In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood

Killer App -- XIII

The next time I was in the LA office after that, some people I hadn't met called me into a conference room. There was a conference call set up for some people outside the office, in addition to the half dozen or so in the room. A woman introduced herself as the sales manager from the Orange County office.

"Would you go over for us the things you told Rudy last week?" she asked. I did. I had two impressions from what I'd seen: the WampusBank people involved in the demos weren't very interested, because it wasn't their budget and wouldn't be their decision, and in fact they didn't work in areas where they could understand or benefit from what the product would do. And just getting the demos set up was a bear. We weren't doing the right advance work, and we weren't getting cooperation.

Nobody said much. They mostly just sighed and gave each other looks that suggested I hadn't told them anything they hadn't already surmised.

"OK," said the Orange County sales manager. "Thank you." And that was that. As I left the room, I heard someone say, "Well, it just isn't being sold at the right level." And that was the last I heard about the issue.

Kit started our next staff meeting in an odd way. "I want to start off by telling you a story," she said. "Now, this isn't about anyone in particular. This is just a story. Nobody should get upset."

The story had to do with a DDT employee who had important information and was looking to stab people in the back with it. The employee kept looking and looking, until he saw a Vice President in the hall and blurted the damaging information to the Vice President, just like that. Then the employee kept going around looking for more people to tell the damaging information to. And kept on telling it.

But that wasn't all. The employee was being sent to customer sites. Due to inadvertences, the employee would arrive at customer sites, and the things the employee needed to make the installs and perform the demos wouldn't be available. So the employee couldn't do the work the employee was supposed to do. So the employee had to do things like study the manuals to pass the time. Now, Kit wasn't saying this was bad. After all, what else could the employee do? But somehow this didn't seem right. The employee wasn't cooperating as much as the employee could be.

I was realizing soon enough that this was about me, though it was being delivered in oddly allegorical terms. And it was an odd sort of story. It started somewhere in familiar territory, and then it went off into fantasyland. I kept wanting to say that I hadn't been trying to peddle anything, that people had sought me out, and I didn't see that I had any choice but to give company officers accurate information. And I wanted to say yes indeed, I felt terrible about wasting time and money going to customer sites when I couldn't do the work, but if it was because somebody else dropped the ball over arrangements that had to be made in advance, how could I fix it? But as Kit said, the story wasn't really about anyone. I should keep my mouth shut. And I did.

Kit had had her knuckles rapped, of course, as a result of what I'd said to Rudy and the people in the conference room. But not rapped hard enough to make a difference. For that matter, it seemed like much as Rudy and the people in the conference room might have wanted to change things, whatever they tried to do, it wasn't enough to make a difference. Prospects for the WampusBank sale, as such things do, gradually petered out in a flurry of happy talk. Kit surveyed her sore knuckles and brooded.

Many Thanks for Your Comments

Thanks to all who've continued to leave favorable comments on my writing. I'm in the process of editing the "Bad Hire" series, which you can find in the March archives (permalink moot with Blogger), for submission to this year's Writer's Digest contest.

I passed the 10,000 visit milestone overnight -- thanks as well to all visitors for your support!

Killer App -- XII

Kit likely knew that the word would spread soon enough among her new group that she and Gil were married. She worked in the San Francisco office, and the next time I was up there, I noticed that Gil had a cube right outside Kit's corner office. It had a big, full-length formal portrait of Kit in it, with a fancy frame, the biggest family photo I'd ever seen in a cube. Gil turned up in Kit's conference calls and staff meetings, though she'd worked out some way to get around the company policy that spouses shouldn't be in a supervisory-subordinate role. Gil actually worked for some neighboring department, but he was in some vague way on loan to Kit.

I've seldom run into anyone, anywhere, as aggressively self-aggrandizing as Kit. All her waking energy went into her own advancement, and the advancement was defined entirely in the context of DDT. She had no children; her husband Gil was around her all day at work; and (as she frequently pointed out) he was fourteen years older than she. Her only apparent diversion was some dogs at home. Adding up these factors –- that she'd been playing on the same court for ten years, and that self-promotion was nearly her sole focus -- her advancement was remarkably slow. Rajiv Vaish, the president of the company, had started there the same time as Kit. With the same single-minded drive to claw his way upward, he had gone much farther than she had.

I kept working on the WampusBank installs with Gil for several weeks. The setup there was starting to look more and more like the setup with the other bank, where a bunch of low-level clerks was in charge of the project. They were supposed to be evaluating the product in hopes that they'd want to buy it, but the more I worked with them, the more I saw that they had neither the interest nor the authority to make any sort of recommendation. The whole thing was just extra work for them that would never pay off. Nobody was talking to the people at WampusBank who could make the decision to buy.

In addition, Gil would send me to other WampusBank data centers in hopes that I could install the killer app for demos there as well. But Gil never followed through with the paperwork and phone calls that would authorize me to do the work at the other data centers, and nobody would have the server or the network address I needed available to set things up. So the trips would be wasted time, money, and effort, and it didn't help DDT's image with WampusBank to be sending guys out to the data centers without the i's dotted or the t's crossed.

One morning I was eating breakfast in a hotel in Sacramento about to go out on another WampusBank wild goose chase, when Rudy Valenzuela, the chief technical guy in the LA office, turned out to be eating breakfast there, too, and saw me from his table. I had a pretty good reputation with him, because I'd found out how little I actually knew when I got out of the training class on the killer app, and I made it a point to share everything I was learning with the other people in the LA office when I was in there. He called me over, and we wound up eating breakfast together.

"Where are you working?" he asked me.

"The WampusBank demos," I said. It was something he probably already knew.

"How's it going?" His tone and his look suggested he already knew it wasn't going all that well, and he seemed to want to hear the straight dope. I gave it to him, in detail. He wasn't bored.

Killer App -- XI

Kit sent me out to do some pre-sales installs and demos at WampusBank with a guy named Gil Atkins. Gil was one of those odd creatures I keep running into, a technical guy who can't do technical things like installs, just like a project manager who doesn't manage projects. Gil was a kind of sales-minion, a person who talked tech with the techies, but he wasn't the closer, who was still the account rep.

He had me go out to lunch with WampusBank's computer security people. I did the best I could to convince them the killer app's security features would meet their needs, but they were there for the lunch -- the sale wasn't coming from their budget, and it wasn't going to be their decision. Once I was at a users' group meeting with a rep from a very big high-tech firm. Several of us were complaining about the company's products. The rep didn't mince words: "It doesn't really matter what you tell us," he said. "We don't sell to you. We sell to the CIO. The CIO buys what we sell him, and he'll shove it down your throats."

He had it called right, of course. We were taking a bunch of guys out to lunch, and what we told them, or what they told us, wasn't worth the time of day. The CIO would buy what he was going to buy, and he was going to shove it down their throats.

But Gil thought I'd done a good job. "You're my man, John," he said. "You knew their problems, you showed them how they could really use the product." But I knew it didn't do a thing to help the sale. And something about Gil began to bother me. He kept making odd little remarks like "I hate this product," and then he seemed to wait for me to chime in. I'm naive, but I'd completed Backstabbing 101, including the section on the guy who pretends to be your friend and pumps you for confidences, which he promptly relays to the higher-ups. So every time he said "I hate this product", I would mumble as spontaneously as I could some section from the sales brochures along the line of "Total Discipline Delivery is your state-of-the-art solution to all problems of IS management -- a quantum leap ahead of everything that's been available. . ."

He'd drop the subject, but a few minutes later, he'd start up on something like, "Boy, a lot of people in this company can't stand Kit", and he'd wait for me to chime in again. I'd say something along the line of how Kit was new to the area, and I was sure that everyone would work hard and do the best job they could. And trusted Gil less and less. If I didn't give him what he wanted to hear, he'd likely make it up anyhow.

It just went to show you couldn't tell the players without a program. One of the factors in DDT that was difficult to grasp at first was how many people had been there a long time. The company celebrated its twentieth anniversary when I was there, but it was pretty small for the first five years. More recently, its growth in employees had been explosive. Yet everywhere I turned there were ten and fifteen year veterans. Kit was one of the ten-year people. DDT must have been the only employer she had ever had. I came to work for DDT after working at Cadovra for five years, which had a typical utility company culture where everyone who counts had been with the company for decades. They, of course, made sure any new ideas got stamped out in a hurry, and new people got the same treatment, with the exception of the ones who could prove themselves no threat to the old-timers. Oddly, DDT, a young company in a fast-moving industry, had a similar culture.

