Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Monthly Archives: November 2024

• Perfectly Terrible Ordeal

  Posted at 9:00 pm by kayewer, on November 30, 2024

  Did you know that Americans admitted to not using about half of their paid time off? In 2018 alone, figures indicate that workers surrendered 768 million days of PTO* (that’s collective among all workers, naturally). and in 2022, 9.5 days on average per worker were left unclaimed.

  When I see commercials on television, the people in them are on vacation, kayaking down rivers and driving reliably tricked-out SUVs up rocky terrain, not rushing to company buildings or working from home. So which is it?

  Sure we’re mostly working from home now, so that should reduce some of the stress from our lives. Perhaps. But we Americans have some sort of masochistic work ethic which forbids us enjoying the adventures of life in favor of the drudgery of reports, remembering to unmute at meetings, being gracious in the face of customer abuse and the uncertainty of fluctuating corporate status.

  Other countries offer generous holidays and time off incentives, and the workers take them. They can spend several days on holiday at the beach or in the country. They don’t even need to travel far from where they are in most cases. Our country is humongous, so we fly or take trains to many major vacation destinations. The last big vacation I took involved more flying than vacationing crossing time zones. I arrived exhausted and spent my returning day mostly in the air and awaiting connections. Returning to work seemed a treat after that.

  What did I just say?

  Full-time workers have five days on and two days off, and on a holiday they are so overwhelmed with everything related to the event itself that there is no time to relax or enjoy the time given that isn’t PTO. It’s a mysterious phenomenon, possibly related to Stockholm Syndrome (in which victims become more attached to those holding them captive) or some dependency disorder to which we have no answers.

  The Monday (or Tuesday) after a holiday is usually torture for workers because of all the catching up required. So holidays become synonymous with the upcoming negativity, making the desire to willlingly subject oneself to it less palatable, and possibly carrying over that same guilt to PTO.

  Of course, we’re not better off working without time off, but the best thing we can do is make the best of the time we are given and take it for all it’s worth. That means, take the PTO. Stay at home, wear the same outfit for three days in a row and let the den degrade into a troll cave. We owe it to ourselves to enjoy freedom when it’s offered to us.

  And no trips to Stockholm.

  *(Source: Zippia.com)

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  Posted in Uncategorized | 0 Comments | Tagged career, pto, travel, vacation, work

• Getting the Message

  Posted at 7:14 pm by kayewer, on November 23, 2024

  Before a certain illness sent the world workforce home, we employees operated in huge buildings with cubicles, phones, computers, printers, drawers filled with paper plates and napkins, and cabinets for smoker’s coats and non-smoker’s coats.

  My office also had huge screens hanging throughout the department, and on which our call center statistics were displayed. In addition, we had slides relevent to our jobs and designed to bring us together as a department. I was in charge of preparing those slides.

  We were preparing to go with a new vendor, and training had barely begun back in March 2020 when we were exiled to our houses to work. Ultimately the building I worked in was shut down, mothballed and vacated, but we learned that our displays could be accomplished on our computers, so the process began to license individual viewers, train us in producing and editing the boards, and finally testing the program.

  My former boss and I were the two trainees for the system, so after the duo became a solo, I was left with the responsibility of working with the boards’ production company and a few selected test subjects from our department to see how the system worked. It took a few weeks to work out the kinks. Nobody could actually summon the system, including me. The IT staff were boggled, but then when dealing with strings of computer commands, IT’s mission is to be boggled. Finally the coding was completed, the errors fixed and we began the odyssey of producing message boards for users in two departments. We have used the system for a year already.

  I have found joy in assembling the slides for the project. Once a month, I put together visual guides to our co-workers’ birthdays and anniversaries, as well as monthly scrolling text, ego-boosters and more. Overall, our departments enjoyed about two minutes of content each month, all lovingly assembled by yours truly.

  During a lull in the usual reporting and other duties I normally do when I’m not enjoying putting together board content, I assembled what I would need for 2025 in terms of positive messages from corporate icons such as CEOs and specialist speakers on topics of interest to workers. I had a rhythm going with the slide content, and the harmony of it was good for the soul. It’s wonderful when things work.

  Occasionally the network would need a reboot, and I would send word out to the users that it would be restored soon. I would get a polite thank you, and soon the system would be updating data and entertaining the masses.

  Then I was present at a management and supervisory meeting as notetaker this past week, and the subject of disseminating information came up. I piped up and volunteered to add content to our message boards so it would be accessible to us, since the department took up the majority of licensed viewers.

  The department manager then said simply, “Oh, the boards are dead. We didn’t renew the contract.”

