In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood

Ahhhhhh, Now I Get It!!

In 1996, William Weld ran against John Kerry for Kerry's Senate seat. One of Weld's campaign stunts was to jump into the Charles River. Weld challenged Kerry to join him; Kerry didn't. Now I realize why -- Kerry had a hairpiece, and Weld was almost certainly trying to score points off it, since Kerry presumably wouldn't go swimming with a hairpiece.

I didn't get the point then -- but now I realize this is what Weld was trying to do. Weld, of course, lost. He might have had more luck if he had, as it were, seized the issue and pulled it out by the roots!

UPDATE: Oldman askes in the comment what is my fascination with hairpieces, to which I don't have a good answer, other than a long-standing devotion to Froggy Gremlin of Andy's Gang. As I've pointed out earlier, this is a non-political blog, so I am deliberately not drawing conclusions about candidates based on their wearing hairpieces. But have you looked at Norm Abram of This Old House and The New Yankee Workshop lately?

Higher Education and the Tech Bubble

I'm happy to see that, after some weeks, the comment facility I added at Douglas Bass's behest has been earning its keep. There's some worthwhile discussion in comments to the post on "The View of Information Systems Outsourcing from the Ground" below, and it's prompted some thinking on my part. Clearly one message from the commenters is that they're concerned about the loss of jobs, sometimes perhaps their own, in the tech sector, and I'll agree that in my case the collapse of the tech bubble resulted in my decision to take a pension and change careers.

But I've raised the question in the comments on whether tech jobs are disappearing (or possibly in hiding), or whether those same jobs have gone overseas. Several commenters have suggested that entry-level jobs for four-year computer science graduates are among those heading to the Far East. I'm skeptical. The reasons for my skepticism go to my own theory of the tech bubble, which I think is a management issue at least as much as an economic issue (and I don't believe Economics as a discipline has ever been fully comfortable with the bubble phenomenon in any case).

Let's start with a thought experiment. Let's imagine a graduate of a four-year institution, not necessarily an elite one, but simply one that's done a competent job of inculcating the principles, as we might envision them, of a liberal education in this graduate. Whatever her major, I would expect her to have analytical skills -- ability to break a problem down into smaller elements and see how those elements function and interact. I would expect her to have expository skills, the ability to communicate clearly the results of her analytic work.

I would expect her to have leadership and interpersonal skills, the ability to divine productive and unproductive ways to get her point across, depending on the personalities and backgrounds of her peers and managers. I would expect her to understand the value of mathematical "elegance", simplicity in solutions, as well as the philosophical principle of Occam's Razor, the idea that entities should not be multiplied without necessity.

Let's say she majored in Computer Science. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that she's working with the usual bunch of Pakistani and Chinese and Filipino immigrants in a Level 1 help desk at either a software vendor or a large corporation that supports in-house applications. Let's say that, with the intellectual curiosity that helped lead to her admission and academic success at Podunk U., she's taking her spare moments and looking at the kinds of calls she's getting all day on Level 1 support.

One thing that keeps bothering her is that the error messages her users are calling in about aren't clear. She takes her experience fielding the help calls and leading the users through their problem, and she comes up with suggested rewordings of the error messages. She tests them on her users with each new call -- "You don't know what to do when you get a Buffer Overflow at Address 9A990B23 message? -- try this. When you see that message, close the window at the X in the upper right hand corner, and then click on the icon to open the window again. That will fix it. Right? Great!" And so forth. So based on weeks of figuring this out, she decides she can save everyone, both users and Level 1 staff, lots of time, frustration, and phone bills by trying her recommended new application error messages.

I'm sure you'll agree with me that this new grad will rise quickly in the organization. Her superiors will slap their foreheads, asking themselves, "why did we go looking for people with H1 visas, when we could have sent a recruiter over to the Computer Science department at Podunk and gotten a far superior product!" The new grad will, of course, quickly be promoted, first to section supervisor at Level 1, but management will recognize that her talents would be better used if they create a new, better paying position for her looking at the whole question of how they can make their applications more understandable and user-friendly.

What? You're making odd faces at me as I explain how this earnest young graduate makes her way in the corporate meritocracy? You're telling me I've probably never been inside a real corporation in my life? You're telling me to go back to kindergarten or Sunday school or whatever odd place gave me such weird fantasies? Get real! Go back to talking about Kerry's Botox, you've got a better chance of building traffic for your silly blog!!

Hum -- there's a range of things that would really happen. First, if the graduate were smart, he'd realize that the support reps to his left and to his right haven't done any such thing as try to make their work simpler or improve the process. They aren't stupid, either. They know they're at the bottom of the IS-IT food chain, and the last thing they need is making enemies in the development staff telling them their error messages suck. The last thing their supervisors need is some nitwit coming to them telling them development's error messages suck. Of course everyone's life would be easier if development's error messages were clear and informative. That's not what anyone at Level 1 is paid for. If everything were easy, there'd be no need for Level 1.

So if the idealistic, well-educated Computer Science grad didn't realize pretty quickly the need to put a sock in it, he'd be edged out pretty quickly on some pretext. If he were inventive, wound up eating lunch with someone in development, and used his people skills to get the new message texts reviewed by their management without going through Level 1's managers, he'd be in even more trouble. I think readers with experience in the field can think of other unhappy outcomes without much more help from me. Based on my own 25 years in the field, I don't see a way for that person to win in the real world.

In fact, let's take a real-world example. I had occasion to visit a former employer's mainframe data center about a year ago. I'd left that company in the mid-90s and was pretty familiar with their IS operation. Their billing was their biggest application, and it was mainframe-based, parts of it 20 years old at the time, 30 years old now. In the early 90s it wasn't unusual for them to have "production problems", errors and bugs causing many hours delay in a night's processing, such that by the start of daily public business, the accounts wouldn't be updated. The clerks fielding the public calls over their accounts wouldn't have the current info, a bad thing all around.

Well. They've got dozens of programmers and operations analysts, all very well-paid, and for the purposes of discussion, let's grant that they all have four-year degrees (though it isn't true). With all these people available to solve these problems -- this is a stable, mature system; it's been around for 20 or 30 years and isn't going away soon -- wouldn't you expect this large, capable staff to look at these damaging production problems one by one, use their analytical, expository, and people skills, and slowly work on this system until production problems are essentially gone?

Of course not. They'd all lose their jobs in the next downsizing, don't be stupid. I'm visiting the data center, and I'm told the manager I'm supposed to meet with can't make it -- he's had production problems all morning. Same story in 2003 as 1993. He does, of course, still have his job. My own analytical skills, breaking the problem down into smaller parts and looking how they function and interact, suggest a connection here.

The reasons for the tech bubble, I think, are more complex than this, but this is a big part of it -- the current IS culture has no incentive to fix problems. It's the old story of the CIO who decides Smith is a good programmer, because he's always at the data center fixing problems. The whole IS department plays this game, but on a bigger scale. Non-IS management, looking at this IS conundrum, wants to see a cost problem, and thinks that all these analysts and so forth cost X in California, X minus Y in India, which is in fact true: drones who don't solve the problems are still cheaper overseas, though you'll be getting nothing useful either way.

The problem is not a cost problem, it's a management problem. IS isn't held accountable for results that help the business. Nobody's rewarded for seeing the IS conundrum in a different light, and in fact anyone who does is profoundly threatening to the established order. A solution to the IS conundrum that, for instance, added to product or application reliability and user-friendliness would in fact cause some Level 1 jobs to disappear, not to go overseas. A solution to the "production problems" in a 20 or 30 year old legacy mainframe system would in fact cause a certain number of operations analyst and maintenance programmer jobs to disappear.

This is no different, as I see it, from the analysis that says manufacturing jobs aren't leaving the US, they're declining worldwide. If manufacturing becomes more efficient and more automated, this is what you'd expect. The same ought to be happening to IS jobs. What's happening is they're disappearing, not due to efficiency, but because general corporate management, as I see it, is currently not seeing enough benefit to IS spending, simply because they're looking at inefficient, unproductive boondoggles that do nothing but add to costs.

So I'll grant everything the commenters have said below: all the operations analysts, all the maintenance programmers, all the Level 1 support reps -- heck, I'll give 'em all Computer Science degrees from MIT. Whatever they've got, it's not serving them well. But the biggest problem is that somebody's missing the point of a four-year degree. It shouldn't entitle anyone to anything, but it ought to provide useful skills that we're not seeing now in the workplace. Corporate management may be at fault for not seeing the potential of a real education, but as I've said many times before, the faculties and administrators that eviscerate and devalue the basic tools are also very much to blame.

John Bruce Still Can't Get Results!

The Weekly Standard has picked up on John Kerry's alleged Botox use (scroll down to my discussion of this below), but, unbelievably, despite the "Bad Hair Day" title, they don't seem to have grasped the higher-level issue of the hairpiece.

And where, oh where, is Mark Steyn?

The View of Information Systems Outsourcing from the Ground

Daniel Drezner continues a discussion of outsourcing programming jobs from a perspective that, it seems to me, doesn't understand the nature of these jobs. I've worked extensively in areas that have been in- and out-sourced for many years. Let me add some personal experience.

First, help desk or "support" functions. I think when these functions are mentioned, they are what the industry would call "Level 1" help desk functions. These are the call centers that get the first problem calls from customers or employees, and a significant number of these calls are the "did you check to see if your computer is plugged in?" variety. Whether a Level 1 call center is in Bangalore or Buffalo, it is going to be staffed with low-level, low-pay employees who will use scripted responses to problem reports (see above). In fact, such call centers are often staffed, in the US, with recent immigrants, so that no matter where you call, you're quite likely to have problems understanding a foreign accent.

If a problem is beyond the ability of Level 1 to handle -- in other words, caller seems to be an adult, computer is plugged in, and problem doesn't appear in the script or the problem data base -- Level 1 refers it to Level 2. These are people with greater expertise, who are typically either just down the hall from the development staff, or may be members of the development staff themselves. This function is higher-paid and is much less likely to be outsourced. The biggest issue from the customer's perspective is how well-managed the Level 1 call queue is, and how well the Level 1 people can tell when to refer a call to Level 2. Ideally, time zone issues aside, it should be no more difficult to locate a call center offshore, provided the managers can make sure calls at any level of difficulty are immediately referred to Level 2 -- again, likely still in the US.

Outsourcing a Level 1 call center is simply not a threat to professional-level US programming staff, as I see it. There may be some impact on those, often immigrants, seeking entry-level jobs in the industry.

Low-level programming staff -- maintenance programmers on mature systems, for instance -- has, as far as I can see, been heavily dominated by immigrants to the US for many years. Companies often like to see applicants who have gotten some years of experience with common US programming languages or applications in places like the Philippines or Taiwan, then come to the US as a next career step. Again, sending these jobs back to the Far East will probably have the greatest impact on those who might instead intend to immigrate to the US to take these jobs. It won't impact higher-level US programmers -- for instance, those who design or develop new products.

But the experience I've discussed earlier in dealing with time zones and the different expectations of different cultures will still be an obstacle to successful outsourcing. I don't see this as a serious problem for the industry -- I think there are much bigger problems to overcome.

UPDATE: "jh" in the comments says, "Where do the higher-level programmers come from, if the lower-level jobs go away? Very few programmers are at that level on completion of their undergrad CS degree." Again, I'm not sure if we're talking about the real IS environment here. I simply haven't met more than a handful of Level 1 tech support reps with a four-year degree in any subject. Much the same applies to the low-level maintenance programmers whose jobs are most vulnerable to outsourcing. My observation has been that these workers are immigrants -- in part, I think, because US workers apparently aren't interested in such jobs at the low pay such workers get even over here.

Gaming the Admissions System, Again

Via SCSUScholars, I found a piece on Highered Intelligence citing a study that shows it pays off to pester university admissions offices with "phone calls, emails, letters, [and] visits" showing your "interest" in the institution. The piece goes on to discuss the related issues of hyper-emphasis on extracurricular activities and other admissions criteria that likely don't predict a student's ability to benefit from the institution, but seem to have settled in as conventional-wisdom qualifications.

It reminds me of the Blair Hornstine case once again, which I've discussed at greater length below (scroll down to "Why do Universities Covet?"). While the problems Michael Lopez points out are real, I don't think they're new. Middle-class conventional wisdom, of the most irritating sort, has always been to follow-up and pester college admissions staff, prospective employers, and the like, it seems to me. This is the essence of the self-help mentality that operates at a certain level of the culture: the Lord helps those who help themselves (not, it's been pointed out, something you'll actually read in the Bible). Books on how to get a job will often tell you to call the interviewer back, send him a note, or whatever. "Why?" an older co-worker once mused to me, "I mean, you're not dating the guy."

It comes around to a basic assumption that the system can be gamed. Whatever your qualifications for a job or college admission, if you wear the right clothes, have the right haircut, put on the right face, look like you have the right attitude, say the right things, and follow up (a shorthand way of saying kiss the right rear end, I suspect), you'll get whatever it is you're wishing for, whether you should actually beware of it or not. I agree with Michael Lopez: he's mostly concerned that all the gaming is wasting the admissions staff's time, but I think life is simply too short for anyone to be this way.

Yet More on Candidates, Hairpieces, Botox, and Epistemology

I'm happy to say it's not just marginal nut cases who are noticing that candidates seem to be going farther out of their way than usual to enhance Nature. Drudge has run some "before" and "after" shots of Kerry, comparing late autumn to now. My guess is a chemical peel and some Botox. He seems less gaunt and less wrinkled (but on careful study, I believe it's the same hairpiece, though his hairdo has been slightly restyled). Still nothing on this from Mark Steyn, a great disappointment.

UPDATE: Via Drudge, The Daily News cites two plastic surgeons who confirm my suspicion of Botox. However, I suspect he's also had a chin tuck at some earlier time, since his countenance in this area is somewhat craggier than it ought to be.

Evil

Prof. Burke at Easily Distracted has a post on evil that, to my way of thinking, dovetails with the issues Karen Locke is raising in the comments here on the organizationally dependent con artists and small-time psychopaths she (and I and many others) run into at work. As I've already said, Joseph Conrad is underestimated as a thinker and describer of the work environment, and he certainly has had a thing or two to say about evil. Heart of Darkness is available on line, and well worth regular re-reading. And as I've said below, we tend to think of the evil in Heart of Darkness as something aberrant, distant, and exotic, something Kurtz is drawn into because he's far away from civilization, but the book doesn't really make these points.

For instance, Marlow learns much about Kurtz by overhearing a conversation on office politics. A station manager and his nephew are trying to understand why Kurtz suddenly decided to return to the interior from their station. “As to me,” says Marlow, “I seemed to see Kurtz for the first time. . . . I did not know the motive. Perhaps he was just simply a fine fellow who stuck to his work for its own sake.” This wasn’t the case, though, with the station manager and his nephew:

’That’s what I say, nobody here, you understand, here, can endanger your position. And why? You stand the climate -- you outlast them all. The danger is in Europe, but there before I left I took care to -- . . . . ‘ ‘You have been well since you came out this time?’ he asked. The other gave a start. ‘Who? I? Oh! Like a charm -- like a charm. But the rest -- oh, my goodness! All sick. They die so quick, too, that I haven’t the time to send them out of the country -- it’s incredible!’ ‘H’m, just so,’ grunted the uncle. ‘Ah! my boy, trust to this -- I say, trust to this.’ I saw him extend his short flipper of an arm for a gesture that took in the forest, the creek, the mud, the river -- seemed to beckon with a dishonouring flourish before the sunlit face of the land a treacherous appeal to the lurking death, to the hidden evil, to the profound darkness of its heart.

The passage is remarkable for how quickly it moves from petty corruption -- just what the uncle did before he left is up to our imagination, but the reference to a nephew must certainly imply nepotism -- to death, evil, and profound darkness. For those who are organization people, it seems to say, it’s enough to trust to “this”.

And “this”, Conrad’s Marlow frequently suggests, is not something off in some mythic or otherwise exotic place. As he tells his prosperous but middle-class London listeners, “The inner truth is hidden -- luckily, luckily. But I felt it all the same; I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at my monkey tricks, just as it watches you fellows performing on your respective tight-ropes for -- what is it? -- half a crown a tumble --” The blank space on the map after which the young Marlow has a hankering, the mighty river resembling an immense snake, “this”, are also bound up in some way with middle-class economic activity. “What saves us is efficiency,” he says at the start of the story.

While Conrad doesn’t seem to have held systematic religious beliefs, it’s hard when reading Heart of Darkness to avoid thinking about C.S.Lewis’s image of Reason making perforations in Nature in his essay “Miracles”. Maps, companies for trade, efficiency, and employment contracts are not the stuff of myth. They are tools of middle-class work, a type of Reason perforating Nature. A source of Marlow’s puzzlement over Kurtz is what kind of work he did: “. . . to this day I am unable to say what was Kurtz’s profession, whether he had any. . . . I had taken him for a painter who wrote for the papers, or else for a journalist who could paint. . .”. A journalist later explains to Marlow that Kurtz would have been best fitted to be the “leader of an extreme party,” a most remarkable observation, since several dilettante leaders of “extreme parties” with talents in painting and journalism were in their formative years as Conrad wrote.

In fact, Conrad is using explicitly middle-class experiences, and indeed certain middle-class values, as a perspective from which to examine an inherent evil in Nature. This shouldn’t be surprising, since we’re frequently told that the novel began as an art form to reflect the experience of the rising middle class. The ideal of the leisured character, found in writers like Forster and Henry James, is puzzling in that the Anglo-American novel rose along with the middle class and the Protestant ethic, often thought to be synonymous with the work ethic.

So I think Karen Locke is completely correct in seeing something close to genuine evil in the creepy people who often make the workplace difficult, and I also agree with Prof. Burke when he sees the potential for evil as something near at hand. In fact, the day-to-day social environment, if we're not careful, and we mostly aren't, can serve as a sort of rose trellis on which evil can grow and flourish. This is how I think an essentially fraudulent graduate-school environment in the humanities (and apparently not just there) can continue, for instance. I think it's part of how the high-tech bubble took place, with high-priced consultants doing work that was clearly a sham.

UPDATE: I've had an e-mail from Prof. Burke that says, in part, "Not sure I go along at the very end with grad school mismanagement being evil :)--I would also say that the kinds of things I think qualify as evil are actually pretty exceptional or unusual." I did note the "exceptional or unusual" part in Prof. Burke's piece. One thing I think he may be doing is mixing rhetorical excess -- "I think it's evil that there are so many calories in a Big Mac," for instance -- with the philosophical recognition that there are some ordinary things in life that can't be fixed. The Judeo-Christian tradition accepts, for instance, that due to the Fall, metaphorically speaking, women will have pain in childbirth, and people will need to work for a living. This is attributed to the existence of evil in the world.

If we simply say evil is exceptional or unusual -- it's just the Holocaust, or it's the problem of child prostitution (which Prof. Burke appears to accept as "evil"), or it's the 9/11 attacks (I sense that Prof. Burke may be wavering here -- if not here, somewhere not far below this level) -- then we're saying, it seems to me, that everything else in life is sort of a negotiable benefit, or something that can simply be fixed like a flat tire. My alcoholic, abusive spouse? It's a matter of the right family law attorney, and perhaps a touch-up in therapy, nothing really bad there. The drug dealer on the corner? A call to your City Councilman should take care of it. (Councilman on the take from the drug dealers? Call him again!) And so forth.