One of the things it took a long time to learn at Cadovra, I'd discovered, was who was married to whom. The women never used their husbands' surnames, so you had to have a lot of oral history to know how the politics might go. But naturally, if you got some guy ticked off, and it turned out his wife was on the committee that had to approve your project, it could make a big difference. With Gil, my guard was up, and I was starting to listen very carefully to every small remark he made. After a week, I began to realize what the story was: Gil and Kit were husband and wife. Every word I said, every move I made, was being reported back to Kit, and likely with enhancements if the simple truth wasn't enough.

On Line "Writing"

Don't worry, more to come on the Killer App. But I spent a good part of this morning Googling to find examples of on line "writing" -- not sure what else to call it -- similar to, say, Mimi Smartypants in the blogroll here. I think mallarme noted in a comment a while ago, where he pointed that blog out, that Cory Doctorow, who appears to be a sci-fi writer, had also put work on line. He seems to have several sites, including boingboing, but so far I haven't been able to locate online "writing" by him.

The best I could come up with, after considerable searching, was this, at a blog called The Mighty Head. In this brief narrative, a woman punches her boyfriend or husband in the nose, causing it to bleed. The motive for the punch is the husband or boyfriend has slept with the woman's sister. The husband or boyfriend complains that his nose is bleeding and apologizes for sleeping with the woman's sister (I think). The woman offers him a tissue for his nosebleed. The two, apparently having made up, walk off together, as a bird picks up a piece of the tissue to complete its nest.

The author appears to be published frequently.

As a much less frequently published author, I have some concerns about this narrative. It reminds me again of the visitor who commented that he found my writing here "better than fiction", and I can't help wondering if this is some of the fiction he has in mind.

First, it portrays a fairly serious episode of domestic violence. If the roles were reversed, the husband/boyfriend punching the woman in the nose, we'd be wondering why she didn't head for the battered women's shelter. Even if the roles are reversed, we accept these days that domestic violence isn't just something to gloss over. Since the cause of the violence is the husband/boyfriend sleeping with the woman's sister, I'm puzzled that an obvious and necessary real-world outcome of the situation -- what's the woman going to say to her sister, who had a willing part in the hanky-pank? -- isn't treated or alluded to in any way (shouldn't she punch her sister, too?).

I don't know if the situation is believable or not. Certainly there are men who tolerate abuse. My estimate of a real-world relationship from which this snapshot might be taken would be that what's going in is pretty complex, and punches in the nose and sex with the sister probably ain't half of it. The guy will probably binge on coke that night, and the wife/girlfriend will bop him on the head with a frying pan, resulting in seven stitches. The story doesn't seem to recognize this. The only point it seems to make is that springtime in Central Park will enable this craziness for a while longer, but nobody's learned anything yet.

Where else can you find "writing" on the web?

Killer App -- X

The day Kit took over as West Coast manager, she had a conference call with all of us who reported to her. "There's just one thing to keep in mind when you work for me," she said. "Shit rolls downhill." She said it with a little giggle, but I could tell she meant it. I'd already found that out at DDT anyhow.

A lot of the work I was doing in my punishment assignments involved writing proposals and sales contract boilerplate. I was back at a customer site, but I was still having to do the writing work for other accounts. Becka was likely so preoccupied and stressed out that she never reassigned the work when I went on site again. Now I was having to bill for eight hours at a customer site, but I was also having to go back in to the LA office after dinner to use the office computer and cover faxes and e-mails over the sales stuff.

A laptop would have made this easier, but up to then the company didn't issue them to ordinary employees -- but then they figured out a way for employees to have them that wouldn't cost the company money. They set up a program where we purchased a company-specified laptop through the credit union. It was a top-of-the-line model, gold-plated -- you had to buy what the company ordered, including the genuine leather fashion-coordinated tote bag. You took out a loan with the credit union to do it. The company paid you back in installments over the next three years, but of course the reimbursement payments were taxable, and the company didn't reimburse the interest charges. If you quit or were fired, the remaining loan payments were your responsibility. It was buy the laptop or go in to the office every night.

What irked me was that there were several project managers who didn't have assignments at customer sites, but they weren't doing any other work. I thought the extra work I was having to handle might be given to them.

I saw my opportunity when I got the proposal files for two separate accounts jumbled together because I was having to do the stuff after hours and simply didn't have the time to keep it straight. One of the account reps complained to me that I'd gotten her project screwed up. (I never quite understood why the rep couldn't have written her own proposal anyhow.)

Not knowing Kit very well yet, I left her a phone message outlining my problem: it seemed like I was having to put in a lot of extra time, when not everyone else had a full load. I suggested as politely as I could that possibly some of the other people who weren't at a customer site might handle some of the extra work I was doing.

I didn't hear anything more, but in the next conference call Kit took roll. When she got to my name, I could feel the anger and contempt. Apparently I'd rubbed her the wrong way. She did reassign some of my extra work in the meeting, but I could tell I was off on the wrong foot.

Killer App -- IX

The meeting the next day was anticlimactic, since everything had actually been sorted out by phone beforehand. The project manager managed to avoid any imputation of blame to himself for anything that hadn't been properly scheduled or arranged, and he was able even to avoid coming to the meeting. Nobody from the bank thought there may have been any problem with the systems programmer telling us to install our product on their domain name server. With those conditions established and nobody else from DDT to take the heat, the rest of the meeting focused on my own shortcomings, which included not paging Georgia when she felt I should have, and bringing down the bank's network.

From DDT's standpoint, of course, the project was out of control, and the only thing that could realistically have been done to get it back under control would have been to bring the sales rep back to talk to the CIO, who had bought the product in the first place and who was presumably the one who had a reason to see it installed. But the sales rep had already told us she'd washed her hands of the whole thing.

I was off the project, of course, and detailed to a punishment assignment for some months thereafter. But even after satisfying the customer by replacing me, neither Becka nor the project manager was able to make any progress in the weeks and months after that. They cycled everyone on the West Coast through that project, but they never got the killer app installed. The real problem was that it was a bad sale, and I'd see more of those. Becka wound up going on medical leave for stress, and when she came back, she was demoted again.

Becka told me I was going to be written up for my part in the fiasco, but she was so stressed out that I didn't get the memo until after she'd gone on leave. The Human Resources guy in the LA office was the one who gave it to me. He had a sense of humor about it. "Do I have to sign anything?" I asked him when I'd read it over.

"Nope," he said. "It is what it is." If I was going to get written up, he was at least a good guy to get it from. They fired him not long afterward.

But things ended well for nearly everyone at the bank. That same year, a bigger bank bought them out, and the CIO left with his golden parachute, so nobody ever asked him about the multimillion-dollar killer app that they never installed. The new bank thought the old bank's data center fit their regional needs, so they kept everyone there on the payroll with the same menial jobs. Now and then someone from DDT tried to get the new bank interested in restarting the project with the killer app, but with the same people in charge, it never came to anything.

Kit Belknap took over for Becka when she went on leave.

Killer App -- VIII

The next morning, the project manager came to me with a new approach: the systems programmer in charge of the Unix systems was going to give us a different box to install on, since they couldn't find a monitor that would work with the HP box we had, and nobody seemed to be able to find a network cable. That was good, since we were billing the bank by the hour, and if we couldn't work, they still had to pay us.

So the systems programmer showed us where the machine was, and where to put the files, and gave us the root password for the install. To finish the install, we had to update some system parameters and reboot it, which the systems programmer knew about -- or at least, he should have.

Within minutes, the bank's CIO was in the machine room with a whole entourage, wanting to know what was going on. We'd rebooted the system, all right -- the machine the systems programmer had put us on turned out to be the bank's domain name server, which managed their whole network. When we rebooted the system, we took down their network. It was nothing we could have known about, unless someone had asked, "Oh, by the way, I know you've told us it's OK to reboot this box, but are you completely sure there isn't something important on here as well?" We couldn't have known this ourselves unless someone had given us a pretty complete set of documentation on the bank's whole configuration, which they hadn't.

The systems programmer was either astonishingly incompetent -- a possibility, since he seemed to be as hard to find during the day as anyone else there -- or he'd set us up. I'm sill not sure which it was. But the result was that the CIO stopped the project, convinced the killer app had crashed his systems.

