What I’m Blogging

For the past few months I’ve been reading the pre-Dune series of books by Frank Herbert’s son. I first read the novel when I was in High School. I immediately fell in love with its complexities and rich portrayals of a future that was starkly different from any other science fiction vehicle at the time. The Novels by Frank Herbert were astounding, impressive, masterful, and above all literature.

…Thank goodness I got them from the library…

They say that the apple does not fall far from the tree, however, in this case the apple caught a bad bounce, rolled down a hill and fell into a twenty thousand foot abyss. The offereings of Brian Herbert are in no way comparable to the mastery of his father. Characterizations are shallow, motives are obvious, plots are contrived. All that was fine and noble about the original series, is squandered in these endeavours.

They are instantly forgetable after completion, like a made for TV movie. In the books by Frank, we traveled the desert but our thirst was quenched, in these volumes we are parched from start to finish. Thank goodness I got them from the library and not the book store.

They are in chronological order;
The Butlerian Jihad
The Machine Crusade
The Battle of Corrin
House Atreides
House Harkonnen
House Corrino

It’s the birthday of Joseph Campbell, born in New York City (1904). He saw Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Riders as a child and decided to learn everything there was to know about Indians. He read his way through the children’s room at his local library by the time he was eleven and started right in on reports from the Bureau of Ethnology.

In college, he turned to studying Arthurian legend. He abandoned a Ph.D. dissertation about Holy Grail stories and went to live in a shack, where for five years he continued to read. In 1949 he published a monumental study of mythology called The Hero With a Thousand Faces; it traced the common theme of the spiritual quest in myth. All sorts of writers found it a treasure trove for their own work, from the poet Robert Bly to the filmmaker George Lucas, who said that without it, he would never have been able to write Star Wars.

Shock and Awe. These seem to be the watchwords of the management of Gigantic Concrete these days. We are shocked by their increasingly erratic behaviour and are awestruck by the swift descent into chaos as a direct result.

…In effect, we are doomed…

I’ve been working hard since the “Ides of March”, often at cross purposes with myself. Everyone seems to want to tell me how to do my job. Every instruction is an order to be carried out. Every order is diametrically opposed to the last one. Each requires more resources to perform than I have been alloted for this year, and several years to come.

We are in the grip of a process and quality improvement plan. Our synergistic business processes will be harmonized to effect increased efficiencies across vertical divisional silos of expertise and excellence… No I’m not kidding. In effect, we are doomed. But as always, the rock must flow.

Today is the “Ides of March.” In the Roman Calendar, each month had three division days: kalends, nones and ides. For months that had thirty-one days, the ides occurred on the fifteenth of the month.

…the signal to begin the attack…

Julius Caesar was assassinated on the ides of March in 44 B.C. A group of Roman senators led by Cassius and Brutus thought Caesar was becoming arrogant and tyrannical, and they devised a plot to assassinate him at a senate meeting on March 15. Many of the conspirators were close friends of Caesar, including Brutus. At the meeting, the group of senators circled around Caesar and pretended to submit a petition. Suddenly, one of them grabbed Caesar’s robe and yanked it off his neck, which was the signal to begin the attack. All of the conspirators were hiding daggers, and they each stabbed him as he staggered across the floor.

I was raised with a sense of duty and a sense of service. The matriarchy of my family, Grandmother, Great Aunt and Mother, made sure these double lessons would be ingrained and make me worthy of the family name. Defend the weak, shelter the poor, choose the right, We were after all “Knights.”

…my role as paladin to the pooches…

Over the last few days I have discovered what happens to these two pillars of character when trapped in the house with dogs. One becomes the concierge of the canine set, the personal butler of the four footed fury ones. Surely the family had something more lofty in mind during those formative years of squirehood; slaying dragons, rescuing damsels, a nice corner office on Bay Street. Sadly, it was not to be.

So here I am, exercising my role as paladin to the pooches… Defend the weak - Stop Sculley from trying to dominate Kodiak all the time. Shelter the poor - the three of them have no means of income… but they do eat a lot. Choose the right - trust me, at 3:00 AM you don’t want to get up and let them out to do what they will do, but you do anyway as it’s the “right” thing to do and at least I won’t be cleaning the carpet at 8:00 AM.

It was on this day in 1884 that Susan B. Anthony addressed the United States Congress, arguing for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting women the right to vote. She said, “We appear before you this morning … to ask that you will, at your earliest convenience, report to the House in favor of the submission of a Sixteenth Amendment to the Legislatures of the several states, that shall prohibit the disfranchisement of citizens of the United States on account of sex.”