There may be a certain kind of optimistic complacency that sees things this way, but I don't think it's a philosophically sophisticated position. There's a whole range of problems just above the level of rush-hour traffic jams or the calories in a Big Mac that eventually prove intractable, it seems to me. Leaving aside rhetorical excess, I think it's certainly acceptable to say that, if corporations lay off thousands of people, but the executives whose miscalculations or malfeasance result in the layoffs keep their jobs and get bonuses, this is in fact a type of evil. It doesn't rise to the level of Heinrich Himmler, but on the other hand, when you think about it, neither does child prostitution, however bad that may be. Even in Prof. Burke's estimation, in other words, there are bad evils and presumably slightly less bad evils. But they're all evil.

So we're really talking about vocabulary. Prof. Burke may wish to use "evil" as a word to describe only the most extreme and seldom-encountered problems. That's fine, but what's his word to describe problems that are less extreme -- anything from plagiarism in freshman comp to corruption at City Hall to the church treasurer with her hand in the till? Wouldn't most people be justified in looking at these as versions of "evil" as well?

Wolves in the Flock

There's some interesting discussion in the comments to my post immediately below on "Headhunter". The question is how much of a problem are people who come to church primarily to take advantage of the parishioners who, we presume, are normally there for more idealistic reasons. In fact, your average churchgoer is likely to be both good-hearted and somewhat naive and trusting, which certainly aren't necessarily bad traits (though it's worth pointing out that in Matthew 10:16 the Founder says, "I am sending you like lambs into a pack of wolves. So be as wise as snakes and as innocent as doves.")

So the problem of wolves among the flock isn't new, and the New Testament metaphor reverses the proportion -- we're lambs sent into the pack. There are other problems, too. Some of what I've heard about Ted Bundy's last days before his execution suggests that he may have repented his sins, and if he did, by good, solid mainstream Christian doctrine, he's entitled to a place in the buffet line at the heavenly banquet along with the saints and the angels.

Also, by tradition and in some cases canon law, I believe, Christian churches can't turn anyone away. But there's clearly a dividing line. Should a repentant serial killer turn up at a church, it would be an uncomfortable situation. I believe a Catholic priest hearing the confession would offer him absolution conditional on him turning himself in to authorities. I assume a Protestant pastor would, or should, have reservations on how fully such a person would be allowed into the community. It's one thing to be repentant, but another to entice 15-year-olds out of choir practice into the back seat of your car. And you can't be sure, even if such a person has repented of his past sins, that he won't be a backslider.

This is the issue all denominations have been facing with pedophiles who work their way into positions where, in a church, they get access to children and adolescents. I note that the Episcopal Church has been running programs where church workers are being trained in what to look out for and situations to avoid. And the Episcopal Church has conducted extensive background checks on clergy postulants for many years. LSD guru Alan Watts started as an Episcopal priest, but apparently due to his fondness for parishioners' wives was defrocked long before he discovered drugs. So irrespective of the theology connected with repentance, all churches have a duty of care to their congregations to keep members from being exploited.

Actually, the church I joined after I left St. ______ had a bigger problem with con artists and small-time psychopaths than St. _____ did. (There was the woman I dated at St. ______ who turned out to be married, but then at the next place there was an alcoholic psychotherapist who was, for a time, determined to make me her third husband -- I never quite understood why her second husband died prematurely.) The clergy there seemed aware of it, and I think they were always trying to balance the need to welcome sinners against the need to protect the congregation. I know I did some volunteer work there where I was in a position to know some of the wolves, and I had a fairly intense meeting with the clergy one night where they asked me exactly what I thought of some of them. The result was, I think with great reluctance, at least one was asked not to come back to church there.

I've discussed below in the post entitled "Narcissists!" the fact that various behavioral syndromes that might be called "narcissistic" or "psychopathic" are in fact recognizable. Looking back, my "friend" Tyler Thompson displayed a number of such characteristics, such as pathological lying, "inadequate" behavior such as inability to keep a job and apparently wrecking his company car in some bizarre fashion, unreliability, and so forth. If churches have been forced to learn more about how to recognize predatory behavior by pedophiles, it seems to me that more could certainly be done in learning more about predatory behavior from the small-time manipulators, con artists, and psychopaths who do come to church with agendas other than spiritual.

My concern continues to be, as I'd mentioned earlier, that the behavioral sciences could be doing more to make us smarter as a society in these matters.

Headhunter

I knew Tyler Thompson slightly before I saw him in church one day. He had been a computer manager at WampusBank, and I was a member of a professional group that met for lunch once a month, and now and then Tyler showed up for meetings. He seemed like a pretentious kind of guy, just the sort of person who would have a name that made him sound like a one-man law firm. He'd sit in the meetings frowning, as though much weightier issues were on his mind than what we were talking about, and he'd always get up in an impatient huff and leave a little before the meetings broke up. I never had the impression he knew much about the technical issues we discussed.

A while after that I was talking with a headhunter -- not Bob Cosgrove, I'll get to him later -- but just one of the recruiters who was always calling around and touching base with technical people she might be able to place. "Tyler Thompson left WampusBank, by the way," she said. This was mildly interesting, but I think both of us had a sense Tyler wouldn't last there forever. She went on, "It was fine for me. I'd keep sending people over to him, and he could never make up his mind. When they had to come back for a third interview, and Tyler still couldn't decide, I was starting to think I was wasting my time. I'll have to send them back one more time now, but maybe we'll get a decision from whoever takes over."

Maybe a year after that, someone new came to the 10:30 service at St. _____, a man with a wife and small child, and something about his face seemed familiar. I thought he looked a little like a guy I used to know at WampusBank, Tyler Thompson, and a little later I realized it was Tyler Thompson. Tyler in fact looked something like Orson Welles in Jane Eyre, half of his face a Byronic frown, but the cheeks a little too full and the mouth a little too cherubic to bring the whole impression off. His eyes were always darting around as if he wanted to be someplace else.

So knowing Tyler, I pretty much had to go up to him during coffee hour after the service, shake hands, and catch up. We traded pleasantries, and he mentioned that he'd gotten interested in religion, so we chatted a little about our mutual reading of authors like C.S.Lewis. He seemed knowledgeable and sincere, and I started chatting with him during coffee hour each Sunday after that. We'd talk some more about C.S.Lewis, and he'd ask what I'd been doing lately at work, and we got along pretty well.

As I got to know him better, I learned that he at least appeared to be pretty well off. He said he and his family lived in a gated community off Wilshire Boulevard, the same neighborhood with people like Cliff Robertson and Muhammad Ali. Then one Sunday he mentioned a sort of hobby he had -- he knew about various places that held focus groups for ad agencies and movie producers, and he'd go to the focus groups and get paid for it. They were at night, after work -- you didn't have to put in much time on it, but they paid you more than a token amount. Would I be interested?

This was a few years before I got married, and I had evenings free for that kind of thing, so I said sure. He gave me the date and the address and the contact name and said he'd meet me there. It was up on Ventura Boulevard, I came when I was supposed to, they had me answer some questions about the packaging of some software, and they paid me. The only thing that puzzled me was that Tyler, who'd said he'd meet me there, never showed up.

I wound up doing a number of things with Tyler in the succeeding weeks. I've posted below on how several people at St. _____ who had technical jobs had become concerned about the proposed donation of a computer to the church without any kind of planning or analysis for what the church might do with it. Tyler and I were part of that group, but what I kept finding out about Tyler was how unpredictable, and even furtive, he was. He'd want to have a meeting; he'd give some vaguely convincing reason for wanting to have it in a particular parking lot in Westwood; the rest of us would go along with it, but when the time came, he wouldn't show up. So I began to decide Tyler was more than a little bit strange. But, I thought, you really couldn't choose who came to church. Maybe if I could be a friend to him, I might be able to help. I'd pretty much gotten used to the darting eyes and the unexplained little conflicts in his stories, and if he was usually very late or never showed up at all, well, that was Tyler.

Right around then, my monthly lunchtime group held another meeting, and a headhunter turned up to join us. He let us know right away that he wasn't your ordinary body-shop recruiter; he was from one of the big-deal headhunting firms. He did his business on retainer, not on commission like the lady I'd talked to about Tyler leaving WampusBank. He'd been tasked to find a computer manager for Big Valley Federal -- someone top drawer, the best in the business. I got the guy's card in the meeting -- his name was Bob Cosgrove -- and sent him my resume. I might not have been the best in the business, but it never hurt to have people know who you are.

In fact, Cosgrove called me and had me come in for an interview with him. He mostly talked about himself. He'd gotten this particular order from being on a bunch of Boy Scout committees, which he apparently used, like any good suburbanite, to aggrandize his own career interests rather than help the cause of scouting. But slowly he got around to his point: I wouldn't do. Anyone he seriously considered for the position would need to have fifteen references, five peers, five direct reports, and five vendors. They would have to have outstanding achievements in their positions, and they would have to be in those positions longer than my own miserable little work history, as he saw it. And when you got right down to it, I likely wasn't enough of a pretty-boy corporate climber to suit him anyhow. Fine, he had my resume, if any trash collector positions opened up, I suppose he could put me in for one. Actually, considering he likely wasn't going to settle for less than Bill Gates or Jack Welch for any position he filled, I wasn't quite sure why he'd bothered to call me in.

The next Sunday, Tyler asked me in an offhand way during coffee hour if I'd heard of any interesting openings. What the heck, I told him about the thing Cosgrove was recruiting for. I was out of the running anyhow. I didn't have his card, but I told him how to get in touch.

Early that week, out of the blue, I had another call from Cosgrove. He'd talked to Tyler. As far as he was concerned, Tyler was exactly what he'd been looking for. Sorry he couldn't refer me, of course, but so thankful I'd pointed Tyler in his direction. He wanted to know more of what I thought about Tyler. I was a little taken aback. I knew Tyler had left WampusBank under a cloud, and I'd never been quite sure what he'd done since then, especially since he seemed to do so much furtive running around between meetings in parking lots. Not that I would hurt anyone by saying things like that about them. Not, especially, since Tyler was a fellow church member at St. _____. So I tried to say as many mildly favorable things as I could think of. Cosgrove kept telling me to slow down, he was taking notes.

Then I got a call from Tyler. Things, he said, were going swimmingly. He thanked me for all the good things I'd said. He wanted to fax me a copy of the resume he'd given Cosgrove. This was interesting, because I'd never been able to figure out exactly what Tyler did, running around from parking lot to parking lot, and sometimes not showing up. I got the resume, and it was just as much of a puzzle as ever. He said he ran the Los Angeles office for some European accounting firm that also had an office in Oklahoma City. I'd never heard of the accounting firm and kept wondering why they'd do business in Oklahoma and noplace else (except, apparently, in LA parking lots). He also had his position at WampusBank listed, but it was also strange, because on the resume he said he wasn't really working there, but instead was there as a consultant. He had a bunch of other jobs listed for companies I'd never heard of.

Tyler called me again and took me through what he wanted me to say to Cosgrove the next time he called. He also told me he was feeling antsy because Big Valley Federal's head office was right across from WampusBank's data center in Glendale, and he was worried someone at WampusBank might see his car parked at Big Valley Federal and put two and two together. If that happened, he wanted to make sure I had the right story to tell Cosgrove. Well, OK, I supposed. Whatever.

Cosgrove did call back. It turned out, he said, that for one reason or another, he hadn't been able to get in touch with the various employers and references Tyler had given him to check his story out. But Tyler had told him I could serve as independent confirmation for anything Tyler said. This was new, of course. All I knew about Tyler was he'd left WampusBank, and probably was an employee there and not a consultant. The rest was pure conjecture, and I didn't believe much of it, if anything. But Cosgrove was in love with this guy. He was a member of my church, and I didn't see a reason to say something disqualifying to Cosgrove. Cosgrove, after all, was the one who was being paid to check him out, and to any ordinary person, finding no listing for a bunch of former employers on a resume would be a problem. Cosgrove, for some reason, wanted Tyler to be his guy for this opening.

So Cosgrove wanted me to confirm the consulting jobs in Oklahoma City and heaven knows what else. He did it with a bunch of leading questions, "So you know about his work in Oklahoma City? And you can confirm this?" and so forth. I just made noncommittal murmurs and umm-hmms, and "well, that's what's on his resume" type remarks. This was plenty for Cosgrove.

Where, I wondered, were the fifteen references he wanted people to give him for these plum corporate jobs? Five peers, five direct reports, five vendors? Cosgrove kept calling me back. Turns out nobody could locate Stan Miller in Lincoln, Nebraska -- could I confirm what Miller might say about Tyler? At this point I was a little bit put out at Cosgrove. He'd decided right away that I wouldn't do for the important kind of job he was going to fill, but it looked more and more as if he'd fallen for the oldest trick in the book, Tyler's resume full of non-existent jobs out of town, non-existent names and non-existent phone numbers you couldn't reach, and somehow Cosgrove was begging me to tell him this was all true. So was Tyler, of course, though not as blatantly. I just kept saying "whatever", as few times as possible, and I didn't feel bad about it.

Cosgrove, after all, was the guy being paid for his judgment and experience, and if he didn't want to call anyone else to confirm Tyler's info, that was his problem, and it was also going to be Big Valley Federal's problem if they were going to do business based on whether some higher-up had bonded with Cosgrove in Boy Scout committee meetings. And that in fact is what happened -- Tyler landed the job, big salary, corner office, company car, bonus, big expense account, big title.

I didn't see much of Tyler in church after he got the job. From what little he told me, it sounded like he was getting into turf wars and petty squabbles with people, like the data center director, that he needed to have on his side. But I had my own work to take care of, and for a while I didn't hear much.

Then I got a call from Tyler out of the blue. "You heard what happened?" he asked. I hadn't. "They won't replace my company car." Somehow he'd wrecked his company car, or burned it up, or something -- from the story he gave, it was hard to figure out exactly what had happened. But apparently Big Valley Federal had concluded that whatever it was, it was strange enough that they didn't want to trust him with another car. "And my own car is in bad shape," he said. "I'm going to have a hard time getting to work."
I gave him my sympathy, but I got the feeling things for him were heading downhill in a hurry.

A few weeks after that, he called me again. I'd started a new job myself. He asked me how things were going. "Do you need someone to come in as a consultant?" he asked. "You're new there -- you can probably tell them you want to shake things up, and you can hire some consultants." Right. And I could get into turf wars with people I needed to have on my side, too. He didn't quite say so, but it sounded like he needed a new job again. I got him off the phone as quickly as I could. I had a very, very strong feeling that once around with him was going to be plenty.

In fact, I'd begun to think it was time to look for alternatives to St. ______. I'd started dating a woman there who turned out to be married -- luckily before I'd gotten too involved. Somehow some wolves had started to mingle with the flock, it seemed, and one of the biggest, fattest sheep they'd singled out seemed to be me. There wasn't much sense saying good-bye or explaining to anyone, I started going to the next-nearest church, transferred my membership, and transferred my pledge.

I never saw Tyler again. I think he might have eventually gotten himself onto the vestry at St. _____. I would imagine that he kept himself afloat doing strange little deals in parking lots all over town. Tyler, in fact, was one reason I started reading a lot of true crime books, because all the perps in those books kept reminding me of him, the wildly shifting eyes, the constant restlessness, the unfathomable deals done in parking lots, the sometimes he'll show up, sometimes he won't, the ultimate unexplainability. And the people, like Bob Cosgrove, for whom the alarm bells never rang.

Not long afterward I was down at LAX and saw an ad for one of those self-help seminars they run in hotel ballrooms. Bob Cosgrove, according to the flyer a high-powered headhunter until just recently at one of the big search firms, was giving a seminar on how to write the resume that will get you your next job. No doubt. Then a while later I heard through the grapevine that Big Valley Federal had made the decision to hire Tyler Thompson because of the strong recommendation of a real expert in his field, John Bruce. The source suggested I not try applying for anything there anytime soon. It didn't matter anyhow -- WampusBank and Big Valley Federal are both history now, swallowed up by even bigger banks.

Playing With the Statistical Toys

I've switched to one of the Site Meter icon options that displays a running total of the unique visitors to the site (see it near the bottom of the right hand column). My traffic for the past week has fluctuated from about 50 to 75 unique visitors on weekdays, somewhat less on weekends. You should see this reflected in the total. For comparison, Glenn Reynolds gets about 22 million unique visitors per year; Daniel Drezner just celebrated his millionth visitor (both use Site Meter, so this is an apples-to-apples comparison, but considering the orders of magnitude, apples-to-artichokes would come out the same).

Inspired by Douglas, I've also put up the referrals monitor, though for whatever reason, this isn't matching the referrals I see in Site Meter. (I'd be interested to hear your insights into this thing, Douglas, but if I see the big variations I see after a couple of days, out it goes again). At the moment, only about a third of this site's traffic comes from referrals (at least based on the count I made yesterday). Two thirds are coming from bookmarks or typing the URL into the address bar. I'm certainly happy that such a proportion is repeat visitors who've found a site they want to return to, but I also need to increase my traffic and am still pondering ways to do this.

While this is only partly an educational blog, as of yesterday, 18% of my visitors were from ".edu" domains. I've been very pleased to notice that of those, many visits are from Princeton, Yale, MIT, Cal Tech, Berkeley, Penn, Michigan, Duke, Purdue, and other very well-regarded institutions. Of my own alma maters, I've had no visits from Dartmouth, one from USC. I suspect neither is especially anxious to acknowledge maternity in any case.

UPDATE: The referrals monitor is out. I wasn't able to get a good sense of what referrers it was tracking, or how it was counting them. For instance, I posted on two comments on Drezner's site and got a dozen or so hits referred by Drezner's comments on Site Meter. The referrals monitor never picked them up. I don't have time for this. I'm kinda skeptical of the numbers I'm seeing on your site, too, Douglas.

More on Candidates and Hairpieces

I posted on the possibility of John Edwards wearing a hairpiece a few days ago, but I felt guilty about it because this is a non-political blog (and it is in fact a focus I'm deliberate about maintaining; I don't want to spread my effort into doing what someone like Daniel Drezner does much better). On the other hand, I realized this morning that issues like hairpieces and plastic surgery are good, solid epistemological questions -- what can we know for sure in life? -- that fit squarely with this blog's mission.

And in fact I've had several hits from Google searches in the last few days on strings like "John Edwards" hairpiece that lead me to believe that some portion of the world feels I may be an authority on this matter, and is beating a path to my door in search of a resolution on this key question.

Not only that, I didn't mention this in my earlier post, but a search on "John Kerry" hairpiece brings up far more hits than one on Edwards, such that the issue of whether Senator Kerry's bouffant locks are a put-on, so to speak, appears to be far more open.

The Weekly Standard has an article, however, pointing out that John Edwards recently turned 50. I make no comment other than to say that I sure didn't look like that when I was 50, and most of my friends didn't, either. A dye job by itself won't distract from the wattles and crowsfeet many of us begin to develop in middle age. For that matter, take a good look at what Fred Astaire or Cary Grant looked like, with the most flattering possible lighting and makeup, in films like Royal Wedding or To Catch a Thief when they were, I think, somewhere around 50 (someone will no doubt correct me on ages here).

My wife, an attorney (though not a trial attorney, as Edwards was), points out that boyish good looks would have been among the key talents he would have needed to establish rapport with juries, and maintaining those looks would have been important to him. She suspects that there may be a Picture of Dorian Gray someplace in the attic.

More, I'm sure, to come!

UPDATE: I should pat myself on the back here: double-checking my off-the-top-of-my-head estimates on Grant and Astaire, Grant, born in 1904, was 51 when he made To Catch a Thief (1955). I didn't find a definite birth date for Astaire, but a biography mentions he was "in his fifties" when he made Funny Face (1953), while I believe Royal Wedding was a 1952 film. So go rent those videos, or pull them out of your collection, and reflect on what real, handsome men look like at 50.