On top of that, Georgia had gone and complained to Katie that something important had happened, and I hadn't paged her. Katie had promptly phoned Becka in high dudgeon. There was going to be a big meeting the next day to sort everything out. And it was looking like everything that needed to be sorted out somehow involved me.

Killer App -- VII

It was plain when we got back from lunch that the clerks in the data center had long since adjusted to Katie's schedule. If she took three hours for lunch, so did they. And since she wasn't in a mood for anything serious when she got back, a lot of people just drifted away for the rest of the afternoon anyhow. It was a sweet deal they had going -- all they needed to do was stay on Katie's good side.

Based on the introductions in the kickoff meeting, I could tell what some of the clerks did, but there were others whose functions I could never figure out. Georgia was one of them. She was apparently important, and she had something to do with the printers. She had her own office, which was a converted closet. There was an angry sign on the door:

WARNING


DO NOT OPEN THIS DOOR


If I am not here,
GO AWAY.

She was never there, but it didn't seem to make any difference. She and Katie had the same way of pursing their lips into a very serious pout. It didn't take me long to figure that in the backstabbing match that determined who wouldn't be laid off, she'd be the one to beat. She came into DDT's office area that afternoon with a very urgent air.

"I'm going to be in a class tomorrow morning," she told me. "If anything important happens, I want you to page me."

This was puzzling. She hadn't been introduced in the kickoff meeting as someone I needed to work with at all. And if she had concerns, I probably wasn't the best person to talk to -- there was a project manager on site, after all. But I took her pager number all the same.

In addition to the project manager, we had a trainee with us, someone even more junior than I was. Despite the kickoff meeting, the bank wasn't ready for us. They'd given us a Hewlett-Packard box, but it didn't have a monitor, and it didn't have a network connection. Our trainee had scrounged up a surplus monitor from an IBM mainframe console, but he wasn't having much luck getting it to work with the HP box, and nobody was putting themselves out to find a network cable.

Brief Pause for Editorial Reflection

Don't worry, there's lots more of the Killer App to come. But I've been uncomfortable about a discussion taking place on Critical Mass, as well as other places like Crooked Timber (links on Critical Mass) regarding the need for some type of new blog covering literature, literary studies, and so forth. Favorably mentioned titles would be "Bookchat" and "Post MLA", and suggested authorial models include the likes of Marianne Moore and T.S.Eliot.

In contrast, I had a comment the other day from a visitor who found my pieces here "better than fiction". Says a lot about fiction, it seems to me. What puzzles me is that there are thousands of blog-visitors apparently milling around looking to get a Marianne Moore fix, anxiously waiting for somebody to set up a site where they can have what appears to be a virtual English Department tea. Well, perhaps not quite as stuffy as an English Department tea, but you know what they mean.

Thousands of people chasing around looking for "literature", all wrapped up and tied with a bow, just not as stuffy as an English Department tea. They might even let some non-Ph.D.s, post, from what I gather, if they can find a way to control it. I'm glad some of the 70-odd visitors I get here in a day find what I'm writing more interesting than that! I have a feeling that the few of us actually putting -- what the heck do you call this? -- up on the web had better stay as far away as we can from the word "literature". Or even "fiction". Nobody over at the English Department would notice, anyhow.

Thanks for the recent favorable comments, to those who've made them. If you can find a way to spread the word, I'll greatly appreciate it. Now back to the story.

UPDATE: As noted in his comment, mallarme has chimed in on this issue. My point continues to be that there's a lot of backing and filling, both on Critical Mass and in mallarme's answer, that of course we don't want to act like a lot of stuffy English professors. The stuffy English professors have their own venues. We just want to be a little bit like English professors and have our own little chats about Wallace Stevens, which will be much more interesting to general visitors. Or something like that. But based on what I read in the posts discussing this possibility, it would be something like Cliopatria, which Erin has, it seems to me, suggested as an example. But Cliopatria is made up almost exclusively of Ph.D. professionals debating, by and large, the arcana of their discipline in an atmosphere at least occasionally redolent of in-groupery and self-congratulation -- what everyone says won't happen in the proposed MLAChatredwagon. If Cliopatria is the example, I'm highly skeptical and think that people actively using the language for anything remotely like an original and creative purpose will have better ways to occupy their time.

But don't let me stop you. I can't and I won't, in any case. But in return, those who participate would be wise to recognize that bookchat and such isn't the whole literary enchilada. We have lots of bookchat, we have almost no real writers these days.

Killer App -- V

In fact, I don't remember why they didn't try to page me. It's likely that I simply hadn't received my pager from that department yet. But the project manager was waiting for me when I got in the next morning. "I tried to get hold of you at your hotel last night," he said. "Becka thought you should have come back in last night."

I told him about the problem with the clerk at the desk. "I'll let her know you had a problem. She's coming up later today. She thinks that if there's any delay, everyone needs to work late." There was, of course, nothing that could have been accomplished by having me stay there late.

She came up on an early flight, dressed in what she must have thought was her most serious suit, an exaggerated pin-stripe double-breasted thing that made her look cute instead of serious. She took over one of the customer's conference rooms and had us lined up outside, talking with us one by one. She called around and got a contractor who had actually done the installs to come up the next Monday and take me through it. She didn't have much choice. It didn't look like there was anyone in DDT itself who knew how to do the install.

But she insisted on keeping up appearances. I was to change my flight home (this was Friday) to the latest possible one back to Burbank and spend the rest of the day looking very busy. I was to take a flight up Sunday afternoon and come in Sunday night and look busy.

All the busy-busy activity didn't really matter to the customer. The customer, or at least the people I was working with, didn't want the product. For the install they'd given me a couple of surplus machines in a supply closet, and to get to them I had to work my way around the artificial Christmas tree that was kept there when not in use for the holiday season. The rank-and-file staff at any customer knew pretty much what the killer app would do for their jobs: it would eliminate them. It was designed to automate the kind of functions that they spent their days tending in typical IS departments. They had a lot of motivation to show their bosses, who'd been foolish enough to buy the product or bring it in for demo, that it didn't work. It was certainly a stroke of good fortune for them that it didn't -- or at least, not well.

After going through the install that Monday with the contractor, I was done with that customer. I was scheduled to start with another one down south on Tuesday.

Killer App -- IV

Becka finally sent me out to do a full install and implementation of the killer app -- on a Unix system up in Silicon Valley. The training class we'd had covered only how to install the system on Windows NT. The Unix version was a collection of older-release products from earlier companies that DDT had taken over. They installed in different ways on different versions of Unix. No class covered all these variations.

I was betting on two things. First, I thought it would be better to be sent out on a job, no matter how it turned out, than it would be to sit in the office without an assignment. Second, I was hoping I'd have more experienced coworkers who could bridge some of the gaps in my knowledge. In fact, there were two other DDT people already on the project in Silicon Valley. One was the project manager, who, in the way of all project managers, had little technical ability and was there mostly to serve as a yes-person for all comers. Naturally, he had no experience doing the installs.

The other guy did have some experience, but it was mostly in his own comfort zone. What I was trying to install was as new to him as it was to me. We went through the manuals, unpacked the media, and started the install. Right away it was plain that what was in the manual wasn't matching the system prompts that came up when we loaded the CD. "Call support," my coworker said, as he began to edge away from the upcoming train wreck. The customer, not to mention Becka, was going to want to see some progress, and this was going to be a difficult install.

I spent the day on the phone with support. There was nobody at support who knew enough about doing this install to talk me through it. The system prompts themselves didn't take you through the whole procedure, and the manual was wrong. Without a real person who knew where the pieces fit, there wasn't much I could do. By 4:00 PM on the West Coast it was 7:00 PM on the East Coast, and support went home for the night, without having made any progress on my problem. I told the project manager I was leaving, too.

We were in Silicon Valley near the peak of the dot-com bubble, and the travel department had somehow gotten me a room at a local hotel. Lodging was so hard to find anywhere in the San Jose-Oakland-San Francisco area that people were routinely being put up in places like Santa Cruz and Monterey, thereby getting a long daily commute on top of their travel to the area. When I turned up at the hotel, there was just one clerk working to check people in. A line of maybe 25 people stretched out the lobby door.

The clerk was from someplace far away where English wasn't the usual language, and he was even less familiar with US names, both people and towns. He was trying to type things into the computer as he checked each person in. "Torres?" he would ask. "How do you spell that, please?" But then they'd get to the town name. "Puyallup? How do you spell that, please?" And he never got it right the first time. And it was clear that the most important thing was to follow the procedure, not to get people checked in. The line wasn't moving.

