medicate with delusional pabulum like “It’s all good” doesn’t mean I am a sour human being.

It means I have a tangible connection with reality.

But occasionally, there is doubt. No surprise, given the avalanche of positivity forced down our throats. Is society any less overweening telling the long-term unemployed how they should feel than it is telling a thirteen-year-old girl how she should look?

I don't think so.

My take on things is decidedly less-fashionable. When life is good, I am happy. When life isn't good, I'm not so happy. Simple. It's a reflection of my emotional palate. Life is never all good or all bad. Some things suck. Some things don't.

Take stop lights. They suck. I detest them. Stop lights are driving's equivalent of having a stone in your shoe. I don’t want to know how many hours I have whiled away at red lights on shriveled cross streets which rarely—if ever—bear appreciable traffic.

Little is as absurd and as pointless as sitting still at an empty intersection. Stop lights impede, impair and inhibit the flow of traffic. Which is a full one-hundred eighty degrees removed from what conventional wisdom says they do.

But this isn’t a post about stop lights per se. It’s about whether I’m a nabob of negativity or a clear-eyed realist.

Do I hit as many red lights as I think I do? Or is it my so-called negativity coloring my outlook?

I have attempted to answer this by tracking two stop lights I feel as if I never make. The streets at those intersections are similar in size and traffic volume.

Intersection 1 is near my home, and consists of two heavily-traveled residential streets. Going north and south seems to be a fifty-fifty proposition, meaning you have a fifty percent chance of hitting a green light.

Going east or west seems to be another story. In my possibly errant opinion, making a green light headed in either of those directions is an event worthy of cake.

Intersection 2 combines another heavily-traveled residential street with a moderately-used two-lane arterial street. And like intersection 1, the signal seems completely unrelated to traffic volume.

Despite their similar loads, heading north or south on the residential street seems to guarantee an opportunity to revisit the word linger, while going east or west on the arterial seems to at least give drivers a fighting chance.

As any budding traffic scientist worth their ceramic brake pads knows, special care must be taken to avoid polluting the sample. Which is an officious way of saying not once did I speed up to make a green light or slow down to hit a red one.

NO DATA WAS MANIPULATED IN THE WRITING OF THIS POST.

I merely traveled at the posted speed and let the lights turn as they may.

Over the course of a month, I encountered intersection 1 (going east or west) twenty-three times. Nineteen times I hit a red light, an astonishing 82.6% of all eastbound or westbound trips. And in fifty-five trips through intersection 2 (headed north or south), I encountered a red light thirty-seven times, or 67.2% of all northbound and southbound trips.

Sure, no one exiting the strip mall from Ray’s World of Seafood should expect to gain instant access to the local six-laner. But neither of the above percentages is anywhere near the fifty-fifty split the similar traffic volume of the streets passing through those intersections would suggest.

Nor are these isolated instances. I’ve encountered signals like these everywhere I’ve lived. Conversely, I’ve never discovered a signal in a comparable location that I made 82.6% of the time. And in the face of so much smart technology, this consistent inconsistency is difficult to understand.

What I do understand is that it wasn't my outlook that sucked--it was the stop lights. I'm no festering nabob of negativism. I'm a clear-eyed realist.

To paraphrase the late, great Eddie Kendricks, this wasn’t just my negativity, running away with me.

But I’m still seeing red.

Short Blog

One of the benefits of working with the public is the opportunity to observe what the public is wearing.

Last week, a member of that public wandered into the retail establishment I work in wearing this t-shirt:

'The floggings will continue until morale improves.'

Sharp intake of breath. Jaw-drop. Oh. My. God.

I don't know the origin of this quote, but it is genius. Like the drumming of Ziggy Modeliste, the writing of John Updike and Pepper Jack Doritos.

If you've ever worked for a living, the shirt's grim truth is obvious. It is the Newton's Law of employment-inspired quotations about misguided leadership and authority abused and general back-asswardness.

And hey, isn't that what work is all about?

Have a great day.

Where Are Our Manners?