UPDATE: Fellow blogger Douglas points out in a comment below that wearing a hairpiece could be relevant to the candidates' qualifications. My answer, in the context of my intent for this blog, is e-mail Reynolds! E-mail Drezner! E-mail Mark Steyn, who is simply out to lunch on this issue!! But for me this is a purely epistemological problem, the question of how we know what we know. I do reflect that in the past, being bald was not a disadvantage to Ike, whose smile, in the accounts of his contemporaries, overcame everything.

Promising Blog Stops Blogging

I stopped by LitSkunk and found an announcement, as of yesterday, that he'd perhaps bitten off more than he could chew with the project and would stop blogging. That was a good darn name, and if I didn't like my own blog's name so much, I'd ask him if I could buy it from him or something! Anyhow, I'm sorry to take it off my short list of links to blogs I truly think are worthwhile.

For that matter, I'm sorry to see that Invisible Adjunct seems to be reconsidering her own blogging, though I would certainly think that nobody should force him or herself to blog if it starts to get old. I was getting a fair amount of traffic from Invisible Adjunct, and that traffic is visibly decreasing, something I need to find a way to replace -- for now, I'm committed to taking this blog seriously, and as a result traffic is one of the items of feedback I have to consider!

Actually, some of the advice I've seen for new bloggers is to post often in the comments of like-minded sites in hopes that visitors will either go to your site from the comments, or the blogger will see the merit in your site and link to it. I'm finding a fairly small number of sites that I think are enough like mine that posting in comments would foster traffic, and I'm sorry to see blogs in the small number that I've identified and enjoy leaving the field.

UPDATE: Per the comment below, LitSkunk couldn't stay away from blogging and now emerges, under a real identify, as The Naive Humanist. I've added a link.

Problems Opening Comments

Two of the regular visitors here have e-mailed me saying they've had problems opening the comments in order to post one. I should probably note that Blogger itself doesn't have a comment facility, and like other Blogger users with comments, I'm using the Haloscan freeware. This is in fact just a couple of lines of code that sit in the Blogger template for my blog. While one visitor asked if it meant I had comments disabled (and I once, in my pre-blogging but avid commenting days, thought this of another blog), the answer is no, I haven't; so far, like other bloggers, I'm finding that comments enhance the site, so I don't currently intend to remove them. If you can't post a comment, this is a bug, not a feature. However, the problems appear to be based in the interactions of the freeware, web browsers, and operating systems, so I don't have an easy solution.

But if you wish to post a comment here and can't open the comments, let me know about the problem and send me an e-mail and it will be my policy to post the text of the e-mail, attributed to you by name unless you request otherwise, in an UPDATE to the post on which you're commenting. I will copy the e-mail text as you send it (observing any exceptions you ask me not to copy), and I will not change spelling, grammar, or style. I will edit line breaks for readability on the blog. The only right I reserve will be to edit profanity and edit for length (Haloscan posts have, I think, a 2000 character limit). My first comment done this way will be in an UPDATE to my post on The Value of a College Education below.

If I get an e-mail that isn't meant specifically as a comment (in other words, you don't specifically tell me you're sending it to me because you can't open the comments), I'll continue to reserve the right to post it in part, in summary, or not at all at my own discretion. But if you tell me you intend it as a comment, I'll reproduce all of it unless you tell me otherwise.

I value the feedback I get this way and look forward to your opinions.

Flyover Country -- III

The people at the Amarillo nuclear plant did, finally, put their minds to the question of where I could sit and what work I could conceivably do, since it would be weeks or months before a security clearance would come through, and until then I couldn't have computer access. There was, in fact, an administration building outside the secure area that happened to house the payroll and travel department, and they had a couple of empty cubes. So I got to sit in a real chair, at a real desk, with a phone, and I could go to the john when I pleased, and I didn't need to be escorted or signed in and out. Becky's attitude was that this was far more than I deserved, and it was only due to my violent outburst that they had been put out this way. My boss was just happy to have the billing continue.

It had been specified in the original contract (the one Becky took seriously) that I had to meet with Becky and her colleagues each day and receive a specific daily assignment. At the time I was too new to on-site consulting to recognize what a bad idea this was. I don't know if my boss recognized the problem, but she was just interested in the billing in any case. You don't bring someone on site at the kind of billing rate a consultant gets and tell them you're going to give them a new project each day. It's the consultant's job to figure out what needs to be done, recommend it, and do it. You are presumably hiring them on the basis that they know their work, will do it based on their ability, and don't need the supervision that a typing temp needs.

So every day I had to drive in through the gates to eat lunch with Becky and the people who worked for her, during which I would receive my daily assignment. Becky took security very seriously. I learned over the course of the work that Becky had started out as a security guard at the plant. The guards there are "camo dudes" of the exact sort that are identified by enthusiasts as guarding Area 51. They wear camouflage fatigues, drive white Jeep Cherokees, carry M16s, and aren't regarded by the Area 51 crowd as especially smart. Becky was promoted from camo chick to system programming manager apparently by the influence of her father, who was high up in the organization that ran the plant.

Becky at various times would poke me in the chest if she found my ID badge had turned face-in, ordering me like a drill sergeant to make sure my ID badge always had my face clearly visible. At one point, the group of us walking through the plant on the way to the cafeteria, I asked her what was done in one interesting-looking building. "I can't tell you, and you should already know that," she snarled.

Becky's subordinates were dealing with their plight as best they could. There were two of them. Their system programming qualifications could probably have bought them a ticket out of Amarillo, but for whatever reason, they chose to stay, and that meant having to work for Becky. As best I could make out, they fell back on flyover-country deadpan. "We call her Wonder Woman," they told me at lunch, with Becky there. She beamed. "She's an Aggie," they went on. Becky liked hearing this, too. Every once in a while, during any given lunch, they'd blurt, almost at random, "Wonder Woman. That's what we call her," and a little later, "She's an Aggie." I guess they survived this way.

Wonder Woman, in any case, finally worked out how I could do my work without access to a computer. She got half a dozen yellow legal pads out of the supply cabinet, and a box of pencils. What I would do would be write out by hand, on the legal pads, what should be in the files I needed to work on. I would also write out by hand on the pads the various commands I would use to implement the changes I was going to make, assuming I had computer access, which I didn't. She gave me printouts of all the existing files so I could tell what was in them and make use of that in writing things out on the legal pads.

Using this way of not getting the job done, I was nevertheless able to work out a detailed schedule for how long it would take to do this, and I started in. That was how I spent my days, writing out in pencil what should be in the files and what commands should be used to implement the changes. Every Friday I had to give Becky a detailed progress report on what I'd done and what was still left to do. On breaks I could go out of the building, stand on the prairie, and look south: just on top of the horizon, two miles away, trains would silently pass on their way from the West Coast to Chicago carrying containers stacked two high, a dream image shimmering in the morning heat.

At lunch, Becky would change her mind about what needed to be done, and I'd have to go back and discard the yellow pads on which I'd written how the files should be, since Becky's new idea meant things had to be redone differently. I reported all this to my boss, but I'd come to realize the whole project had to be done deadpan. As far as my boss was concerned, my time was billable, and that was that. She wasn't interested in how I felt about it. Nevertheless, even the sham of work was being done according to a schedule, and the customer appeared to want to have it finished on time. Becky's changes were beginning to threaten the schedule.

Every day at quitting time I'd get back on the I-40 and head west to the Amarillo Holiday Inn. Every day I had the same struggle with myself to keep from just heading straight back on the I-40 all the way to Los Angeles, never stopping in Amarillo again. The only thing that made the work remotely worthwhile was the group in the payroll and travel department that I was sitting with in the administration building outside the gates.

They were outside the gates in more ways than one. Everything I'd seen up to then about Amarillo was a pretty relentless, monolithic set of social attitudes. You conformed to what Amarillo thought, or you were squashed. I'd run up against it several times myself. A Southwest pilot once chatted with me during the stopover in Las Vegas: "Towns out there are pretty strait-laced," he said. "People have to get out now and then and go to Vegas to kick over the traces. They can't do it any closer to home"

The payroll and travel people were different. One thing I noticed was that they'd all had disappointments of various kinds, like divorces or career changes, that gave them a greater sense of experience and detachment. It didn't sound like Becky had ever had much of a disappointment in life -- nobody crossed her, because they were all afraid of her father. But talking to someone like Job Stimson, the payroll and travel manager, was a different experience. "I'll bet you're thinking right around now that Amarillo is just about the armpit of Texas," he told me. "That's not really true. Lubbock, Midland-Odessa -- maybe even El Paso -- I'd say they're just about as bad, when you get right down to it."

"I was a clerk-operator on the Burlington Northern before I got this job," he told me. "I was on the extra board. They'd call me up in the middle of the night, and I'd have an hour to get down to someplace like Childress and take over some guy's shift. Then one night I fell asleep at the wheel and didn't wake up until I'd scraped the side of my car along a bridge. That made me think it was time to change jobs." The guy in the cube ahead of me had a large jar of hard candy. It took me a long time to notice what the candy was -- and even that didn't surprise me, the hot, hard round red candies aren't well known outside the South, but I'd seen them before. Finally I put together the fact that I was in a nuclear plant, and I was looking at a jar of Fireballs. I was dealing with flyover-country deadpan once again.

So while I did my busy work writing out by hand what should be in the files, only to have Becky change her mind, I'd listen to the banter and the stories from the folks in the payroll and travel department. Somebody was throwing a tantrum that they couldn't get a jet flight to Fort Worth. It didn't matter that there were no jet flights to Fort Worth, the travel people were falling down on the job. Some guy wanted to put his tips at the lap dance bar on his expenses, and was trying to pull rank about it. An ex-husband was trying to get the kids away from one of the ladies in the department again.

I've posted below about George Orwell's insights into the "boulot" that he discovered while working as a Paris dishwasher. "The customer," says Orwell, "pays, as he sees it, for good service; the employee is paid, as he sees it, for the boulot -- meaning, as a rule, the imitation of good service." Boulot is a French slang term that might be translated as "the deal," or maybe "the scam". What I found in Amarillo was as clear a case of work as boulot as I've ever seen. Someone had decided they needed a consultant. Someone had decided the consultant had to be out right away. Never mind they had no place for the consultant to sit, no way for him to do his work -- get him out here, and get him to do something. What I was doing, of course, was completely useless.

We were getting toward the end of the scheduled work, but due to Becky's continually changing her mind, we weren't even on schedule for the boulot. I had no idea what to put in the progress reports, which, following the wisdom of the flyover-Americans I saw around me, relied on a certain deadpan assertion that work was being done, carefully couched to avoid any concrete implications that might be derived from seriously interrogating any particular point. Week by week this had become more difficult, and my most recent report had begun to circle carefully around the likelihood that we wouldn't be able to finish the sham work by the time the schedule called for, but it didn't really matter, because nothing worthwhile would be accomplished in any case.

The end came when my payroll and travel department companions decided they wanted to hold a special lunch, and they wanted me to eat with them. We'd gotten along famously. The idea for the lunch came up pretty quickly, they wanted to call out for Chinese food at a place over in Pampa, they said of course you're going to eat with us, John, and I did, and I completely forgot that under the contract I was supposed to drive in to the cafeteria and get my latest orders from Becky. It was probably at the back of my mind. It was probably at the back of their minds, too. Job Stimson had stopped by my cube earlier in the day and looked at the stacks of yellow legal pads.

"Do you have the remotest idea what you're doing here?" he asked.

"No," I said, in a voice that called up all the emptiness and despair I'd found in that forlorn place at the end of the buffalo prairie.

In the middle of the afternoon a whole procession, Becky and her deadpan yes-men, drove down to the administration building outside the gates to get my ID badge and escort me out. I'd already figured that with what I'd said in my progress report, things weren't going to last much longer. The folks in the payroll and travel department, of course, saw what was happening right away. They came over and shook my hand, one by one, and said good bye. Job Stimson looked at me very straight and very hard, right in front of Becky, and held out his hand. "It's been a pleasure having you here with us," he said.

My boss, of course, knew about it already when I called her from the hotel. "Well," she said, "the good about it, for you, it's over." She passed on some remarks they'd made about how I was flexible, but I could have been more flexible. She knew I'd kept the billing for about as long as anyone could have done it, though, and I never got a hard time from her over it.

Mild Puzzlement Over Nona Gerard

I'm not writing this blog to fixate on any one issue -- it's a big world out there, calling for plenty of detachment and a sense of humor -- but I guess it's long enough since my last post on Nona Gerard to remark on the update from Prof. Gerard herself on Critical Mass. The only thing that puzzles me here is that, with a closed hearing at Penn State now evaluating the facts of her case under due process procedures, she should find it necessary to make various clarifications via Critical Mass. One would think that, whatever the outcome, her case would be past the need to make corrections of the record via public assertions.

I can't help but wonder what kinds of thought processes are in operation here.

The Value of a College Education

I've had a post on this, in a more general way, at the back of my mind for several weeks. I was originally going to say that, in fact, many current high-paying jobs, especially in the tech sector, de facto don't require a four-year degree. I've posted earlier on some of the reasons I think degrees are devalued, especially the one nobody else mentions, the extent of cheating in undergraduate classes.

But leaving that aside, let me point out here, before I try to get back to my story of what I learned in flyover country, the social cost of a large workforce without effective education.

Over the weekend I got an e-mail from my ISP, Verizon, telling me my "account has been identified as an account possibly being used by [spammers]." They said the reason for this was that my e-mail password was too easy to guess, and I needed to change it.

Let's start here. Somebody at Verizon has access to my e-mail password and has decided it's easy to guess. Of course, if somebody can just pull the thing up on a screen, they don't even need to guess it. In fact, if such a person chose, that person could make a nice side income by selling IDs and passwords to spammers. How many people at Verizon can pull my account and password up on a screen? Does Verizon see a problem in this potentially equivalent to some customers having passwords some security-wallah thinks (after looking at them) are easy to guess?

In fact, the actual cost of "guessing" (or running programs that attempt common passwords on a series of user IDs) is fairly high, something a security-wallah might be expected to know -- it's much cheaper for someone trying to steal passwords to do "social engineering", simply asking credulous users to reveal their passwords under some pretext, or indeed, to locate a security-wallah interested in a second income.

Uhh-- Verizon -- do you do drug screening on these folks who have all this sensitive info? What happens if one of these guys gets a garnish on his or her paycheck? Do you run periodic credit checks? Actually, I've never heard of a place that does, so I suspect you guys at Verizon are no different. Rather than bother us ordinary citizens, perhaps you should pay some attention to what's in-house first.

But, having worked in this area myself, I know I should be a good citizen and change my password as Verizon says. So I followed the directions in the e-mail. First, I found that the directions in the e-mail were incorrect. I had to go through an extra screen that wasn't mentioned in the e-mail, and naturally had to spend some extra time and effort to figure that one out for myself. Apparently nobody proofread this e-mail, which must have gone out to some thousands of customers in the general public, to see if it gave correct instructions.

Then when I got to the password change screen, that system was apparently down. I variously timed out trying to change my password, or got a Not Found screen after the system seemed to accept the change. The change never actually took.

Having learned what I've learned in this business, I knew what was coming next. Verizon was going to decide that I was a recalcitrant, a poor citizen who wouldn't change his password so the spammers couldn't jack my e-mail, and they would cancel my e-mail. I basically just got onto my e-mail each day waiting for that other shoe to drop.

This morning I got into my e-mail, and the system hung on the password check. The other shoe had, in fact, dropped, I figured, so I cussed pretty hard, knowing there'd be a good hour on hold with the support center (assuming I could find the number) until I cajoled someone into fixing the problem. So I spent 10 minutes trying to find the support number, which Verizon and all other vendors hide cleverly several non-intuitive screens down the tree in order to keep call volume down. They want you to e-mail your questions, of course, but if they've canceled your e-mail -- I think you understand.

After an hour, I got through. The first person I talked to was a DSL person -- the voice-recognition call routing thingy had misunderstood when I said "dial up", so I had to wait longer on hold to get a dial-up technician. The technician told me no, the problem wasn't that Verizon had canceled my e-mail, the problem was that Verizon's e-mail had been down for hours, and they didn't know when it would be up. Maybe today, maybe not.

I can understand minor outages, but in the past (having done such work myself) I was given to understand that on-line service providers of most types -- ISPs certainly among them -- had the good sense to have redundant equipment to avoid such predictable problems as server outages. I've been in computer rooms where spare servers sat on tables with the specific intent that they would be moved quickly into a rack to replace any server that had coughed or died. Apparently not Verizon. Probably not a good many other places.

At least I confirmed with the technician that, notwithstanding the admonition in the e-mail about my password, Verizon would not cancel my account if, given my understandable wish to avoid the kind of complication that leads to additional service interruptions, I do not change my password using the unreliable tools Verizon provides.

What if there were a cadre of individuals of somewhat above-average intelligence running Verizon's ISP operation who had, in fact, received the putative benefits of a liberal education? Would they in fact be able to provide simple reasoning skills to the range of problems presented by my e-mail admonition and the subsequent e-mail outage? Would they have the analytical skills, the people skills, and the persuasive skills to cogitate and secure approval for a less destructive approach to these problems? Would they be able to develop and justify redundancy and contingency planning that, in this organization, seem to be absent?

What of the higher-level managers who don't appear to see the need for such a cadre? They, of course, are largely preoccupied with doing the hokey-pokey with their subordinates, so to some extent the blame for the current state of affairs lies with them and those who've promoted them through the ranks. But you professors, you administrators, who've done so much to devalue and eviscerate a degree and its putative benefits, are the ones who are most responsible. I'll certainly have more to say on this.

UPDATE: Karen Locke e-mails, since the comment facility isn't opening for her:

John,

Clicking on "comments" buttons gives me a blank window. Don't know if that's because you have comments disabled or because my downrev version of Mozilla has some problem with it. Hence my sending email. The particular post of interest is "The Value of a College Education".

My first comment is technical, regarding the whole "we looked at your password and it was too easy to guess" issue. It ought to be possible to examine an encrypted password for patterns which indicate how easy it is to guess, without actually seeing the password. I believe software exists for doing this. Good system security involves putting as many obstacles as possible in the way of crackers.

I'm not certain your example truly illustrates the general lack of a good education. Large companies often seem to develop poorly-conceived policies and procedures. Often, any single individual would be able to do much better, but these things tend to be designed by committees where the primary agendas are political jockeying within the group.

Another issue is whether or not the company and/or it's individual employees have any motivation to deal with the problems demonstrated by your e-mail admonition and the subsequent outage. The business model of the company may well be to supply the minimum amount of customer service necessary, and to spend as little as possible on technical support for it's ISP. Perhaps it believes that improved service does not justify the extra expense.

I, too, am distressed about the quality of higher education, and the lack of it associated with the bachelor's degree. But I don't think this is necesarily a good example.

In general, I truly enjoy reading your blog. You make me think, always a welcome effort. Keep on writing.

I agree that corporate bureaucracy and poorly thought out ideas on what's cost-effective are the enemy of good execution. But I would continue to say that one object of a good education ought to be to produce the kind of person who can use analytical, expository, persuasive, and leadership ability to be that one person who makes a difference. In other words, corporate committees exist, and they routinely do mediocre things. Why shouldn't a graduate of Dartmouth or Swarthmore or Duke or Yale or St. Cloud State University or Texas A&M be the kind of person who can change the mediocre way one or more corporate committees do things?

Some Backstory on the Credit Lyonnais Guilty Plea

Instapundit mentions the latest development in an ongoing scandal, in which a French bank, Credit Lyonnais, pleaded guilty to misleading US regulators in transactions by which it took over the junk bond assets of "the failed Executive Life Insurance Co."

I met and courted my wife while we both worked at Executive Life Insurance, and although I left around the time the initial junk bond scandal heated up, my wife continued to work for the successor until, following the Credit Lyonnais acquisition, it wrapped up operations.

