Blog Archives 071211 to 071123

Old pointless chatter instead of new pointless chatter.

 

071211 Davis, CA
Today was an annoying day. We had a mandatory Harassment Training For Managers meeting from 14:00 to 16:30... I was working in the lab, lost track of the time, and was ~30 minutes late to the meeting. Not good. Still, I slipped in, picked up the hand-outs and found I'd just missed the initial orientation, covering the same "What is Harassment" sort of stuff on which all employees are briefed. Thanks to moving between various sites, I've had that briefing four times since starting with my company.

The presentation was done by two lawyers from our New York legal office and was mandated at this time, because of a research grant from the US government, which requires, as part of the grant conditions, that all managers go through the 2 hr Harassment Training, a 0.5 hr Affirmative Action Training, and a 2.5 hr Employment Law Training.

Most of the presentation was using cases where the Lawyers gave examples that seemed to place a tension between required actions and ethics or fairness. For example, what if an employee asks for a private, off-record, confidential conversation and during that conversation reveals that a situation related to another employee has made that person feel slightly uncomfortable? The employee wants the conversation private, off-record, confidential, etc., because that employee does not want the situation to be "escalated" to an HR case. Answer: You have no choice. As a manager, you are, legally speaking, The Company. As a representative of The Company, you have heard a harassment concern and this must be investigated by the appropriate arm of the company; HR. To fail to report the concern for investigation leaves a reported harassment concern unaddressed and is grounds for your termination.

This sounds harsh and questions were encouraged, so people were asking "Can't you leave the conversation off record and private, as requested, and just keep tabs on the situation to report it if it is not resolved without an investigation?"

Sigh. This is why I was annoyed. We had a room full of bright people who were just plain not getting it. This was not a discussion about philosophy, morals, logic, ethics, or fairness. This was a discussion about Law. Specifically, this was a discussion about Harassment Law. Keep in mind that Harassment Law includes awards of punitive damages, i.e. damages based not on the size of the grievance, but based on the size of the company. So, a big, multinational company may experience one case of unaddressed racial jokes in a hinterland five-person office and thereafter be found liable for millions of dollars in punitive damages.

Company survival in this legal environment requires that the lines be clear, sharp, and bordered in termination clauses. Again, fairness, logic, balance, etc., are not the concern; corporate survival is the concern. This is why, when a harassment investigation is initiated, the accused person is immediately put on administrative leave and the accuser remains free to come to work. It might seem "fair" to put both parties on leave, but that could be interpreted as retribution to the accuser. No matter whether the harassment charge is substantiated, any apparent retribution against the accuser opens the company to lawsuit as well.

So, the lawyers presented case after case where there was an apparent tension between the "right" thing to do or the "reasonable/moderate" response and the legally required response while asking the gathered managers to answer the question "What should you do?" And I watched manager after manager respond with something along the lines of "I know you want the answer 'report it to HR', but wouldn't it also be reasonable to do X?"

Dangnation! These were Lawyers! Briefing us on Harassment Law! This was not an exercise in "What is Reasonable", this was an exercise in "What is the Legally Required Response To Prevent Exposure to Harassment Lawsuits"! You don't go to a cop and say "Well, the road was straight, clean, and clear, with no other cars on the road, so isn't the safe speed reasonably something in the neighborhood of 70-80 mph?" No. The speed limit is 55 mph. Reasonable has nothing to do with it. You may have been perfectly safe in the operation of the vehicle, and at the same time been breaking the law by exceeding the speed limit. It is a clear, hard-edged Law. If you are going one mile over the speed limit, then you are breaking the law. If you are being trained by a cop on the law and how to stay within it, you don't start bargaining and asking about maybe going one or two miles over the speed limit being OK. The answer is, as it must be, "No; 55 mph means 55 mph, not 57 or 58 or 63 if the road is straight. Just 55. Period."

What is so hard to get about this? With the scary risk of punitive damages out there, a company can not accept the risk inherent in any official policy suggestion that managers do only what is "reasonable"; company policy, with regards to harassment, can not be laissez-faire - it must require that every supervisor make every effort to ensure full compliance and no exposure to liability.

