Category Archives: Deep Thoughts

I think…therefore I’m dangerous.

People Just Don’t Want to Work Hard

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I watch a documentary about the Kolb Brothers on PBS and realize something tragic.

KAET, Channel 8, is one of our local PBS television stations. Last night, it showed a 30-minute documentary about the Kolb Brothers.

Emery and Ellsworth Kolb made their name as Grand Canyon Photographers. They started their business in 1903 (or thereabouts) and it remained in business until 1978 (or thereabouts; I’m good with dates, but not perfect). The studio where they lived and worked on the Grand Canyon’s South Rim still stands. It’s a bookstore now, with a gallery downstairs where their old movie theater used to be.

Because of a shortage of water at the Rim, when the Kolbs were first starting out, they printed their photographs down at Indian Gardens, which had a year-round creek. It was a nine-mile hike down and back and the Kolbs did it almost every day.

They’d start out at the top of the Bright Angel Trail, where they’d take photos of the mule riders as they began the descent. Then they’d run back to their studio on the rim and create proofs, often using muddy water collected from puddles and ponds to wash them. Then they’d hurry down the trail, on foot, and catch up to the mule riders before Indian Gardens. At the gardens, they’d show the proofs to the riders. The riders would order prints, then continue to Plateau Point or the river by mule. The Kolbs would create finished prints at Indian Gardens, where they could wash them with clear water. Then they’d hurry back up to the rim and be there when the riders returned at the end of the day to finish the sale.

Having been into the Grand Canyon less than 2 months ago, the thought of doing that hike every day sends chills down my spine. Of course, the Kolbs were young and weren’t carrying around extra weight, like I am. I think if I started doing it (and didn’t die of heart failure soon after starting), I’d drop my extra weight, strengthen up my muscles, and feel pretty good after a few months.

The point, of course, is that these guys came up with a plan to succeed and they worked hard to make it happen. Harder than 98% of the U.S. population would be willing to work. And that’s a problem.

It seems to me that people are soft these days, more interested in how much money they can make with the minimum amount of work than how much work it would take to really succeed and get ahead.

I’m not talking about time here. People don’t seem to care about how much time they spend at work. In my old corporate America days, when I worked in Corporate Headquarters for Automatic Data Processing (ADP) as an auditor and later, financial analyst, I often saw people staying late in their cubicles, heads buried in documents that were likely just giving them something to focus on in case their bosses came by. The goal, of course, was to be seen by your boss at your desk after quitting time as often as possible. That supposedly showed how hard you worked. To me, it showed how little regard you had for your family or how little life you had outside the office. I didn’t play that game. I started at 8 and quit at 4 (to beat the traffic both ways) and got a lot of work done in between. No one ever bothered me about leaving so early — probably because I always had the coffee ready for them when they got in at 8:45 AM.

These days, promotions seemed based more on how long you’ve been on the job than how well you do that job. People are constantly looking for ways to minimize the amount of work they do. Few people ask to do more work than they’re given. Instead, they stretch that work out so it takes as long as possible. They look busy, but they’re taking their blessed time. After a while, they naturally slow down. Then they can’t keep up. And they complain.

I think being an employer here in Wickenburg woke me up a bit. As fuel manager, I had a staff of employees who spent the day sitting in the airport terminal, providing airport condition information on the radio, pumping fuel into the few airplanes that stopped by, and keeping the place neat and clean. The vast majority of the 8-hour day was spent sitting at a desk that looked out over the fuel pump area. On a windy or rainy or very hot day, no one would fly in. Otherwise, they could expect 10 to 20 planes a day, 25% of which might actually stop for a bathroom break or soda or fuel. Sometimes, people would drive in to chat or check the place out. So the employee chatted — that was part of the job, too. “Ambassador to Wickenburg,” was one of the phrases that was thrown around by the town. Whatever.

