El Gato and the other new hire

blindsided

el gatoHere’s a work story from 2000, give or take a year, that I wish had gone better, about a new hire.

First, I have to explain that, for a brief time around the turn of the century, my department, the New York Small Business Development Center, was taken over by something called the Institute for Entrepreneurship. It happened because IE had political clout.

There was a kickoff in which New York State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno rambled on. It was the evening of November 10, in 1999, I believe. We were all required to show up and stand around looking enthused, about what, je ne sais pas, the night before a holiday.

Felix Strevell, a former barber who inexplicably had became NYS Deputy Secretary of State headed the IE. Ostensibly, the entity was supposed to be a conduit “through which SUNY has sought public grants and private donations to expand academic research and development that could help small businesses.” But there were about 24 employees, and most of them had not much to do.

The contempt for which IE held SBDC showed up in an organizational chart I saw and wish I had copied. Every one of the IE folks was on the chart, but the entirety of the SBDC, which had been operating for a decade and a half, was in a box on the bottom.

For the most part, we at SBDC kept our heads down and did our valuable work. Occasionally, though, El Gato, as I referred to him, wanted our then-state SBDC director, Jim King to do things that weren’t allowable. Even through closed doors, one could hear the arguments. Jim King, BTW, was not related to Robert King, who was then Chancellor of all of SUNY. Robert King’s wife, not incidentally, worked part-time for the IE, doing who knows what.

The crux of the matter

The local SBDC center in Albany needed to hire an advisor to counsel potential entrepreneurs. I was the chair of the committee, which was fine; I’d done it before. This involved calling the meetings, designing the procedure, and doing the paperwork that SUNY required in terms of our process. We came up with a suitable candidate, who I’ll call CC.

Then, another member of the committee, who I’ll call Holly, said we had to hire someone else as well. What? It wasn’t anyone who was already on the list of candidates. Holly had the resume, and she expected that I, as chair, would sign off on them. I wasn’t about to do that. So SHE signed off on the mystery candidate. I told one of my superiors about it, but they felt there wasn’t much to do about it.

What I WISH I had done was to take down the name of the bogus employee and report it. But to whom? There were a few mid-level, long-term SUNY Central employees I could have, should have consulted. By the time it occurred to me this strategy, I didn’t have the bogus candidate’s name. Though, as I look back on it, they probably could have figured it out from the date of service. I was blindsided and didn’t figure out a better way to respond.

Comeuppance

By the way, El Gato was canned in 2001, and soon thereafter, the SBDC was released from the yoke of the IE. In 2007, El Gato admitted to having committed fraud, “including using his corporate credit card to pay for a trip to Disney World, bringing his father along on two business trips to China, and arranging for a $95,000 pay raise to which he was not entitled.”

He continues to have legal trouble. El Gato was convicted in 2017 of perjury, in giving false testimony about his personal and family expenditures.

Eh. Twenty years later, this still bugs me.

Utility: external gas meter

a six-inch gap

utility conesIn a real, fundamental way, I’ve actually been, dare I say, excited of late. That’s because, for the past two months or so, people from utility entities have been doing work on my street.

It started on June 9 with a tag on our door that National Grid was going to install a new gas line on our property, and to install an external meter. We let Matt into the side door of our house. It was a way to let him do his job while being socially distant from us. In fact, he may have been the first person I allowed into our house in nearly three months. It felt… foreign.

Within the week, workers were digging a large hole across our sidewalk and onto a bit of the lawn, with a smaller hole by the house. Then other folks filled the holes, initially with small rocks, pressed down by a machine sounding like a jackhammer. The strips in the sidewalk were tarred over.

What’s that smell?

A few days later, I vaguely smelled what I thought was gas. But it wasn’t coming from the area of our oven in the kitchen. Instead, I sensed it as I walked down the stairs from the second to the first floor. We called National Grid.

The guy who came over was Will. As it turned out, he had heard of me because of a convoluted story. The bottom line is that his wife’s middle name is Green. Blame this on Will’s father-in-law, Broome.

In any case, Will discovered that the vent that sends the hot water heater’s contaminants out of the house through the chimney was detached by six inches. That’s huge. So we were experiencing a mild case of carbon monoxide poisoning. I suspect the jackhammer-like tool outdoors a couple of weeks earlier disconnected the vent. Note to self: install a CO monitor in the basement!

In other works

Subsequently, different workers have planted grass seed on our lawn, which has been growing back better than it was before. Two sidewalk panels were replaced entirely.

Workers trimmed excess branches from our power lines. We wish they had taken more of the lower branches, but I gather they weren’t National Grid’s responsibility.

Workers repaved part of our street. Not just patching holes but digging up and replacing. I had a nice, brief chat with one of the guys who helps control the traffic when one lane is closed off. I noted that everyone would notice if he and his partner at the end of the construction barrier were to screw up.

This talk happened right after I’d seen a story on the news about the value of conversation, even with a stranger, in releasing oxytocin. That connection with others may be the thing I miss the most in COVID world.

Say nothing and close his Twitter

“The American people demand equitable results.”

no twitterIt is my considered opinion that if the incumbent wants to be reelected to stay in the White House, it wouldn’t be that difficult. All he has to do is say nothing and close his Twitter account. OK, that’s a bit hyperbolic. Still, I do believe that, even in 2020, every time he doesn’t say or tweet something amazingly wrongheaded, he’s accused of finally becoming Presidential.

Fortunately, this appears to be utterly impossible for very long. The item that’s gotten the most play recently is his interview with Axios National Political Correspondent, Jonathan Swan. It was conducted on July 28 but aired on August 3. on HBO It is worse than I could have possibly imagined. The answers were just bizarre. And, as is usually the case any time he speaks, PolitiFact needed to fact-check 22 claims from the interview.