Executive Life Insurance was the creation of Fred Carr, a business associate of Michael Milken, and at its peak, the company was able to offer better returns on life insurance policies and annuities by taking Drexel Burnham junk bonds into its portfolio. These bonds paid better rates than investment-grade bonds, and thus the insurance company was able to structure its insurance and annuity payouts based on its projection of these higher rates.

The company ran into trouble and failed in 1991 after Milken pleaded guilty to securities fraud and related charges, which in turn depressed the value of Drexel Burnham's junk bonds. Executive Life voluntarily entered rehabilitation with the California Department of Insurance when it appeared that the declining value of the Drexel bonds wouldn't allow it to meet its future claim and annuity obligations.

However, the Drexel bonds proved to have been more valuable than the markets and the regulators originally thought, and the former Executive bond holdings eventually regained their value. Nevertheless, Executive was acquired by a new company, Aurora National Life Insurance, which did not make a serious attempt to sell new business. This led some observers to think that Aurora was simply an interim step by which Executive's business could be wound down and the bonds sold to another investor. In fact, Aurora gradually divested itself of policy service type functions after it was acquired by the Credit Lyonnais units. My wife, who worked for Aurora until it closed most operations, felt that Credit Lyonnais's biggest vulnerability was that it apparently never intended to run an insurance company and meant from the start simply to cash out.

Unlike Milken, Fred Carr was never indicted, and no illegal involvement between Executive Life and Drexel was ever seriously alleged. Those who were familiar with Carr and Executive Life felt that Carr was a financial innovator who was able to work with some brilliant people to capture high-end sophisticated insurance and annuity business. However, Carr was too naive to understand the need for actively working to maintain his and the company's reputation once the Milken scandal broke and regulators began to focus on Executive Life's connection with Drexel.

There were some very capable people who worked at Executive, many of whom were in fact of above-average integrity, and who, unwilling to pull their personal investments out when they might have based on insider knowledge, lost their life savings. In fact, if there's a real backstory to the Executive Life scandal, it's how close a strong core of capable, honest people came to making a success of the company. What prevented it was mostly Carr's naivete and a certain shortage of business savvy among his closest associates. This was then compounded by regulatory bungling and the eventual scramble to cash in on the Drexel bonds.

Flyover Country -- II

I wound up in Amarillo because my billable stint at another customer was about to end, and my boss thought she'd found a great deal where I could go from the one gig just as it ended to the job that was starting in Amarillo. In fact, the Amarillo people were adamant that I absolutely had to start the following Monday. I talked to them on a Thursday or a Friday in the middle of faxing contracts back and forth.

"I see I need a security clearance for this," I said. The job was at the nuclear weapons facility I mentioned in my last post. The clearance itself wasn't a problem, but these things take time.

"We've faxed you the paperwork," said Becky Lipscomb, the customer. "Just bring it with you when you come out Monday."

I did, though they faxed only some of the forms I needed. I could tell there was a problem when the forms started with "page 2 of 8" or whatever and referred to other forms I hadn't received. There wasn't time to work it out over the phone, so I simply showed up that Monday with what I had.

Whether I had all the forms filled out was moot. The clearance would take weeks, if not months, to investigate. I'd had a fairly high clearance with the Department of Defense, but this was the Department of Energy, and whatever Defense said didn't matter; Energy did things their own way and were going to start all over. So I couldn't understand why they'd wanted me out that Monday.

Without a clearance, I had to be escorted everywhere. I couldn't go to the john without someone to watch. In fact, I had to ask permission to go to the john, because there might not always be someone available to go with me just then.

They weren't ready for me at all, in fact, because they didn't have a place for me to sit. After a lot of rummaging around, they found an old typing stool with no back and no arms, that rocked back and forth. They moved that into Becky's messy cube, which was one of those programmer's cubes that had every inch of flat surface covered with old printouts. And because I didn't have a clearance, I couldn't get access to their computer systems to do the work I was supposed to do. So I sat next to Becky in her cube, tottering on the typing stool, with nothing to do, and not even a place to write, since the desk area was covered head-high with stacks of paper. Bringing my own laptop to a secure area was, of course, out of the question.

Over lunch I found a phone and tried to call my boss. I worked out of Los Angeles, but my boss was in northern Virginia. I saw her in person once or twice a year. All I got was her phone mail. Our contract said I had to have a desk, chair, phone, and computer access, none of which I had. I left a message telling her that, but since I didn't have a phone to call back at work, I gave her the number of my hotel.

All afternoon I sat in Becky's cube with nothing to do. I learned a little about Becky from her phone conversations. Becky was an Aggie, which is to say a graduate of Texas A&M University. She took being an Aggie very seriously, which I found puzzling, since Aggies seem to self-identify, as best I can understand it, as people who are game but not necessarily very bright.

Texas had just issued vanity license plates for Aggie alumni, and Becky had been among the first to get a set, but she was deeply concerned that someone might steal them, since as she saw it, these were highly coveted items. She had talked to the Department of Motor Vehicles office in Amarillo, as well as with auto mechanics, on the best way to protect her Aggie license plates from being stolen, and she was very unhappy with the inadequate solutions she'd been given.

This and other issues took precedence over finding me a place to sit, or a decent chair, or getting me a clearance. Every now and then I had to interrupt her phone conversations to ask her to find someone to take me to the men's room. I found a free moment and a phone later in the afternoon and left another message for my boss.

When I got back to the Holiday Inn, my boss still hadn't replied to my phone messages, and I left her another one. I went back in to work the next day and repeated the whole routine. I had to be met at the front gate, escorted in, signed in, and escorted to my wobbly stool in Becky's cube. I tried to get hold of my boss one more time. Again, just phone mail. She didn't try to page me, either.

Finally I came back from a men's room trip and sat down and asked Becky if she'd made any progress on getting me a place to sit. She answered that I had a place to sit. It was where I was sitting. In her opinion, everything was strictly according to what was in the contract.

I scratched my head. I said the contract specifically said I had to have a desk, phone, and computer access. Becky disagreed -- that was the general contract the Department of Energy signed with Digital Discipline for all the work we did. But the specific agreement on what I'd be doing in Amarillo didn't say anything about that. That was the real contract, as far as she was concerned. I should sit still and shut up, she said, in pretty much those words.

I asked to use her phone and tried to call my boss again. Still phone mail. I left another message, trying to make it sound a little more desperate than the ones earlier.

I wasn't getting anywhere with my boss, and I was getting stiff and sore sitting on the wobbly stool. "You know," I said to Becky, "I hate to say it, but I think this stool you've got me sitting on may be an OSHA violation. I'd hate to have to file a complaint."

Becky immediately got up in a huff and went in to her boss's office. A few minutes later I got a page from my boss. "I just had a call from Becky's boss," she said. "He says you lost your temper and had a violent outburst. Becky was in his office crying. Then she had several witnesses who explained to her boss how violent you'd been."

I mentioned my earlier phone messages. "But before you said anything yourself," she said, "you should have let me take care of it." Right. I'd been waiting for her to take care of it for two days. She returned the call soon enough when Becky's boss called her.

My boss smoothed things over. The customer could, of course, have told her they didn't want me, but they had a project they needed to get done, and it seemed as if I was the only one who could do it. I'd have to stay in Amarillo and finish it however I could. It took them a day or so longer, but they found me a place to sit.

Flyover Country

I've been in Amarillo, Texas during two periods of my life. The first was when I was a Boy Scout riding a bus to the Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico -- Amarillo seems to be an overnight stop in range for Philmont trips, and when I came back to Amarillo 35 years later, I still saw busloads of Boy Scouts getting on and off the I-40 there.

Amarillo looks like a railroad, cattle, and rest stop town along the I-40, and it's probably now best known for The Big Texan Steak Ranch, which I first heard of from a Los Angeles taxi driver. It has on offer a 72-ounce steak dinner that, if you can eat it all in an hour, is free (otherwise it's $50). If you throw up, the contest is over, and you lose. (The taxi driver knew about this, too.)

But like many things in flyover country, Amarillo isn't what it seems. Its biggest employer is a US Department of Energy nuclear weapons plant east of town, and its second-biggest employer is the school district. On my Boy Scout visit, there was an Air Force base and a Texaco refinery; both are still there, but closed, decrepit, and overgrown. A co-worker, an Air Force veteran, found out I was being sent to do some work there and shook his head.

"Amarillo is an awful place," he said. "It's the kind of place where it can be 95 degrees, and it's raining on one side of the street and not raining on the other. Since I got out of the Air Force, I've deliberately avoided going back. I thought there was a remote chance that I might die when I was passing through, and I'd have to spend all eternity there." When I saw him again, I mentioned that his description was generally correct, but he hadn't told me, when it was raining on just one side of the street, how hard that rain was.

The Amarillo Holiday Inn has cigarette burns on the bathroom sinks, on the toilet tanks, on the bathtub edges, on the writing desks, on the arms of the chairs, on the TV, on the bedspreads, on the sheets. The washing machines down the hall thud and shriek all day and all night. The people in the next room scream and curse at all hours, and if they don't completely wake you up, they seep into your dreams.

I was commuting from Los Angeles to Amarillo. The only non-puddlejumper flights in were on Southwest, mostly through Las Vegas, and the passengers were mostly people who'd driven there from Little Rock or Tulsa or Oklahoma City to get the cheapest flight to Vegas. The return flights had lots of boisterous drunks. I'd fly in on Sunday night with mostly drunks and a few accountants, like me heading for work, and out Friday evening.

The service was so bad in the Holiday Inn coffee shop that I'd had to figure out which tables had the servers who were least sluggish, because I was supposed to be at the customer's place when they started work, and it was hard to get eggs and coffee in less than 45 minutes or an hour, and sometimes they'd forget to bring the check, and I'd have to go looking in the kitchen for someone to get it. They'd be pretty put out when I did that. "You in a big rush?" they'd ask.

One Friday morning I was doing my usual routine, checking out before work so I could leave at quitting time, drive to the airport, drop off my rental car, and fly home for the weekend. There were two clerks at the checkout desk, neither too eager to run my receipt -- my company's expense department wouldn't accept just the rapid checkout thing they slid under the door, it had to have a zero balance. So I walked up, and the phone rang just then. This was much more interesting to them than I was.

The clerk who picked up the phone listened intently for a minute or so, while the other clerk watched her. Finally she cupped the receiver in her hand so the person on the other end couldn't hear, turned to the other clerk, and said, "Did we have someone die in this hotel last weekend? This person says someone died here, and she'd like to thank whoever it was that helped in his last hours."

The other clerk looked thoughtful. "No. I don't think anyone died here last weekend. Do they have a room number?"

The first clerk picked up the receiver again and asked, "We don't think anyone died here last weekend -- do you have a room number?" There was a pause. "She has to check," she told the other clerk.

I was still waiting to check out. I was a little too clever for the Amarillo Holiday Inn, and they knew it. They kept talking back and forth about whether someone had died there last weekend.

"Excuse me," I finally said. "This person is dead. I'm still alive. Can you check me out so I can get to work?" Too clever by half.

The first clerk picked up the house phone. "Elbert?" she asked. "Could you come in here?"

A few moments later a security guard came in from the back room. "Just stand right there, Elbert," she said to him, pointing to a spot right behind me. Her voice was just barely trailing into hysteria. "Just stand right there. That's fine."

Then she leaned over the counter toward me. Her face was screwed up in a contortion of anger and disappointment and lost options. "Don't you ever climb on me," she said in a long, slow growl.

Hairpieces

This is a non-political blog (there is no way I can or want to compete with some of the outstanding political blogs out there), but I have one question based on the recent prominence of John Edwards: what's with the strange part in his hair?

As I get older, I seem to focus more on bad hairpieces and bad plastic surgery, prompted by watching The News Hour, where I often feel a pang of lost possibilities that I never seriously considered getting the toupee franchise for Washington, DC. It seems like every third (male) talking head on The News Hour is hair-enhanced. I intend no aspersions on any political viewpoint; this particular vanity seems to extend across the whole spectrum.

Most cases are clear-cut. But there are exceptions. Sometimes I think Michael Beschloss (a very good writer and commentator) has a really good hairpiece, and sometimes I think it's natural. But John Edwards -- nobody, to my knowledge, parts his hair in that strange way naturally. What in the world is that guy's hair doing? Is that a hairpiece?

UPDATE: As with anything else, I could have googled this one before posting, but (with a sense of relief here) now that I have googled "'John Edwards' toupee" I haven't found any obvious bits of evidence -- just occasional questions like mine. For instance, here, where a blogger comments on an Iowa debate, "Then there's whatever the hell Edwards was doing to his head. The only way to describe it is for you to picture the dapper Edwards with his usual parted hair and, on the shorter side, his hair falling as usual. The rest of his do resembles a razor-sharp toupee, hung at 45 degrees, then pasted to the side of his head. The result is a diagonal blade of hair protruding dangerously, even menacingly, from mid-Edwards." So whatever it is, it's not just me.

Interviews and Bad Attitude

Easily Distracted mentions my blog in passing (thanks for the link!) in taking up a post on Critical Mass containing an e-mail from a frustrated job seeker and his bad interview experience at one of the professional meat markets. Looking at it from Prof. Burke's point of view, I can see a possible case of bad attitude on the interviewee's part -- I have a post below (scroll down to "Space Story") covering an interview at JPL where I was shown pretty much every possible discourtesy, but I never quite got to the point of telling the interviewers off. Certainly in an interview that's not going well, I do everything I can to salvage the situation, but rarely (as in occasional cases where you think you've come for a job interview, but they want to sell you something instead) I've simply asked to end the interview right away and be escorted out. I've had interviewers escort me out on the spot for some inadvertence on my part, for that matter!

So I certainly agree with Prof. Burke that there may be an attitude of entitlement on the part of the job seeker, and if someone is that unrealistic in the current academic job market, there's something odd in operation. My take on that story, though, was based on my own experience in what must now be hundreds of private-sector job interviews, from which I've gotten a sense of whether the interviewers know what they're doing or not.

Bad signs, as I've already said, are starting the interview late. In fact, over the years I've learned there's not a whole lot of reason to be patient with this. Certainly interviewers expect me to be on time, and in fact for me to have a sense of what traffic will be like so I can make it on time with a contingency cushion to spare. If the interviewer can't return the courtesy, I tend to discount that place as a possible new employer. It's a hassle, for instance, working for a boss who can't manage her time. Maybe one interview in ten for me has started out with the receptionist saying, "Mr. Smith called to say he isn't in yet. His baby threw up this morning," or some such thing. I pretty much say something polite that perhaps Mr. Smith may wish to reschedule, and I leave. I can decide if I want to return Smith's calls later.

The next bad sign is when the interviewer does all, or nearly all, the talking, and asks perfunctory, predictable questions. It sounds like this is what happened in the interview recounted in Critical Mass. To me it's a sign that the interviewer isn't the real decision maker. Either there's a candidate who's already got the inside track (and you're not the one), or the interviewer is clueless and waiting for someone else to make the decision (and you likely won't be the one). "Where do you see yourself in five years?" is that kind of bad question in the private sector. Forty-five minutes of this kind of chit-chat is a waste of everyone's time, though if the interviewer is spending his time this way, he doesn't have anything else important to do.

The question I'd be asking myself (though not out loud in the interview) would be whether that panel from Podunk U. was doing anything but going through the motions over a decision that had already been made, or that someone else was going to make irrespective of what happened in the interviews. It does sound to me like everyone in that room was wasting his or her time, and whether they matched the right vita with the right candidate was unimportant.

The next question is how to react. The candidate who sent the e-mail to Prof. O'Connor appears to me to have realized at some point during the convention that his academic career was over. It's possible that he knew (based on his observation of how the other candidates were dressed, just like he was) he was going through the motions and wasting his time. After 35 years in the big city, I tend to be blunt, especially if I'm in a bad mood, if I figure the bluntness isn't going to come back and kick me in the butt (and sometimes even if I figure it will), and if the person I'm being blunt with is a jerk. Given such a conjunction, I wouldn't hesitate to suggest to the interviewers that they have a problem with time management, assuming that when I returned from the convention city I was going to start seriously looking for another line of work.

In fact, I sort of admire a true bad attitude. Whether that's what we saw in the Critical Mass e-mail, I'm not completely sure -- I was inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt until Prof. Burke raised his points. In my case, if I thought there was no point in spending 45 minutes watching a bunch of people over their heads try to find my resume, I'd simply say something halfway polite and ask to end the interview. The biggest mistake that the correspondent made, as I see it, was to let them waste his whole 45 minutes.

More on Fiction and Work

Jim Taylor both posted a comment and sent me an e-mail in response to my post below on Fiction and the Uses of Work. Jim says,

It occurs to me immediately that there are entire genres which focus on the work performed by fictional characters. Detective fiction, even by high falutin' authors like P. D. James, concerns itself with little else. Adam Dalgliesh has his late wife and his current flame, but we see them mainly as they are reflected in, or affect, his work, either as detective or as poet. Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles, Morse, Cadfael all are who they are because of the work they do. Westerns are similarly populated with working folk, as is the better, i.e., traditional, science fiction. Fantasy fiction sometimes does and sometimes doesn't, although the occupations of witch, wizard, and scientist (mad or otherwise) are certainly prominent.

Can it be that the relative popularity of literary and popular fiction is based on the ability of people who work for a living to relate to characters who work for a living?

There is an extended essay lurking in my response to this, so I can only hit some high spots here. The first thing I would say is that some detective novels cross the line into real literature, such as Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, and Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. Chandler in particular is a master of the twentieth century deadpan-sentimental style along with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and he captures the true sound of Los Angeles talk ("Remind me to laugh on my day off") -- he's been a major influence on my own writing. That said, I don't think anyone will disagree that in the 60 or so years since Chandler's best work, nothing has come along in the genre (or indeed, out of it) to match it.

In fact, I find most detective fiction unreadable. The simplest explanation I can make for this in a short space is to compare detective fiction with true-crime books. You would think that a detective novel would be a first cousin of a true crime book, but the fact is the two genres are worlds apart.

Detective novels are full of improbable characters, not least the detectives themselves, an increasingly strained menagerie of moonlighting housewives, rabbis, priests, and the like. But wouldn't you expect the criminals in a detective novel to look something like the real psychopaths, narcissists, abusers, liars, manipulators, and so forth that we actually find in an Ann Rule? They don't. They're abstract, in part due to the need to maintain the artificial "whodunit" puzzle.

In the real world, crimes are solved mostly because there's a fairly obvious, small set of suspects, and if the detectives can't find a way to bring charges against someone in that small group, the crime likely doesn't get solved. However you disguise the hack fictional detective, he or she is, down deep, addressing the after-dinner group in evening clothes, astonishing everyone with his or her rationalistic power in identifying Colonel Mustard, whom nobody else suspected, as the perp. The real world isn't this way. So this, to me, isn't "work" as we know it.

For a while I was a real true crime book addict, because I was finding accounts of real people doing real evil, and the various ways their real victims, real enablers, and real avengers dealt with what they'd done. I'm interested in writing about what I see in the real world -- this includes work, but in part that's simply because it's what real people often do in real life. I don't see this in detective fiction. But, no kidding, I need to break this off so I can usher at St. Thomas's Church Hollywood right now. No doubt I will revisit this.

More on the Class Action Suit

Winston's Diary has a post, the Question of Blame, offering his additional thoughts on the conversation that's been going on this week (links in the post just below) on the graduate school attrition rate, especially in disciplines like English and History.

I want to make my position here a little clearer, as well. In part I'm proposing the ideas of a "class action suit" and a certain level of fraudulence in the career expectations of graduate school as a thought experiment. My attorney wife keeps waiting for a fellow attorney to weigh in over this in the comments here or elsewhere, since in her view a class action suit has many practical obstacles connected with it, and knowing me to the extent she does, she recognizes I'm not suggesting a whole bunch of disappointed ABDs run down to their attorneys Monday morning.