I’d created a checklist of things that had to be done every day. Things like check the fuel farm for leaks (a 5-minute walkaround), get the mail (2 minutes if you used the back door), fill the fridge with soda (5 minutes with 2 trips to the closet in the hallway), clean out the bathrooms (15 minutes; they were seldom used and seldom dirty), take morning and afternoon readings from the fuel pumps (5 minutes each trip), mop the floor (15 minutes) — you get the idea. There was about 2 hours of real work on that checklist and, on a really dead day, that would only take about an hour to do (bathrooms don’t get dirty, soda isn’t sold, etc.). Most of my employees did the job without complaining. After all, there really wasn’t much to do and they had 8 hours to get it done. But one or two of them just couldn’t do it without complaining and whining. Sometimes they’d skip things on the checklist and try to tell me that it had been too busy with aircraft fueling at quitting time to do it. Of course, they didn’t mention that they were too busy reading a book or talking on the phone the rest of the day.

One of these guys quit when I reminded him that he had to do everything on the checklist. He just quit with no notice. Sheesh. Did he think I was going to back down? He obviously didn’t know me very well.

It was employee problems that caused me to sell out my Airport fuel manager contract. I just couldn’t deal with the mentality of the one or two people who couldn’t be thankful for a job that paid them to sit on their butts most of the day, in a relatively comfortable place (heat and air conditioning at their command), chatting or reading or just watching the planes go by.

One of the guys tried getting his new boss to pay him more. A lot more. Like almost double what he was making, which was already too much. When the new boss refused, this guy quit. No notice. It really put the new boss in a bad spot, especially since he was already shorthanded and this guy worked 5 days a week. And the boss’s uncle had just died in Idaho and he needed to make a trip to the funeral. This employee obviously thought he’d get his way. But the new boss was a lot like me in one respect. He doesn’t back down. So the guy was unemployed for a long time and I heard he even filed bankruptcy. (He tried to tell the Airport Manager that I’d gotten him fired. Can you imagine that?)

The new boss wound up getting the guy who’d quit working for me to work for him. Recently, when he reminded that guy about his work responsibilities, he quit again. At least he gave two weeks notice this time.

It’s this kind of mentality that has me worried about the U.S. It isn’t just adults who think and act this way. It’s kids, too. In fact, I think the kids are worse. They spend more time and effort thinking about how little work they could do to get by rather than actually doing work that’ll help them get ahead.

I think of the Kolb brothers running up and down that trail. I can’t think of one person — myself included — who would do that kind of work to make a business succeed. Maybe that’s a problem.

Too Old for a Helicopter Ride, Part II

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An update to an earlier entry.

If you read these blogs faithfully (although I’m not sure why you would), you may recall my “Too Old for a Helicopter Ride?” rant about two weeks ago. This is an update to that saga.

When I received the letter starting “Due to the age of our members…”, I was outraged. I mean that in the real sense of the word. It ticked me off that someone in Texas should play “daddy” to some retirees at a park in Arizona.

I wrote a letter to the editor of the Wickenburg Sun. It was printed in yesterday’s edition.

So far, I’ve received about eight comments from people who have read it. Two of them live in North Ranch, where folks are “too old” to enjoy helicopter rides (according to the President of their Association, not me). One of those people actually looked up my phone number in the phone book and called me.

All comments were in the same vein: how could he write something like that? Aren’t these people able to make their own decision about what they’re too old for? Besides, a helicopter ride sounds like fun.

Some comments showed disbelief. One person actually wanted to see the letter. I’ll bring him a copy this week.

I’m sure I’ll get some comments from people who aren’t happy about my letter to the editor. I always do. There’s always someone out there who misses the point entirely. In this case, someone will probably think I’m attacking North Ranch, rather than the sorry attitude of the man in Texas who makes all the decisions.

Perhaps Bud Carr will call. What will I say? Nothing. I’ve said it all. Besides, it’s a waste of time to talk to someone with a closed mind, and I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that his is as closed as a steel trap.