I did the thing I usually do. I spoke up and asked if there was a way to get another clerk working on the check-in line. The clerk knew exactly what to do. Dissent at this hotel was not tolerated. "What is your name?" he asked me. Like an idiot, I told him. I could see the reptilian smile of anticipation forming as I spoke. "Well," he said, "I have just canceled your reservation. Thank you very much. You will please leave now." Oddly, he could cancel a reservation in a flash. It was checking people in that took him so long.

Getting another place wasn't as hard as I feared. I drove a couple of miles up the I-880 and found a motel that was nearly empty. The clerk seemed surprised I wanted to stay the whole night and didn't have anyone with me. I had to pay a cash deposit to use the phone. Everything in the place, the lamps, the alarm, the TV remote, everything but the trash can, was bolted down. It smelled bad, too. But it was a place to stay. And nobody had my phone number.

Killer App -- III

What Al Westfal was discovering, which was one of the things DDT more or less pretended wasn't the case, was that a substantial number of companies had already decided against dealing with DDT as a matter of company policy. Some of them had even written clauses into their contracts with other software companies that said if that other company was ever taken over by DDT, the contract was null and void. Sales of the new killer app were coming harder than people at DDT expected, and as a result, there wasn't as much work for people like me as they'd thought there would be.

My problem was that I hadn't been at DDT long enough to have the various mentors and angels that the other people had who could rescue them from this group. I was sending my resume out to try to find a job elsewhere (as any sane person would), but that wasn't panning out, either. I was going to have to find a way to convince Becka Mantis to send me out on whatever work she had, which wasn't much. And even though the group I was in got smaller every time I went down to San Diego, there were still too many people for the work available.

One day a friend in San Diego called me to say they'd found a way to fire one of the other guys in the group. His job was to teach classes in DDT products. One Friday afternoon he'd wound up one of his normal classes, and when he was done, they called him in and told him he was fired. No reason given. We all figured this was a convenient way to reduce head count without the need to pay severance.

Becka, meanwhile, had a big chart drawn on the whiteboard in her cube, with names matched up to areas of expertise. By this time it had lots of rubouts and smudges, but she still couldn't decide whom to send out on whatever jobs were coming in. I was getting the feeling that they were going to find more reasons to fire more people unless some work came in soon, and it would have to be work that I could convince Becka I knew how to do.

Then she got some orders for work on Unix systems. I hadn't worked on Unix for about ten years, but nobody else had any Unix at all. I was in luck. She sent me out on a couple of Unix jobs. The first one was easy -- the customer already had the product installed, but they didn't think DDT had done a good enough job of training them on how to use it. So Becka sent me in there, and the customer's questions were actually pretty simple. I scored some good points with Becka for an easy job.

The problem was -- Becka never understood this herself, and I was still low on my learning curve -- that DDT's killer app wasn't really a new product. It was a hodgepodge of older products that DDT had decided to rename and market as a single, new product. No three-day course at company headquarters was remotely going to qualify anyone to understand, install, or demonstrate the thing. I didn't have enough information yet to know how much I didn't know.

Killer App -- II

After the first manager quit, they put one of the guys who'd been in the class in charge. He was based in Sacramento, but I never did more than play phone tag with him before he quit as well. Finally they settled on Becka Mantis in San Diego. This position was in fact the midpoint of several demotions for her. She had previously been the manager in charge of the San Diego office. Becka was very San Diego herself, blonde and blue-eyed, petite and anorexic, attractive if you glossed over the fact that age and anorexia would eventually conspire to make her nose droop and her bony chin point more outward, so that she would eventually look like a Halloween witch, with point of nose and point of chin threatening to meet. But that looked still to be several years away.

Some weeks after the class, Becka called together the West Coast draftees for the killer app. At the same time, she lost her manager's office and got put in a cubicle, a sure and certain sign of her own change in status. I started to commute to San Diego and was set to learning the TDD system with a colleague, an Iranian with a pony tail who had been transferred into working with the killer app from a cushier area and was none too pleased. He was used to spending much of his time working out in the company gym. The rest of the day he spent on the phone with his wife, orchestrating intricate schedules and handoffs for picking up and delivering their daughter to day care, the allergist, the piano teacher, her grandmother, and so forth. I know this, because I shared his cubicle for a couple weeks. Mostly I was by myself. "I'm going to the gym before lunch," he'd say, or, "Tell anyone who asks I had to pick up my daughter because my wife's car is in the shop."

He knew this new job was going to involve travel, and as far as he was concerned, he was going to stay in San Diego and work out in the gym and drive his daughter around to appointments. The next time I was down there, he was gone. They told me he got three offers from other companies right away and was out the door in a flash.

Back in LA, my cube was right next to Al Westfal. Al had transferred down from San Francisco to start selling the TDD killer app, making cold calls into IS departments that didn't have any DDT products, trying to sell them TDD. He was new at trying to sell a product with a six-month sales cycle. While things were still starting up, I would come to work without any assignment and sit in my cubicle, not doing much more than listening to Al make his calls, which weren't very fruitful.

After a couple of months, he started to make progress with the LA field office of a European wire service. He was taking them out to lunch a lot, and he was getting close to a signature on a contract, when the people in the field office finally decided to check with headquarters in Berlin or wherever it was over the purchase. It turned out that DDT's reputation with Berlin was so bad that they had a policy of not buying DDT products, no matter what. Al's bosses, in a typical move, wouldn't listen, and kept pressing Al to try to save the sale. The sale wasn't going to be saved. The guys in the field office told him they'd be fired if they bought the product, it was that simple. The whole thing died down after a while. Al kept plugging at trying to sell TDD for a year or so, but finally the guy who had been his mentor up in San Francisco plucked him away and put him in a better job.

Killer App -- I

I had been at Digital Discipline Technologies, which everyone called DDT, for less than a year when, after I'd sent her my weekly activity report, my boss said I probably didn't need to send it to her any more, because she wasn't sure who I worked for. Apparently a big reorg was in the works. Everything was very confidential.

A couple of weeks after that, I was called to a meeting at company headquarters back East. There were about two dozen of us there, from all over the country. DDT was on the verge of announcing a new product, a killer app, the magic bullet that would blow away the competition. They had a neat play on the DDT initials: the product was called TDD, or Total Discipline Delivery. They showed us a video that described it. There were neat lasers and satellites and cute babes and pretty-boy actors pretending to be IS managers who talked about how TDD was going to solve all their problems.

Those of us who'd been called in to headquarters were in a three-day class. We were going to be the ones who demonstrated and installed it for the customers. Without the presence of real-world obstacles and level-headed opinions, the pieces and functions covered in the class appeared to be first-rate. I would spend another two years or so learning that what I had seen in the class was just a version of the DDT corporate rat race, with the presenters doing what they needed to do to impress their higher-ups. The functions they discussed didn't work, were full of bugs, didn't do what the customer was led to believe. In fact, they often didn't work when they were demonstrated in the class, which of course should have been a bad sign.

It was also a bad sign when the manager they introduced us to, whom we were all supposed to work for, quit a week or so later. I was already used to managers quitting at DDT. My first boss lasted a couple of months. The biggest talk I had with him was when I got my appraisal and was ranked last in the department. I'd already been told that the customer I was working with thought I was doing such a good job that they'd relayed the word both to the customer's headquarters and DDT headquarters. But I got ranked last. My boss told me it was because Human Resources told him he always had to rank the newest guy last, since he was obviously of less value than anyone who'd been there longer. He quit not too long after that. I had to stay.

Philosophy Class

I've been in bed with the flu, and my posting strategy is the same as when I'm busy with other things, to post excerpts from ready-written but unpublished material I have on hand. The Greek Class post below is one such, and Oldman in his comment asks the question that I'd answered in the next paragraph of my incomplete piece languishing on my hard drive:

"But perhaps, you might say, if I’d taken a philosophy course instead of Greek, I’d be more satisfied. Not a bit of it. The introductory philosophy course covered only intellectual set-pieces like “the ghost in the machine” or the problem of predestination. It was just as worthwhile as listening to my classmate’s unctuous rendition of the aorist tense. The course I should have had would have been from a philosopher-rhetorician qualified to teach classical Greek, and if we read an interesting passage from Plato in one class, he would have suggested we read Aristotle’s and St. John’s versions (in Greek, of course) of the same issues for the next. I suppose there are courses like that in heaven, but probably nowhere short of that."