Shame, shame Chicago.

I was reared to always say thank you to those who extended me a kindness, did me a favor or otherwise performed a good deed simply because it was the right thing to do.

And despite the unceasing efforts of the National Rifle Association and folk like federal judge Samuel Der-Yeghiayan to keep our streets awash in the greatest number of firearms possible, I have yet to hear even a single Chicagoan voice a simple thank you!

I ask you: were we raised in the Cheney household? I think not.

So after yet-another violent weekend, I propose that our city’s usually well-mannered citizenry extend heartfelt and multiple thank yous to the NRA and Judge Der-Yeghiayan. Over each bloody and lifeless corpse, imagine a cheery ‘Thank You NRA’ banner. Or relatives of the deceased sporting ‘I (heart) Judge Der-Yeghiayan’ t-shirts.

It's only right.

Without their relentless and unselfish labors, how would it be possible to have the gun-saturated neighborhoods we now enjoy? How would it be possible for people like Shawn Gowder, with one firearms-related felony (since reduced to a misdemeanor) already under his belt, to exercise his Second Amendment right to bear arms?

The short answer is, it wouldn’t.

Imagine a weekend evening without the musical crackle of gunfire. Imagine walking along a city street without the spine-tingling threat of being shot. Sucks, doesn’t it?

Like, thank god for X-Box. Totally.

Kidding aside, I’m fairly sure the United States is the only nation on earth with an entity like the NRA, which exists solely to protect an unthreatened civil liberty. Their staggering success has made the United States a first-world leader in things like violent homicide, and who doesn’t think that’s something to be proud of?

It’s kind of like having an advocacy group for wife beating.

In the cockeyed logic of the NRA (which dovetails nicely with conservative fear-mongering), widespread gun ownership will make us crime-free. But a gun in every hand is not an equalizer. It’s not a panacea. It’s a fatal fantasy.

Curing crime with guns is like eradicating lung cancer with cigarettes.

Gun violence is a complex, multi-faceted problem originating in the dark well of hopelessness that is grinding, entrenched poverty. There are no easy or fast answers.

What we see on Chicago’s south and west sides comes very close to realizing the NRA's fantasy; there very nearly is a gun in every hand. But it doesn't work. Crime is thriving. Entire neighborhoods are engaged in arms races—with tragic and costly consequences.

Overturning gun bans will only extend those races and those consequences across the entire metropolitan area. The winners will be handgun manufacturers and the politicians who auction-off their support in exchange for campaign financing.

The losers will be us.

More shaving. More screwing.

When I was young, I worked in a tough, uncensored warehouse. PC had only recently begun to stand for personal computer. Politically correct wasn't even on the radar.

So after depositing a skid of merchandise in the wrong shipping lane, an irritated foreman asked me: “I know you’re a dumb-ass. I get it. Why do you keep proving it to me?”

I want to ask the same question of my employers. But an inconvenient need for food and shelter renders this behavior risky. So I administer yet another self-inflicted bite to my poor, pockmarked tongue.

And my employers continue to see the circular firing squad as the best path forward.

Case in point is a part-time position I landed in spring at one of those big box home improvement stores. You know, the ones with everything from rebar and cement mix to sub-zero refrigerators and orchids. I’m sure there’s one in your neighborhood.

My training consisted of three eight-hour days spent watching videos—in solitaire. Videos about customer service and store procedures and how to operate equipment. Videos about workplace safety and sexual harassment and company policy. And then there were the videos on customer service.

Did I mention the ones on customer service?

I should add that the “hands on” portion of the training was eliminated because of insufficient staffing.

The hard part came when I was to convert the content of the videos into living, breathing, three-dimensional reality. But I spent my first three days in the self check-out area. I'm not sure what I was supposed to learn by watching people check-out, but I'm sure there was something.

Then an entire week passed before I was scheduled to work again. If this makes sense on another plane, it’s a flight I don’t have a ticket for.

A few weeks in, I discovered that the self-proclaimed industry leader who preached customer service non-stop got all obsessive-compulsive when it came to shaving payroll to a bare minimum that would make a stripper blush.