Just as individual cops are capable of using their judgment to not hand out speeding tickets to every car going one mile over the speed limit, individual managers must use their judgment in what should get forwarded to HR and what is trivial. But, just as the law is not at all fuzzy about 55 mph being a limit, the policy is not at all fuzzy about what violates harassment reporting policy. The lawyers can't tell you any violation of policy is OK, but no matter what they must say, they are not really expecting you to turn off your mind and start reporting ever time someone uses "harassing" language (e.g. the "ageist" greeting "How's it going old-timer?"). This is not brain-surgery, but it is your rear on the line if you ignored the wrong things.

So, the two hour mandated Harassment Training passed. The questions made nothing any slower or faster; the main points were covered in the first 30-40 minutes after the initial 30 minute introduction (i.e. by about the hour mark), but a mandated two hours covering a set number of points means that if you cover the points faster, you are required to sit there and continue discussing them until the two hours is up and your mandatory, government regulation required training is complete.

Then we sat for the required 0.5 hr Affirmative Action talk. More or less, the only legally safe option is to hire the most qualified person, with that qualification being a written, fixed document filed with HR before the hiring process starts. If your needs change, or there are several equally qualified people, the safest thing to do is to end the job search entirely, redraft the job description document (in an individual-blind and unbiased way), and then open up an entirely new search with the new, immutable document.

Afterwards, many of the people walked out still discussing the questionable "fairness" of being required to kick a vast flotilla of apparently trivial nonsense over to HR for potential harassment investigation. I, on the other hand, did not walk out discussing it; I got it. I had paid attention during the meeting, had not fallen asleep (unlike two other people), and was one of only three people who had correctly answered every question in the closing questionnaire.

Actually, I didn't get to walk out of the meeting at all; having come late to the mandatory meeting, I had not been signed in from the beginning and could not be authorized as having fulfilled all requirements of the Harassment Training paperwork. To fulfill the requirements, I'll have to sit through the entire two hour training again, along with the couple of people who missed the meeting due to business travel.

Remember, this has nothing to do with fairness, logic, or what is reasonable; this has everything to do with meeting legal requirements. Dangit. I get it, but I'm still annoyed.

Tomorrow morning is a mandatory, federal law-required 2.5 hr Employment Law Training meeting. Whee. You can bet your rear that I'm not going to be late to that one.

071206 Davis, CA
It's late and I'm tired, so this is brief. I've finally started exercising on a regular basis. I was occasionally running before, but I'd be regular for a while and then very irregular for a while. Now, I've picked up something that I'm doing about three times a week consistently; yoga.

I tried a couple of random excercise places and a couple of different yoga studios before settling on the place I've been going regularly. It is all apparently simple stuff, but the pace and the degree to which positions are held make me sweat like a maniac and I've yet to finish out class without arms or legs or both shaking with effort at some point.

For example, just get down into a push-up position, on your toes and hands. Make it easy on your self by putting your hands directly below your shoulders and straightening your arms, so your arms don't have to work very hard. Right. Now, straighten those legs and get that butt down or bring your belly up, so that you have a nice straight line from your head to your shoulders to your pelvis to your knees to your heels. Still easy. Now, just stay in that "easy" position while the teacher walks around individually checking everybody to make sure their position is right... Then continue to hold that "easy" position while the teacher reads aloud from a book about the importance of breath in yoga... Remember, your butt and knees should be staying in that nice straight line!

And there you have it; you're just holding still. You aren't even doing a push-up, yet after a few minutes (which feels like a few tens of minutes), your arms are shaking, your abdominal muscles are on fire, and you are beginning to wonder if it is possible that you just pulled your butt muscles.

Then the teacher says "Enough relaxing, how about we get to work?"

So, I'm doing yoga, because it proves to me (pretty much every class) that my flexibility is so-so, my strength is pretty iffy, my stamina is comparable to a sickly parakeet, and my balance calls my sobriety into question. I figure that any exercise routine which humbles me that comprehensively must be pretty darn good.

Oh, I am slowly getting better at it... For example, my stamina is now comparable that of a healthy parakeet. Here's to self improvement!

071202 Davis, CA
Ugh. Earlier this week, I added a few new quotes to the random quotes script I use... Unfortunately, I messed it up and broke the site; I accidentally put a " mark in the wrong place, creating a script parsing error and causing a failure to load the blog. After fixing that, I updated the blog with the latest post.