  There is no moment so embarassing than when you are the first line on a project, but the last to know the latest about it. I sat there on Zoom, in front of about a dozen participants, and I didn’t even have a certain lower body part to have in my hand (to coin a phrase) and complete the humiliation. Fortunately I did not have my video on, or I would’ve looked like a fish on land breathing its last.

  So when I had the chance to talk to my direct manager, I found out the horrible truth. Back when the boards were on overhead monitors, they were a constant presence that one could see or ignore. Once the information was placed onscreen on monitors, it was an annoyance which could be completely ignored by not signing into it at all. With all the applications our agents were already using, the display took last place. After reviewing the usage data, the only regular viewers were my manager and myself.

  It’s a case of holding a party that nobody attended.

  The experience was great while it lasted, and at least part of my efforts–the birthdays and anniversaries–still appear on another platform. And I know for a fact that people see them, because the slides are copied to at least one department at the start of each month.

  I also enjoyed the work involved. It will be replaced by other tasks, which are already pending training for me and a few others. I guess when one monitor goes off, another one comes on.

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  Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment | Tagged community, digital-marketing, education, humor, news

• Long Haul Getaway

  Posted at 6:37 pm by kayewer, on November 16, 2024

  Visitors to the United States make note of how big the entire country is. Some states are bigger or smaller than others. Rhode Island, for instance, is small enough that you may not realize you’re in it until you’re out of it.

  Next door to me is the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, on the larger side of our 48 contiguous parcels. It’s called a Commonwealth because the founding fathers preferred it to “State,” which is interchangeable; however, their ties to England before independence was a big reason for the nomenclature. It’s a horizontally huge plot of land big enough that it takes over four hours to cross by car. Which is what I did this weekend.

  The turnpike is an enjoyable ride, passing by acres of farmland, touring the insides of four mountain tunnels, and seeing the development of county after county as housing sprouts up all over. The authority in charge of the toll road have made it a clean and smooth drive for everybody.

  I’m not sure how good their cable or radio reception is in the far reaches of farm country (I used satellite radio for the trip, and it only blacked out in the mountain tunnels). I attended an event at a location far enough away to necessitate the trip across hill and dale to appear live. And it’s not just me: people visit from Ohio and New York as well.

  I drove the four hours straight out, with just a bottle of water by my side and Eighties tunes for entertainment. My car’s direction feature didn’t work (I spoke with support), so while I waiting for them to reboot my system, I turned to maps on my phone to get the directions to what was a twisty trip into the mountains via winding skinny roads to the site of the event. The standby method didn’t let me down, and I arrived safe and sound. The shopping was intense, and I came out of it with quite a haul. I won’t go into detail, because I included holiday shopping in my trip.

  After spending a third of the past two days driving, however, I’m a bit beat. The benefits of driving the route are exhilarating enough to make me do it again, for the peace and steady rhythm of the road, as well as the feelings of independence which eventually escape our capabilities as we age.

  For now, I’ll make shorter trips to the corner market.

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  Posted in Uncategorized | 0 Comments | Tagged art, photography, summer, travel

• He Wins

  Posted at 3:34 pm by kayewer, on November 9, 2024

  An American having a birthday in November–particularly the first ten days of the month–sometimes celebrates or suffers from reasons not to do so. I know first-hand how this happens, because I am one such Scorpio dealing with the fallout of the recent election.

  Second worst birthday ever. The first was back in 2016.

  Belated, early, or not, the outcome of how this humungous chunk of ground on which we live will be run politically for four years can cause elation or depression on one’s birthday, depending on the side you’re on. Our presidents tend to swing like a pendulum between our two main parties (Democratic and Republican), with one side running for four years and the other then taking over for the next four. Usually the incoming party tries to reverse what they feel is damage done in the prior administration, so taxes, policies and international relations tend to fluctuate in kind. For most of my life, however, our country ran reasonably well when run by either party. Then suddenly, somebody swept in and came into power, and as I’ve watched the past ten years unfold, I’ve never seen such a disturbing turn of events.

  After the 2016 election results became my first worst birthday present ever, I watched as throngs of extremists praised far-right ideas and ignored what our forefathers would have recognized as rantings and fascist concepts. Men with no jobs, who could have had jobs taken by immigrant workers, chanted against their presence while ignoring the fact that, without those jobs being held by somebody, food and other merchandise would never leave the farms.

  The worst of it? The overturning of abortion rights for women paved the way to a futuristic Handmaid’s Tale society which will glut men’s egos with what they perceive as power. When I looked at the inordinate expansion of red states which caused the election this past week to swing to the right, I was horrified. Not even half of the states were willing to elect a woman to office. Either the women didn’t vote on Election Day, or they agreed with the men, which would be even more horrifying.

