Not Singing in the Rain

It's been a bad week.

Thursday was a very bad day, owing to the layoff situation. Friday was far too exciting (in a bad way). Saturday was tiring. And Sunday is nerve-wracking.

I already wrote about Thursday. 'Nuff said.

But let's talk about Friday.

Friday was a good day to spend with the family. I only went into work for a couple hours (most of the workday hours were spent remotely) for meetings which added absolutely nothing to my knowledge-base. Friday evening was our monthly scheduled Game Night.

It was a dark and stormy night, and we arrived at the place (the house of the friends who host the Game Night) right after the rain started. We didn't get too wet, though.

Mostly, Game Night is a way for Adam to get in some quality game time. I'm not into games at all (probably lost too many of them as a kid), and most of the other kids are blasé about the whole thing; but there's a group at the office who get together once a month to play some serious board games, and Adam fits right in. So we all go as a family to support his gaming habit!

On this particular night, the games went well, but right around ten o'clock, Dad and the girls were getting tired, so we decided to leave the boys -- who were right in the middle of a hot game -- and take the girls home, and Dad would stay with them.

So Cheryl and the girls and I got in the van and drove home. In the rain.

We only got a few miles down the road.

When suddenly ...

The power steering stopped working.

And the water temperature shot up.

We pulled over when the temperature 'idiot' light went on. No fools are we! Not sure what to do, since it had come on so suddenly with no big noise to warn of something broken, we sat by the side of the road (in the rain) trying to figure out what to do.

Finally we just started up the car again and drove for a few additional minutes to see what would happen. When the water temperature started to rise again, Cheryl (who was driving) found a well-lit parking lot and stopped, and I got out to look at the engine - as if I could figure out what was going on!

(Stop laughing. Miracles do happen, y'know...)

Took me a few seconds to spot the problem, but when I did, I couldn't believe it. The belt had fallen off.

The car is nearly ten years old, with well over a hundred thousand miles on it. This kind of thing has never happened before. And the only thing that could've caused this problem was that we had the car in for service about a month ago and they replaced the belt because the old one had started to get noisy.

Looking at the pulleys and tensioner and everything else associated with the belt, I couldn't figure out how the belt stayed on. The tensioner did not have a rim around it; in fact, it was curved inward, as if it didn't care whether the belt stayed on or not. This fact probably helped when I put the belt back on, because I basically pulled it up and over the edge of the tensioner pulley until it popped back on.

With the belt back on, we drove very carefully and cautiously back home. And then Cheryl (the Researcher) got onto the web and started searching.

And found a treasure trove of information about the serpentine belts on Dodge Caravan / Plymouth Voyager minivans. All bad.

First, two of the pulleys are not rimmed, which means that any slight misalignment of the belt/pulley system will cause the belt to slide off one of those pulleys. Second, any amount of moisture (rain, snow, spillage from somewhere in the engine) will cause the belt to slide off one of those pulleys. Third, there is no warning light to indicate that the belt has failed - which means there is no warning to the driver that critical systems (steering, electrical supply, and cooling) have failed.

And even though the car continues to run, the engine will experience permanent damage within a matter of minutes. If the driver survives the sudden loss of steering control.

Apparently it is one of those very bad design errors that the manufacturer refuses to acknowledge or fix. That is, there was never a recall, and you can't go to the dealer and demand that it be repaired. The only serious fix, in fact, is an after-market kit which replaces the smooth pulleys with ribbed/rimmed pulleys so the belt absolutely cannot come off.

It's a serious safety problem. And this problem has been known for several years.

Except by us.

I find it difficult to believe that a flaw of this nature with a standard American car - doesn't every family own a minivan?? - hasn't become common knowledge. We've owned this car for nearly ten years, and this is the first time we've heard of it.

And we've driven this car for ten years with no problem, until a recent belt change coupled with a recent rainstorm combined to form the perfect set of events to cause the failure.

Is it really a problem with the pulley design? Or is it simply a badly-manufactured belt?

We don't know. We ordered the kit, and I'm going to put it on. I don't trust the pulley design. And I don't want to go through the same experience all those other people on the web forums did, putting the belt back on in the middle of a rainstorm (or merely when the roads are wet).

