Corporate Malfunction

This is work in America in the 21st Century:
Toy ‘R’ Us clerk is worried she might get written up because she isn’t selling enough “Reward Cards”.
The Bank of America teller tells you that you can use the ATM next time for your transaction. The teller is advocating reducing teller staff.
Fifth Third Bank Commercial Banking pushes sales competitions that result in winners held up as a great example for the rest of us. Rest of the staff knows with certainty the winner lied about the number of sales calls, new business, whatever.
Postal workers are required to scan bar codes on individual house mailboxes so managers can track them and check how quickly they are delivering mail on their route. This required purchase of new equipment and the carriers have to lug around something that looks like an oversize remote. And they’ve hired new supervisors to oversee this program. Also they follow mail carriers and advise them on ways to save 10 seconds by cutting thru a parking lot and such. Of course these supervisors need a new boss to oversee them. They could save a lot more money by trashing the program.
My Kroger store upgraded their self-scan check out system. Now every time I use it it requires an attendant override to get it to work properly.
Try to buy something at Barnes & Noble. You have to answer 20 questions just to pay cash for a simple magazine! ‘You can save 10% with a member card, do you have one?’ ‘Has anyone explained to you the benefits of membership?’ ‘What is your email address?’ ‘Do you want a bag?’ I am making a $5.09 purchase but don’t want to come back because it is just a real pain.
Chase branch managers have to spend their time greeting customers at the door. Who is running the bank, making loans, taking care of bank business?
Companies are too large and run by people who spend all day looking at number, percentage change, and all that useless data capabilities built into software programs at every company.
Is this truly progress? No wonder there are so many inefficiencies! Everybody to too preoccupied with measuring performance and have forgotten about doing the work. It is all about growing, selling more, buying into the latest technology for customer database, client management systems, sale force measurement tools. Design another survey that I will throw away.

The Inmates are Running the Assylum

Wayne Co. has the FBI investigating severance packages for employees who left to take new jobs. Yes, you read that right. $200,000 severance given to a woman who left her post to take a new county related job for more money. Also had severance in the works for county appointees who might leave their jobs at election time. What is wrong with this people that they think they are gods and can do as they please?!? Democrats in Michigan really need to clean house.
And you probably saw the news about the wild animals shot in Ohio. No laws against having exotic animals. Gov nixed it.
The whole world is like Kafka.
And the Amish in Ohio are attacking each other in gang like hit and run assaults. (Remember I now have home delivery of the New York Times so have lots of useless info)
Never liked Ohio. Especially not their banks.

Priority Health’s Priorities

You can not be insured by Priority Health if you have a basic pre-existing medical condition. They refuse! So they really just want to insure healthy people, who won’t use health insurance. Keeps their costs down. Considering that they don’t pay much in benefits UNTIL you have used your entire deductible, they are making money on premiums.
On the other hand Blue Cross won’t pay bills for prior existing conditions until after 180 days of insurance. So you go half a year with no insurance. They can pretty much say anything you claim is related to that ‘condition’, right?
And people run around saying there is nothing wrong with health care in this country.
I can hardly wait to see what sort of premium cost Aetna will come up with for me.

Ah Netflix, automated recommendations are for the Birds

Don’t understand how Netflix bases their recomendations. Because I liked Il Postino, Cinema Paradiso and Gandhi, they recommend for me The Life of Birds. And the similarity is? Probably I get the recommendation because viewers who liked those films also ordered The Life of Birds. Not me. Making some really wrong assumptions here. Those computer generated models don’t always work. Actually you’re pissing me off and I just disregard all your recommendations.

What Happened to You!

Well I have a house, remodeling work, yard work and lo and behold I have a job! Who would have thunk it could happen.
Networking in the community caused me to be in the right place at the right time. And all others turned the job down. I manage the community Farmers market. Gonna start a new blog about this experience.
But it is stimulating, envigorating, calls on my mixed basket of skills and gives me a reason to get up in the morning. And stay up late at night. I have a new area to research and learn about, which it something that has always served to stimulate and engage me.
I’m not up with the chickens, but handle increasing traffic, getting vendors, advertising, writing news articles, developing strategies and inadvertantly offending all sorts of township board members and various other ‘important’ people.
The difference is I don’t need the job, I don’t want promotion, I don’t want fame, I don’t want rewards, other than pay. Good for me bad for the employer, perhaps.

Recycled Graves ch 6 pg 16

In current day Germany you will be moved out of your grave and the plot resold after 25 years. Australia refers to it as renewable tenure. When the time is up, family members can renew tenure or allow the site to be used to accommodate another coffin; how nicely put. My Mom found this out to her great surprise and dismay on a trip to East Germany in the late 1990’s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. She went to Neumark to see her good friend Marianne Popp, who she knew from her days in Neumark right after the war. Marianne is also my godmother. The cemetery where her parents and sister, my own grandparents and aunt, are buried is right across the street from Marianne’s house.
For many years my mother sent money for maintenance of the plots and the purchase of flowers for the graves. On this visit, they went to the flower shop where my mother purchases nice bouquets for the graves. My grandmother died in 1972 in West Germany and her cremated body was transported back to the east for burial with her family. So my mother had never personally seen her own mother’s gravesite, but she had previously visited the graves of her father and sister, Liesbeth. It was all just so very cumbersome trying to get into the old East Germany as a capitalist American with travel restrictions and hoorendous visa requirements. And for people who once actually escaped the country, there was always a threat they might not get back out. Wasn’t much easier for West Germans to visit. East Bloc inhabitants were ‘free’ to visit other East Bloc countries, but your vacations were usually done in conjunction with a youth camp, or a workers camp on the sea, so some other structured organizational entity. You didn’t just get in your car and say “Let’s go to the Black Sea for a long weekend!”