That insufficient staffing I encountered during training? It wasn’t an aberration—it was business as usual. Standard operating procedure.

As a consequence, customers can’t find salespeople. Employees attempting to contact other departments get busy signals when the phone doesn’t ring endlessly. And theft is rampant because aisle after aisle is bereft of even a token human presence.

You don't need the radio telescope in Arecibo to discover what kind of customer service this is. But no worries—Wall Street really loves our rate of return.

However much I enjoy having a customer stare a hole into me because I can’t get another department on the phone, or because the hardware section is completely uncontaminated by hardware clerks, it gets old. Really old.

And it’s not just the wee folk who suffer.

Department managers manage sour and dispirited staffs made up of underemployed part-timers because Wall Street says full-timers get benefits, and benefits are profit-killers.

So instead of juggling eight schedules, they juggle twenty. Instead of informing eight staffers of a new procedure, they (theoretically) inform twenty. And instead of tracking eight people's performance, they track twenty's. It must be wearying.

Then there are the monthly updates, which are little more than a mechanism for disseminating company propaganda.

Last month, the update focused on theft. I mean shrinkage. It offered fascinating statistics on theft, er, shrinkage, and what employees can do to combat it. And like the information contained in the training videos, it made perfect sense.

The problem is that the folks in training never got the memo from finance about payroll, so the gulf that exists between what this company wants to do and what it actually does remains unsullied by anything resembling a bridge.

I mean, I’d love to root between the two-dozen bags of cement mix/potting soil/road salt and grass seed customers routinely buy for circular saw blades, power tools and silver solder—just as soon as the 'wait to checkout' metric is eliminated. Ditto the one for 'cashier friendliness'.

Apparently, this needs to be said: you can’t have rapid check-outs and thorough inspections for hidden-on-purpose merchandise. They’re incompatible. Mutually-exclusive. A wordy oxymoron.

And while I’m at it, you also can’t staff a hundred-thousand square foot store with a dozen people and not expect thieves to have a free-for-all.

Let me know when you figure out what your priorities are. K?

My employer has demonstrated—repeatedly—they’re not about the customer service. They’re about extracting the greatest amount of cash from the store in the shortest amount of time with the fewest possible expenses.

It’s rape as a business plan.

The secret shoppers and the metrics and the marketing can't obscure that hoary old expression about actions speaking louder than words.

But as long as those guys with mansions in the Hamptons and fleets of Ferraris say it’s all good, it is.

Who am I to argue with success?

Idiocy

Here in Chicago, our media (especially the electronic kind) have contracted hives. They have become all itchy and scratchy over the impending NATO summit.

Road closures and changes in public transportation schedules are reported with a barely-controlled mania, and are examined, dissected and speculated on with the deadly seriousness normally accorded an outbreak of flesh-eating bacteria. No change is too insignificant to escape the attention only massive chunks of airtime at four-thirty, six and ten can provide.

Law enforcement’s preparations follow right behind, as the Democratic convention of 1968 is routinely revisited as an ominous harbinger of things to come. Yes, there are going to be protesters, and they may protest! Even as we speak they are preparing to converge on our fair city.

Can we roll that convention footage one more time? Oh my.

Yes, life as we know it is going to cease. What goes unreported are the issues facing NATO, and why they are likely to spawn protest. Wait. Isn’t that, like, serious or something?

Meanwhile, the ravages of the two-decades-long Daley administration continue to surface, and are barely reported. At least electronically.

The latest is his artful manipulation of our convoluted state and municipal pension systems, to the point where Mr. Mayor’s extraordinarily modest contributions (he avoided more than 400K of them) have miraculously yielded a lavish 183K per-annum pension.

By somehow spending one month in the state legislature’s pension fund and then returning to Chicago’s municipal pension fund, Daley became eligible for eighty-five percent of his mayoral salary. I probably don’t need to tell you there isn’t another employee of the City of Chicago who can touch that percentage.