I should also say that my own time in graduate school ended 30 years ago, and as a result I would probably not qualify for damages in any such suit. I wound up in a line of work with which I've been happier. I made myself do things like read all of Milton, which I would never have done otherwise. I learned a lot in graduate school, but I think it's a little like what you learn from other bad experiences. What do people learn from a bad marriage and a divorce, for instance? But it's all far enough in the past that at this point it's "emotion recollected in tranquility", I'm making blogosphere hay out of it (thanks for the traffic, guys!), and I'm having fun with this discussion. So that's full disclosure of my interests here.

On the other hand, I think there may be good public policy issues resulting from the discussion of a class action suit. Winston's somewhat concerned that such a suit could be like suing McDonald's because Big Macs made you fat (I resemble that remark). Certainly in many clear cases we make common-sense assumptions: I accept the manifold risks of cigarettes when I choose to smoke. I accept the risk of losing my stake when I go into a casino.

On the other hand, it's accepted that the state should take con artists, Ponzi operators, and the like out of circulation. The state has a hand in making sure that you have something like an even break when you buy stocks or mutual funds. As we've seen over the past several years, we accept that it's a bad thing to cook corporate books or give certain investors breaks at the expense of other, less well-informed investors. I simply haven't read any commentary at all (and if there's any out there, I'd be interested to see it) that the state has no business enforcing laws as applied to situations like Enron, since investors assume the risk of fraud when they buy a stock.

So someone like Winston may say he accepted known risks when he went to grad school, and I take him at his word. Does everyone know and accept the risks the same way? I think social consensus has changed, and is changing over this. In the 1960s it was common for libertarian-like thinkers to object to efforts by Ralph Nader to legislate automobile safety. Since that time, though, highway deaths have decreased while highway miles driven have grown enormously. I doubt if the auto industry would have adopted effective safety features by itself. I don't think it was then, or is now, an effective argument simply to say that drivers accept the risk in accidents when they get in their cars, if that risk can be reasonably reduced, and if the manufacturers won't reduce it voluntarily.

There are certainly people who are satisfied with their academic experiences; there are certainly people who have posed questions along the line of "if you reduce the number of grad students, who will serve as the cheap labor that now makes up such a big part of the academic economy?" Some of them, I'm sure, still like the prospect of the academic life as it is and their chance of landing that kind of a sweet deal.

For my part, I hope we see a lot more discussion!

A Brief Outline on Graduate School Reform

Invisible Adjunct has put up a new thread asking for thoughts on what might be done to reform the problem of excessive attrition in humanities Ph.D. programs. While I've sometimes taken mild issue with Prof. O'Connor (as I have with most other bloggers), I certainly agree with the thrust of her current post, that reform will not come from inside the system. (Thanks again to Prof. O'Connor for her link today.)

Many posters on the Invisible Adjunct thread have already said the route to reform is to reduce the number of humanities grad students. As I've said below, faculties won't do this -- it's their enrollment, and that means their jobs. Unionization of TAs in and of itself won't help, because there are simply too many naive people -- not just 22-year-olds, either -- willing to work for subsistence pay.

My guess is that the solution will come from a creative class-action suit that builds on the work that's already been done establishing that TAs are employees of the university, not students. Most people who've seen the situation of grad students and TAs close up think that there's an injustice of some sort there; the question is how to put it in an acceptable legal context. Certainly if large numbers of people are induced to undertake both the opportunity cost and low pay of graduate study in hopes of getting a Ph.D., but the actuarial odds simply don't pan out, irrespective of outcomes that might be predicted based on merit, I think you could begin to put together some type of case for fraud. The situation as it exists isn't too far from a Ponzi scheme: the earlier investors, the graduate faculty, are being paid off from the foregone salary (paid them in tuition credit) of the TAs, the later investors.

The thing that actually makes a Ponzi or multilevel marketing scheme a fraud is the mathematical impossibility for any but the early investors to make money from the scheme. While the math is less spectacular than with a Ponzi, nevertheless if those running the graduate studies scheme know that, given the math, it's impossible for 70 percent (or whatever number applies to a given discipline) of those who enter the program, "investing" foregone income (which goes to the university and the graduate faculty in the form of low-paid labor and tuition credits), ever to get a return on the investment, and neither up-front caveats nor realistic, merit-based attempts to cull the field occur, then you might be able to build a case against quite a number of players -- the universities with graduate schools, the faculties, the professional associations, and so forth. It sure would be a fun thing to watch!

My wife, an attorney, has listened to my ruminations on this now and then. She says the biggest problem is that attorneys aren't creative. Every now and then somebody wins a suit based on some new theory -- such as sexual harassment -- and next thing you know, somebody's basically put together kits that show all the other attorneys how to file such suits with minimal work. So you've basically got to wait for someone to break the path in this area, but once it's done, all the other attorneys will immediately take up the lucrative trend.

I think the cornerstone to this particular reform is, via such a class action suit, in fact to raise the salary of TAs, if only just to the level of unionized schoolteachers. At that point universities wouldn't be able to sustain the current financial model of graduate studies. The number of graduate faculty would immediately drop, since there'd be far fewer graduate students. Faculty used to teaching upper-level courses would be forced to take freshman comp sections. Universities would likely have to offer favorable buyout packages to existing faculty deadwood.

The next step would be to eliminate, or heavily modify, the current system of time limits on funding. As many have pointed out, the time limits are unrealistic and are actually part of the essentially fraudulent system that offers graduate students careers in return for foregone income, but then snatches the careers away by making it impossible for them to complete their apprenticeship. With the time limit and implicit "up or out" factor removed or modified, the graduate student becomes simply a lower-level faculty member who can advance based on earning a degree and other forms of merit.

The fact that each faculty would potentially be stuck with the people they admitted would probably force more attention to merit-based selection in the admissions process, as well as more attention to genuine merit-based retention throughout the earlier phases of an academic career.

UPDATE: I've tweaked some of my thinking about the graduate studies game as a type of Ponzi-like scheme above, trying to make the parallels a little clearer. Another point that's been raised in the Invisible Adjunct thread is that if the entry cohort of humanities graduate students is severely reduced, this might prevent capable people from entering the field, if selection becomes based on homogeneous criteria.

In thinking my approach through, this occurred to me -- the only thing I can say is it's better for someone to have to decide to find another line of work at 22 than at 26 or 30, after having sunk much more time, youth, and foregone income into the project. What people are discovering now at later ages is simply that people are approving dissertations or hiring new Ph.D.s based on the same homogeneous criteria that they would use to select new graduate students. I'm not intending to change the world here, just trying to reduce one possible source of injustice.

Nobody has yet raised objections to the ultimate very high cost of the class-action suit I would propose, not just potentially in damages paid to those in the class (and fees to attorneys, of course), but ultimate cost to universities and educational consumers to pay for a better-compensated cadre of entry-level scholarly apprentices. My answer in my current thinking is that universities, at least according to some faculty studies, haven't passed the great runup in tuition costs over the past generation on to the faculty in proportion to the increases -- the extra money has gone to administrations, to fund increased administrative staff and additional programs, including sensitivity training, condom festivals, and the like. My current thinking is that universities wouldn't be able to pass all the increased costs on to consumers, and thus would have greater pressure to choose among spending priorities, possibly eliminating many of the more frivolous expenditures.

Fiction and the Uses of Work

“The main facts of human life are five,” says E.M.Forster in Aspects of the Novel, “birth, food, sleep, love, and death.” A character in a novel, Forster says later, “. . . is generally born off[stage], he is capable of dying on[stage}, he wants little food or sleep, he is tirelessly occupied with human relationships.” I read Aspects of the Novel first as an undergraduate, and later in a graduate seminar, but it wasn’t until much more recently that I began to think about the huge gap in Forster’s view of life -- and it’s life he refers to here, not art. He doesn’t mention work. I don’t know if it’s his personal circumstances that limited his view, or possibly the prejudices of England in the 1920s, but he appears to feel that the quotidian spaces between food, love, and sleep are beneath narrative notice. Those spaces, of course, are often occupied by work, and sometimes, for those who don’t work, by boredom. The ways the events and routines of work, or indeed the routines of boredom, reveal the attitudes and characters of everyday people are artistically important.

It was a truism in my graduate seminars that characters in novels didn’t work, they were “leisured” or pursued, like Lambert Strether, some vague occupation. In fact, it’s hard to think of novels that cover work as people now know it: Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Bukowski’s Post Office. The issue that gives rise to the story in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is Charlie Marlow’s need for a job -- the steamer on the Congo is all he can get, after a long search. A recent re-reading surprised me with how carefully described the commercial arrangements are, and how familiar: “. . . before forty-eight hours I was crossing the Channel to show myself to my employers, and sign the contract.” The locale may be distant and exotic, but the circumstances reflect the preoccupations of people who work for a living. Of the map with blank areas that fascinated the young Marlow, the older Marlow says, “But there was in it one river especially. . . . Then I remembered there was a big concern, a Company for trade on that river.”

There are human situations reflected in accounts of work that are missing if characters are leisured -- statements of apparent purpose and conditions of varying urgency contrast with characters’ actions and motivations. In Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell reflects on working as a hotel dishwasher at the bottom of Parisian society:

. . . the job the staff are doing is not necessarily what the customer pays for. The customer pays, as he sees it, for good service; the employee is paid, as he sees it, for the boulot -- meaning, as a rule, the imitation of good service. . . . The others laughed when I wanted to wash my hands before touching the butter. Yet we were clean when we recognized cleanliness as part of the boulot. We scrubbed the tables and polished the brasswork regularly, because we had orders to do that, but we had no orders to be genuinely clean. . .

Like many others in my generation, I spent more years than I should have preoccupied with E.M.Forster. I matured slowly, but eventually I left graduate school and went to work, eventually in the high-tech field, where I largely prospered. But characters and situations began to seem familiar, which shouldn’t be surprising if we allow that novelists are accurate observers. Writers like Conrad and Orwell don’t disdain work -- that’s a pseudo-aristocratic posture that they would abjure. But they talk about it. This is valuable for readers and writers, it seems to me, because art and our experience of it should reflect the lives most of us live -- and most of us aren’t aristocrats. Why don’t our expectations of art reflect our world?

War Stories -- III

About five years after I left graduate school, I went back to work for the University of Southern California in its computer center. This was in the late 1970s, when some functions were still being computerized for the first time. In this case, it was USC's Accounts Receivable system, which up to then had been a manual tally of forms, checks, and receipts.

I was hired by Jim Larssen, who for a brief period was director of the computer center -- at a later time, he would have had a CIO title, but it was still a little early for that, and he reported to USC's Vice President of Finance. (So there's no misunderstanding, all names in these blog accounts have been changed, although a number of the people involved have passed away.) My job was to write the manual for the Accounts Receivable system.

This turned out to be harder than it sounded, because Larssen had lost control of the project. He had a director of business computing and a project manager under the director, and they'd stopped giving him useful information on progress, which was bad, because the Vice President of Finance was interested in things like the budget, and whether the money USC was paying its programmers was translating into progress on the system. It wasn't, of course. Larssen's job was to prove somehow that the computer center was doing its work, while the Vice President was looking for hard evidence to fire everyone involved, which they well deserved, and which happened soon enough.

Somehow Larssen's managers had wangled things so there was no way he could put a question to them on progress that they had to answer in any meaningful way. The director of business computing, Bob, was a married guy, while his project manager, Mary, was a very attractive, divorced woman, and they spent most of their days together behind a locked door in Bob's office, "planning", or so Jim thought. Jim, I think, was one of life's tourists. I learned from co-workers that he was independently wealthy and owned apartment houses, and he didn't need his job, so he just didn't work very hard at it. He believed, or certainly seemed to, everything Bob and Mary were telling him, which amounted to, yes, they were a little behind schedule on what the Vice President wanted to see, but they'd make everyone work all weekend and get caught up right away. However, there had been several months of promises to work all weekend and all night, but nothing had been delivered.

But Jim thought he had a secret weapon. My job, in writing the manual, was to talk to the programmers themselves, get copies of the program code, and document the stuff. If Bob and Mary wouldn't tell him what was going on, he could call me in and find out how much had actually been done. Once Bob and Mary found out this was happening, they took the position that any time their programmers had to give me for documentation was taking away from their critical program work, already behind schedule. They put up obstacle after obstacle to me doing the work. Did Jim want the project finished, or did he want the documentation?

I got lucky. I ran into one of the programmers over lunch, we got along pretty well, and he started passing me copies of his program files and design work without telling Bob or Mary directly what he was doing -- the whole thing was pretty much deniable from his end. So I started writing the manual, but it contained what the individual programmer was doing, and little else. To Jim it was something of a godsend -- at least someone was giving him some kind of information, and that was letting him report something concrete to the Vice President. Bob and Mary, I think, were hoping to dry up any supply of work I had and get me laid off, but somehow I was getting input, and the manual was getting written in spite of them.

So Jim thought I had potential. He was convinced that Bob and Mary were working hard and "planning" behind Bob's locked door all day, but he knew Al, his director of academic computing was doing something else behind locked doors with his secretary. Typical of Jim, though, it would have been a little too much to confront the director about it directly. Instead, he announced a big reorganization, and since he felt documenting the Accounts Receivable system was so important, he transferred Al's secretary to work for me on that project. In one fell swoop, Al lost his secretary and daytime squeeze, and his secretary lost her patron and protector.

Once she worked for me, the secretary basically went on strike, disappearing for hours, not coming back from lunch, and so forth. When she showed up for work, she brought her dog with her. It didn't matter as far as the work was concerned; so little was getting done on the project that I could do it without her, but naturally you couldn't let someone just come and go, mostly go, as she pleased that way. So I started the usual step-by-step process, keep track of her time, talk to her about it, keep track of her time, write her a memo about it, make sure Jim's aware of what's going on. She was getting madder and madder. Al was getting madder and madder. Finally she wrote some kind of angry note and stomped in to Jim's office and said "I Quit!!" I think she was expecting Al to get involved and get me out of the loop again.

Instead, Jim called me in and told me what had happened. "That's a voluntary quit," I told Jim. "You've got it in writing. I think we should accept the resignation." Jim didn't really seem concerned; I have a feeling he'd already resigned his own job by then and wasn't saying. He just accepted the secretary's resignation, and that was that, or so I thought.

Right around the same time, Bob and Mary had made one last promise, such-and-such work is going to be done by Monday morning after everyone works all weekend, and of course it had the same result, nothing more was finished. The Vice President instructed Jim to fire both of them, and what actually happened isn't clear; Bob and Mary both announced they were leaving (they both got good jobs right away), but then, so did Jim. I think actually having to fire someone was just a little too much for him. Jim preferred to work like a kid who'd turned over a rock and poked with a stick to see what the ants would do. That interested him, sort of. Work didn't. And he didn't need to work anyhow. After he left, he just tended to his apartment houses.

Apparently the failed Accounts Receivable project caused so much concern at higher levels at USC that they did a major reorganization, took the computer center away from the Vice President of Finance and put it in charge of Dean Wormer (I don't know if he was a relation to the Dean at Faber College or not), apparently with instructions never to let the place get so far out of control again. So when Jim left, Dean Wormer announced he wouldn't be replaced -- Dean Wormer himself would run things.

Except, of course, that Dean Wormer knew nothing about running a computer center. Of the top echelon that had mostly quit or been fired, only Al, the director of academic computing was left. So Dean Wormer decided Al would run day-to-day affairs, and I would report to Al. Right. I'd just gotten rid of Al's daytime squeeze, not something I'd wanted to do, but something Jim had worked out like poking at ants with a stick.

Once Jim left and Al had a free hand, his first move was to re-hire his secretary. It took him a while, but he finally had it wangled so I reported to her, and I could see the handwriting on the wall. That was during a high-tech boom period, and I got another job with no problem. I heard not too much later that one day Dean Wormer wasn't at USC any more, and then I was hearing about a lot of my old co-workers at the computer center there looking for jobs as well. I think Al was the only one who stayed.

When Mary left, I remembered vaguely that she'd gone to work for a bank. Ten years later, I was working at that same bank, and I often had lunch with a group of long-term senior programmers and Vice Presidents. I began to hear stories of how crazy things had been eight or nine years ago, especially with a project leader named Mary who'd gotten onto the fast track. It was amazing, they said, she kept getting promoted, over and over. Finally she was in charge of the biggest project they'd ever had. The problem was that she'd always be locked in the office of the Senior Vice President she reported to. Everyone kept wondering why things were late and nothing got done, and she kept promising that she'd make everyone work all weekend, and everything would get caught up.

Finally someone high up in the bank got fed up, and she and the Senior Vice President and a bunch of other people were fired, just like that. That was the last I heard of Mary. Jim Larssen, who was a heavy smoker, died of a heart attack a few years after the events here. He couldn't have been older than 50. He left a young wife and a family, a tourist to the end.

Historical Context for the University Dilemma

Karl Hallowell posts a comment to my entry below on Ph.D. attrition rates, musing, "Unlike other social systems, there's not a lot of history of what happens when academia goes wrong. The Library of Alexandria seems to be relevant, but it's fate is surprisingly vague. Perhaps the philosopher schools of ancient Greece are more relevant. As I recall, these seem to have lasted till the officialization of Christianity in what became the Byzantine Empire."

I've given a lot of idle thought in the past year to why universities are the way they are, and for a while I had a hypothesis that they were medieval institutions (since places like the University of Paris grew up in the late middle ages). I still feel that the Enlightenment has passed university culture by, since many of the current financial or personnel scandals that keep recurring indicate a lack of transparency, management by policy, and similar concepts that seem to have arisen with the Enlightenment.

But not long ago it occurred to me that much of the "action" in the Confessions of St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), whose life in fact comes after Constantine's Christianization of the Roman Empire, centers on the spiritual emptiness and sometime licentiousness of his youth, during much of which time he was a professor of rhetoric. (Given his age, he would have been what we now call a TA in the English Department for at least part of that time, I would guess.) It appears that university culture at the time wasn't much different than it is now -- there was a wide variety of philosophical schools and options, with a sense among those in the university that they were separate from, and superior to, the rest of society.

Interestingly, Augustine's mother, despairing that Augustine will ever grow out of his extended student phase, goes to a Christian bishop, who counsels her not to worry so much, just let Augustine keep reading, and he'll straighten out. This, of course, is what eventually happens.

On the other hand, it interests me that Augustine's spiritual journey does involve an extended and difficult move out of the academic culture he'd gotten used to. Clearly for an academic in the late Roman period, scholarship and lifestyle were closely related; Augustine himself had a live-in situation and a child out of wedlock.

I found the process of leaving graduate school to be a similar journey, not one that began or ended when I stopped teaching classes or working on my dissertation in 1974. I found I had a great many unexamined assumptions I had to work through, a destructive live-in situation I had to get out of, and many spiritual and intellectual questions I had to answer -- the process took many more years. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but I wouldn't not have gone through it, either. I suspect that many who do leave graduate school fairly late in their Ph.D. work have to go through a similar migration.

Universities are on the right track in the sense that they don't play favorites among religious or philosophical views; empirical and scientific inquiry should continue to drive educational perspectives. That means we continue to risk people wandering, like St. Augustine, in a spiritual wilderness -- but Christians like John Milton argue that losing ourselves and finding ourseves again is what we've been put here for. Why it should take those who choose to leave academic careers something close to a twelve-step experience to bring it off, on the other hand, is something we should continue to think about. But it's clearly nothing new.