Centuries of Bodies Ch 6 pg 15

It is striking, in retrospect, that not all cemeteries here have been destroyed. The Jewish cemetery was destroyed before the war by Germans and a plaque is all that marks the site on the north edge of Heydekrug. But throughout the area it is clear certain cemeteries were targeted for destruction. Not all cemeteries containing Germans had to be expunged. The effort was not directed at all religious sites. The British and American pilots at the prisoner of war camp have graves undisturbed; the Catholics in the city are safe, but all traces of German Lutherans are gone. The only acknowledgement they get is from the wind blowing over their bones now scattered between the heather.
As I traveled through Europe I’d often wonder that any cemeteries were left at all. There were those troops marching back and forth, pillaging and plundering, two thousand years history, revenge and retaliation, tanks rolling back and forth, bombs smashing the landscape, mass graves. There can’t be a piece of land untouched by violence in some way. Or, on the other hand, think of all the hundreds of thousands of people that died in Europe. Doesn’t it seem there should be a lot more cemeteries? Where are all those bodies from all the centuries before?

Conspicuous Wealth

And my take on the Royal Wedding. I just looked at some photos on line since the news coverage did a lousy job of showing and identifying the guests. Is food rationing happening in Europe again? Lots of very thin women and men. How does Victoria Beckham actually go full term with a pregnancy – where does she put it? At least the women are dressed much more fashionable (not just trendy) than a similar event in the US where they would all look like the Kardashian whores. One or two, notably one of Fergie’s kids, looked trashy. And when did Andrew get so old!!!! I get confused – he is the uncle of the groom, not the brother, this time right?
But that old unease about any monarchy lies just beneath my calm exterior. Inherited titles and wealth – what’s with that? Like someone died and made them gods.

Road Trip

Freshly returned from a trip to Connecticut. Oh it is lovely to be in a state not full of the great unwashed! Initial impressions of Michigan after crossing the Blue Water Bridge: poorly maintained highways, lots of road kill all shapes and sizes, chunks of tire treads littering the landscape. One great thing about toll roads – they are immaculate! People and cars must hit deer in New York, but I never see the mutilated remains and blood spatters. And even the free highways of Connecticut are maintained. It is nice to be in the state with the highest per capita income in the country.
And I had a chance to meet a New York State Trooper up close and personal. Caught me in a speed trap near a construction site. Damn those audio books! I was listening to Nevada Barr’s

Winter Study

right at the suspenseful end! I missed the 55 mph signs for the work zone, the part that comes BEFORE the orange barrels are put out. Of course the troopers were lined up ready to catch the offenders. Yeah, I got the old ‘I’m giving you a break and not making it a work zone’ line. Fines are doubled in work zones. You could have given me more of a break and given me a warning! Can hardly wait to see how much this will cost me.
don’t pay it and never set foot in New York again? What about two tickets in a work zone and license is suspended? They can’t do that if you are licensed from another state, can they? And does my insurance company find out about tickets issued in other states? Need to get on Google.

What’s Behind Coffin Number 3? Ch 6 pg 14

Some of the vandalism did fall to the local inhabitants. As a result of shortages on construction material they pilfered the metal fences and grave markers to use on their farms. Others stole anything that might be of value to sell – good granite and marble lay around for the taking. And then there were the actual graves, the bodies and what lay with them. Grave robbers looked for jewels, gold teeth, anything that maybe had a resale value. They dumped out the bodies and plundered the coffins. Maybe it is good that the forest now covers what once was the old cemetery of Gnieballen. Perhaps what remains now lies there in peace, reclaimed, never again to be disturbed.
These tactics of abolishing cemeteries not only served to destroy and cleanse the land of previous inhabitants, but it served as a warning to the current liberated citizens. The Soviets were know as atheists, but is it right to say that as a result this made them more brutal say than the Spanish Inquisition, or the Puritans burnings witches in Salem , Massachusetts? The degree of brutality or savagery is rather irrelevant. It does however seem a rather unique approach to ethnic cleansing by getting rid of those already dead. It perplexes me, this act of taking out vengeance on bodies long dead. More than anything it violates a long standing human taboo about corpses, for whatever reason.
Yet there is something that puzzles me yet, something relating to the current day. So many Germans go back, so many want to reclaim their land, so many have formed these pseudo political organizations to take back lost lands. Do none of them want to ‘rebury’ the dead? Is there no one to even gather the bones in an act of respect for ancestors, burying the past in a deeper sense?