Susan's Scribblings the Blog

We wish people Merry Christmas, but we know it’s not that way for everybody. Still, we try to make one day in the calendar seem better than the others, and we set aside time for humanitarian good deeds and such, but the world will go through the same tumultuous 24 hours on Christmas Day as any other.

Births and deaths go through the same paces. People will get into mishaps at home and on the road. Stores will run out of milk and bread (especially those that don’t close on Christmas). And people do go to work on the holiday. I happen to work at a 24-hour operation, so somebody will bring food in to the workers (and they get overtime). I have the day off, but the day after is Friday, so I’ll have double the work (and don’t mention what has to be done on January 2).

Hospitals and police departments and 24-hour operators deal with some horrendous stuff on holidays: no wonder they eat, drink and smoke too much on average.

Some people will still have the same problems on Christmas that they had the day before, and on the day after Christmas, some seasonal employees will find they have been fired.

We close out another year of 365 days with much the same situations in place as the year before. It may not be merry, but you can predict that some things never change. All we can do is try to make a few bad situations better. Wish somebody a peaceful holiday: sometimes that trumps merry.

Life is full of exercises in bad timing. My company decided to institute a new timekeeping software program now. There is no time like the present, the old saying goes, and there is never a good time to get people used to new software, but it’s the end of the year and we have two holidays coming up. Just when everybody is on the same page with a routine, the rules change.

The timekeeping gods are dancing a jig now.

Also, the decision was made to start using the new software at the start of a new pay period, which for us starts on a Saturday. This means that, for the majority of us who do not work Saturday or Sunday, we will start right in with a new way to account for our daily hours first thing Monday morning. I’m anticipating lots of spilled coffee and four-letter words shouted at the height of desperation.

Either that, or a manager will come around and tell us that the software crashed the system over the weekend.

In addition, we can’t sign in until we receive our logins and passwords. Usually new logins are complex URLs which take up two lines of type on your computer screen. Passwords are born as a string of unintelligible garble which you must change into something you won’t forget the minute after you devise it. Having gone through family names and birth dates and names of pets from 1965 who were alive ten household moves ago, most password reminders now ask us for ten characters for a new password. Even a birthdate only contains eight. And what if you gave your kids and pets names of only five letters?

You might try stringing together four-letter word patterns with an exclamation point at the end for your “special character.”

I often have to dig deep for passwords, because my life is dull and missing exciting things I could use for passwords. That must be why the most common passwords are 1234 and such. Who has the time to figure out a new password before you’re one minute late clocking into the new time clock system?

We don’t appreciate people in law enforcement enough, and it seems that Ferguson, MO, demonstrates that all too well. Police officers are somewhat like the parental figures in grown-up society, and we are known to treat them with that same degree of grudging tolerance, with occasional outbursts of outright hatred because they try to keep us in line. We know that we need police officers, but when they do their job, we cringe. The people in Ferguson are shown and heard on news media in acts of civil disobedience and justifying it because an officer shot a suspect who died of his wounds. I’m including a link to an article which, I think, describes the incident in the most neutral and thorough terms from the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/ferguson-missouri-town-under-siege-after-police-shooting.html?_r=0

It seems that police officers are often treated like domestic workers: they clean up messes nobody else wants to handle, and they’re looked down upon for doing that job. Really, think about the last time you greeted and asked after the well-being of your workplace’s domestic staff, who clean your break room’s gunky sinks and wipe poo and other indescribable fluids off your toilet seats. Don’t you usually just “leave them to their job” and ignore them unless the sink still looks a bit grimy? Now ask yourself when you ever greeted a police officer and thanked him or her for going into filthy crack houses to stay the hand of a tanked-up addict holding a weapon from hurting his wife and kids, or standing in a row of ten or so officers against 50 riled up citizens who want to burn down the town’s beloved businesses?

These folks do a tough job that no average person would or could do. They train to run into the line of fire, stand between two sides in a domestic abuse standoff, negotiate in dangerous situations and take matters to task when they get out of hand. They run themselves ragged guarding our civility and trying to keep the peace, but the only time we remember them is when they pull us over for speeding and we cuss them for giving us a ticket. We don’t mind the misbehavior, just getting caught.

And even though Ferguson seems to want it to be so, the race card doesn’t even figure into what happens when an officer makes an arrest: the officer is wrong, even when it’s Satan himself getting handcuffed, because somebody always jumps in and plays the joker card of police brutality. Maybe we need robotic law enforcement like in Robocop to calm things down.

Sure we could go on about how unfortunate it was that the dead man in the Ferguson case, Michael Brown, wound up being shot after an alleged robbery, or we could talk about karma, fate, the hand of God, misuse of power, Jean Valjean and Javert or any such story to make facts sound more palatable, but human free will is tough to deal with, and cops are human beings tasked with a great responsibility to try to balance that free will for the good of all. It is impossible for people not to misbehave, and it is impossible for officers of the law not to have outcomes like this on occasion. They try to avoid it, but it will happen. What we might want to do is remember that crime and justice are two parts of our existence that don’t always come out the way we want them to, and the best we can do is let police officers do what they must do and behave ourselves.