UPDATE: It occurred to me after I posted this that St. Patrick (a little over a generation later than St. Augustine of Hippo, c.390-c.460) had problems trying to get his appointment as Bishop of Ireland because he didn't have a university education (instead, he'd been a slave). I have a sense that universities that probably resembled the early medieval model continued to exist in the Roman world at least until the fifth century.

Revisiting F. Todd Weatherbee

A week or so ago I profiled F. Todd Weatherbee, my pseudonymous freshman comp chair, who despite problems with basic math and tippling all day from the office sherry bottle, served his English department well by keeping the lucrative freshman comp franchise in house, when departments like Cinema and Victim Studies were trying to encroach on the market.

The post just below on idealistic TAs using classroom materials from the crazy left, as well as thoughts on the endless stream of 22-year-olds eager to become TAs in the wake of those who get fed up four or five years later, reminded me of another Todd Weatherbee episode. When Todd first took over as freshman comp chair, he gave the standard speech to the assembled TAs -- he's on our side, he wants us to succeed, he understands our problems, the whole routine -- and concluded, "By the way, remember that my office door is open. Anyone who wants to come in and talk about any problem -- not just related to your teaching or your grad school career, but any problem at all -- just come on in and do it. I want to listen."

Some of us may have thought Todd was sincere because, in our meetings, he often gave us bizarre details of his personal life. He had male pattern baldness, and what hair he had was cut short -- but one day he explained how he got his hair cut. His wife, a spindly woman well above Todd in height who dyed her hair an unnatural orange and wore harlequin glasses, would cut his hair at home -- but she'd always take off her clothes before she did it. This was something I could never quite visualize, though it was so strange it had to be true.

Poor Ronn Faulkner. I think, even for a TA in his early twenties, he was especially naive, and I think people knew it, so nobody was terribly surprised when he actually did go in to talk to Todd about a problem. Ronn had apparently gotten into an affair with a married lady on campus, and it was causing him a lot of torment.

"I'm in love with a married woman," said Ronn when he went in to see Todd.

Todd was normally full of sherry-soaked smiles -- usually he was a bright, joking guy, and he didn't screw you until later. But Todd's latent Mormonism came through right away this time. "I'm in love with a married woman, too," roared Todd. "My wife!"

He fired Ronn on the spot. Someone else took his classes.

More on Teaching Assistants and Being Had

Not long after I put up my post just below on how the teaching assistant game is rigged -- pay is low, attrition rates are high, your chances of getting a decent job even if you make it through to a Ph.D. aren't good, but your low-cost labor creates jobs for the graduate faculty -- Winston's Diary has a piece on how TAs in freshman comp at an unnamed university are using Moveon.org and Michael Moore films as teaching materials, apparently with the encouragement of the adults in charge.

To tell the truth, I don't think these pieces of information are completely unrelated. One feature of academic life has always been the sense that participants are a breed apart, the recipients of special knowledge. This is one reason why academics seem more fond than the population at large of political conspiracy theories, and why various kinds of academic quackery have persistent popularity. If you can "deconstruct" middle-class culture to reveal its horrific exploitive, sexist, racist, homophobic underbelly, you can feel superior to it and complacent in your own views and lifestyle.

This is certainly a profitable set of attitudes to promulgate among the TAs, who, let's face it, are a group that should be kept happy and complacent. So by all means feed them conspiracy theories, the Bushies are plotting a coup, the Bushies are out to steal the mideast's oil, whatever they'll buy. Keep 'em focused on the Bushies; the guys who are really running a scam are a lot closer, but the grad students don't know it.

Ph.D. Program Attrition Rates

Invisible Adjunct has a post citing a Chronicle of Higher Education colloquy on the attrition rates in Ph.D. programs. IA herself makes a cogent point in one of the comments, "I think 50 percent is too high. . . . the high attrition rates suggest that programs are taking in many more people than they can reasonably handle." However, I don't think she's taken this point as far as it can be taken.

I've always thought that English departments took in exactly as many graduate students as suited their purpose. These fell into several categories. Some were schoolteachers taking a few graduate courses as part of a tuition-reimbursement program to get Master's degrees. There were a few priests and Army officers taking courses for similar reasons. These, of course, are gravy -- their employers foot the bill, they pay cash up front, and they're soon enough gone. There are also a few rich people taking courses for the fun of it.

Then there are the more conventional graduate students working their way through as teaching assistants, or getting funding from some other internal university source. You have to focus on this population, not as a demand-side group of people working toward degrees, but as a supply-side resource that funds the faculty at its preferred level. Graduate students typically take seminars. Professors prefer to teach seminars, for that matter: the grad students are more mature, the course material is more challenging, and not least, it's much more OK to have dalliances with graduate students than undergraduates, if that's how you spend your spare time.

But seminars are not cost-effective. Multiply a dozen or so students by the tuition cost per unit they bring in, and then compare that to the fraction of the professor's salary he's getting paid for teaching it. Then add the overhead for the course and the classroom. A seminar loses money. You have to make up the loss in some way, either by the university somehow deciding that it must subsidize Sanskrit 352, or by having the department compensate by having large-enrollment courses in other areas (like freshman comp for English departments). From the standpoint of the university's internal operation, there has to be a way to pay for the money-losing seminars.

The most common way to do it is by using teaching assistants, who teach sections of high-enrollment, high-"profit" courses like freshman comp very cheaply. The money they bring in subsidizes the graduate seminars they take. But this is actually less important to the TAs than it is to the graduate faculty, because without graduate enrollment, they'd either be out of jobs or teaching freshman comp themselves. So the faculty's object is to have as many graduate students as they can justify, and the number is, not coincidentally, going to be driven by the need to fund a certain number of graduate seminars to keep the faculty employed at what it prefers to do.

The attrition rate within Ph.D. programs isn't of serious concern to the graduate faculty -- indeed, any more than the number of Ph.D.s who get decent jobs once they've earned their degree. The great majority of graduate students are simply pawns in the economic game of funding graduate seminars. The students may also be valuable in other roles as drinking buddies, research assistants, menials, gofers, babysitters, or whatever else. But their value to the faculty mostly isn't as people being groomed as Ph.D.s, and in fact their value to the faculty essentially ends once they get a degree.

The optimal number of graduate students in a department is completely unrelated to anything that might be actuarially calculated as the optimal level of Ph.D. production for that department, given market conditions. In fact, the optimal number of graduate students, which is the number that will support a desired number of graduate faculty, is far larger than the optimal level of Ph.D. production for that department. As a result, heavy attrition is built into the system.

If Invisible Adjunct discusses attrition rates before earning a Ph.D. at something like 50 percent (this seems as reasonable as any other number), it's likely that the reasons will be other than simply merit-based selection. In my case, a number of bad experiences, some discussed in posts below, convinced me after five years that I was better off not doing my dissertation. I'm a little astonished to hear now of graduate students remaining in programs for periods like seven or ten years and then dropping out.

Certainly one reason students enroll in graduate programs is unrealistic expectations about the academic job market. What puzzles me, though, is that I went into graduate school pretty much as the bottom fell out of the market, and I readjusted my own expectations relatively soon. In the 30 years since then, people considering graduate school and careers in fields like the humanities have had extensive real-world data showing their actual chances of success -- yet far more people still enroll in graduate programs than the market can handle.

Unfortunately, I suspect greater career counseling would help only so much. Graduate school is a racket, a game where the odds heavily favor the house, but there are still plenty of suckers out there wanting to sign up each year. Past a certain point, you can't cheat an honest person -- I've got to ask myself what so many people expect of graduate school if they seem so willing to be had.

UPDATE: Several comments in the Invisible Adjunct thread I linked to above refer to the time limits imposed on graduate student funding. In my case, when I was in graduate school at the University of Southern California, teaching assistants were limited to four years. It really wasn't practical to get both a Master's and a Ph.D. in that time, assuming you had a half-time course load. Posters at IA indicate that unrealistic time limits are common; typical time limits seem to range from four to seven years, with anecdotally few candidates finishing within the limits.

As a practical matter, this is probably part of the rigged setup in graduate school, and the schools can get away with it simply because there's such a continuing stream of naive 22-year-olds and others who are willing to accept those terms. Most people who find they can't finish within such time limits, or who may wash out for other reasons that to a more experienced observer may seem part of a rigged game, will blame themselves for what they see as their own shortcomings.

UPDATE: Many thanks to Prof. O'Connor for her link to my comments here at Critical Mass. Thanks to Invisible Adjunct for pointing visitors here as well.

Dodgy Academic Terminations and Academic Reform

Erin O'Connor and King Banaian have new posts continuing to discuss the issues they feel are raised by the Nona Gerard and Robert Day terminations. My own feeling continues to be that both were, as they say in the real world, trying to act above their pay grade. One comment to this thread on SCSUScholars made the point that Day appears, from all the evidence, to have been "dumber than dirt". My wife, hearing the circumstances of the Gerard case, felt Gerard was simply a "spoiled brat". Clearly not everyone thinks this way, but it's more likely that those with real-world experience outside the academy will, I'm pretty sure.

What intrigues me about the Day case is the conditions under which he was already willing to work. The copy of his teaching contract on his web site indicates that, while he agreed to teach at Cumberland College (and in fact was subject to substantial penalties if he breached the contract), Cumberland didn't specify what his duties were, or what he would be paid. Day said that in fact, Cumberland cut the faculty's family benefits at the start of the current academic year.

Now and then I've had to work under contracts that had me screwed. It helps to be married to an attorney in such cases, of course. But the first thing I've done when that's happened has been, absolutely as soon as it was convenient for me, to get the heck out of that contract, usually by invoking non-performance by the other party. (If the other party is a big enough jerk to write such a one-sided contract, they're likely also a big enough jerk not to hold up even their one-sided end of it.) People who set things up the way Cumberland College does are never going to deal fairly, it seems to me. Anyone who doesn't like it is free under the Fourteenth Amendment to seek other work or another career.

When I was a teaching assistant, we were told that we could expect to teach one summer course during our time as TAs. This was important, since otherwise we weren't paid during the summers, and other summer jobs were hard to find. The eligibility for teaching those summer courses was carefully prioritized and scheduled. But when my turn for a summer course came, I was suddenly "bumped" by full-time faculty whose own summer courses hadn't made enrollment, and thus decided to earn their summer teaching money by taking our sections of freshman comp.

There was no existing policy that allowed this, and it was simply a fiat by the department chair to favor his cronies and screw the TAs. I was pretty angry, but once I talked to my graduate advisers, it was plain that I simply had no recourse. (In retrospect, I could probably have won a case in small claims court, but I would probably have been fired by the university as soon as I filed the suit.) The nature of the academic world is that very unpleasant bullying takes place. One of the choices people have to make is whether they want to be in such an environment -- certainly nobody requires them to be in it. My experience of being "bumped" from the summer course I expected to teach was an important message I picked up on whether I really wanted an academic career.

So having seen that aspect of academic work, I'm inclined to think Day was remarkably unrealistic about the specific environment at Cumberland College, when he appears to have had piece after piece of evidence of what he was dealing with. On that basis, I still can't sympathize with him, and still don't see an injustice.

The problem I see in Prof. O'Connor's most recent post is the sense that accommodations must be made for people who seem, in Day's case, remarkably naive, and in Gerard's case, remarkably spoiled. "Instead of trying to fire Gerard, PSA could have found an alternative teaching assignment for her--one she could believe in and devote herself to." What in the world would that have been? Altoona, Pennsylvania, is a railroad and coal-mining town in the rural middle of that state. Whatever one may think of changing a community college in such a place to a four-year institution, it's unlikely that there would be enough students to support separate Theater, Creative Writing, Music, and Art departments. Yet such a combined organization, which seems entirely logical under the circumstances, was precisely what Gerard objected to (presumably she felt entitled to pass on the artistic, writing, and musical abilities of her colleagues, and have her opinions stick).

It seems to me that King Banaian has been entirely correct in suggesting that academic freedom is misused if it's invoked to support complaints about one's contract, or complaints about one's department organization or teaching assignments. Prof. O'Connor cites KC Johnson as a sympathetic example of an academic freedom case, but Johnson differs in the important respect that he kept his job, and he kept it via the due process operation of the academy. Johnson was also sympathetic; Day is arguably terminally naive, while Gerard is arguably a spoiled brat. Interested lay people are not going to "kick and scream and write and reason" over cases like these. A big reason is that they bring too much real-world experience of how people behave, reasonably and unreasonably, to their appreciation of these things.

I certainly can't sympathize with an attitude that says everyone in the academy, no matter how junior, should have his or her preferences and wishes accommodated. The real world isn't like that, and academic reform, if it occurs, will likely move in the direction of recognizing what the rest of the world is like, as it is already doing over issues like student-faculty "consensual" affairs.

More Fodder for the Inner Contrarian!

Critical Mass has posted another faculty termination dispute, this one covering Nona Gerard, an Associate Professor of Theater at Penn State Altoona, who is accused of various behaviors, ranging from disparaging colleagues to staging nudity to refusing to cooperate with PSA academic programs. Most pertinent, it seems to me, is a passage from a newspaper article to which Prof. O'Connor links in her piece, citing an e-mail to her Dean ". . . telling him she would no longer direct or be involved in any theater productions at the school. . . . Two months later, she received notice that her alleged misconduct could lead to her dismissal."

Again, pointing to equivalent situations in the private sector, refusal to do one's job or refusal of instructions is insubordination, cause for a quick, escorted walk out the door. I believe the conditions under which a tenured professor can be terminated are basically abandonment of position -- in other words, not showing up for work -- or conviction for a felony. A written refusal by a Theater professor to direct or be involved in the school's productions sounds like a refusal to do the work, probably close enough to abandonment of position, and while the overall situation isn't completely clear in the accounts to which Prof. O'Connor links, it sounds as though a termination would be justified, given those facts.

I simply don't know what other professional canons apply to the case. It appears that the PSA administration is also bringing in a lot of documentary evidence that Gerard was what might be politely called a piece of work. As happened in the Peter Kirstein case, where a History professor was disciplined for issuing publicly demeaning statements to an Air Force Academy cadet, there may be seldom-enforced professional canons regarding the type of statements a professor is entitled to make. Kirstein was not ". . . free to issue 'demeaning, degrading statements as a professor in or outside the classroom,'" said the president of Kirstein's university.

The Penn State Altoona Dean's allegations include:

He said Gerard's actions led to the early retirement of one faculty member and the resignation of a co-coordinator of the IA program.

"In a flurry of e-mails in 2001 and 2002, she openly states that our faculty are not qualified to teach IA, makes accusatory and derogatory remarks to and about the IA faculty and states that 'I still cannot support this degree and would not encourage students to enroll in it,' " Cale wrote.

Unlike the situation with Robert Day at Cumberland College, which I discuss below, Prof. Gerard is receiving full due process. The points that strike me as key are what appear to be outright refusal to perform her duties, as well as written statements, like those of Peter Kirstein, that are probably out of professional bounds. Gerard is represented by what appear to be well-paid counsel, who are, interestingly, trying the case in the press.

Critical Mass frequently brings up what appear to me to be marginal issues focusing on close (or even, as perhaps may be the case here, easy) tenure decisions, often, it appears to me, expressing sympathy for some very unsympathetic characters. This isn't where academic reform is going to come from -- we interested lay observers simply don't want to hear about dog-in-the-manger profs and those who take absolutist positions on the tenure entitlement. A much more welcome approach to academic reform, it seems to me, would be to recognize that professional canons specifying courtesy to the public and to colleagues are valuable and should increasingly be enforced. In addition, cases where professors are in fact receiving due process, and where the facts suggest that fairly flagrant misconduct may be taking place, are probably very bad candidates for stirring up sympathy and indignation on the matter of tenure.

It's worth recognizing that interested observers who participate in university affairs through channels like blogging or alumni activities, but who are subject to private-sector job conditions, aren't likely to look favorably on cases where professors expect a lifetime-job entitlement under the same conditions that, in private industry, would lead to a quick and fully justified termination.

Academic Freedom and My Inner Contrarian

A few days ago, Critical Mass raised the issue of "a website posted on October 6, 2003, by Robert Day, then an assistant professor of Social Work" at "Cumberland College, a small Baptist institution in Kentucky". Day put up a web site that advocated reforms at Cumberland College, including various financial reforms and a review of the college's mission statement. For this, the president of the college called him in and received his resignation a week after the web site went up.

King Banaian at SCSU-Scholars picked this up on Friday as well. At first glance, this might seem like a potential academic freedom issue not far removed from the Scopes Monkey Trial: the AAUP should, we feel, swat those bad boys at Cumberland College down. They probably handle snakes in their religious services, after all, and those holy-rollers can't deal with a reasonable appeal for financial reform.

This is one of those areas where, after a career spent largely in the private sector under the conditions that real-world private sector workers have to put up with, I have a hard time working up the proper level of sympathy for Robert Day, or indignation at his treatment. I've been a contrarian on this issue ever since I posted in the comments section of Critical Mass, and my inner contrarian continues to speak out. Tenured professors, you're all free to click to some other site here while I go on!

First, Prof. O'Connor points out that Day is an assistant professor. An assistant professor is, of course, not tenured. If he had been tenured, it would be much harder for any institution to fire him for putting up a web site of almost any sort. However, an assistant professor is in the "probationary" category. The AAUP Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure says that "[d]uring the probationary period a teacher should have the academic freedom that all other members of the faculty have." However, this seems contradictory to me. In general, a "probationary" employee is subject to more stringent standards than a "non-probationary" employee in any field.

In fact, human resources departments in the private sector have frequently dropped "probationary" periods, as they are now felt to give employees the mistaken impression that if you pass your "probationary" period, you are a "permanent" employee, essentially "tenured". In other words, the employer wants to avoid giving the impression that if you consistently overstay your lunch break while "probationary", you can be fired, but if you do it while "permanent", you can't. But the AAUP does use the term "probationary", and to an outside observer, this gives the unavoidable impression that an assistant professor can be fired for reasons other than those for a tenured professor.

In fact, I think the AAUP's statement is somewhat circular. A tenured professor must be given academic freedom. On the other hand, so must a probationary professor. So what's the difference between a tenured and a probationary professor? A reading of the policy suggests that, after lengthy hearings and peer review, you can in fact sack a probationary professor, but this would presumably take months, and probably would not be done for an offense like putting up a web site critical of the college.

It seems to me that, as a practical matter, assistant professors are normally much more circumspect than the AAUP policy would suggest. Jeffrey Hart, a Senior Editor of the National Review, recounted in his book When the Going Was Good his very real fear, in the supposedly McCarthyite 1950s, that, while he was an assistant professor at Columbia, other professors would find out that he was sending articles to that conservative publication and make an adverse decision on his tenure. Why should Hart have been worried? The AAUP, after all, said he should be subject to the same academic freedom provisions as a tenured faculty member!

I suspect that assistant professors, whatever the stated policy, have always acted under the assumption that their actual expectation of academic freedom protection is so much tommyrot. An assistant professor who does something controversial, unless he or she is confident of protection from specific higher-ups, is naturally going to have tenure problems. In this regard, I tend to question Day's judgment.

A private sector employee who puts up a web site and identifies her or himself as an employee of the XYZ Company and says the XYZ Company needs financial and administrative reform, including a review of its mission statement, is skating on very thin ice indeed. This is generally understood. People now and then do it -- there are whistleblowers, for instance -- but they usually recognize that in doing such a thing, they will be fired, and will probably not be employable afterward by any other employer. This is a simple fact of life.

In general a private-sector employer who fires an employee for putting up a web site critical of the employer can make that termination stick -- the employee is fired for disloyalty, pure and simple, and under private sector "at will" employment conditions, that's plenty good enough. I suspect that Cumberland College can also make that termination stick from a legal standpoint, considering that Day was a "probationary" employee. I see no basis for a sense of injustice here. The guy was working in the rural Southeast at a religious school, and whatever one's abstract views of justice and academic freedom, a strong sense of reality seems to have been missing in this case.