One thing that puzzles me since I wrote that paragraph is that I've dredged up more memories of how slapdash that introductory philosophy course was. We read a bunch of random essays in a primer. One that sticks in my mind, as a Californian, was by Josiah Royce. I was 17 or 18 when I took the course and could not have been expected to know Josiah Royce from Adam (I was a Marylander at the time in any case). I forget the title or the content of the Royce essay.

From subsequent reading, I believe Royce is known as a key early faculty member of the University of California who began his inquiry into philosophy as a result of seeing first-hand the issues surrounding the establishment of California civil society.

Nothing was said of this in my philosophy class (though we were, of course, in a bastion of the Eastern establishment in any case). Royce was simply a disembodied voice uttering various statements, which were examined in a desultory fashion. Other essays by William James and Charles Sanders Peirce were covered the same way. In retrospect, there was probably a heated controversy in those essays that might have engaged the curiosity of such serious minds as may have been in that class. If it was there, though, the instructors didn't point it out.

I suspect that the faculty was simply going through the motions of Philosophy 1, but that, for me, is a problem: Dartmouth, supposedly a place that focused on teaching excellence, by and large wasn't providing it. If it was doing it only sporadically in the 1960s, I would imagine that it's doing it much less now -- and I would assume the same applies to nearly all other institutions.

Greek Class

I started my freshman year doing several things wrong. I'd been exempted from both the foreign language and freshman composition requirements by the Advanced Placement exams, but I wound up taking freshman comp anyhow (and have discussed the results here). I got something close to 800 on the Latin achievement test, which meant I didn’t need to trouble myself with a foreign language at all, but I did what seemed to me the only logical thing, which was to take Greek. This was, to be plain about it, a horrible experience. There were three people in the class. It says quite a lot about Dartmouth that it would conduct a course with enrollment that low, but the course itself gave new and excruciating meaning to the word tedium.

The last I checked, the professor, very young when I was there, was still on the staff at Dartmouth, though apparently not teaching Greek, so I won’t go much beyond saying this change has probably been a good thing for subsequent generations of Greek students. My two fellow students were a curious pair, a study in extremes. One was the kind of teacher’s pet type of student who made a point at the start of each class to show how thoroughly he’d prepared his translation. It was plain he’d spent hours on it, diligently parsing every word. He seemed to have no interests or opinions in life otherwise -- he was completely preoccupied with the study of Greek as intricate busywork. The other was something of an idiot-savant, the kind of guy who could sight-read a passage from Xenophon without resort to either grammar or lexicon. He didn’t need to prepare his translations, and his path through the class was effortless. Like my other classmate, though, he also was devoid of interests or opinions. Other than the apparently trivial exertions he made to produce his translations, his mind seemed essentially unoccupied, even in a certain way vacant.

I was the only Greek 1 student who came to the class as a human being, which is to say, not always with my assignment completed or the grammar and vocabulary fully mastered. With only three in the class, and the other two usually doing perfect work, the professor was able to spend much of his time with me, and the only parallel I can draw is when I took piano lessons at ten years old, and my piano teacher would suck air through her teeth in dismay at my mistakes.

I remember once he called me in to go over the results of a midterm exam. I didn’t do very well on the composition part. I clearly remember him going over all my errors on each sentence, until he got to one: “I don’t understand one thing,” he said. “All these other sentences tell me you aren’t working very hard. But this one sentence -- this is a good sentence. And we didn’t have any sentences like this in the readings. ‘They captured them and led them away, slaves.’ You wrote a very good, original Greek sentence. Why can’t you put this effort into the rest of your work?”

The reason, in retrospect, was that I was challenged in writing that one sentence. But sitting between Goody Two-Shoes and the Rain Man day after day was a waste of time as far as I was concerned. We were reading Plato’s Apology of Socrates, a work that I found electrifying. The clear, simple, personal story the character Socrates told was conveying to me in the writer’s original language overwhelming impressions of humor, disgust, futility, and an odd sort of faith. We never talked about that. We parsed and plodded. Why were we doing this? The prof was the junior man and got the introductory course that year. The others needed the credits. I was doing it because I thought I should study Greek.

Every now and then I run into someone, usually clergy, who's taken Greek. We share the experience. I don't think I'd trust any clergy who didn't say they'd done badly in it.

After the Grocery Strike

It was a week or so after the Los Angeles grocery strike, where the strikers finally went back to work without getting much of what they wanted. I was doing the weekly shopping at Albertson's, and only two checkout lanes were open, with long lines. A Russian guy was just ahead of me in my line.

"Why does everyone put up with this over here?" he asked me. "In Russia, people would be shouting to have more lines opened."

I agreed. I'm the sort of person who speaks up about this kind of thing, anyhow. I called to the checkout clerk, "Is there a chance we can get more lines opened?"

The clerk wasn't happy to hear this. "Ask him," he said, pointing to the clerk at the other checkout stand. "He's the manager today." The other guy didn't answer.

In our line, two women, who appeared to be a well-off mother and her au pair girl, were going through the checkout and had twins with them, two large, ugly babies, each in a sling around one of the women's necks. It looked like they'd brought the babies to get attention, and they were getting it. It had to have been easier just to leave the twins home with the au pair, but they'd brought them along instead.

The checkout clerk had stopped scanning groceries and had gone over to do the coochie-coochie-coo routine with the twins. Both of them. Neither of the lines was moving. I called over to the other clerk, the one who was supposed to be the manager. "Why can't we get another line opened?" I asked.

"Nobody else is here," he finally answered. It looked like a lot of the strikers simply hadn't come back to work after the strike.

The clerk in my line finally got done wasting time with the babies and resumed scanning. Slowly. The Russian guy and I worked our way up to the head of the line. He just had a couple of items, and then he was out.

The checkout clerk knew I was the guy who'd been asking to have a new line opened. "I hate this store," he said to me when I got up to him. "You people drive me crazy here. You people want us to work, work, work. I've put in for a transfer to another store."

I didn't know what to say at that point. I could sympathize with going out on strike and getting nothing out of it, but sometimes you've got to work harder than you want to.

He went on. "I'm back on Valium," he said. "I've only come back to work for a week, and you people have got me on Valium. I'm going to transfer." He paused and looked at me. "I don't know why you want to get out of here so fast. Look at all these other people." He gestured to the long lines at the two checkout lanes. "None of them is complaining. You're not the only one here, you know." My Russian friend had already left.

I guess he got his transfer, because I only saw him at the store once or twice after that.

Bad Day

After I got laid off from Digital Discipline Technologies, which everyone called DDT, I worked for a while as a contractor installing DDT software. There was a small market for customers who'd gotten fed up with DDT, had already paid for their products, but wouldn't let anyone from DDT on their property.

I even worked a job as a contractor for DDT's sales side, when they didn't trust anyone from the post-sales side to do the installation right. This was up in Silicon Valley. The customer's employee bulletin boards had a no-questions-asked free ride home policy: if you were too drunk to drive home yourself (this, you understand, is at work), you could call Security, and they'd drive you home.

DDT's sales team had been in this place for something like eight months trying to get the stuff to work right. I'd worked with the guy who was putting it in while I was still at DDT. Everyone called him Doc, the way you call a guy who runs a card game Doc. When I got there, I discovered that it sort of worked. It sort of worked if you didn't look at it too hard. It worked the way you might expect it to work if someone named Doc had installed it.

The customer wasn't looking at it too hard, because Alison was their account rep. She came in wearing miniskirts and tight sweaters, and they looked much harder at Alison than they did at the software. The two customer guys who were working on the project would leap after her like crazed puppies.

So I started to take a careful look at how things had been installed. If you started up one part of the product, you'd get a security error on another part. If you tried to start the other part without the first part, it wouldn't work at all. I asked Alison if she knew anything about how things had been done over the past eight months that might have caused this. Of course not, it wasn't her job -- her job was to wear miniskirts and tight sweaters. She was sure, though, that Doc had installed everything correctly.

I tried reinstalling twice. I spent two hours on the phone with DDT support getting the thing straightened out. It turned out Doc had screwed something up with Windows NT security eight months earlier. I changed the Windows security parm, and after I'd been there two days, everything worked.