Twitter and Facebook removed recent false claims of his about COVID-19. not for the first time. His assessment of the Beirut explosion seemed to be based on talking through his hat.

Are his recent executive orders even legal? Or actually executive orders? Kevin Drum posits that “the stuff that’s legal is unimportant and the stuff that’s important is illegal.”

Something he has promised, since before Day One, is a better health insurance plan. There is NO plan. He hires people with great hyperbole and fires them with even more.

His record has initiated a series of The Lincoln Project advertisements, often quoting the man’s own words. Chuck Miller describes the evolution of the snake, a story djt told quite frequently. It’s odd; often, what he describes of others is what he does, who he is.

He’s the butt of some pointed satire. Here’s an Honest Government Ad, a “message from the White House.” Borowitz in the New Yorker declares Americans Support Using U.S. Postal Service to Ship Him to Different Address.

Lest We Forget

“Early in [his] term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of his cruelties, collusions, and crimes…

“It felt urgent then to track them, to ensure these horrors — happening almost daily — would not be forgotten. This election year, amid a harrowing global health, civil rights, humanitarian, and economic crisis, we know it’s never been more critical to note these horrors, to remember them, and to do all in our power to reverse them. This list will be updated between now and the November 2020 Presidential election.”

Is This the Beginning of the End of American Racism?

In the September 2020 Atlantic, Ibram X. Kendi posits that IMPOTUS “has revealed the depths of the country’s prejudice—and has inadvertently forced a reckoning.” Hmm.

Back in 2019, “Trump now faced reporters and cameras. Over the drone of the helicopter rotors, one reporter asked Trump if he was bothered that ‘more and more people’ were calling him racist. ‘I am the least racist person there is anywhere in the world,’ Trump replied, hands up, palms facing out for emphasis.” He says that a lot.

Kendi, the author of How To Be An Anti-Racist, suggests the current regime “has paved the way for a revolution against racism.” The “denialism has permanently changed the way Americans view themselves. The Trump effect is real and lasting. The reckoning we have witnessed this spring and summer at public demonstrations transforms into a reckoning in legislatures, C-suites, university-admissions offices.

“On this path, the American people demand equitable results, not speeches that make them feel good about themselves and their country. The American people give policymakers an ultimatum: Use your power to radically reduce inequity and injustice, or be voted out.”

My, Kendi is more optimistic than I. Has America truly embraced an anti-racist agenda for the long term? Or will they have moved on to some other concerns come November? Je ne sais pas.

Death, The New Normal. 20 years after dad.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Les Green.tree sweaterWading through old email earlier this year, I found this piece that Parker J. Palmer called Death, The New Normal. It’s fairly short.

“If emotional honesty is part of living well — which surely it is — then shaking my fist at death is just as important as accepting it. If that’s unenlightened, so be it! At least I have the good company of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.

“I discovered her ‘Dirge Without Music’ when my father died nearly twenty years ago. I found a curious peace in the poet’s refusal to accept the inevitable, and I find it again today.”

As it turns out, it’s been twenty years since my father died. And I remember it all, astonishingly well. Hearing, in Albany, that my father was in the hospital. The news on a Thursday that my father had a stroke. My wife and I staying in his hospital room in Charlotte the following Monday night. The levity between my father and my baby sister on Tuesday morning.

The rapid decline he had undergone between Tuesday morning and Wednesday evening, when the doctor said he would die within the week. Starting to write the obituary on Thursday morning, only to get the news that he was dying. And my sisters had both vehicles. Me waking the next-door neighbor who worked nights, and who I did not know, to get him to drive my mother and me to the hospital. My wife staying back to watch niece Alex. Mom and I arriving after he had died.

The lengthy funeral negotiations on Friday. The funeral on Sunday. The burial at a military cemetery 40 miles away on Monday, and deciding that taking the limo made sense. A bunch of aftermath stuff.

Poem

Dirge Without Music
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

(Excerpted from Collected Poems. Read the full poem here.)

Self-reflection is indeed a PITA

My wife and I were watching on TV the New York Times bestselling author Ibram X. Kendi, Ph.D. He was discussing the ideas presented in his book How to Be an Antiracist, a book I have not yet read. But after listening to the virtual presentation, I feel that I need to.

It’s because he noted, in the question and answer period from viewers, how he had to confront embarrassing and uncomfortable actions in his past. Oooh, self-reflection. That sounds like fun! And, of course, I have done more than my share. I think, to the degree that I’ve done so in the past, this blog works because I know I don’t have all the answers. I DO have a lot of the questions.

Yet, there are a few situations from my past I’m feeling the need to write about. In fact, I’ve already written about one of them, but I think I needed some sort of context. The topic involves race and family.

Others do not seem to have a racial component, to my knowledge. One incident, in particular, has been gnawing at me for years. It’s also how I could have handled that better. In fact, it was one of those treppenwitz moments.

Something useful from DHS?

The trick here is to stay in the self-reflection mode and not too much in beating myself up. And I am quite capable of the latter. This article from the Department of Homeland Security, of all places, speaks to something I know.

“Many of us are pretty rough on ourselves. We think things about ourselves we’d never say to family, friends, or co-workers. It’s a behavior that’s worth taking the time to change.”

I know all of this is fairly oblique. I blame Arthur.

It could be, in part, a recognition of my own mortality. I am more than middle-aged. I’m not going to live to be 134; of that, I am fairly certain. As I write this, it’s suddenly dark a couple of hours after dawn. A storm is surely coming, as the dewpoints are oppressive and the temperatures remain high.

But once the rains and winds come through, things will start to clear up. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Ramblin' with Roger
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