Living Will

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I pass along something amusing (and rather sad) to readers who think.

This morning, I got an e-mail from my cousin Kathy who lives back in New York. Kathy teaches school and is one of the family’s more thoughtful members. (Sadly, she’s related by marriage, so it doesn’t help us score points in our bloodline.)

Kathy often passes on funny things she receives via e-mail. Unlike a lot of folks who forward stuff to me, the ones I get from Kathy that aren’t related to menopause or the stupidity of men are often quite well written and funny. This one was like that. I want to share it with readers here.

Sadly, I don’t have a by-line for the piece and don’t know who wrote it so I can’t include credit for it. I did not write it. If anyone out there knows the original author of this piece, please let me know. And obviously, since I respect copyright, if the author has a problem with me sharing this, he should contact me so I can remove it. Frankly, if I’d wrote it, it would be…well, right here. And I’d be proud to put my name on it.

That said, here it is. Read it and think.

Below is an example of a LIVING WILL you may want to draft in light of recent events:

* In the event I lapse into a persistent vegetative state, I want medical authorities to resort to extraordinary means to prolong my hellish semiexistence. Fifteen years wouldn’t be long enough for me.

* I want my wife and my parents to compound their misery by engaging in a bitter and protracted feud that depletes their emotions and their bank accounts.

* I want my wife to ruin the rest of her life by maintaining an interminable vigil at my bedside. I’d be really jealous if she waited less than a decade to start dating again or otherwise rebuilding a semblance of a normal life.

* I want my case to be turned into a circus by losers and crackpots from around the country who hope to bring meaning to their empty lives by investing the same transient emotion in me that they once reserved for Laci Peterson, Chandra Levy and that little girl who got stuck in a well.

* I want those crackpots to spread vicious lies about my wife.

* I want to be placed in a hospice where protesters can gather to bring further grief and disruption to the lives of dozens of dying patients and families whose stories are sadder than my own.

* I want the people who attach themselves to my case because of their deep devotion to the sanctity of life to make death threats against any judges, elected officials or health care professionals who disagree with them.

* I want the medical geniuses and philosopher kings who populate the Florida Legislature to ignore me for more than a decade and then turn my case into a forum for weeks of politically calculated bloviation.

* I want total strangers – oily politicians, maudlin news anchors, ersatz friars and all other hangers-on – to start calling me “Bobby,” as if they had known me since childhood.

* I’m not insisting on this as part of my directive, but it would be nice if Congress passed a “Bobby’s Law” that applied only to me and ignored the medical needs of tens of millions of other Americans without adequate health coverage.

* Even if the “Bobby’s Law” idea doesn’t work out, I want Congress – especially all those self-described conservatives who claim to believe in “less government and more freedom” – to trample on the decisions of doctors, judges and other experts who actually know something about my case. And I want members of Congress to launch into an extended debate that gives them another excuse to avoid pesky issues such as national security and the economy.

* In particular, I want House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to use my case as an opportunity to divert the country’s attention from the mounting political and legal troubles stemming from his slimy misbehavior.

* And I want Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist to make a mockery of his Harvard medical degree by misrepresenting the details of my case in ways that might give a boost to his 2008 presidential campaign.

* I want Frist and the rest of the world to judge my medical condition on the basis of a snippet of dated and demeaning videotape that should have remained private.

* Because I think I would retain my sense of humor even in a persistent vegetative state, I’d want President Bush – the same guy who publicly mocked Karla Faye Tucker when signing off on her death warrant as governor of Texas – to claim he was intervening in my case because it is always best “to err on the side of life.”

* I want the state Department of Children and Families to step in at the last moment to take responsibility for my well-being, because nothing bad could ever happen to anyone under DCF’s care.

* And because Gov. Jeb Bush is the smartest and most righteous human being on the face of the Earth, I want any and all of the aforementioned directives to be disregarded if the governor happens to disagree with them. If he says he knows what’s best for me, I won’t be in any position to argue.