I want a car that's safe to drive my family around in.

Just Another Day at the Office

I had gotten up early in the morning, as is my custom, to begin my day in the silence of the sleeping house. The cats had been fed, the windows were open to bring in the fresh dew-laden air, one laptop stood on its tray with the morning news while the other was set up downstairs as my remote office.

It was just another ordinary day, working from home.

After the regularly-scheduled telecon to India at nine, I drove up to the real office to check in with a few folks on the team. I took along the laptop, plugging it in at my desk and checking email again out of habit (and a deep-seated fear of being disconnected to the mothership).

There was one bizarre email from my team lead which was so wacky that I took it for a joke.

Rob
I have been let go. My last day will be July 28.


Had to be a joke, right? We hadn't heard any rumors about layoffs or anything. We have six more months to finish up this project! Ridiculous.

Then the phone rang.

It was the line manager.

The layoff was real.

My entire staff of full-time employees had been laid off. All three of them. Leaving me with six contractors. To finish the verification testing for a huge software project by the end of December. Without my lead engineer.

To say I was angry would be an understatement. I was furious. Especially when it was revealed to me the selection methodology which was used to determine eligibility for said layoff.

GE is laying off engineers who want to do engineering. Coders. Developers. Testers. People who like to get their hands dirty by playing with the hardware, people who exercise their creativity by exploring the world of software development. People who are doing the things they trained to do in college.

All those things can be done much cheaper in India or Malaysia or the Philippines, by kids just out of Technical School who are content to sit in cubes and pound out line after line of code, or sit in cramped labs running test after test on hardware which is built by the lowest bidder from a sweatshop factory.

GE is keeping engineers who want to be "leaders" - that is, those who are content to juggle schedules and budgets and "resources" (the euphemism for "people"). They are getting rid of engineers who just want to be engineers in an effort to reduce cost. Streamline. Fulfill the expectations of the stockholders, who just want to see their stocks go up and up and up.

Because GE wants to be a Tier 1 supplier. That is, they want to design complete avionics systems on paper, and subcontract out all the real work. So all the engineers who like to put hardware together and make it work, and all the engineers who like to write code, are going the way of the dodo.

For a short time, the local contractors will be swamped with work as they struggle to catch up to the sudden influx of demand for their services due to the shift of duties from full-time employees to temporaries. Indeed, we are recommending that our laid-off engineers immediately transition to contractors so that we can re-hire them (at twice the pay) to get the work done.

But inevitably all the work will shift out-of-country because American workers cannot compete with the salary disparity. It's nearly a ten-to-one ratio. Even though the level of experience is far less, it always comes down to the money.

Disregarding the fact that those remaining full-time employees in the States will be asked to take on even more work as they attempt to take on their new management duties as well as providing training and expertise and knowledge to their new, inexperienced teams.

It's a stupid plan.

--

One thing in particular infuriated me as I was on the telephone with the line manager. Practically the first words out of her mouth were, "Don't worry. You're safe." As if my only concern was my job, my position. As if I was a shuddering ball of worry terrified that I might get the axe. I almost lost control.

I hate it when people assume self-centeredness on my part.

Jobs come and jobs go, that's just part of the way life works. What's important is that the people doing the work understand the reasons and the seasons for these changes. When they know there is work to be done, and they know when the work is scheduled for completion, they can plan their lives accordingly. When they know that they are valued for their skills, and they have an understanding of the needs of the company, and they are made aware of the direction the company is going, they are empowered to make the choices which are right for them.

When the company comes out of left field and lays them off before projects are completed, without prior warning, for reasons that make no sense - "We need to cut costs, let's roll the dice to figure out which day to do it" - the company has lost sight of its real mission.

The company is not in business merely to make money for shareholders. The company is in business to meet the needs of people - and those needs include not only the products or services they provide, but the need for men and women to have gainful employment, to have a means to provide for their families, to have a future. After all, why do we build airplanes? To move people from place to place. To bring material from place to place, for people. Everything we do is for the benefit and convenience of people.

A business has a place in the community - in the country, in the world - to provide a benefit to people. When the leaders of the company puts their financial interests above that of the people who are the company, they have reneged on their responsibility to fully take into account all the aspects of leadership.