Despite my considerable excitement at the prospect of spending the next 27.3 hours at my part-time, temporary job paying off the state’s title transfer, license plate and driver’s license fees, I am made even more excited knowing it is going to assist in the fulfillment of extravagant pensions for folk like our former mayor.

And Daley isn’t the only one—not by a long shot. (This is Illinois, after all.) In one especially galling example, Chicago Federation of Labor president Dennis Gannon was given a city job for a single day, which in turn made him eligible for a public pension based on his 200K salary with the CFL.

Wow. Have eight hours on the job ever made you eligible for a pension? Anywhere? I’m guessing the answer is no.

But in the eyes of our twitchy, panic-button-pushing media, this can’t hold a candle to the visceral, bowel-rumbling anxiety that a possible road closure or cops in riot gear can generate. Never mind a rolling closure of the Kennedy Expressway.

I’m sure it’s just my addled sense of things that leads me to believe that the likes of Mayor Daley and our two disgraced former governors have done more to cripple our city and our state than any invective-hurling protester could ever dream of.

It just doesn’t make for provocative TV, I guess.

Andrew Bogut

Only Rhonda Byrne knows why certain people have targets on their backs while others sail through life blissfully ignorant of what band-aids are for. But Andrew Bogut is certainly one of the former.

A basketball player first saddled by the label ‘number-one draft pick’and then by the one which read ‘injury-prone’, Bogut has faced more than his share of obstacles in his NBA career.

The pro game didn’t come easily to him. But Bogut never pouted when stardom didn't prove microwaveable. He never carped about playing for a mediocre franchise in a small, Midwestern market. The affable Australian merely set about sharpening and refining his skills.

By his third season, Bogut was showing signs of becoming the talented center first envisioned by NBA scouts. By his sixth, he was leading the league in blocked shots.

Having become by this time a high-percentage shooter, excellent passer and a potent rebounder, Bogut was rightly viewed as one of the league’s emerging talents. The hare of expectations had been passed by the tortoise of Bogut’s diligence. It was a feel-good story you could feel good about.

Then came the injuries.

No one paid much mind when his second season was cut short due to a severe sprain in his left foot. He’s a big man, jumping up and down in a small space occupied by other large men. You aren’t always able to see where you’re going to land. Chalk it up to occupational hazards. They happen.

His fourth was reduced to thirty-six games because of lower back problems. Potentially serious, but Bogut recovered. During his fifth (a breakout year for both he and the team), a horrific injury to Bogut’s right arm sidelined him just as the Bucks were on the verge of clinching their first playoff appearance in years.

With their MVP on the bench, the Bucks were eliminated in the first round.

His sixth season was marred by a recurrence of back, leg and arm problems, and his seventh never really began, owing to a fractured ankle just twelve games in. Now Tuesday’s trade to the Golden State Warriors, a hapless franchise in perpetual disarray.

When it rains, it pours.

Bogut reclaimed a talent the NBA threatened to invalidate. Bogut then endured multiple lonely and painful rehabilitations that would have sidelined a lesser man. To date, he’s been knocked down five times and made it back to his feet four.

But it will be exponentially harder to escape the tag ‘injury-prone’. Once labeled, you become a financial risk. A virus no one wants to catch. Ammunition for talk show callers demanding the head of the GM who signed you. There may as well be a sex offender-styled web site.

Even Wolfgang Puck doesn’t offer a pressure cooker that can compare.

Despite the cushy lifestyles provided by otherworldly salaries, basketball is brutal. The list of players with promising careers snuffed out by injury is a long one. Penny Hardaway. Larry Johnson. Grant Hill. Gilbert Arenas. Brandon Roy. Even David Robinson qualifies.

No one knows why one athlete has a career rupture like an ACL while another doesn’t. Life isn’t fair. Unfortunately, it’s a lesson only some of us have to learn.

In the end, it might be fitting that Bogut is now a Warrior not just in outlook, but in name. Maybe he's the guy who can put the warrior back in Warriors.

Best of luck in the Golden State, Mr. Bogut.