Ugly Fat Americans

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I hear a startling bit of information on the radio.

I listen to NPR. For those of you who favor reality TV over reality, NPR stands for National Public Radio. It’s PBS (Public Broadcasting System) for the radio waves. Funded by “listeners like me,” charitable foundations, and corporations looking for tax breaks, it’s primarily talk radio with news and information shows that go far beyond what you can find on regular television and radio. News shows focus on politics, foreign affairs, literature, science, and other topics that people who think actually think about.

My friend Jim says that NPR is for liberals. But Jim worships Rush Limbaugh, so I can’t take anything Jim says very seriously anyway.

The other day, on my way to work, the discussion on Talk of the Nation or the Diane Reems Show — I can’t remember which one I was listening to — they can be very much alike at times — focused on the problems with Social Security and Medicare. As you may (or may not) know, both services are in financial trouble, although Medicare is in much bigger trouble than Social Security. Why? Well, the government is paying out more in benefits than it’s collecting and it isn’t earning enough on the balance of funds to sustain it. (I think financial mismanagement is partly to blame for that, but that’s not the point here so I won’t pursue it.)

The man being interviewed — and forgive me if I can’t recall his name or the position that gives him his expertise — presented a shocking piece of information. For the first time in decades, the average life expectancy of Americans is going down. Yes, down. That means that today’s Americans are not expected to live as long as Americans a few years back.

The cause of this sorry statistic: obesity.

The phrase “ugly fat American” takes on new meaning. Not only are we spoiled rotten and accustomed to having our way with the world (thus making us “ugly” in the eyes of the people who really don’t like us), but we are literally fat. And those fat tissues are starting to eat away at our life expectancy.

If you’ve got eyes and you use them to look around yourself in public places, you must have noticed it by now. There are a lot of fat people. But worse yet, there are a lot of very fat people.

Look at yourself. Honestly. How many extra pounds are you carrying around?

Heck, I’m overweight. I’m 5’8″ and weigh about 30 pounds more than I should. Anyone looking a me would likely say to himself, “Now that’s a big girl.” He might not use the word fat, but that’s only because (lucky for him) he hasn’t seen me in a bikini. My height helps camouflage my extra pounds. Those 30 pounds are 20% more pounds than I should be carrying around. And I can feel that extra weigh. Last spring, when I weighed 20 pounds less (can you believe it?) I felt better. Healthier. And my clothes fit a heck of a lot better, too.

I was lucky enough to have a high metabolism until I was about 30. That meant I could eat as much as I wanted and never put on a pound. In fact, for a while, I had trouble keeping weight on. In college, my weight dropped down to 105 lbs. I looked terrible, like a walking skeleton. I began to have digestive problems. I wasn’t anorexic — it wasn’t like I was trying to keep the weight off. I was just too darn busy. Working two jobs, commuting 30 miles each way to school, shouldering an 18-credit course load. I had trouble finding time to fit meals in. Then I moved on campus and got on the meal plan. That fixed me up. They made these warm rolls….

As time ticked on, my metabolism adjusted. Now I have to watch what I eat to prevent myself from getting any heavier. And I have to diet to take off the pounds. I’m on a slow diet now. I’d like to drop 20 pounds over the next few months. Maybe by the end of June. We’ll see how I do. I’ve been at it for a week and have lost 3 pounds. Big deal. But if I can keep that up, I’ll do okay.

Obesity runs in my family. (Yes, it has been linked to genes.) At 5’1″, my mother weighs more than I do. Her brother (my uncle), who died last year, was at least 100 pounds overweight. He did a lot of sitting in front of the television in the last few years of his life, and pretty much ignored the doctor’s recommendations about diet. He developed diabetes (which also runs in my family) and heart problems. We weren’t surprised when he died at age 69. Instead, we were surprised that he lasted that long. Fortunately, I have a good helping of my father’s genes. He’s always been tall (6’4″) and thin as a rail. So was his mom. I think that spared me from a fat fate.