However, when I did that, I blew it in a different way; the blog now showed an error in the post down at 071111, with everything after the word "lot" being bold due to a failure to close an emphasis tag... This was an error I'd made a while back, but fixed when I was adding another post. The fact that the emphasis tag got un-fixed means that I screwed up when I was uploading and downloading versions... which means I lost a full post or two and didn't even catch that I'd done it. Oh well. It just means the blog post was slightly more ephemeral than intended.

I've updated posts on my home computer and on my work computer and I synch them with the version on my father's computer (which is serving these pages). Typically, I declare the version on the server to be "official", so I download that before making changes. Occasionally, I think I already have the latest version on the computer I'm currently using, so I edit that without re-downloading and then post it to the server. Occasionally I'm wrong and so I edit an older version, adding the newest post to a file missing the newer posts, then I upload that, thereby losing the newer posts. It doesn't happen often, but that bold mistake was one I know I fixed just before typing a bunch of stuff up. Oh well. Just evidence that I need to download the official version from the server every time before adding text.

Anyway, I've long since ceased being super careful about checking the whole site. It mostly works when I make changes, so I tend to upload without spending the time to check more than the newest post and if I'm running short on time, I sometimes don't even check the newest post. Eh, this is a very long way of explaining why the site is occasionally broken. If you visit and you find things seem broken, just send me an email to let me know. Chances are good I'll know exactly what got messed up and be able to fix it in just a minute or two.

Talking about tinkering with the site, I had been thinking of putting in proper code for language identification for those times when I have thrown a foreign word into the mix, like when I mention mochi (餅, もち, a tasty block of pounded sweet glutinous rice). Unfortunately, I keep running up against good reasons not to do "proper" coding.

Current browsers don't handle the lang element consistently. Therefore, most web coders who try to use the lang element are forced to specify both lang (the HTML attribute) and xml:lang (the XML attribute) to make sure browsers recognize things properly. Unfortunately, the specifications for HTML 5 specify that lang must be used only for HTML documents and xml:lang must be used only for XML documents. So, you are forced to choose between current proper handling or future proper handling.

If you actually do succeed in having the attribute properly recognized, then many browsers don't handle it in a clever way. In the example of "mochi", if I had tagged it as a Japanese word and your browser had recognized it, then chances are good your browser would prompt you to install a whole pile of Japanese fonts to handle the different Japanese character sets (romanji, hiragana, katakana, and kanji), even though all I did was write "mochi", which uses the standard romanized character set.

Rather than do "proper" encoding, which might pester readers with prompts to install Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese, Greek, etc. character sets, I'll just stick with not properly (in code) identifying the foreign words. Embracing the multilingual world is trickier than you'd think!

Oh, the whole reason I got off on this tangent was becaues I wanted to mention mochi; I had some recently. I walked past a place selling frozen yoghurt (tasting very tart, not like TCBY's frozen yoghurt) and I went and tried some of their pomegranate yoghurt (made with fresh pomegranate juice) and topped with mochi chunks. It was good! It reminded of the other tasty Japanese winter treats like tosted mochi balls, eaten still warm (kinda like marshmallows), and shiruko (汁粉, しるこ, sweet red azuki bean) soup topped with mochi. Yum!

071126 Davis, CA
It used to be that I'd come from Utah in the winter to visit with E and C in California and wonder why they left their house so cold... Now that I'm living in California, I'm doing it too; the winter is so mild that you can go a rather long time without bothering to turn on the heat... You just slowly adjust to an ever-so-slightly colder indoors. As the weeks pass, it never quite seems time to turn on the heat yet: it's only a little bit colder than it was last week.

I have to admit, I finally did (grudgingly) turn on the heat. We had a cold weekend and it dropped to 38°F (3.3°C) outside and below 50°F (10°C) inside my apartment. That was enough to make me be slow to want to get out of bed, so I turned on the heat, just warm enough so I won't fight the alarm clock; 65°F (18.3°C).

Other places, the weather would go below freezing and I would have been forced to turn on the heat long since, but in California, I still feel like it is somehow cheating. California winters are so mild, and I grew up in cold climes... It feels like I'm somehow being weak and decadent by actually turning on the heat. Eh, whatever.