Of course, they will claim that they are making these decisions in order to remain competitive in the global marketplace. Hard to believe that excuse when you see the salaries those bigwigs are pulling down. And the bonuses. If they wanted to remain competitive, they would work hard to make sure that their people were successful, were being provided the tools they need to get their jobs done quickly and efficiently, were convinced that the company was looking out for them as well as the bottom line.

There have been so many stupid decisions lately. It will be difficult to convince anyone that the people at the top have any brains at all.

--

Nearly a hundred people. Eighty-three engineers. Hopefully some of them will be able to find positions with the contracting agencies. But some will not. Some will move on. In this economy, it will not be easy. It will impact the local economy, if the local economy can handle it. There will be fewer people shopping, few people paying taxes, which will roll right through the local economy and result in other companies laying off their people. There will be houses up for sale which will not sell, resulting in foreclosures. There will be disruption of families, neighborhoods, churches, organizations.

We can only wait and see what will happen.

Fun Friday

What a wonderful week it's been! Lots of things to do at work, lots of things to do at home, a birthday, a home-coming, and lots of new toys.

I spent a couple days working from home, not feeling quite up to par, and hoping to catch up on some work without being interrupted by a lot of questions, which is the normal routine at the office. It was nice to be home; I could get seriously addicted to it. Even managed to work with the kids on their summer projects: writing books.

James is working on some illustrations for his children's book. He is sketching the draft versions and then scanning them into the computer, where they get colored and printed. He was having trouble with the first drawing program we used, then we switched to Gimp and he quickly got the hang of it. Like this:


Field of Fireflies

(This one doesn't have anything to do with the story, but he had lots of fun coming up with it!)

Owing to his artistic bent, we decided to order a pen tablet for the PC so he can draw with a stylus type of input device instead of trying to use the mouse of the trackball. Yay! Another new toy! Can't wait til it gets here!

The girls are writing a story together. It's sort of a two-for-one deal; they each write the story from a different perspective, and generate two different books with identical dialogue. And, of course, they'll be illustrating them as well.

Adam has been working on his stories for a long time, but it's been hard to get any of them written down because he's so prolific at generating timelines and characters and situations that he doesn't have time to get into details and characterization and dialogue. We've gotta work on that.

Adam just got back from his East Coast trip, after a week of traipsing to different places like Niagara Falls, Philadelphia, New York City, Washington, D.C., Jamestown, Williamsburg, Gettysburg, and Hershey, PA. Picked him up this morning after the men's breakfast. He looked tired but quite happy. Brought home a bunch of pictures (they're in Flickr now).

Here's a couple teasers.


Adam the Explorer in Jamestown

Adam the Explorer in Jamestown (closeup)

In other news, our DVD player, which is only eight years old, bit the dust and we had to go out and buy another one. This time we got a Sony combination DVD/VCR with a digital tuner which allows copying VHS directly to DVD, so we can transfer our old tapes (like Anne of Green Gables).

More toys! Yay!

(The best part is not the new electronics, but being able to take apart the old electronics and scavenging the parts. Did you know that there are three motors in the DVD player? Cool!)

In summary, to repeat what I said a couple days ago, Happy Birthday, Mom! Your grandchildren can't wait to see you again! (And your son and daughter-in-law can't either!)

Breathe

I haven't taken a breath for four days now.

Not a good, deep breath, anyway. No matter how much I strain, the air won't go in. It stops half-way through, as though reaching some impassable gate, and won't budge any further. I yawn, I stretch, I tip my head way back to expand my chest, but to no avail. My lungs have developed an anti-oxygen defensive system, and the system is working quite well.

It isn't the allergies, though. The doctor (of course I went to the doctor! Do I have "moron" written on my forehead??) gave me an inhaler, but it didn't work. And he checked my heart with an EKG, but it was OK. And a few other little things. Everything looked good.

Except I can't breathe.

So he scheduled me for a full set of tests next week, the whole cardiology checkout routine. Treadmill, etc. (Funny how they couldn't see their way to get me an appointment the next day. Wouldn't you think that the inability to breathe would put a RUSH order on things?) Gonna take a whole day off and spend it at the lab having my systems put through the wringer.