But my 30 pounds of extra weight is nothing compared to some of the people I see when I get out and about. I’ve seen many people who are 50, 75, or 100 pounds overweight. There are people who can easily be described as round. People who, if you tipped them over on their side, would roll down a hill with arms and legs sticking out, just like in a cartoon. People who are so fat, they have difficulty walking, so they wedge themselves into one of those motorized carts at the supermarket when it’s time to do their grocery shopping. And around the house, when they’re not hiding the La-Z-Boy from view with their bulk, they use wheelchairs.

Don’t these people understand what’s happening to them? Don’t they care? Don’t they want to be healthy and active, to live life to the fullest — and longest — possible? Why won’t they get help?

And what of the millions of Americans like me who are “just a little” overweight? How many of them don’t make a conscious effort to stop their weight gains and start to reverse them? They’re 30 pounds overweight one year and 40 pounds the next. Then 50 and 60 and before you know it, they’re spending more time on the sofa in front of the television than moving about — simply because that’s the only thing they can do.

I don’t want to live forever, but I also don’t want my life cut short by obesity — something I can prevent.

How long before the rest of this country wakes up to what’s quickly becoming a leading contributor to early death?

How the Other Half Lives

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Mike and I spend time down in Phoenix, chatting with “city folk.”

A few weeks ago, I was invited to a housewarming party down in Phoenix. The party was yesterday evening. After some minor discussion, Mike and I hopped into my city car (the Honda S2000), put the top down, and sped southeast.

We hit Home Depot and A.J.’s Fine Food along the way. At Home Depot, we needed to gather pricing information for a summer cabin I’d like to build on our property at Howard Mesa. The plan is to have a building shell put on the property, then fill the shell with the comforts of home — things like toilets, sinks, lights, a bed, a stove. You know. That stuff you have where you live that makes your home feel more like a home than a campsite. We bought our hostess a nice orchid plant with a decorative pot and a Home Depot gift card. Then we hit A.J.’s for some deli salads and a cake.

Our hostess was one of my editors. I write articles for a technology Web site called InformIt, which is somehow related to Peachpit Press, one of my publishers. I write about the kinds of things that can be found in my Peachpit books and InformIt adds links so readers can buy my books. They also pay me a few hundred bucks per article. That’s a good deal for me, since I can knock off two articles in a day and they seem interested in publishing anything I want to write about. When I’m done with my Tiger book, I plan on writing eight or ten articles for them before I dive into my QuickBooks book.

I’d never met Esther in person and the photos she uses as her iChat icon looks nothing like she does in real life. (I think it might be a glamour photo.) So when we arrived at her house, it took some guessing to figure out which one she was. I got a big hug before she hurried off to do other things. Mike and I grabbed a coke and tried to mingle with the other guests. We were not very successful. The other guests were gathered in groups and obviously knew each other. They pretty much ignored us newcomers. I guess they didn’t need to meet anyone new. We didn’t need to meet anyone new either, but you don’t normally go to a party with that attitude, so we’d left it at home. Since several of the conversations seemed to revolve around OS/2 (an ancient IBM-created operating system, if you recall), we didn’t feel as if we were missing much.

After a while, Esther showed us around the house. They’d been living there three months and had finished most of their unpacking. Both Esther and her husband, Bill, work out of the house and their offices were in the two front bedrooms, side by side. Lots of computer stuff. Mike says the house was probably built in the 70s, but I think it might be early 80s. It had an interesting layout, with a master bedroom suite tucked into one corner and a long, narrow kitchen with two giant refrigerators and a chest freezer. (Seriously into refrigeration, as Mike said.) Esther brought us back out into the back yard, which was completely surrounded by a 6-1/2 foot wall, and had a curvy-shaped pool with a fence around it. There were big trees that shaded the half of the yard without the pool. The next door neighbor had really, really tall palm trees. A third of an acre, Esther told us proudly. “Pretty big for this area.”