And occasionally thank them for their service.

And say hello and “How are you?” to your office domestic staff.

We are used to lines, though we complain about them. The season for lines is coming fast, which means an increase in the pairs of sore feet and acts of impatience.

Last weekend I was out and about and found myself near the new location of Carlo’s Bakery–the family pastry business run by TLC television celebrity Buddy Valastro–which just opened in Marlton, NJ. I pulled into the shopping center, hoping to drop in, but the line went out the door about 100 deep at 3:00 on a Sunday afternoon. Of course this was about 24 hours after the grand opening. What was I thinking? So I did the only logical thing I could do: on the way home, I stopped at the local fourth generation bakery with no line.

Some people feel that, if a store has no lines, they’re not popular. Some folks in my office rag on me about my Windows® computer, and the fact that people are milling about the Apple® store by the dozens on a slow day, while customer associates at Windows® are drawing lots to see who will have the privilege of serving any walk-ins. I believe that sheep and cattle stand in line at the abattoir, so I’ll wait off to one side until they come get me.

At the start of each month, the grocery stores are packed with lines of people who just got paid on the first day and are stocking up with food for the next 30 days (or 29 if it’s November). I have images of cellar freezers crammed with fish sticks and pizzas and racks of ribs or club-sized trays of chicken drumsticks. The carts are straining from the loads. What ever happened to the weekly grocery trip?

Of course some lines have lessened, like at the movies or concerts, when all you have to do is log on and find out they’re electronically sold out as of two minutes ago.

Other lines start too early and grow ridiculously huge, like the people who have already camped out outside stores like BestBuy® for Black Friday deals.

On customer service phone lines, occasionally the wait with hold music is more torture than standing in a Black Friday queue at the cashier. If yours has only two recorded tunes with which you must wait for the next available representative (neither of which is identifiable), it can seem like you’ve camped out two weeks in advance at BestBuy®. Phone lines should have at least three recordings of hold music. And no country, please.

When I’m waiting my turn, I often think about what I have accomplished so far in the day. It sometimes makes the delay less painful. If it’s the first thing I’ve done that day, I remind myself that I awoke in the morning, there was breakfast in the kitchen and my digestion is healthy. Then the person behind me bumps into me, and it’s back to reality.

There was too much to talk about this past week. A deadly disease is visiting the United States: one man is dead, and two nurses who treated him are hospitalized. A cop murderer in PA has spent weeks on the lam and the local town is postponing Halloween to protect its citizenry. Joan Rivers’ death appears to be related to propofol, the same anesthetic medication which killed Michael Jackson.

But a few stronger news stories stood out this week.

A woman named Brittany Maynard has terminal brain cancer, and her doctors have been frank with her about the kind of death she will face: she has decided instead to end her life her own way, using assisted suicide laws in her current resident state. With her family by her side, on November 1st she will take a combination of drugs which will shut down her body and prematurely end the vicious assault of the tumors which are torturing her. When you think about cancer, it is a kamikaze disease, killing itself in the process of killing its host. Both are a waste. I recall an interesting scene in the film Soylent Green, in which Edward G. Robinson’s aging character “goes home” to a spa-like building in which he is given a drink which will end his life in 20 minutes, and he relaxes while movies of things and places he loved are shown around him and, essentially, has a peaceful ending his way. What happened after that is for you to find out if you’ve never seen the movie, but it involves Charlton Heston and food alternatives in a post-modern wasteland Earth. What it comes to is this: when we die, it’s not always the most pleasant way, but we are so stubbornly tethered to ideas about sustaining and prolonging life at any cost ,which hold us prisoner to our fears about the end of mortality, we can’t find it within us to offer the options of peaceful passing. We often treat our beloved pets better than we treat our elderly and terminally ill. May Brittany find the journey out of here a good one.

A Philadelphia charter school had some difficulty this past week, when their enrolled students exceeded the caps established by agreement when the school opened. The school’s founder lost an appeal in court and must now hold a lottery to determine which students can stay at the facility. The student population must be cut from 1300 to 675. It is hurtful to the students, who are only weeks into the school year, and parents must find alternative education options quickly if their children don’t make the cut, but the most disturbing aspect has to be the inabilities of the parents to communicate their frustration at the situation. On camera it was obvious that education has failed multiple generations, and schools which are struggling to find funding to teach the language of the world and obliterate the language of the street are losing the battle. It is because the parents were not educated properly that Philadelphia owes it to their children to break the cycle of poor education. All the schools are being affected, but the college campuses and job markets will feel the aftereffects years from now. How will children learn STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) if they can’t even spell “stem?”