The customer was ticked off it'd taken me two days. They didn't mind having Alison around for eight months while things didn't work. They thought I could have fixed the NT problem sooner than I did. They knew all about NT, after all. They complained to the contracting company I was working through. The company docked me two hours billing -- according to the customer, I should have fixed the thing two hours sooner.

"You're Not The Only One Here, You Know."

I've heard this several times in the last few months. It always comes when I've been (in my view) reasonably self-assertive, from someone who's all ticked off about it and trying to tell me I'm being selfish, or something like that. I was in The Pantry about a month ago. There was a short line for the counter, but lines at The Pantry can be a problem, since, as I indicated in my post below, the clientele isn't necessarily made up of the best and the brightest. Normally a seat opens up at the counter, the next guy in line takes it, and things move smoothly. But not everyone handles lines that well.

I've never understood why some people want to get seats together at the counter when there are tables open they could just as easily sit at. The people who want to sit together at the counter, of course, need to wait for the statistically less likely case of two seats opening up at the same time -- this will most probably occur if two people already sitting together at the counter get up and leave, and there are two more people serendipitously available at the head of the line to take their place. But this is the best of many possibilities, and the other cases are more awkward.

I was standing in the counter line that day, and a guy with a woman who apparently was his date from the night before were at the head of the line. They were waiting for two counter seats together. One guy got up from the counter and left, but that was just one seat, so the couple just stayed at the head of the line. Then another guy got up and left, but that seat wasn't next to the first open seat, so the couple just stayed at the head of the line. The guy right behind them wasn't paying much attention. Seats were opening up at the counter, but the counter line wasn't moving.

I finally said something to the people ahead of me in line to the effect that gee, seats were opening up -- were the folks in front possibly waiting for two seats together? Then perhaps those waiting for single seats could go ahead and sit down so the line could move. Nobody appreciated me saying that. They all sort of glared at me. Probably I was a troublemaker. Finally one guy did decide it would be better to eat than stand in line, so he did go past the couple at the front and sit down. Then another guy did.

All of a sudden three seats opened up together, so the guy and his date from last night got two of the seats, and I wound up sitting next to them. P___ was our waiter. P___ was the kind of no-options ex-con white guy I described in the post below. He made his own salsa, which was better than the salsa The Pantry put out. The management sort of looked the other way over it. One day, not knowing he was the guy who made the good salsa, I asked if The Pantry sold it to go. He explained in a low voice, looking over his shoulder to be sure the manager wasn't nearby, that this wasn't The Pantry's salsa in the first place, it was his, and if they caught him selling it, he'd be in a lot of trouble. Fine.

But then he thought it over, and he got a big styrofoam cup and spooned out about a pint of the stuff, put a lid on it to make it look like a cup of coffee to go, and pushed it at me over the counter. That was great. I gave him several bucks extra as a "tip", and we had things worked out. Even after that business tapered off, I still tipped him generously. But I think after a while he forgot who I was, even when the cooks would hand him my breakfast before he'd given them the order. P___ forgot things a lot. I don't know if he was half in the bag the way a lot of the waiters seemed to be, or not.

Something about the guy's date had P____'s head spinning this particular morning. She wanted steak for breakfast. Apparently the guy had promised her steak for breakfast, and this was going to be a big deal. P____ got so much into the thing that he went back to the kitchen to bring her out her choice of cuts. This was not your normal Pantry style of service. P____ was so determined to kiss this woman's butt that he ignored everyone else sitting at the counter waiting to give him their orders. He was explaining steak in detail to this woman. Everything he had ever learned about steak, he was telling her.

I couldn't figure it out. He wasn't going to get laid with this chick any more than I was. He was an old guy. Not only that, but once he got the order of the guy who was with her, it was plain that the chick's breakfast was going to cost pretty much every penny this guy had with him, and he was hemming and hawing to see if he could get just coffee and toast or something like that. P____ wasn't going to get a tip out of this. But he kept on trying to butter this woman up.

Finally I got my order in -- I was way at the end of the counter, and the cooks couldn't see me, or there was a good chance they'd have cooked it and handed it to P____ anyhow. That day I had to wait. Then P____ disappeared. I saw my order come up down by the grill, but P___ was gone, so I just sat there watching it cool off. Finally P____ came back, another plate of steaks in his hand. The guy's date hadn't liked any of the others he'd brought her, so he'd gone back to the kitchen to got more for her to choose from. My order was still sitting up by the grill.

I was able to cough and tilt my head and roll my eyes or whatever it was I had to do to get P____ to notice my order and go back and get it. But then he went right back to chatting up the guy's date, who still hadn't chosen her cut of steak. I wanted some salsa. I didn't care if it was P____'s salsa or the ordinary stuff, I just wanted some salsa. I got P____'s attention and asked him for some salsa. He ignored me and kept on chatting up the guy's date.

"P____," I said, "Could I have some salsa before my eggs get completely cold?"

That brought him up short. He was ticked. People didn't talk to him that way. "What do you mean?" he asked. "You think I'm your slave?"

I took that one a little slowly. I didn't know what to answer. I'd always tipped the guy well. "Maybe you need to keep in mind," I told him, "you work for tips."

That was that. He blew his top. "I don't need your f____ tip," he said.

"OK," I said, "you're not going to get it."

The guy whose date had been daintily choosing her cut of steak broke in. "He ain't your slave, man!" he said.

A couple of other people at that end of the counter took up the chorus. "Yeah, man," they all said, "he ain't your slave. He ain't your slave, man."

The woman's date went on, "He was causing trouble in the line even before we sat down. Tailgating me. Wanting us to move."

P____ picked up some empty plates and threw them under the counter, cussing under his breath. Finally he turned to me. He'd thought of exactly the right thing to say: "You're not the only one here, you know."

I probably won't go back to The Pantry, either.

The Pantry

The Pantry Cafe is one of Los Angeles's oldest downtown landmarks, in operation (though not at the present site) since 1924. Until a few years ago, it looked on the inside like other bygone California institutions, like the old Amtrak station in Oakland, the walls together with paintings and murals of bland-but-historical subjects stained a uniform deep yellow-brown by generations of tobacco smoke. The Oakland Amtrak station was taken out by the Loma Prieta earthquake; The Pantry finally got a new coat of paint.

I've been going to The Pantry for about 30 years. I went there for breakfast the day I got married. I nearly got thrown out of there last month, though, and the place has changed, so I may not go back.

It's kept its atmosphere in some ways, despite the new paint. The food is plentiful, old-fashioned, and good, and on weekends there's usually a line. The waiters are all men -- I don't know how they manage that -- and they wear traditional white aprons and black bow ties. It's probably a plum job for a waiter, though not for the kind of LA waiter who's also an actor. These are the kind of waiters who would have been there 50 years ago, older guys, the kind of waiters you'd imagine in a James M. Cain novel, film noir waiters, guys with no options who live in old brick apartment houses six blocks away. But the tips, I assume, are good there.

It has the air of a low-class place, but the kind of low-class place that Hollywood types like to visit when they go slumming, and there are wannabes who come to rub elbows with the slumming Hollywood types. But it's still low-class. You've got the luck of the draw on whether the guy next to you at the counter has had a shower in the past several days. Or if he doesn't smell bad, he may be into pouring ketchup into his mashed potatoes and swirling the mess around for a while before he eats it. I got into a routine fairly early where I could enjoy the food if I made sure I kept my vision focused straight ahead and didn't breathe too deeply through my nose. I avoided a lot of disappointments that way.

I went there enough, and I tipped well enough, that the cooks knew who I was and started cooking my regular order before I gave it to the waiter. It says something about the waiters that they were always surprised when the cook handed them my order before they expected it. In fact, the thing that puzzled me about the waiters -- all of them -- was that, even if they'd been there ten, 20, or 30 years, they were always fumbling around as if it were their first day on the job. Forget orders, forget to bring everything you'd ordered, get distracted and ignore orders that had come up.

Early this year, the bacon started tasting different. At first I wondered if the bacon I'd ordered had previously gotten involved with some pancake syrup. But it tasted the same every time I came in after that. Then I saw in the supermarket that Farmer John, LA's local meat packer, was selling a new kind of bacon -- maple flavored bacon. Of all the dumb ideas -- if I want maple syrup on my bacon, that's real easy, I put it on my pancakes, if that's what I'm eating, and it'll probably get on the bacon. But if I'm not eating pancakes, and I don't particularly want maple flavor, why do I get compulsory maple flavor on my bacon anyhow? The Pantry has been slowly changing. I used to like it because it was a no-nonsense place. Now, it's turning into a nonsense place.