According to Critical Mass, Day is now suing Cumberland for "constructive dismissal, tort of outrage, and defamation". This would be an indication that Day didn't have specific protection in his employment contract against violations of academic freedom -- these are terms, according to my attorney wife, under which most people who've been fired sue, alleging in effect that they were working under bad conditions, and the employer treated them badly when they were fired. "Tort of outrage" is a variation of "intentional infliction of emotional distress" and requires a very high standard of outrageousness (one real-life example would be strip-searching the employee in front of a customer) -- calling someone into the office and saying "quit or be fired" doesn't reach this level.

In fact, to my wife, the issues described look like any garden-variety suit from a terminated worker, the kind of thing an employer might normally settle for a token amount to make the plaintiff go away. Day, significantly, doesn't raise whistleblower, freedom-of-speech, or off-duty conduct issues in the suit as described. In the normal employment-law environment here, Day is pretty much nailed.

One issue that concerns me is the suggestion on the academic blogs cited here that Day may be entitled to a greater level of protection from his own quixotic poor judgment than some non-academic employee who was fired for the same thing. I could sympathize if the Baptists were firing Day for teaching evolution, or birth control, or tolerance of gays, or whatever else -- but it's nothing so noble. He's been fired for doing the things that any TA or adjunct would have the good sense to avoid, it seems to me, because they know the AAUP won't waste its time with them. In fact most assistant professors would have the good judgment to avoid putting up a web site saying anything controversial about their institution, especially in the Bible Belt, at least until they got tenure.

Additional information may come to light that changes my view, but I think we can interpret this under the available facts, not necessarily as an academic freedom issue, but an issue in which some professors apparently feel that even probationary members of their guild are entitled to a level of protection from their own actions that ordinary citizens don't receive. I can't endorse this attitude.

UPDATE: King Banaian has additional comments responding to my post, and as he mentions below, Douglas Bass also has a post. This thing has been on and off my mind for several days, and I'm happy to see that academics King and Douglas don't see this as a clear-cut situation, though they naturally come at it from their own perspectives.

Here are some additional concerns that I bring to the problem. First, why did it fall to an assistant professor to take up the cause of fiscal responsibility and whatever else at Cumberland College? Where was the tenured faculty here? I can certainly imagine myself in a situation like Day's, but as I struggled with what to do, certainly one piece of the puzzle in my mind would be the apparent inaction by more senior members of the faculty, administration, alumni community, and so forth. I can't apply my own criteria to someone else, but I can imagine a final sleepless night among many in which it dawns on me, suspiciously like a message from the Almighty, that perhaps I'm not called to be at Cumberland College at this time, that there might be better ways for me to spend my energy when it appears that action on my part will simply get me squashed like a bug.

Day's predicament may also, of course, be a kind of self-sacrifice not much different from the archetypical Christian self-sacrifice, and it may have good results, but we have yet to see this. But let's assume the best from the current circumstances: the controversy results in publicity and prompts the needed reforms at Cumberland: Day's self-sacrifice is the perfect type of Christian example. (On reflection, though, the cookie-cutter, overblown "tort of outrage" lawsuit militates against this interpretation of Day's motives.) But if Day had been given the protection of AAUP policies on academic freedom, would there have been the same publicity? The gospels, for that matter, detail the extra-judicial processes and kangaroo court by which the Founder was convicted and crucified. Had Pilate played the role of a Clarence Darrow and gotten the defendant before him off with a plea bargain, what would have been the consequence for all subsequent history?

Actually I mean this as more than a sophistical question. One major difficulty I have with tenure as a concept, not just in the academy but in civil service and elsewhere, is that it insulates people from risk. Risk means the real possibility of failure. If you're insulated from risk, your chances of "failing" are relative at the very best: your treatise on deconstructing Fichte won't receive the stellar reviews you'd wished, and that's it. This gets back to the question of where the tenured faculty were at Cumberland College if they let an assistant professor take the risk of publicizing the problems. They were, I assume, risk-averse to a fault. An assistant professor risks, and gets, summary dismissal; they stay on the Dean's good side. Maybe they'll all get raises as a result of this -- no harm there -- but on the other hand, nobody will snub them at faculty meetings, either. Best possible outcome, as far as they're concerned.

The problem with tenure is that it insulates people from economic messages -- as I've commented elsewhere, it interests me that so many of the tenured professors I knew in graduate school were probably, in retrospect, half in the bag all day -- and also from similar spiritual messages. Is this what I should be doing with the rest of my life? Who cares -- I've got a no-cut contract here at Podunk U! Where Day is lucky is that he's gotten his wake-up call that this is probably not where he will be most effective in his life, and issues of tenure and risk-avoidance won't obscure the message.

Space Story

In light of W's intent to send us back into space, coming with Charles Krauthammer's exhortation to regain our nerve over interplanetary exploration, I should discuss the closest I ever came, or likely will ever come, to space travel: a job interview at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena.

When you see it, JPL is a surprisingly uninspiring place. It looks like a down-at-the-heels middle school with badly maintained grounds, set in a none-too-good residential neighborhood. It's also a bad sign when you go to an interview, and they make you wait well past your appointment. The place has tight security, and they left me in the lobby, with a receptionist coming out several times explaining they had to get a lot of people together for the interview, and she was still working on it.

Finally they brought me into a conference room with half a dozen people in it. One of the features of job interviews for high-security aerospace companies is that you often don't know exactly what the job is, and this was the case here. It turned out that one of the people in the room was the person who was supposed to be doing the job I was interviewing for, but he "needed help". It didn't take much discussion for me to conclude that the job was pretty easy and could be done in a short time by anyone who knew what she was doing, but this guy didn't really have a clue. So they were going to bring someone in to "help" him, and I was a candidate.

Partway into the interview another JPL staff member came into the room. He was in fact something straight out of Dilbert, a bearded, sandal-wearing guru type, an expert on everything. This was the guy they'd apparently all been waiting for; the first part of the meeting was just chit-chat as far as they were concerned.

The guru started out clearly put off that I worked at Digital Discipline Technologies. "DDT, huh?" he asked. "You guys think you know a lot, don't you?" I gave a noncommittal mumble; as far as I was concerned, the guys at DDT were bumblers like everyone else. But the JPL guru had a chip on his shoulder.

"Quickly," he said, "can you give me an explanation of the Boolean least-sums algorithm as it would apply to decrypting a public key message header?" or something like that. It had nothing to do with what I was interviewing for.

"I'm not sure if I'm in the right place," I said. "I didn't know that was part of your job requirement." I could see this thing going down the toilet in a hurry.

The guru kept up with several more questions like it, then got up in disgust and left the room. The other half-dozen stayed put. Finally the guy who was supposed to be the big boss, the hiring manager, spoke up tentatively. "Well," he said, "did any of that have anything to do with the job we're interviewing for here?"

The others were uncertain. The clueless guy who "needed help" finally murmured, "Not really." But it was plain that, with the interview turning out that way, there was nowhere else they could take things.

"I'm sorry I wasted your time," I said, and got up and left.

I certainly offer JPL my congratulations on the Mars lander success this week. But if we're going to regain our nerve and get back to exploring space, we're going to need something more than apparently is at JPL right now.

UPDATE: Via Daniel W. Drezner, I see Rand Simberg is also saying, "Unfortunately, there's no evidence that NASA has been, or can be, reformed sufficiently to entrust it with such a project." Based on my own little glimpse, this is my feeling exactly. We are in fact capable of being inspired and doing great things, but there's a basic conflict between that and petty, cover-your-butt bureaucracies too timid to fire or reassign people without the basic skills to do their jobs.

The effort by the US and its military to win World War II required, at the start, a major overhaul of the armed services, with incompetent officers being identified and removed in droves. I really think any exercise of major national purpose will require the same sort of resolve and the same sort of effort, such that a credible start of a manned Mars mission would imply that all the JPL folks I met in that conference room, and all others like them, would no longer be employed there.

UPDATE: This post, and my comment on Rand Simberg's site pointing to it (this is how you get traffic with a new blog!) have generated by far the most visits and comments I've had here. I got an e-mail from Brent Ware that says,

I'm sorry that you had such a bad experience at your JPL interview. However, it bore no resemblance to the two interviews that I had there (one after my postdoc in 1999, the result of which ended in my not being offered a job - budget cuts, they said; the other of which did end up in my being offered a job, which I accepted in 2002). Both my interviews were all-day affairs in which I met individually with the people that I would be working with, for an average of an hour each. The technical questions I was asked were directly related to the work I would be doing, unlike my experiences at (the old) HP, Qualcomm, and a couple of other industry places where my experience was more like yours. Having interviewed several people myself since then for JPL, I believe that for scientific positions, my experience is pretty representative.

I would think that for a mission like the Spirit rover to succeed as it appears to have done so far, almost flawlessly, there would clearly need to be substantial numbers of competent people at JPL. My interview was in the data processing area, probably not what Brent would have called a "scientific" position. On the other hand, the comment I've had below suggests that others see some resonance in the experience I've recounted here, and Brent himself has clearly had other high-tech experiences that show the field overall is full of hangers-on and others who feel entitled to have competent people carry them -- and indeed, then get their jollies by humiliating competent folks who unwittingly show up for interviews.

Brent and the other competent people at JPL have my best wishes and, again, my congratulations. I certainly hope NASA can leverage off its good people to move ahead in the future, as it will certainly need to do this if we're to send manned missions to Mars.

George W. Bush and American Humor

I found the following in my e-mail last night:

Bush and Osama decided to settle the war once and for all. They sat down and decided to settle the whole dispute with one dog fight. They would have 5 years to breed the best fighting dog in the world and whichever side's dog won would be entitled to dominate the world.

Osama found the biggest, meanest Doberman and Rottweiler female dogs in the world and bred them with the meanest Siberian wolves. They selected only the biggest and strongest puppy from the litter, and removed his siblings, which gave him all the milk. After 5 years, they came up with the biggest, meanest dog the world had ever seen. Its cage needed steel bars that were 5 " thick and nobody could get near it.

When the day came for the dog fight, Bush showed up with a strange looking animal. It was a 9 foot long Dachshund. Everyone felt sorry for Bush because there was no way that this dog could possibly last 10 seconds with the Afghanistani dog. When the cages were opened up, the Dachshund came out of its cage, and slowly waddled over towards Osama's dog. Osama's dog snarled and leaped out of its cage and charged the American Dachshund---but when it got close enough to bite, the Dachshund opened its mouth and consumed Osama's dog in one bite. There was nothing left of his dog at all.

Osama came up to Bush, shaking his head in disbelief, "We don't understand how this could have happened. We had our best people working for 5 years with the meanest Doberman and Rottweiler female dogs in the world and the biggest, meanest Siberian wolves."

"That's nothing,” said Bush. "We had Michael Jackson's plastic surgeons working for 5 years to make that alligator look like a wiener dog."

This is a non-political blog, so my interest in this joke is as a literary artifact, and what fascinates me about it is its thematic similarity to Mark Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calveras County", which you may have read many years ago but certainly ought to revisit via this link. Mark Twain's narrator is tracking down an enterprising frontiersman named Jim Smiley (trying, he says, to get background on his possibly non-existent son, a "Reverend Leonidas W. Smiley"), and through a garrulous town drunk learns about several of Smiley's schemes to win bets on animals.

The most notable of these schemes, of course, is the trained frog, a "sure thing" bet on which Smiley nevertheless loses because the other gambler fills the frog with bird shot before the contest. Smiley earlier loses a bet on a dog fight when his runt bulldog (named Andrew Jackson), which normally wins fights by seizing on the other dog's hind leg and never letting go, is put into a fight with a dog without hind legs, having lost them in a sawmill accident.

I have a suspicion that Mark Twain found a series of jokes already in currency and polished them up a little for his story, and the joke about George W. Bush and the nine foot long dachshund must be a distant descendant of such jokes. Notice how W is able to fit into the characterizations of such a joke as the deadpan bumpkin who somehow outsmarts the con artist. Notice the persistence of certain flyover-country American attitudes -- the foreigner, the city slicker, isn't so smart after all. We Americans can sometimes masquerade as dummies and still win bets (aided, then as now, by serendipitous use of technology!).

Some days it feels especially good to be an American.

UPDATE: As you can see in the comments on this post, I've had my first troll, which I guess is a milestone of sorts. When I was thinking this post through during a waking patch in the middle of the night, I originally thought I would add something about who might and might not find this joke funny. (It didn't send me into guffaws, but I think it has great appeal.) I thought probably Englishmen, with exceptions, but certainly Frenchmen and Germans might not find it very funny at all. Italians and Austrians might -- I had a visit from Austria today, though didn't get any feedback on the joke. Czechs and Poles, I thought, might like it a lot. Clearly my troll didn't find it funny at all; he seemed to think it was evidence that "W cheated".

Of course "W cheated." This is a joke, guy. It's supposed to be funny that the deadpan bumpkin cheats the wise-guy foreigner. "W" is a character in a joke, a popular type of humorous story that often displays and relieves underlying social tensions, in part via trenchant but not fully respectable insights into common assumptions. Some people see this, and apparently a few don't. Sigh.

A Case Study in Offshore Computing

There's been a fair amount of comment lately on sending professional, "knowledge-based" jobs offshore to places like India and China. I'm all for free trade, and in principle I have nothing against work going where it can be done most efficiently.
However, I've seen several offshore computing projects up close, and as far as I can see, they compound many of the difficulties that are formidable enough in trying to manage IT when everyone's working in the same place.

The one that comes to mind right away is at Digital Discipline Technologies, the company I was working for in my earlier post here "War Stories -- I" (there are plenty more war stories to come, by the way). For reasons that in a corporation are almost always completely obscure, we were trying to install a product in California, but a group of people in England had created both the install procedure and the diskettes we had to use for the physical installation.

The people in the UK had everything all worked out. If you put the diskette in the drive and typed "a: install", it put everything on the system just the way it should, and it rebooted the system, just the way a techie would think it should do. They'd tested it over and over in their lab, on every possible machine, and it worked like a champ. No mistakes. They had a detailed written procedure with checkoffs that you had to follow to the letter. Assuming you'd done everything the way they said, put the diskette in the floppy drive, type in the install command, and checked off all the steps, you'd have a perfect job. No excuse for anything to go wrong.

The problem was that they'd added that last step of rebooting the system. Those of us doing the installs in California were putting this product on servers, not little desktops. Companies don't just reboot servers they way you reboot a desktop. A server is a larger system that often controls functions people need to use all day at work, like a data base or e-mail or the office network.

If you reboot a server, you stop its function until it reboots, and the result isn't predictable, so not only might you interrupt the company's CEO just as he tries to send an important e-mail, but you knock the people taking the orders from the 800 number off, too, and they stand to lose real money because their system went down. Basic truth: You do not reboot a server just like that in the real world. The result is, more often than not, some very angry high-level people, all wanting to know why you made the system go down.

Servers may in fact go weeks or even months between reboots. If the server is reliable, there's no reason to reboot it except for periodic maintenance, and if a company runs 24/7, any reboot is an inconvenience. So reboots are carefully scheduled. You can't go into an Information Systems operations group and just say, "Hi, I've got a diskette here, can we run this and reboot the server?" Often you have to go to a meeting where you explain and justify what you're going to do, and they give you a date, days or weeks out, where they'll schedule you in.

Apparently, of the group of techies in the lab in the UK, nobody understood this, and they'd worked the whole install procedure out so it required a reboot, when technically you didn't need to reboot -- the product worked just fine as soon as it was installed. So we got the final install package via Fed Ex from the UK with the instructions and diskettes, and everything looked good.

"John, could you just run this once on your laptop to see how it works?" asked my boss.

I did. Everything worked fine until the system rebooted. "It works fine, but it reboots the system when it's done," I said.

"What's wrong with that?" asked my boss. I want to focus on the problems of working internationally on computer projects here, so I won't belabor the issue of needing to explain basic data processing to your boss, who theoretically is supposed to know more than you do, and certainly thinks he does. After half a day, I convinced him there was a problem.

We were budgeted to spend about two weeks doing all the installs on all the servers, which meant we'd have to so something like 30 or 40 servers a day. There was no way we were going to be able to get the customer to agree to reboot 30 or 40 servers a day on no notice. And the problem was, we didn't need to, since if the guys in the UK had known about the problem, they could have set things up so the install diskette didn't reboot the server.

"Call the guys in the UK and see what they can do," said my boss. Here I discovered two basic problems inherent in offshore computer work.

Time Zones California is eight hours behind the UK. In other words, if it's 9 AM in California, it's 5 PM in the UK. Just when you might have gotten through your phone messages and e-mail when you get in, the guys in the UK are heading out the door. (And consider how much worse it is if you've got to work with people in India or China.) Add to this the fact that I was calling the UK about a mistake they'd made (I didn't put it that way, of course, but no matter how I put it, it was something they'd have to fix). They had no incentive to return the call with any urgency, so we pretty much lost a day with every step in phone tag.

National Character I'm not going to look up the exact derivation or wording of the observation that the US and the UK are two countries divided by a common language, because the more experience I have working with UK people, the more I realize "language" is really a metaphorical abbreviation for a great deal else. Tocqueville warned his readers not to make the mistaken assumption that Americans were just a subtype of Englishmen. He understood better than many since that the first Anglo-American settlers left England for very good reasons, and a century and a half later, their descendants kicked the English out for reasons just as good. Indeed, there are places from Ireland to India that have been just as glad to see the backsides of Englishmen, and I can deeply appreciate such feelings.

I found that once the UK lab folks deigned to return the call from the rustic, unlettered Yank, their attitude was simply that the procedure must be executed exactly as they had specified. It had been thoroughly tested. It had been fully approved. Why were we even bothering to question them? I was wasting their time. That was that, as far as they were concerned.

Each of these exchanges wasted a day. And my boss was too frightened to tell his boss about the problem. "We're not here to have problems," he told me. "We're here to get things done. And you -- you're not thinking outside the box."

Actually, I had been thinking outside the box. "I do have an idea," I told him.

"What?" he asked.

"Before they finished the install program, someone gave me a copy of the diskette without the reboot step. It's exactly the same as the official one they've sent from the UK, but it doesn't reboot the system. It's just something I had in my laptop. But we can use it instead."

Oddly, even though I'd been thinking outside the box, my boss's face turned black. "I'd have to get approval to use your copy," he said. "We're not here to tell the higher-ups about problems. We're here to get the job done. You're not thinking outside the box."

Since I'd already spent half a day explaining basic data processing to the guy several days earlier, I despaired of ever getting through to him. "OK," I said. "I'll try to think of something else. But I can't think of anything really quick right now. And remember that they think we're doing these installs already. Time is running out."

"I think we've got a problem with your attitude," said my boss, and I could see my days with DDT growing short.

But the next morning he came in a changed man. "I got to thinking last night," he told me. "I was trying to write down all the things you were doing wrong." Of course he was, he was going to get me fired. "But I couldn't figure out what you were doing wrong. 'Why is John wrong?' I kept asking. Then I realized that our only chance of getting this thing done is to use the copy of the program you have that doesn't reboot the system." Actually, he liked me after that, but I got laid off later that year anyhow.

In the meantime, the UK group had not taken well to my calls discussing the problem with reboots, and they'd gone up through their chain of command complaining about me. What really ticked them off was that, in an effort to shorten the one-day phone tag cycle, I had one of their managers paged after hours. The result was that my higher-ups sent a long and detailed memo to me and my boss outlining the proper procedure for referring technical issues to the UK group. "Don't take it too seriously," said my boss. I think at some point, to cover his rear end, he did tell his boss that we'd used an unofficial, unapproved version of the program to do the work. I mentioned this to his boss in my annual appraisal. The guy's face didn't quite turn black, but it turned a shade of gray. "I wouldn't call that solution a success," he said. "If it was anything, it was a qualified success." And of course, they laid me off not long after that.