071125 Davis, CA
Last night, I had a graphic reminder that you can control your own stupidity, but you can't control someone else's stupidity. I'd gone out to dinner, then to a bookstore, and upon returning home, I found my street blocked off by a number of police cars, an ambulance, and a firetruck.

Apparently, a speeding car had side-swiped a motorcyclist coming the other way. The motorcycle slewed into a line of parked cars. When I got there, the motorcyclist had already been bundled into the ambulance and the police were slowly sweeping the whole of the accident scene with flashlights, looking for pieces. Of the motorcyclist.

Shortly thereafter, the medics declared they could wait no longer and they sped off to the hospital. The police continued to look for bits they could send along to the hospital and they photographed the large pool of blood before pouring sand on it and pouring sand on the pool of motor oil.

Someone else had a moment of inattention and bad judgement, and now the motorcyclist will be spending the holiday season in rounds of reconstructive surgery. So, remember to look around, enjoy the view, and smell the flowers, eh? There's no guarentee you'll have eyes or a nose tomorrow.

071123 Davis, CA
I didn't go anywhere for Thanksgiving. I just took the day for doing a bit of cooking at home. I made pumkin pie, sweet potato pie, and baba gannoj. Baba gannoj is a very simple Syrian dip made of roasted eggplant blended with fresh lemon juice and sesame seed butter. The recipe I use is out of "Gourmet Cooking For One (or more)" by Robert Grahm Paris. I got this 1960s-era book at a garage sale years ago and it is great for someone living alone. All the recipes are scaled down, involve minimal processing, and are relatively elegant. The recipes themselves have been taken from around the world, so flipping open the book to a random page (which I just did) will show you recipes from Brazil, Japan, Persia, and Estonia. It was a darn good garage sale find.

I spent a good chunk of Friday at the local laundromat. The people who use laundromats are typically the people who can't afford their own washer and dryer. My apartment building has one coin-op washer and one coin-op dryer in the building, but I don't use them. I prefer going to the laundromat. For one thing, there are lots of larger washers and dryers, so you can do all your laundry in a single pass. The other reason to go is purely people-watching. The other people there are the poor elderly, scraping by on social security checks, or the working poor; recent Mexican immagrants, tattooed high school drop-outs, divorced mothers with too many kids, etc. It is an interesting mix.

The topic of laundry machines has me thinking some about the utilities I found in Europe and Asia. One thing that was pretty common was a little unit that was both a washer and a dryer. Load your clothes, set the wash run, set the dry run, or do only one or the other. Very efficient and convenient. I wonder why we don't have them here. Another common device was the water-efficient two-button toilet. One button for disposing of liquid waste (a "half flush") and another button for disoposing of solid waste (a "full flush"). The US has enough cities built in deserts or other arid climes that you'd think this simple technology would be all over the place here. Again, I don't know why we don't have it.

I'm not trying to bash the US or anything; I'm just wondering why some nice things haven't made it here. Living in Europe made me appreciate the modern American over-engineered shower head with multiple spray settings. The Europeans are often making due with the little shower head attached by a flexible hose to the faucet. I like the flexible hose, but I did wonder why the shower head couldn't be the fancy big American style shower head.

Wow. Even I am bored by the tepid triteness of the above observations. Time to close this post before I cause too many banality-induced comas.

Page Last Modified: 2008 04 14, 16:50:41

 

 

Blog archives

• 071211 to 071123 
• 071111 to 071005 
• 070929 to 070802 
• 070728 to 070603 
• 070520 to 070323 
• 070320 to 070228 
• 070218 to 070122 
• 070121 to 061219 
• 061217 to 061119 
• 061114 to 061020 
• 061017 to 060917 
• 060916 to 060817 
• 060816 to 060717 
• 060716 to 060617 
• 060610 to 060518 
• 060515 to 060418 
• 060417 to 060218 
• 060218 to 051228 
• 051222 to 051124 
• 051114 to 051017 
• 051016 to 050918 
• 050914 to 050819 
• 050815 to 050717 
• 050717 to 050612 
• 050612 to 050509 
• 050509 to 050414 
• 050414 to 050313 
• 050313 to 041231 
• 041231 to 040612 
• 040612 to Start