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August 18, 2003:
Greenville Michigan:
I have witness true insanity on channel 12 local news recently.
The people of Greenville Michigan have lost it big time. They
have gone backward in time. They were burning books. They were
burning Harry Potter. They were burning the Douay version of
the Christian bible. They were burning country and western CDs.
Channel 12 showed film clips of this. I saw the fire. I saw these
primitive wild eyed frantic crazies tearing up the books and
throwing them into the fire. It was like a completely mad lynch
mob scene out of an old horror film. Sick, sick, sick!
California:
I fully expect to see a chimpanzee qualify for this election
before it's over. What a bizarre circus. Only in California and
caddy shack! Even so, I don't think Schwarzenegger can possibly
be any funnier that Ventura or Ingler.
Iraq:
We have more dead soldiers. Bush says, "Bring em on!"
August 7, 2003. The terrorists car-bombed the Jordanian embassy
in Baghdad. "Bring em on!"
Power Down:
Unless you just woke up from a long winter's nap, you know there
has been a disastrous failure of the Eastern US power grid. Even
without that, it would have been a busy week for me. The power
failure simply upped the ante. I did not have much time to notice
recent news to begin with. Of course there was no news anyway,
unless you consider listening to the top-of-the-head premature
opinions of fools about the power outage to be news. I don't,
so there was no news for several days.
Word power:
People have this amazing childish almost religious belief in
the power of words. They seem to not notice the difference between
the symbols and what they represent. They think, by saying something
often enough and loud enough, it will magically be true without
doing anything to make it true. They believe they can create
reality out of the symbols for reality. Managers are most prone
to this silliness.
Integrity:
I once had a manager who had just learned something from his
secretary that he should already have known. He looked at me
with a bewildered expression and asked, "How come everyone
knows what's going on before I do?"
Anyone on his staff could have answered that.
"It's because you don't want to know you fool. You prefer
that we lie to you. In fact, you insist on it. We lie to you
because that's what you want us to do."
It's alright to lie sometimes if we are sure that is what
someone else wants us to do. If someone is dying and they don't
want to deal with it, it's OK to discuss what kind of vacation
they will take next year even though we know they will be deceased.
In that case they must be the bellwether. If they want to talk
about dying, they will do it. If not we go with the myth. It
is the same with managers. If we are sure they don't want to
hear the truth, we go with their lie.
About Employers:
A employer should be creating situations, concepts, and products
which enhance the human condition while providing a creative
employment environment where the people want to come to work
because they enjoy it. If an employer is not doing this, they
are perpetrating a fraud on the culture. They should change what
they are doing of shut down. In this kind of environment, there
can be no half-witted managers, contributing nothing and acting
in a way which inhibits and frustrates the natural energy and
creative talent of the workers.
Marie:
Years ago we had a buxom neighbor woman who would stop by once
in a while. She would have one or two fingers of bourbon, then
she would sit on the arm of our couch and pick a tune or two
on my guitar. She said she particularly liked the guitar as an
instrument because its shape gave her a built in boob rest.
Routine:
When we are doing routine things which we do over and over again,
we tend to not notice differences and just do what we have always
done. We tend to not listen but instead record what we expected
to hear. In medicine, this can be very serious. It can result
in catastrophic events, like amputating the leg of the wrong
person, amputating the wrong leg of the correct person or giving
incorrect medication. It can, and has, caused death.
Recently on a pre-op examination, I told a medical person,
I had an EKG six months ago which was two doctor visits ago,
she only heard the two and recorded that I had an EKG 2 weeks
ago. My doctor caught it and scolded my for misinforming the
R. N. I was not able to convince him, I had not fibbed.
There is a recent development in the health care field which
can only make this situation worse. This is the practice of scheduling
medical personnel, especially nurses, to regularly work 12 hour
shifts. The idea is to attract nurses by offering them a 36 hour,
full pay, three day work week. It may be efficient from the standpoint
of cost and scheduling but it's just too dangerous for the patients.
Do we really want a person who has been working for eleven hours
to be calculating medication dosages? Not on me, thank you!
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