My Record Collecting Nightmare

There is a monster lurking in my basement. It is an evil, insidious, sprawling, clutching thing. To those fortunate-enough not to have glimpsed its contents, it appears completely benign. Innocent, even.

But to those who have, it is a wretched and heinous beast; a honey-do list ignored until it rages, sullen and violent. It is the mouth of hell itself. In this context, ignorance isn’t just bliss. It's a cornucopia of rapture.

You see, I am the owner of a vast music collection. One gone out of control. I have boxes and boxes containing thousands of CDs and cassettes and records. They occupy an entire corner of the cellar and only fitfully yield their contents.

Their mass exceeds the available space on my cranial hard drive, requiring that I catalog it/them. However much of an ordeal it is, I am optimistic this will prevent a fourth copy of Tom Verlaine’s Dreamtime from finding its way into my collection.

To ensure the results are letter perfect, I have refreshed myself in the fine art of alphabetizing. The basics are easy: drop the articles ‘a’, ‘an’ and ‘the’. Bands that assume the name of an fictitious individual (i.e. Alice Cooper) are filed under the first name and not the surname.

Conversely, solo artists employing a made-up name (i.e. Bob Dylan) are filed under the assumed surname, and not the first name. And band names which incorporate a member’s name into that of the band’s (i.e. the Alan Parsons Project) are filed under the surname. Simple.

But musical entities rarely acquire their names in consultations with Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. Which is the reason we encounter grammatical pretzels like Booker T. & the M.G.s. Or …And You Will Know Us by the Trail Of Dead…. Or T. Rex.

So. What’s the standard for band names that contain a member’s entire name except for the surname? Do I pretend it’s there and file Booker T. & the M.G.s under J for Jones? Or pretend that Booker is a stage name and file them under B?

Is D for damn good an option?

Perhaps it doesn’t matter whether I can find my cherished copy of Melting Pot or not. I mean, who among us can enjoy music while suffering the ravages of a pounding headache?

Moving on, could you point me to the rule for bands whose name begins and ends with ellipsis? Does the article still get deleted, even if it’s part of a quote? Or does the integrity of the quote matter? And what of the integrity of the band?

Or, for that matter, this project?

Maybe I should ignore a decade of being tobacco-free and fire up a Marlboro. Or ponder what happens when a band is known by one name in one place and another name in another place. I mean, the aspirin’s paid for. Right?

And what of Elvis Costello & the Attractions, who invariably end up under E instead of C? Shout “Hey People! That’s not his real name!” everywhere I go? I can tell you, nine out of ten people tend to dial 911 soon afterwards—especially in enclosed spaces.

Memories.

You’d think my record collection would be done tormenting me by now. Or at least showing signs of tiring. After all, have I not lovingly cared for it over several decades? Kept it dry and away from extreme heat and direct sunlight?

Does it have even a wisp of an idea how difficult that was in the southwest?

Not a chance.

This can mean only one thing: Tyrannosaurus Rex. Yes. Them.

The band which gifted Western civilization with the phrase hub cap diamond star halo is in cahoots with the record collection monster, hell-bent on twisting and mangling my sense of organization into something grotesque and unrecognizable.

I desperately search the Internet. Front to back. Side to side. And top to bottom. Where oh where is the protocol for bands who are officially known by a contraction of their original name that appears to be an individual’s name—but isn’t?

Does a rule even exist? A theory? How about a guesstimate from Bush number-two?

Was Marc Bolan so consumed by career and chart position that he gave no thought whatsoever to the alphabetizing woes of poor, besieged record collectors who want only to efficiently locate the fruits of his musical labor?

This conundrum wrapped in an enigma is further complicated by the fact their name is sometimes hyphenated (T-Rex) and sometimes includes a period (T. Rex).

I ask you: in a mass-produced, standardized world where even our fruit is genetically engineered for uniformity, can we not agree on one, single, best-practice spelling for these grammatical terrorists?

I won’t even consider the trauma Alice Cooper solo albums could provoke.