…didn’t become law until almost fifteen years after her death…

She had been petitioning Congress in writing for sixteen years, but this was the first time that she managed to persuade Congress to vote on the amendment. It failed.

But even though the constitutional amendment failed that year, it was only six years later, in 1890, that Wyoming became the first state to give women the right to vote. Colorado adopted women’s suffrage in 1893. Fifteen states in all gave women the right to vote in the next thirty years.

Susan B. Anthony died in 1906. The amendment she asked for on this day in 1884 didn’t become law until almost fifteen years after her death, on August 26, 1920.

Today, I’m supposed to be making my way to Detroit (again). Another small hop for Gigantic Concrete, but a giant leap out of personal life. This is a trend out of the company playbook. “The company comes first, loyalty is required, do your duty, oh and by the way, no additional compensation will be forth coming for all this extra loyalty. One should be happy one has a job at all etc. etc. etc.” Unfortunately I’m going to have to disappoint them.

…sent an email of career advancement limitation…

Yesterday was the sorting out day from the recent executive execution. The universe has changed, the protections offered by my previous manager have been torn away and the crap is now flowing freely down to my team. A team that is to get an increase in responsibilities, while sustaining a major hit to our numbers as the contractors are being lined up against the wall. Do more with less, make mud bricks without straw, and me without a promised land to hope for or a red sea to cross.

I arrived home last night after 8:30 PM. I’d been at the office since 8:00 AM. I discovered that my wife was very ill and hardly able to move. This morning she is no better. Already I’ve been getting notes on my “crackberry” of all the things I need to do today when I’m in Detroit. I turned off the evil device of instant communication, called the travel brokers, cancelled my trip, and sent an email of career advancement limitation indicating that I would not be able to acquiesce to their requests today, and quite possibly tomorrow as well. This could ultimately result in an ICE (Involuntary Career Event), but how involuntary would it really be?

Today is a stay home and take care of family day. A day of where loyalty and duty should mean something real. A day where I don’t particularly care if the rock flows or not.

It was on this day in 1933 that a man named Charles Darrow trademarked the board game Monopoly. Darrow based the game on an earlier game called “The Landlord’s Game,” which had been designed by a woman named Elizabeth Magie. She’d designed the game back in 1904 as an educational tool, to teach people about the evils of capitalism. Darrow’s real genius wasn’t in inventing the game, but in redesigning it. In the midst of the Great Depression, he turned the game into a celebration of capitalism, giving people a chance to imagine that they were rich.

…No one dares say anything anymore, everyone is afraid…

It was on this day in 1933 that the Nazi Party won the majority of the seats in the German parliament, known as the Reichstag, effectively taking control of the country. It was the last free election in Germany until the end of World War II. Adolf Hitler had secured the chancellorship after the November 1932 elections, but he still didn’t have a majority in the Reichstag, so he set March 5, 1933 as the date for new elections. Six days before the election, the Reichstag building caught fire, and the Nazis used the fire as a symbol of the chaos that they would help correct, though some historians believe that the Nazis set the fire themselves. After the elections, Hitler passed a law that gave him absolute power over the country.

Just five days after the election, Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor of romantic languages living in Germany, wrote in his diary: “It’s astounding how easily everything collapses. … Since [the election,] day after day commissioners appointed, provincial governments trampled underfoot, flags raised, buildings taken over, people shot, newspapers banned, etc., etc. … A complete revolution and party dictatorship. And all opposing forces as if vanished from the earth. … No one dares say anything anymore, everyone is afraid.”

Corporations are like “banana republics”, every few months there is a coup and the nature of the universe changes. My department has recently been decapitated. The manager immediately above me has been sent down to the minors and we are all awaiting the replacement player.

…Will the purges continue?…

Walt Whitman writes about a captain who dies just as his ship has reaches the end of a stormy and dangerous voyage, the situataion at Gigantic Concrete is similar. Our department was finally getting ahead of the curve on projects, orders, billing - all the halmarks of corporate success. But prior to brining it home, a trigger is pulled. Hopes, plans, are all now languising in a blood stained pool in the executive office.

What will be the future? Will the purges continue? Will the new guy become a micro management torrent of destruction culminating in the sum of all fears - a new beloved one? Have the “Ides of March” come early?

I think the resume requires some dusting…