Get your hands off their survival

Cynthia posted this on her Prodigal Aspersions site. I'm with her. Not being a surviver myself, I see this as a sacred trust being held on the behalf of them. Hence my title, "Get your hands off their survival", rather than her more personal one.

A working vacation

I am on a one week 'working vacation'. A time to relax, pull out the hammer and saw and build things! No I am not finishing my office, but I have been basically the entire rest of the house while i work on that huge project and, besides, I got sidetracked when my mother-in-law's house got flooded back in May...

My brothers-in-law and I tore down the bottom half of all the walls in her basement (Why, oh why did she have so much sheet-rock down there?) and are replacing them with good ole plywood and, in the more finished parts, wainscot panel. It's taken all summer, and my home projects have suffered accordingly.

Dad came over today (thanks Dad!) and helped me put up a new bookcase in the hallway into our master bed room. Fun work that really took only a day. Now I just have to prime and paint. Tomorrow I do a few odd things and maybe get back into the office for a bit. Thursday, Dad comes over again and we build cubbies for the front hall. My wife has been clamoring for cubbies and the boxes of books have been clamoring for shelf space for a lot longer. Friday will be dedicated mainly to painting and cleaning up.

I write software for a living, and I guess I find a similar joy in the craftsmanship of woodworking. What I think I like most is the sense of accomplishment when a substantial project is done and done well - especially, if it comes together just they way I planned it.

There's hope after all

I bought a new laptop a couple weeks ago on eBay - an IBM Thinkpad R51, if anyone's interested. It has a huge screen with high-res graphics and the price was right so that's what I went for.

The machine arrived sans power cord - the supply was there, but the cord was not.... Oh, boy, I thought. Here we go.... I sent this carefully worded note to the seller, the ghist of which was, "Was this an oversight?", figuring that it wasn't, honestly. Well, I get this note back, "Definitely an oversight, I'll put one in the mail right away." Cool.

I had a spare cord, so I got busy loading up my software on the new machine and playing with it. It worked great up until I started working with Quicken. Now that piece of software is what some people would call "finiky", and I would call, "a total pain in the neck", but the church uses it for its books and I'm the treasurer, so it's gotta be on the machine. And its gotta work. Period.

It did, mostly. But there is this one function that a treasurer simply has to be able to perform. Print checks. That didn't work. I went to the Web site. I tried installing and reinstalling the software, the printer drivers. I tried installing them in reverse order. I tried to load the software in 'Safe Mode'. No go.

I spent 4 hours of my life on a chat conversation with three different Quicken reps. The machine as now been rebooted as many times in three days as I would expect to see happen in approximate a decade. And it's getting slower.....and slower.....and slower. Other software stops working right.

I uninstall a whole lot of stuff to try to get things back to some form of normalcy. It gets worse. I'm approaching two decades worth of reboots at this point. Finally, I do the obvious and look in the system log and there it is.....disk errors - bad blocks. Now I know I'm in for it. I send another carefully worded note to the seller asking for his plan to help me out, thinking, "Yah, right." Do you know that the guy is sending me a new drive? Wow.

Buy laptops from Jay's Computer parts, folks. He's great. He's helping to restore my cynical heart, too. Thanks, Jay.

What happened to keeping your word?

I work for IBM. I have a great job and very supportive management, but there is one issue that keeps surfacing when I talk with others who are also long-standing IBMers -- the Pension Plan. Something critical has gone wrong here, and it colors our entire feelings for the firm and its leaders.

IBM was once a leader in valuing its relationship with its people. Their mantras of "Respect for the Individual", "Good corporate Citizenship in the local community", and "excellent business practice" became hallmarks of how a well-run business got and stayed ahead in the 1950's and 60's, but IBM was there long before that. There is a story that in the Great Depression, TJ Watson, Sr did not release his engineering staff, as so many of his competitors did. Instead, he kept them on in any role he could find - sweeping floors, if necessary. When WW II came along, he was poised with a qualified and loyal team to pull out all the stops to support the effort. IBM flew out of the gate and never looked back. Loyalty flowed both ways and all benefited.

Fast forward to a new world of tough times. GM is way in the red. Airlines are suffering. IBM slashes their defined benefit pension plans along with these failing behemoths. Why? "This is the business trend, so we are getting on early.' So IBM is being run as well as such business luminaries and GM and US Air. Congratulations.

IBM should be ashamed. For years, they staved off the unions by providing benefits that rivaled union shops. For years, they promised to take care of their people and now, while the company is strong and healthy, they abandon that promise to chase the easy solution to meeting quarterly objectives.

IBM's own business conduct guidelines say, "Honesty based on clear communication is integral to ethical behavior. The resulting trustworthiness is essential to forming and maintaining sound, lasting relationships." Does not honesty start with keeping your word? Sure, the legal blurbette has always said, "IBM reserves the right....", but this is not about the Law. It is about honesty - which puts you in the moral landscape. When a company has a team of 200 lawyers seeking ways to break a promise without incurring legal damage, that is morally the same as an out-and-out lie.

God, help me to pray for the well-being of my company and its leaders. They have hurt me through their misguided desire to fix what they see as an unsustainable business model. Their willingness to follow the path that others, weaker than themselves, have trod is reprehensible. If I, in return, refuse to give them an honest day's work for my pay, I am every bit as guilty. Only through your grace and my trust in your care can I let go of my anger and give my best.

Amen.