More tomorrow on almost getting thrown out.

The Odd Dynamic of Bad Service in Restaurants

As I said in the post below, I'll give a mom-and-pop operation that serves good food -- or that I even think might one day serve good food like the last owner served -- a lot of leeway, especially if I'm exploring and on my own time. On the other hand, there's Denny's. I likely only go into a Denny's (or any similar place, like a Cracker Barrel) if I'm traveling on someone else's nickel and have to get someplace at a particular time. A Denny's, or any similar chain operation, is there to give me a particular product, which includes a level of service, at a particular price. If I think they're screwing up, I complain, in large part because I do, under those circumstances, have to be someplace on time.

Once I was in a Denny's in someplace like Normal, Illinois, and nothing was working right. The "please wait to be seated" sign was up, and nobody was there to seat me. Nobody was there to get my order. Finally somebody wandered out and got my order, but nobody must have been in the kitchen, because nothing happened. And the place was full. Everyone else was putting up with it.

Finally I went looking for the manager, so I'd have some chance of getting to work on a full stomach. I found the guy, who was apologetic, and all of a sudden I got a glass of water, my breakfast magically appeared, someone started watching the cash register, and so forth.

Then some guy in the middle of the restaurant stood up. He seemed older and more prosperous, but otherwise he had the air of the guy in the Norman Rockwell "Freedom of Speech" painting in the Four Freedoms series: confident yet diffident, "I'm just Joe Average, but I've got something really important to say."

And he said it. He proclaimed in a loud voice, "I JUST WANT TO SAY THAT I THINK EVERYONE HERE IS DOING AN EXCELLENT JOB. AN EXCELLENT JOB." And then he sat down.

I have a feeling, in fact, that if I'd actually left the restaurant in the post below when the owner gave me the option of leaving right now, something similar would have happened among the remaining customers. It would have gone something like, "HAW, HAW, HAW. WHO DID THAT GUY THINK HE WAS?" and there would have been several concurring refrains of "HAW HAW HAW, YA GOT THAT RIGHT," and so forth.

It's as though some large part of the population feels they're truly entitled to bad service. They're disappointed when they don't get it. They absolutely can't relate to anyone who would even observe that service was slow, much less complain about it.

On Almost Getting Thrown Out of a Restaurant

Is it just me, or is anyone else noticing how touchy people seem to be lately? One of my interests is finding restaurants with real breakfasts -- in other words, not the standard stringy hash browns, scrambled eggs, and toast you get at Denny's and similar places. You tend to find restaurants that serve really good breakfasts in places like Baker, Oregon or San Luis Obispo, California, but if you look, you can find them in metropolitan areas as well (one in LA is The Pantry, which I'll get to in another post).

So I found one of those places up in the desert about five years ago. Large portions, omelets with unusual ingredients like spinach and Cajun sausage, biscuits-and-gravy instead of toast. The clientele I've observed includes Sheriffs' deputies, long-distance truck drivers, professional gamblers on their way back from Vegas, and so forth. I'll give a place like that a lot of leeway. It's been there a long time, and it's apparently passed through a number of hands. The owner who had it when I discovered it sold it right around 9/11.

The new owner probably bit off a little more than she wanted to chew, so to speak. She kept a waitress on from the previous owner, who stayed until she got pregnant, and the owner took over waitressing herself, which didn't seem to agree with her. The chef under the old owner was probably the owner's husband, and he left when the place was sold. The new chef had the old recipes, but nothing's been quite the same. He has some kind of a knack for making a breakfast cold as soon as it comes off the frying pan. The cheese on top of the omelet melts, but it's some special kind of cheese that melts on a cold omelet.

The new owner decided last year she was going to sell the place. First there was a For Sale sign, then the For Sale sign got an In Escrow sign added to it. I heard some scuttlebutt while I was in there once that the buyer wanted to open it seven days (the place had been closed Mondays and Tuesdays). Then the In Escrow sign changed to Sale Pending. First the owner was getting the place painted (it'd had a definite desert patina) -- then there was a big banner saying Now Open 7 Days! But the owner was still there. I assume there must be a problem with the sale, and the buyer must want to see financial results from a new coat of paint and seven-day operation before he or she commits.

The food was still worth coming in for, even if it was below lukewarm when you got it, and it was the kind of place you shouldn't expect urban promptitude from anyhow -- but the owner subbing as waitress got into the habit of disappearing for periods of time, so there was nobody to take or put out orders, get glasses of water, refill coffee, bring you your check, and so forth. The cook, who could see the whole place, might have done it, but he didn't. Probably wasn't paid enough to put the food up hot in the first place. And he only had one speed.

I came in last Friday morning, and there were maybe eight people sitting at the counter and at tables waiting for the owner to reappear and take their orders. Finally, she did. She worked her way through the older couples who wanted to have all their possilble choices explained to them in detail before they ordered. She worked her way through the people with kids, with the kids changing their minds over and over.

At one point, she handed me a menu. I knew what I wanted and started to say, "I'll have the three-egg. . ." She brought me up short.

"Wait your turn," she said. "I'm just handing you a menu. I have to take these other people's orders first." She gave me a look that said I was trying to slip something past her and went back to the backlog of dawdlers and ditherers.

The chef started on the orders. Slowly. After all, he had to let them cool down before he put them up. It began to fascinate me how much time you could take cooking eggs. Eight orders was something -- it's too bad the owner had disappeared and let the backlog build up -- but this wasn't the Augean stables, after all. I watched each order come off the stove with agonizing slowness. Every time one came up, the owner would be paying attention to something else, refilling someone's coffee, wiping off a table, getting caught up in conversation, and it would take her a minute or two to notice. It was adding more and more time to how long it was taking to get my breakfast.

Finally I looked at my watch and realized I'd been sitting there for half an hour. How long does it take to cook eight orders of eggs? The guy still had several orders to go before he got to mine.

"Half an hour is a long time to wait," I said to the owner behind the counter. I meant it mostly as an observation. I thought it was a mild observation under the circumstances.

Not the owner. She blew her top. "WE MAKE EVERY ORDER HERE FRESH," she screamed at me. "WE COOK EVERYTHING HERE TO ORDER SPECIAL. IT'S NOT MY FAULT YOU CAME IN WHEN ALL THESE OTHER PEOPLE WERE HERE." I understood that, of course. And I didn't say anything about all the people being there because she'd been off on break. I'd been giving them a lot of leeway for three years anyhow. She lowered her voice to a growl. "You have two choices. You can wait, or YOU CAN LEAVE RIGHT NOW!!!" The last was said so everyone in the place could hear it.

I decided to wait -- I'd invested half an hour in breakfast, and I'd have to wait a while someplace else anyhow. Ten minutes later my order finally came up. The cheese was melted, but it was the special cold-melting cheese. The owner was still shaking with silent rage as she put my order down in front of me.

I left a tip, but something tells me I'd better not go back there.

So What's With This Old House?

My local PBS outet, KCET, has emerged from one of its numerous month-long fundraisers, in which it suspends vaguely interesting programs (like This Old House or Nova) in favor of lectures from quacks like Dr. Wayne Dyer (who replaced Dr. Deepak Chopra several years ago after a San Francisco escort did or didn't surface with copies of charge slips for her services on Chopra's American Express card). Increasingly, I find unannounced programming changes following these fundraisers: this time, This Old House has become an un-program, though its spinoff, Ask This Old House, continues. They cut The New Yankee Workshop about a year ago the same way.

Normally This Old House has a couple of new projects each year, but then fills in with reruns. I'm wondering if they may have created a problem when they made Steve Thomas an un-person, replacing him with Kevin O'Connor. Would they still feature Steve Thomas on re-runs? (And come to think of it, has viewer interest in the program tanked with Thomas gone?)

For all the years I've followed Norm and Steve, largely because, like many people, I'm hooked on watching other people work with tools, I'm less concerned than I would have been before, since I've begun to have the same reaction James LIleks had to Car Talk on NPR when he began to realize the whole program, meant to sound spontaneous, is scripted. Not only do you get the enduring This Old House formula of preppy-white-boy-bonds-with-other-white-guys-in-the-building-trades, but it's scripted.

KEVIN O'CONNOR

Hey, Richard!