F. Todd Weatherbee

In a post just below, I mentioned my old freshman comp chair, F. Todd Weatherbee, who I remember primarily for his favorite saying, "If you think literature makes good men, just look at the people in the English Department." Todd (not his real name, of course) was in the English Department too. I'm not sure how he exempted himself from his own observation, but I'm almost certain he did mean it not to apply to himself. And despite his opinion, he succeeded about as well as one can succeed in an English Department; the last I checked, he'd been promoted to an endowed chair. His colleagues must certainly have known about his attitude toward them, yet somehow this never stood in the way of his advancement.

Todd did differ from the typical English professor in several ways. He came from rural Utah and made no secret of his Mormon background, though he was a jack Mormon, which is to say a Mormon who smoked and drank. In fact, he kept a bottle of sherry in his bottom desk drawer, from which he tippled frequently during meetings with his teaching assistants. Todd's specialty was "composition", an intellectual sibling to what's taught in education schools, where you master not a field itself, but how to teach a field. A "composition" specialist didn't specialize in writing, he specialized in teaching writing.

In fact, "composition" was the only specialty where someone with a Ph.D. from that English department could hope to get a decent job. One day it dawned on a classmate in my advanced eighteenth century seminar that she wasn't going to get anywhere with Christopher Smart or Fanny Burney; she quickly changed her specialty to "composition" and had an Assistant Professor job at Michigan before she'd finished her dissertation. That was Weatherbee's, and the university's, reputation in that field. Those who stuck with specialties like eighteenth century at that school (which might charitably be called "top-50") were driving taxis and flipping burgers.

The first year or two that I was a TA, the chair of the freshman comp committee was just an associate prof out of the utility pool. The teaching guide, syllabus, and texts were straightforward Aristotelian rhetoric, not what I'd learned as an undergraduate, but I liked the sense of rigor, and the guy in charge was easygoing and sympathetic to the TAs' problems. Then somehow Weatherbee decided that, since he was an expert on "composition", who better could there be to run the freshman comp program? He'd turn it into a model.

Weatherbee followed what might be called the corporate-technocratic paradigm, which was popular in the early 1970s. This consisted mostly of using scientific, especially computer-related, jargon in fields where you wouldn't expect to find it. A student no longer "wrote" a paper, for instance; she "generated" a paper. Weatherbee called us in to long meetings to learn how to teach freshman comp right.

He'd figured out the best way to write a paper: you used "field theory". What you did was write down ideas on slips of paper and push the slips around on your desk until they began to make sense, sort of like refrigerator-magnet poetry kits. So you might have something like "Nick Adams fishing" and "Hemingway laconic style" and "initiation story", or something like that, and you'd push them around on the desktop until you sort of came up with your paper. (I don't know if they still teach Hemingway stories in freshman comp. You can probably substitute something more current if you have to.)

I went home after the session where we learned this particular method of writing, and one question kept eating at me. It assumed that the writer started out in what was basically a state of writer's block, and the point of the exercise was to come up with an idea. But what about real writers? Samuel Johnson didn't write that way. He started with the point he wanted to make about Paradise Lost and went on from there. He didn't need to push pieces of paper around to find out what he wanted to say.

The next morning I went in to Weatherbee, already starting on his office bottle, and asked him about this. "If I write an op-ed for the LA Times," I asked, "don't I already know what point I want to make? I wouldn't even write the piece unless I was trying to convince people, say, that the Foothill Freeway should not be finished. Why are we spending all this effort trying to come up with an idea?"

He gave me the serene, peaceful look of the guy who's got the whole world figured out. "I'm way ahead of you," he said. "Someone who's writing for the LA Times, of course he knows what he wants to write. This is a technique for the classroom, not the LA Times." I'd plain forgotten about the ed-school mentality at work: we were learning about how to teach writing, not learning how to teach people to write. How people actually wrote in the real world was beside the point. As long as people saw that about Weatherbee, they got along just fine.

I went on teaching comp the same old way. With all his new ideas, Weatherbee still hadn't updated the texts or the syllabus, so I just followed the same Aristotelian material that was in them anyhow. And Weatherbee never checked to see what we were doing or visited classes, so it basically didn't matter, except that we had to waste time going to his meetings where he'd tell us how to teach.

One day he called us in to another, special meeting. He'd been doodling ideas the other night, he said, and he suddenly realized there was a way that we could all teach one extra class a semester, but spend fewer hours in teaching. "Bear with me while I explain," he went on, almost trembling with excitement. "This is something that could mean a real breakthrough for all of us." He started calculating on the blackboard, and the secret of his breakthrough was apparent soon enough: he'd decided 3 x 9 was 24. If 3 x 9 was the same as 4 x 6, obviously if we taught four courses a semester we could spend less time in class than if we taught three and still have the same number of units. Or something like that. We TAs just sat and scratched our heads.

I was already on the top of his blacklist, so I finally raised my hand and pointed out that 3 x 9 was actually 27, and if you did the math that way, you'd spend exactly as many more hours in class teaching four courses a semester as you'd expect, and it would be more, not less, than if you taught three. This was a hard sell, because Todd basically didn't trust people who disagreed with him. Finally several other people tentatively raised their hands and agreed with me that 3 x 9 was 27 (there were no pocket calculators back them), and he had to back down. The meeting was over, we weren't going to get a whole new schedule next semester.

In retrospect, I think the problem with Todd was what I might call the "regulated utility" model of freshman comp. As long as freshman comp was a required course, the English Department had a monopoly, a guaranteed high enrollment that justified TAs, graduate faculty, and even slush funds from making every student buy the Plagiarism Guide for $3 at the bookstore. This is no different from the regulated utility that has every ratepayer connected to its meter. There's little incentive to improve the product, because a guaranteed income stream is coming in no matter what. The only motive to the provider is to protect the franchise. The result is complacency.

In an early post here on "Academic Plagiarism and Academic Futility", I mentioned other sessions with Todd where he made it clear that departments like Cinema and Victim Studies were angling to make their introductory courses meet the university's freshman comp requirement. That, of course, would have been the end of the English Department's sweet deal, and in retrospect Todd may have been where he was because he was the unique, obtuse, obstreperous, jargon-spouting bully to keep freshman comp where it belonged, in the English Department. (In fact, a reward for having done so could be the only remotely understandable reason I can think of to have given him an endowed chair.) But in doing so, any consideration that the students should actually get an education was clearly not important.

Interestingly, for all his proclaimed expertise in how to teach writing, Todd never took his own section of freshman comp (I suspect Hemingway would have been a challenge for him, and his favorite remark about literature, good men, and the English Department was his way of dismissing that problem). For all his gimmicks, he never took a serious interest in the problems like plagiarism that the TAs actually had to deal with. Todd's real expertise appears to have been in the various bullying and political skills needed to survive and advance in mid-level university management, and in that he's succeeded.

I doubt if someone like Todd would survive a whole career in private industry. Office tipplers who don't know basic math do appear in the corporate world, but they can't afford infinite mistakes, and if the wrong person finds out about the meeting where 3 times 9 is 24, they're out in a hurry. The issue, it seems to me, is how to change faculty and administrative incentives so that obvious incompetents can be winnowed out in the academic world as well.

Every Link is Retail

Mark Steyn has very kindly printed an excerpt from my post below regarding his epistemological caution on gay marriage in this week's letters column on his site, with a link to my blog here. If you've stopped by looking for it, scroll down to "More on Epistemological Uncertainty" below.

As I've said before, at this stage of blogging, you've got to sell every visit and every link at retail, so I'm very grateful to Mark for pointing visitors in my direction, especially when I disagreed with him.

Student-Professor Sex

Instapundit points to an article in Slate covering student-professor sex. I checked the article out; it's chatty and snarky and mostly takes the position that those who object to student-professor sex are puritanically repressed or victim-wannabes. From what I've seen, this is the most common reaction to developments like the University of California's adoption of a policy proscribing such relationships in many cases. The article, in its overall superficial approach, suggests that other schools are making this move but cites no other actual cases. This was the general view on Critical Mass when the matter was discussed in the comments section; many suggested that those who thought there was something wrong with student-professor sex were simply jealous that profs had made it with their girlfriends, or something like that.

I've always been puzzled at the currency of this view. Most other professions and occupations have definite policies against sex between principals and the people they must work with in positions of power, authority, or trust. A police officer or FBI agent can't have sex with informants or arrestees. A doctor or therapist can't have sex with a patient. Attorneys can't have sex with clients where there's a conflict of interest. The guy who reads the gas meter can't have sex with the lady of the house (check your local utility's policy). Corporate policies increasingly prohibit "consensual" sex between employees where one is in the other's line of authority. Priests who have sex with parishioners normally attract serious scrutiny and various personnel actions.

In fact, "consensual" sex in the corporate world has been subject to evolving legal policy. If a manager has sex with one subordinate, other subordinates may be able to claim sexual harassment, since even if the relationship is "consensual", the one individual is able to bring factors to an appraisal that others might be unwilling to bring, and this creates an unfair situation. I've certainly seen situations where one employee is able to gain access to the boss via pillow-talk that no other employee can get.

In one of those situations, it was the lady in the cube next to mine, who kept posting Heathcliff cartoons on her cube wall. I knew something was going on between her and the boss, but couldn't quite see the point of Heathcliff. Only after I left that job did I discover that a few blocks from work was a Heathcliff Street, on which was a Heathcliff Motel. That lady, before I fully appreciated what was happening, reported the details she gleaned via eavesdropping of every personal phone call I had at work to the boss "after hours".

She, of course, was after my job; when I saw what she brought to the table, I got out of there; not long afterward she and the boss were both fired. This kind of thing, it seems to me, can poison the whole atmosphere of a workplace -- or a graduate department. Instapundit links to a post on Crescat Sententia detailing an extraordinarily petty and complex kerfluffle over relationships at ". . . a certain prestigious midwestern university's English Department, as revealed to me by a gossipy, disgruntled grad student in the program."

My biggest reaction to this is that these folks have altogether too much time on their hands, first doing the hanky-pank, then putting up web sites about it. Instapundit asks, "So why don't those people seem more cheerful?" (I'm reminded of a favorite saying of F. Todd Weatherbee, my old freshman comp chair, "If you think literature makes good men, just look at the people in the English Department.")

In fact, "consensual" intramural sex among graduate students and professors has much of the implications of "consensual" sex in the corporate cube environment: some students can bring more to the table than brilliant term papers. This inherently discriminates against students who don't want to play the game in that fashion. I would have to say that there's little wonder that the atmosphere in departments where this behavior is common is so poor, and that disgruntlement would play itself out in the way it does in these cases.

There are certainly those who will say, "that's how things are, get over it," but luckily, we don't all necessarily have to take orders from those folks. If we define "petty corruption" in part as circumstances that allow hiring, grading, and promotional decisions to be made on a basis other than merit, "consensual" sex in the workplace, including the academic workplace, fosters corruption, and people who can point to specific cases and feel entitled to remedies are fully within their rights.

If the collective judgment of faculties -- especially, it would appear, humanities-department faculties -- is so poor, they're beginning to forfeit whatever benefit of the doubt they might get from academic independence. The problems that result from intramural "consensual" sex are no different from those that arise in other professional and workplace environments. I'm all for every faculty policy that brings a university into the real world over this problem.

Jobs, Downsizing, Outsourcing, and Chance

Via Instapundit, I found a long discussion by Kim du Toit giving his advice on what to do if you think your job is going to be sent overseas. This for me is a little like the flash of recognition some people get when big media does a story on a subject with which they're familiar. I've worked on projects that did pilot studies of offshore computer programming, and my wife and I have seen our own jobs disappear for one reason or another many times between us.

As a new blogger, I get the feeling that it's not good etiquette to criticize another blog directly, so I won't. I'll just give a short form of my take on the subject Kim discusses.

First, there are many ways for jobs to disappear besides being sent offshore, and Kim does mention some of them. The company can simply decide it has too many people, and it lays off several thousand. The company can decide it's cheaper to operate in another part of the US, and they give everyone the option to move or be fired. The company can move jobs offshore. The company can go out of business.

The bottom line here is that life is uncertain. There are in fact various jobs where this is less likely to happen, such as civil service jobs (which are often great plums to certain kinds of people) and teaching jobs. Some jobs in private industry, like utilities, used to be this way, but economic reality is bearing in, and people are discovering that a "lifetime" cushy deal with the electric company doesn't pan out the way it used to. Kim du Toit's advice to learn a trade before you go into white collar work isn't actually what many people do: they get safe white collar jobs from the start, working at the school district or the fire department or the sanitation bureau.

That in fact is much better advice. Despite what Kim says, most people who work in areas like the building trades aren't paid comparably to professional people, and even if they do know how to lay floor tile, most people wouldn't be able just to give up a computer programmer's job to lay tile and still make the nut. Despite Kim's optimistic examples, it doesn't work that way. People who want security should go for the teaching credential or study up for the civil service exam.

In my own experience, civil service jobs can be a hell on earth. If you have any kind of initiative or imagination, you'll go stir crazy. I worked for the Los Angeles statistical analysis office for a time after I left graduate school; now, every time I take a cab, I see the signature of one of my former co-workers on every taxi driver's permit. Several years ago, looking at options, I took the LA City civil service exam for senior programmer and, to my surprise, came in number one on the list with the top score. The pay was so low compared to what I could get in private industry that it was going to be a last resort. But I found in the interview process for each opening that the internal candidates had the system so completely gamed that there was no way someone coming from outside, no matter how high the exam score, was going to get one of those jobs.

Chance is one element in life. If you're so frightened of losing a job or an income that you feel you need to plan your life around it, there are options where you can lock things in about as well as that can be done. But there are other tradeoffs -- if you're a person with any kind of talent or initiative, you're not going to be happy working with people who lack those qualities, and you're better off recognizing that talent and initiative are gifts you have that can get you through the unpredictable times.

I also tend to disagree that doing what I think Kim recommends -- low-balling, relying on manual labor job skills if you're capable of more -- is a good strategy for dealing with unpredictable environments. Trying to run your whole life based on the possibility that something could go wrong is a kind of slow spiritual suicide. Things will go wrong, count on it. The point is to take each day as it comes and use your gifts to get through it.

John Updike, The News Hour, and Jack the Ripper

I outgrew John Updike around the time I was old enough to vote. I thought his early short stories were good when I was a teenager, but not for long afterward. I could never get into his novels, which all seem to be soft-core pornography. Then about 15 years ago I saw a photo in a magazine of Updike with William Styron (what a fix we're in if this is all we can find for literary figures), and the two had expressions on their faces as though they'd just high-fived each other for putting over some big scam. My first reaction was disgust that they were getting away with it, and my second reaction was gratitude that, as an English major, I'd nevertheless been able to find work that was less dishonest than writing.

The next time I saw Updike was on this past Monday's The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, in an interview with Jeffrey Brown on a new collection of those early stories I outgrew. He looked awfully good for 71, and I couldn't help wondering if he'd had plastic surgery. I added that to the way he talked in the interview -- for instance:

I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality. I also read a lot of mystery novels, and my few attempts to begin a mystery novel fell apart. So I was stuck from my own limits, really, with middle- class... middle-class life, or the mundane, let's call it, and so I was just trying to, story by story, encapsulate some aspect of life as I was experiencing it or observing it.

Real people don't talk like this. Real writers don't talk like this. Only people who've spent their lives trying to sound like they think Henry James would sound talk like this. He "rather liked it." Good grief. This guy is a little like the plastic automatons they have at the Disney parks, but those are honest, because you know they're not really pirates or Abraham Lincoln, they're clever robots. John Updike comes across as someone who's doing everything he can to come across as a Great Writer, but won't acknowledge that he's just a poor imitation.

I did some traveling over the holdays, which meant airplane reading, and by a strange serendipity found a recent book by Partricia Cornwell, Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed. My impression is that the whole subject was a little too big for Cornwell to get her arms around, but she argues for an English impressionist painter, Walter Sickert ("the best English painter since Constable" is one opinion in the book), as the most likely Ripper suspect. The strongest part of her case, which she substantiates with paper and handwriting analysis, is that while the police at the time thought most of the hundreds of "Ripper letters" taunting the police were frauds, it's likely that most were in fact written by one person, and that person was likely the murderer. How peculiar that some appear to have been written with a paintbrush, or have handwriting and other features similar to Sickert.

We'll likely never have a good idea who Jack the Ripper was, at least until better DNA analysis comes along, but Cornwell's fragmentary discussion of Sickert as an artist nevertheless led me down some interesting paths. Sickert's art is often creepy. Cornwell points to similarities among faces in Sickert sketches to the faces in Ripper crime-scene photos, as well as Sickert's fascination with the East London scene of music halls and prostitution that the Ripper inhabited.

The biggest artistic problem I see with Sickert is that there's no sympathy, no moral sense to his paintings. One of of his best-known, Ennui, which was done in multiple versions, is described in the book as follows:

[A} bored older man sits at a table, his cigar lit, a tall glass of what I assume to be beer in front of him. He stares off, deep in thought and completely uninterested in the woman behind him, leaning against a dresser, her head resting on her hand as she gazes unhappily at stuffed doves under a glass dome.

(I found a small image of the painting online here) My problem with this painting is that it's little more than a sideshow exhibit. These people, apparently middle-class, are bored with life and each other. Update their clothing and the "mundane details", and they'd be Updike characters, stuck in their middle-class lives, in fact skewered like butterflies on entomological pins. Updike would have the brand name of the beer prominently displayed, and perhaps a paper or television set displaying news about Khrushchev, but the spirit is there, and it's exactly the same.

I get this sense in Updike's story "A & P" that he discusses at some length in the News Hour interview. It covers a young man who quits his job as a supermarket checkout clerk when the manager complains about two young women who've come into the store dressed in bathing suits. Updike says of his story,

. . . also you get a glimpse of the adult life that he has momentarily put at risk; that is, the Lengels [the manager] of the world, face grimly going through the necessary task of manning the slot that he has abandoned, and then the vision of married life, of the young mother with her squalling, greedy, candy- crazed child out on the hot parking lot.

So in a way he's saying hold off to all this, and he's in a kind of limbo. But he does feel, yes, that the world, the world does not forgive easily. It won't forgive a quitter. He has become a quitter, a quixotic quitter, you could say.

This is potentially a complex story. The kid who quits his job is naturally doing it for quixotic and wildly impractical reasons, but my inclination is to be interested in this kid and to sympathize with him. How in fact will these instincts of his play themselves out in the future? Is there hope for someone like this? What puzzles me about the News Hour interview here is that these questions don't seem to occur to Updike. "The world does not forgive quitters" seems to be the impression Updike takes away from his own story. The best we can hope for is mothers arguing in parking lots with greedy, candy-crazed kids. There's no difference between characters like these and the middle-class couple in Sickert's Ennui.

Patricia Cornwell's examination of Walter Sickert's life and character in light of the Jack the Ripper evidence is, of course, inconclusive -- Sickert is long dead, and the only mechanism we would ever have to determine the effectiveness of her case would be to bring it to trial in front of a judge and jury, which will never happen. But the picture she outlines is of a disturbing moral universe, where an artist can be so detached from the world and his subject matter that moral issues, or even the worst sorts of crime we can think of, become esthetic matters only. In the process, we take the details of mundane life and turn them into a sideshow with no other purpose. This is a problem with one type of art, and certainly why I don't think much of John Updike.