The area was just south of Thunderbird around 56th Street. All the houses were like Esther’s: single-story homes with walled-in back yards, and security company signs on their front lawns. Suburbia. Later, Mike commented about how odd it was to not be able to see the horizon from the backyard. I hadn’t thought about it. The backyard hadn’t seemed like the outdoors to me and I wasn’t really expecting to see the horizon.

We found some folks in one of the two living rooms who were more friendly and we settled down with them. One group was a family: mom, dad, and two kids. The son, who was probably about 11, had his head buried in a Game Boy the entire time we were at the party — about 2 and a half hours, as it turns out. He even managed to continue playing while he was eating dinner. The girl, who was 8, spent much of the time browsing through Esther’s impressive collection of books, which includes some compilations of comics and an odd book called “Why Cats Paint.” The dad told us about his flight training experiences, which were impressive but did not result in a pilot certificate. The mom talked with two other moms about the school systems where they lived.

Another guy who heard we’d driven down from Wickenburg was very impressed. “That’s a long drive,” he said. “And I was debating whether it was worth the drive for me.” He’d come from Thunderbird and 24th Street. Just over thirty city blocks away. Well, to be fair, blocks in Phoenix aren’t like blocks in New York. You can walk 30 blocks in New York and not break a sweat. Thirty blocks in Phoenix has to be at least three miles. That was some drive.

The conversation turned to neighborhoods and this is where it got weird. They all started comparing their neighborhoods. Apparently, it was a good thing that in one neighborhood, people liked to put their barbecue grills out on the driveway and hang out there. So everyone had their barbecues out in front of their houses, within shouting distance to their neighbors. Almost every house in that same neighborhood, which was on Wagon Wheel Road, had wagon wheels in front of their houses and they’d put colored lights on the wagon wheels for all the holidays. People would drive through the neighborhood on those holidays just to look at the lights on the wagon wheels. Another neighborhood got hundreds of kids for Halloween because people from South Phoenix would drop off their kids there to go trick or treating.

Esther’s real estate agent showed up late with a woman and a plate of cookies. They were dressed as if they were ready to hit some posh wine bar in Scottsdale after the festivities at Esther’s. They joined in the conversation. And that’s when Esther started talking about the convenience of living two houses off Thunderbird. When they lived in Taranto, they’d get in the car and have to drive 10 minutes before they got to any shopping. That gave them plenty of time in the car to decide where they were going out to eat. Now they have no time for discussion in the car. They get to shopping within minutes and there are so many choices. And sometimes, they even pass their house while they’re still out shopping!

Wow. I never really thought of convenience as a reason to live in one of the thousands of “compartmentalized” homes in the Valley. Sure, I bitch that there are no dining options here in Wickenburg and shopping is somewhat limited. But never in a million years would I consider moving down into the Phoenix area just to increase my dining and shopping options. That’s a quality of life change. Those folks get their privacy from 6-1/2 foot walls that block the views. I get my privacy from having neighbors that live too far away to see into my windows. Those folks make their neighbors an integral part of their lives with community barbecues and home lighting rituals. I make outdoor activities and recreation an integral part of my life with hiking, horseback riding, and Jeeping — all from my backyard. Those people live with the sound of traffic on Thunderbird or other major arteries a backdrop to their daily existence. The soundtrack for my life is the sound of the wind and the birds and the occasional howl of a coyote or hoot of an owl.

We left the party at 9 PM, using our long drive as an excuse for early departure. We were tired — Mike had done some serious yard work early in the day and I’d spent 3 hours that morning at the office. We drove up to I-17 and Carefree Highway with the top down. The sky was clear and the moon was full. As the ambient light around us faded, the stars emerged, one by one. I realized that the folks we’d spent the evening with probably couldn’t see the stars from their homes.

Would I trade my lifestyle for theirs? What do you think?