The funniest thing was, after we'd gone through all the initial testing and he couldn't see anything obvious, he turns to me and asks, rather innocently, "Have you been experiencing any stress lately?"

I didn't know what to say. What a bizarre question, in this day and age! I was afraid if I opened my mouth, I'd just start laughing uncontrollably and they'd have to cart me away in a straitjacket.

Nothing but stress. How can anyone get anywhere in this world without some level of stress?

And I've never handled stress well. Do any of you remember the poor walls of the house back in Virginia? The windshield of the old volkswagen? Storming out of the house in a rage? The migraines I used to get right before every Calculus exam?

Stress is not my friend.

The job is stressful, as is every job on the planet - at least the ones for which I'm qualified - but that's just the way things are. And that's what bicycles are for; and walks around the neighborhood; and sympathetic shoulders to lean on; and long drives in the country; and tennis matches; and basketball games. And guitars. Guitars make wonderful stress relievers.

But it doesn't feel like a stress thing. And it doesn't feel like an allergy thing. I mean, there's no itching, no sneezing, no stuffy nose. Just the inability to get a full breath of air. And the constant need to yawn.

Odd, how I didn't notice it until Adam went away on his East coast trip. Maybe I'm allergic to Adam not being here. I'm very protective of my son, perhaps more so right now than for the other children because he is going into High School (or Freshman Campus) and growing up so fast; and he's so wonderful and yet so fragile at the same time, and I'm so afraid for him, what the world can do to him. And I want him to be surrounded by good friends who will be good influences. And I want him to have fun and be successful and always be happy.

And I want him to come home safe and sound.

With lots of pictures.

Breathing.

Bowl Me Over

We had a thoroughly exciting evening with the Junior High kids from church tonight, eating tacos at our house, going out bowling, then coming home for banana splits and a pick-up game of frisbee football in our backyard.

Now I'm exhausted again.

The day started out poorly, with the dentist struggling to fit my new crown in place; the procedure took twice as long as it was scheduled for, owing to the poor fit of the crown. The first time (two weeks ago) was too loose; this time, it was too tight. But at least it can be whittled down with a Dremel when there's too much of it. Had it been too loose again, I'd have to wait another couple of weeks to try again, since they send those things out to be manufactured.

At work it was meetings, meetings, and more meetings, all to discuss how little work we are getting done (from being in too many meetings, of course). And the problem with needing to send more people to handle emergencies in other divisions, which drains our department of the talent we need to get our jobs done. So we are short-handed and overscheduled and under-budgeted, and what's new? Nothing under the sun, nothing at all. Been there, done that, will do that again.

Ran away from work around four-thirty, got home just in time to help out with the dinner buffet prep before the Junior High kids showed up. Stuffed my face with tacos, then went to the bowling alley for a bit of fun. Had Adam and James in my lane, and they both did very well. Cheryl was doing fantastic (she was hanging out with all the girls); our own girls, who aren't really into the bowling thing owing to the lack of five-pound balls, brought along some books to read. Such reading geeks!

Afterward, we all went back to the house and stuffed ourselves with ice cream and chocolate syrup and fresh strawberries and fresh blueberries and bananas and peanuts and cashews; then we had to throw the kids out of the house into the backyard because they were all suffering from severe sugar rush. Deborah and Mary grabbed the frisbees and soccer balls and volleyballs out of the garage, and in a few minutes there was a wild frisbee free-for-all going on, which morphed into a quasi-football game. So the kids ran around and used up all that sugar-based energy, and then the JH leaders stuffed the kids back into the church van and took them home.

Now I can get back to work...

What Time Is It?

I would like to write something clever and insightful tonight, but it's already morning and my brain isn't working and I'm supposed to have all this work done for the office for a big meeting at 8:30 but I'm not going to be there anyway because I have a dentist appointment to replace a temporary crown and things are just going insane at the office because they're still sending people out to California to fix a major problem (at the expense of all the other programs) and there just aren't enough people to handle all the work and I've been sneezing all week long due to an overabundance of spring pollen and now my nose is aching because the medicine hasn't taken effect and I fell asleep earlier this evening (last evening?) watching Season 3 of the Muppet Show with the girls while Cheryl and the boys were at church taking a Greek class and tomorrow (today?) several of the kids have dentist or orthodontist appointments and then we have the Junior High kids coming over for pizza and then we're all going out bowling and I still have to review the kids' writing assignments from this morning (yesterday morning?) because they're doing home/summer school.