  What woman in her right mind would want to elect a person who thinks that, if she were walking down the street minding her own business, and a man sexually assaulted her, the possibility of pregnancy should be of no concern? She should simply go home and wait to see if she is going to give birth to a baby for whom her attacker would have no responsibility.

  Already men are taunting women with the mantra, “Your body, my choice.” They’re not being deleted from social media. Is Mark Zuckerberg that afraid to put his foot down? Maybe the goal is to put the collective masculine foot down on the throats of women.

  The measure of what made a man a man used to be his epiphany of where women exist in their universe. For ages, men have been afraid of women, and not in the cowardly sense, but in the way that suggests their awe but admiration of what we contribute as the “opposite sex” to society. In ancient times, women held positions of respect. In the deep South, the women ran the household and served as the societal enforcers (viewers of Gone With the Wind will know just how powerful Scarlett’s mother Ellen O’Hara was). Women have shared battlefields (Molly Pitcher), given their lives for science (Marie Curie), penned timeless literary works (already covered in said adapted movie) and proven their worth in settling the West, expanding sports and much more throughout history.

  Anybody who has seen a movie from the Frank Sinatra era knows that women supported men; the post-war household was run by a woman who cooked meals from scratch, minded the children, cleaned and laundered and shopped, and still kept every hair on her head in the perfect style and greeted her man at the door looking her best, with the newspaper ready to be read and slippers to comfort his tired feet. That was no made-up concept; the men crossed the ocean to defend our nation and the world against a formidable foe, and while they were gone, women filled men’s jobs at home, put on work clothes and got themselves dirty, burnt and injured to support the war effort. When the men returned, women had proven their worth, and stepped aside to be equal partners while filling their original roles.

  And now this may all change. Images of present-day Iraq or Pakistan could become this nation’s new norm. Can this truly be what American men want? Subjugation? Free-range denigration?

  If that is true, I will spend every birthday until the last one content in no man earning my respect.

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  Posted in Uncategorized | 0 Comments | Tagged feminism, kamala-harris, news, politics, women

• No-Vember

  Posted at 3:11 pm by kayewer, on November 2, 2024

  This is the month for elections and turkey in the United States. For some folks, it seems like we will elect a turkey to run the country (or the turkeys are the ones doing the voting).

  I promise that will be the only political joke I will put in this blog. I follow the ideals laid out by Linus Van Pelt in Peanuts, in that one doesn’t discuss religion, politics or the Great Pumpkin.

  At least one of them only comes around every October 31, and the other only periodically. Thanksgiving is a set holiday on the fourth Thursday every year. That’s about two weeks after we learn whether we should splurge on the annual family dinner or tighten the purse strings.

  That’s a political observation, so it doesn’t count.

  November is also National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. I’m slightly behind on the second day, but this weekend is where I will catch up and exceed the word count to stay ahead. The challenge is to write 50,000 words in the month, starting officially at midnight the morning of the 1st and ending at 11:59:59 on the 30th. That averages out to about 1667 words per day. Fortunately I have three consecutive completions under my belt, so I’m not worried if I don’t reach the goal for a fourth year. A hat trick is an accomplishment; more than that is extra gravy.

  At my age, I need to watch my gravy intake. It all packs on pounds.

  November is a great month to stop doing something, such as snacking, smoking, consuming a daily two-liter bottle of soda or not walking more than a thousand steps a day. This month for me is going to be a no-spend November. I have one day in which I’ll be doing planned shopping, and that’s it. Nothing from Amazon or my favorite websites for this month. Fortunately my holiday shopping is finished. This means no shocking bills come January. Nobody wants to start out a new year with a payment plan (other than tax time).

  If you take on the No month challenge, it helps to have something to do instead of the thing you plan not to do. If you normally guzzle a big bottle of “Hillside Condensation,” try a bottle of essence or vitamin water instead. Instead of the bag of chips, try a bag of grapes. Instead of sucking in chemicals, try a throat lozenge. If you can’t get outside to walk (like on lucky days when it actually rains), take some stairs or a tour around the building or the block, or even around your yard. Cell phones have great step counters.

  A friend of mine hauls out her phone regularly to track her steps. She usually meets her goals. I don’t pocket my cell, so I don’t know how that will work for me. I would need a wearable counter instead, and those are about as fashionable as Halloween glow-in-the-dark neon necklaces.

  So for me it’s no spending this month. I already have groceries except for regular essentials such as bananas, milk and eggs.

  And a turkey that won’t be running anything except my electric bill.

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  	Eden on Getting the Message
  	Eden on The Unasked Questions
  	Eden on And Her Shoes Were #9
  	Eden on The Poison Field
  	Eden on Final Tally