Pointing your finger,
Placing blame where it belongs!
Looking in mirrors.
Category Archives: Working
On craziness…
And I hadn’t even turned on the tv or gotten the paper yet…
Well, I had skimmed through FaceBook, but that’s not really the craziness I was refering to. Just the craziness of daily life sometimes. When we have back-to-back weeks juggling multiple meetings, being everywhere, wading through a tsunami of email…
Until you finally have a couple of free weekends sandwiching a light schedule at work. Not that you’re going to be any less busy. After all, you’ve got all those personal and professional to-do list items that were swept aside by the hectic schedule, to work on. But it’s your schedule, you feel in control again…
Not looking ahead to the week coming up, the week when the craziness begins again.
Ugh…
…another one of
those crazy series of days
that seem to run together.
Everything else lost to sight,
time at the speed of light!
Here…
Here I sit, what can I say.
Should be on a jet plane,
Jet plane’s on delay.
Not the traveler’s Bain
To find another way
For missed connections are a pain.
Hello, now another delay
My second flight’s plane
Has suddenly saved the day.
Maybe next time I’ll go by train.
Integrity…
Grease tattooed,
callused, working hands, folded, peacefully.
My father’s hands.
Leaving…
leaving on a jet…
Oh yeah, someone used that.
Leaving Baltimore…
Where…
Where is the haiku
Sitting on your shoulder it still asks,
Coming says the haiku?
What’s this guy doing here?
That’s basically the same question I asked myself when at 20 I found myself in the Pacific, swimming as fast as I could, as the Gridley drifted toward the far horizon.
Maybe that story says something about why I write, why I blog, who I am.
I had grown up in a Navy family, traveling here and there. Picking the wrong entry into higher education, then the Daytona Beach Community College, when I fancied myself a surfer, ended with the first semester. So, a couple of short stories later, finding my employer’s business seized and padlocked, hitchhiking to Ohio, I was avoiding the draft in the Navy. Naturally, see my blog, Teacher’s Pet, the key is in there, I’d choose the Navy.
I was a young Boatswain’s Mate, the ship’s swimmer, and we were on an exercise off the coast of Hawaii – way off the coast, even from the bridge you couldn’t see the island. We’d ended the exercise because the seas, while calm, – it’s a Pacific thing – were running 10-15 feet and we needed to recover the small unmanned remotely controlled boat that had been part of the exercise. As the swimmer I got to go aboard the Boston Whaler and attach the block (a technical bosun’s term) to the whaler so it could be hoisted back aboard the USS Gridley (DLG 21). I won’t take the time to fully explain what was happening or why self-compensating davits are important and will just tell you that with 10-15 seas Gridley was rolling 15 degrees to starboard then 15 degrees to port. That 60 degree difference would dump the block, a lot of heavy metal cable into the whaler on the roll to port and then yank it and the whaler up and out on the roll to starboard. Not what Boston Whalers are built for!
So when the whaler starts to break apart and I see that my safety line is hopelessly tangled in the block and cable I had cut myself loose and went overboard. It seemed a smart idea at the time – considering the condition of the whaler when it was recovered it still seems a smart idea.
But I was upwind of the Gridley and she was presenting a lot of surface area to the prevailing wind, actually leaving a shadow of wake as she sailed downwind. Being young, strong, a good swimmer, doesn’t mean you can out swim a situation like that. And, that’s when I started asking myself, ‘What am I doing here?’.
And that’s about 1/50 th (a wildly unsupported statistic) of who I am.
Loose Change
Quick trip to Florida and came back to loose change. Working at loose change, like “loose cannon” wrecking random havoc, at least that’s how keeping up with all the regulatory change in the financial sector feels. Counterproductive change, it’s going to have impacts that were never intended – certainly weren’t wanted by the people who thought they were being “ripped off” by the big banks. Change that is going to affect all those who paid their credit cards on time, never went over their credit limit, etc. – affecting them as creditors work out how to implement and comply with the new regulations.
Loose change… You better start collecting it in the car’s ashtray. You may need it soon when you’re riding on empty and your debit card gets declined.