That's probably too much information all at once, but I'm too tired to care; so now I'll sign off and let you read this and then shake your head(s) in disbelief that anyone could bother putting this up out in a public forum.

GeekNite

There's something uniquely geeky about our house. Perhaps it is our willingness to just sit around the house and play with our computer systems. Certainly it is one of my favorite things to do!

Thursday night was one of those nights where I just had to sit and geek out. It had been a long, rough day at work and there was absolutely no way I was going to do any more of it after coming home; my brain was completely fried. Or at least fried enough not to want to deal with email and spreadsheets and document reviews. I wanted to deal with ... hardware.

Specifically, computer hardware. See, there was this little project I'd been wanting to work on for the last few weeks ... or months ... or something. Setting up the Linux server with all the old XP data on it so that it will be available on the local network. And the only way to do it right was to take the hard drive out of the XP machine and connect it as a slave drive on the Linux machine.



The boys, meanwhile, were up to their armpits in DS games.



And lovely Cheryl was websurfing.



{And the girls were, of course, in bed...}

Deep Dark Depression

It's been a weird week, difficult to describe in words, and there aren't any images in the camera that come close to depicting the weirdness of it all, but there is an instinctive need in my psyche that demands some kind of creative outlet, and blogging is one way of getting it out of my system. Sorry about that.

The team was only in India for four real days of work, but those four days were bookended by long flights, so the net effect was an entire week away from home. My sense of time was lost during the third leg of the flight (Paris to Chennai), and my sleep patterns were completely destroyed; I never got more than three hours of sleep a night from Monday all the way through Friday.

Even afterward, this last week, my internal clock was messed up. Sleep would hit me like a brick around two in the afternoon, and it could not be ignored. During a dental appointment one day, having a crown replaced, I fell asleep in the chair and they had to wake me up to continue. My body didn't feel tired; in fact, the wave of exhaustion that hit me was not a gradual slump due to physical labor or lack of sleep, but a sudden, overpowering kind, not unlike that experienced when going under anesthesia.

The effect lasted all week, only lessening a bit this weekend as I allowed myself the luxury of sleeping late on Saturday. But there's still a bit of drowsiness in the afternoons.

It didn't help that there was a sense of "out of the frying pan, into the fire" at work. Tasks are piling up, and going out to India for a week didn't shrink the pile. And there are other problems that have arisen this past week which may require additional trips, shifts in activities, all kinds of changes to the way the business is being run.

It wouldn't be so bad if those changes were going to have positive results, but there is nothing in the way things have been going over the past two years to inspire confidence that the management will make the correct decisions now, so that we won't be in the same mess a year from now that we are in today.

I'm getting tired of working all these extra hours.

"A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work." [Ecclesiastes 2:24]

It's these times when there is no job satisfaction that I wonder if it is time to move on to something else. At this point in the time-line of the family, with kids in school, it would be nice to have a job that was strictly nine-to-five, the kind of job which can be left at the office and not follow me home on the laptop; the kind of job which can be isolated from the home so that the lines don't blur. Over the last few years, the lines are so blurred that I can't tell on from the other, not even on a (supposed) vacation.

I'm perfectly willing to throw away a good career (if it can be called thus) for the sake of my family, if it were possible to find such a job as the one I describe; but I'm not sure if those kinds of jobs exist anymore, the kind where one can support a family, provide financially for food, clothing, shelter, health and education, and still have time to spend with the children before they grow up and move away.

After all, it's not like the company has any loyalty toward me. When it comes down to numbers, they would not hesitate to cut me from the payroll if they thought it would serve their best interest (profit, stock price, etc.). They have little (if any) concern for the stress in my life caused by the mismanagement and bad decisions and rushed schedules and poor quality.

I'm just not sure how much more I want to put up with.