RICHARD TRETHEWEY

Hey, Kevin! What's Norm doing today?

Recited woodenly. I was getting tired of it anyhow.

The Persistence of Bukowski

Over the last couple of weeks, I've run into various discussions of writing in the blogosphere that refer, directly or indirectly, to Charles Bukowski. As a Los Angeles writer, naturally I can't ignore him, but there are others who appear either directly to follow his model, or are influenced by a similar esthetic.

Via The Greater Nomadic Council, I found this direct borrowing from Bukowski at Sanity's Edge, explaining one way to handle hate e-mail in its lessons on How to Blog:

Standard Hate Mail Reply Template

Dear [insert name here],

I have received your correspondence dated [insert date here]. After a careful review, I printed it out to hang on my refrigerator, next to my Chinese menus, so that I might reflect upon it often. However, after some thoughtful deliberation, I folded it neatly into a paper airplane and sailed it across the room. It landed gracefully next to a pair of shit-stained underwear, where it will likely remain until someone more motivated than I chooses to remove it.

(The borrowing is acknowledged at the bottom of the post, by the way.) I've also been visiting Mimi Smartypants with some frequency since I had it pointed out to me. It's particularly intriguing because it's a blog that's gone commercial, with a book based on it published in the UK. So far, I haven't found a direct reference to Bukowski, but the material has some similarity, covering as it often does social contacts and other experiences centering on drinking. She also takes swipes now and then at MFA programs and writers' workshops.

This shouldn't be surprising -- as Douglas Bass posted a couple of days ago, "The blogosphere rewards creativity and ingenuity. . . .. The blogosphere rewards excellence in writing and thinking. Just as God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble, the blogosphere smacks down the pompous and the suck-ups."

There's something to be said for Bukowski's version of unmediated experience as a model for blog writing. Certainly it's a more productive avenue to pursue than to try just to be another John Updike, Flannery O'Connor, or even Erica Jong.

"We Know Our Smartest Students Earn Grades in the B and C Range"

At some point while I was at Dartmouth, then-President John Sloan Dickey said this in some context -- a most interesting statement. It came back to me a couple of years ago, and I've been turning it over in my mind now and then ever since. Why was this? I would guess, in fact, if the possible reasons for it are correct, Dartmouth's smartest students are still earning grades in the B and C range, even with the median grade close to A-minus.

Here are my current hypotheses:

1. Grading on a curve, as I've outlined in the second-most-recent post below, is a sucker's game. There's no way you can put in a "reasonable" effort and get a predictable result, because you're being set up against the wannabe burnout cases. Smarter students are going to have this figured out, and aren't going to become burnout cases themselves. Thus they'll be farther down the curve.
   

   
   

2. Even in college, you're still looking at the "teacher's pet" phenomenon, where charming but less capable students get the prof's attention and are more likely to be identified incorrectly as high performers.
   

   
   

3. The students who have the most initiative and intelligence are likely also to miss the subtle pointers on what the profs want to see in papers, and will thus, wittingly or unwittingly, take risks the less capable students won't take.
   

   
   

4. Geniuses (as opposed to prodigies or idiots-savant) can simply be ugly ducklings.
   

One problem we have as a society, it seems to me, is that our educational institutions aren't making us smarter overall by identifying and helping the students with the most potential. Instead, like Dartmouth, they're giving high grades to average performers and likely giving short shrift to -- even discouraging -- some of the most intelligent students.

Who's doing research here? Anyone? Why not?

UPDATE: Alex Halavais makes the point below that, in effect, since the smartest students know the grades are meaningless, and knowledge is its own reward, it doesn't really matter. I don't disagree with him in any sort of short term. But, at least theoretically, the grades should be some kind of indication of who's actually mastered the material -- or who's actually been stimulated enough by it to learn further. We're back to William James's "morbid minded" dualism, it seems to me: there are things in the world that seem good, but aren't. What's our duty to bring these things into line? A tough question -- but complacency isn't the answer, it seems to me. Wouldn't we be smarter as a society if grades were a more useful indicator of actual ability and performance?

Grade Inflation at Dartmouth -- Market Forces

The Dartmouth Alumni Magazine piece I've been discussing here goes on to suggest it's ". . . unfair -- and illogical -- to try to equate the likes of an entry-level physics class with, say, an advanced religion class. 'The difficulty is when you come to courses such as mine and everybody wants to be there and everybody is interested in the material,' says religion professor Susannah Heschel. 'What do I do? You want to be liked and you want to be judged a good teacher. You don't want to get a reputation of being too hard or too difficult.'"

A major reason a professor wouldn't want to get such a reputation is enrollment. The introductory science courses can afford to grade on a curve, because pre-meds have to take them. I don't know the current policy, but when I was an undergraduate, all students had to take some type of introductory science courses in any case to satisfy the general liberal education requirement. Like a business with a monopoly, a department can do pretty much as it pleases with a required course. The article quotes Susan Ackerman, another Religion professor, who says, "It's certainly true that average grades in humanities and social sciences are higher. . . . [science courses] play an important weeding out function. If in the religion department we set a mean grade of B- or C-, our enrollments would plummet to the point where we would be in trouble."

If not enough students enroll in a given course, it has to be canceled, and that means the department has to find something else for the professor to do that semester. If the department's enrollment falls overall, that will affect its staffing. Everyone has his or her reasons. But this brings up what I think is the false dichotomy between the curve-grading science courses (exactly what are they weeding out if the median grade after the weeding is a B-plus?) and the give 'em all A-minuses humanities and social science courses, whose instructors are clearly afraid to give anyone a grade that would offend them. What we aren't seeing is a grading system that's predictable, transparent, fair both to the achievers and non-achievers, and consistently enforced. All it would take would be for faculty and those who supervise the faculty to do the jobs they've been supposed to be doing all along.

And let's say that simply making expectations clear about what's an "A", "B", "C", and so forth, and then consistently grading based on those expectations, isn't enough. Don't Dartmouth and its peer institutions have enough talent in their faculties and administrations to come up with a better system? As with the massive inaction that's led to the current academic labor system, academic nonfeasance in finding an effective grading system is something astonishing.

As I said in my first post about Dartmouth's grade inflation here, both faculty and administrators seem fairly comfortable with the situation as it exists. The article concludes with more remarks from Dean of the Faculty Gazzaniga: "'You cannot tell a difference between these kids' by merely looking at a transcript, acknowledges Gazzaniga. Still he sees no signs of any seismic changes at work. . . . 'Where it really comes to fruition is graduate school. It doesn't take long to figure out who is smart there,' he said."

So the Dean of the Faculty acknowledges that Dartmouth has essentially abdicated any responsibility to provide a realistic assessment of a student's performance, passing that function on to "graduate school".

Yet it's become a truism in the blogosphere that graduate school itself is something of a fraud, enrolling far more students in most disciplines than the academic job market can hire. And when I was in graduate school even 30 years ago, the official policy was that graduate students received grades of only "A" or "B" -- using the reason Dartmouth now gives for awarding only "As" and "Bs" to undergraduates: they're the cream of the crop, after all.

Academic blogs have pointed out over and over that no effective merit-based culling of the field occurs in graduate school, contrary to Dean Gazzaniga's assertion. The people who leave graduate school, or who leave the academic job market following graduate school, are primarily those who do so on their own initiative. The rest struggle in an academic labor system that is, in many ways, simply the end point of a system sustained by Gazzaniga's and his colleagues' complacency.

In one of my earliest posts here, "Cheating and the Academic Transaction", I suggested that no individual institution is going to crack down on the amount of cheating that is taking place among undergraduates (and I have no reason to think Dartmouth is exempt here), simply because any such crackdown would cause a scandal and likely drive applicants to other schools with fewer scruples. I suspect that if Dartmouth undertook a grade crackdown, there'd be a similar result, and with leaders like President Wright and Dean Gazzaniga approaching retirement, nobody's going to rock the boat.

Dartmouth has, however, been blessed with both visionary executives and highly capable administrators over the years, and it's not beyond hope to see better people replace the ones we now have when the time comes. It appears now that the Dartmouth faculty is satisfied to have the introductory science courses perform the hazing function they always have -- such "weeding out" as they accomplish seems to be ineffectual, based on Dean Gazzaniga's remarks -- and they're kept around, I think, as a salve to everyone else's conscience. In Hanover, the system works, at least for those who are already there, at least for now, and at least until they retire.